"My foe!" cried Albano. The second hot pain darted from Heaven into his
life, and the lightning-flash blazed up fiercely again. As a heartless
carcass of the former friendship, Roquairol had been thrown at his
feet; and he felt the first hatred. That poison-mixing of sensual and
spiritual debauchery, that fermenting-vat of the dregs of the senses
and the scum and froth of the heart,--that conspiracy of lust and
bloodthirstiness, and against the same guiltless heart,--that spiritual
suicide of the affections, which left behind only an airy, roaming
spectre, ever changing its forms of incarnation, upon which there no
longer remains any dependence, and which a brave man already begins to
hate for the very reason that he cannot lay hold of this yielding
poison-cloud and give it battle,--all this seemed to the Count, who,
without the transitions and mezzotintos of habit and fancy, had
been ushered over out of the former light of friendship into this
evening-twilight, still blacker than it was. Beside the superficial
wound which his family pride received in the maltreatment of his
sister, came the deep, poisonous one that Roquairol should compare him
with himself, and Liana's ruin with Rabette's. "Villain!" said he,
gnashing his teeth; even the least shadow of resemblance seemed to him
a calumny.
Most assuredly Roquairol had miscalculated upon him, and set out his
poetic self-condemnation too much on the reckoned strength of a poetic
sentence from the judge. As in an uproar one unconsciously speaks
louder, so he, when fancy with her cataracts thundered around him, did
not justly know what he cried and how strongly. As he often, to be
sure, found less that was black in himself than he depicted, so he
presumed that another must find even still less than he himself. He
had, too, in his poetic and sinful intoxication, made for himself at
last the moral dial-plate itself movable, so that it went with the
index; in this confusion it was never indicated to him where innocence
was.
Had he foreseen that his epistolary confessions would bound and rebound
in more hostile corners than his oral ones did aforetime, he would have
prepared them otherwise.
For agitation Albano could not directly write the short
parting-letter--not a challenge--to the abandoned one, but delayed, in
the certainty that the Captain would not come himself,--when all at
once he came. For procrastination he could not bear; bodily and
spiritual wounds he received as theatrical ones; too much accustomed to
win men, he too easily brought himself to lose men. A terrible
apparition for Albano; it was but the long coffin of his murdered
favorite set upright!--that now over that powerfully-angular face, once
the stronghold of their souls, furrows of weeds should wind, that this
mouth, which friendship had so often laid upon his, should have become
a plague-cancer, a concealing rose to the tongue-scorpion for the good
Rabette when she approached so trustingly,--to see and think of _that_
was clear anguish.
Hardly audible were greeting and thanks; silently they walked up and
down, not beside but against each other. Albano sought to get the
mastery over his wrath, so as to say nothing but the words: "Begone
from me, and let me forget thee!" He meant to spare Liana in her
brother, who had reproached him with being sacrificial-knife to her;
unjust suspicions keep us better in the time immediately following,
because we are not willing to let them grow into just ones. "I am
candid, thou seest," Roquairol began, with moderation, because his
ebullitions had been half distilled and dropped away from the point
of his pen; "be thou so, too, and answer the letter." "I was thy
friend,--now, no more," said Albano, choking. "I have not surely done
anything to _thee_," was the reply.
"Heavens! Let me not say much," said Albano. "My miserable sister,--my
innocence of the coming of the Countess,-my wretched, abandoned sister!
O God! drive me not to frenzy,--I respect thee no more, and so go!"
"Then fight!" said the Captain, half drunk with emotion and half with
wine. "No," said Albano, drawing in a long breath, as if for a sigh of
indignation; "to thee nothing is sacred, not so much as a life!" This
pupil of death so easily threw after his own life-days and joys and
plans all those of another into the tomb with them; that was what
Albano meant, and thought of the sick Liana, so easily dying of others'
wounds; love (_instead of friendship_) had passed along like a soothing
woman before his provoked soul; but the foe misunderstood him.
"Thou must," said the Captain, wildly mocking; "thine shall be precious
to me!"
