Unlike other fathers, Gaspard had been, since the first battle about
war, the same as ever, yes, almost better than ever; with his old
respect for every strong individuality, he took it quite agreeably that
the sun of the youth entered so perceptibly into the signs of summer,
and soared above the earth higher as well as warmer.
He gave him the nearest proof of his undiminished regard in the fact,
that, amidst the gradual preparations for returning to Pestiz, he
answered in the affirmative to a quite unexpected wish of his son's
for--separation. That is to say, Albano, who now, like ivy, wandered
with all his blossoms and twigs among the monuments of the heroic past,
and twined himself faster and faster around them, would not part from
Rome without having seen Naples. To reinforce his own longing came also
Dian's inspiration for the daughter-land of his father-land, for the
splendor of its sky and earth, for its Grecian ruins