"Heaven and Hell! I meant a better one," said he; "slanderer, toward
thy sister I have _not_ acted as thou hast against mine,--I have not
wished to make her miserable, _I am not as thou!_--and I shall not
fight; I spare _her_, not thee." But the hell-flood of wrath, which he
through Liana had wished to turn off into a flat land, and make more
shallow, swelled up thereby as if under an enchanter's hand, because
Roquairol's lie about her being sacrificed came so near home in that
connection.
"Thou art afraid," said the exasperated Roquairol, and still took down
two swords from the wall. "I respect thee not, and will not fight,"
said Albano, only stimulating him and himself the more, while he meant
to control himself.
Just then Schoppe stepped in. "He is afraid," repeated Roquairol,
weapon in hand. Albano, reddening, gave, in three burning words, the
history. "You must fight a little before me!" cried the Librarian, full
of his old hatred for Roquairol's dazzling and juggling heart. Albano,
thirsting for cold steel, grasped at it involuntarily. The fight began.
Albano did not attack, but parried more and more furiously; and as,
while so doing, he beheld the angry ape of his former friend with the
dagger in his hand, which had been ploughed up out of the blooming
garden-beds of the loveliest days, and upon which he had trodden with
his wounds: and as the Captain with increasing storminess flashed away
at him like lightning, unavailingly: then did he see on the grim face
that dark hell-shadow standing again, which had stood and played
thereon, when he had strangled Rabette struggling in his grasp;--the
drawbridge of countenances, whereupon once the two souls met, stood,
suddenly raised high in the air. More fiery grew Albano's glance; more
drunk with indignation, he set upon the were-wolf of devoured
friendship;--suddenly he severed his weapon from him like a claw: when
Schoppe, indignant at the unequal forbearing and fighting, would fain
invoke vengeance with Rabette's name, and cried, "The sister, Albano!"
But Albano understood by that Charles's sister, and hurled one sword
after the other, and fiery drops stood in his eye, and hideously
distorted the face of the foe before him. "Albano!" said Roquairol, his
wrath exhausted, relying on the tear-built rainbow of peace,--"Albano?"
he asked, and gave him his hand. "Farewell; live happily, but go; I am
still innocent,--go!" replied Albano, who felt bitterly the tempest of
the first wrath overhead, which having settled down, between his
mountains, continued to beat upon him. "In the Devil's name, go! I too
shall be roused at last," said Schoppe, interfering. "In such a name
one goes willingly!" said the Captain, whose tongue-muscles always
stiffened in Schoppe's presence, and silently departed; but Albano had
for some time ceased to look upon him, because he could never endure
another's humiliation, but, like every strong soul, felt himself bowed
down at the same time with any abasement of humanity, just as great
thrones tolerate no distinguishing marks of servility in their
neighborhood.[33]
Schoppe began now to remind him of his own earliest predictions about
Roquairol, and to name himself the Great Prophet-Quartette,--to
denounce the fellow's incurable scurvy of mouth and heart,--to compare
his theatrical firmness with the Roman marble and porphyry, which has
on the outside a stone rind, but inwardly only wood,[34]--to remark how
his internal possession might be said to be, like that of the German
Order, only a _tongue_,--and in general to declare himself so
vehemently against self-decomposition through fancy, against all
poetical contempt of the world, that any other but Albano might well
have taken his zeal for a defence of himself against the slight feeling
of a similarity.
Schoppe had strong hopes Albano would listen to him believingly, and
would grow angry, laugh and answer; but he became more grave and
silent;--he looked at the honest Librarian--and fell passionately and
silently on his neck--and speedily dried his heavy eye. O, it is the
gloomy day of mourning, the burial-day of friendship, when the outcast,
orphan heart goes home alone, and it sees the death-owl fly screaming
from the death-bed of old feeling over the whole creation.
Albano had, in the beginning, inclined to go this very day to
Blumenbühl and lead his forsaken sister to the mausoleum of truth; but
now his heart was not strong enough to sustain his own words to his
sister or her immeasurable and inconsolable tears.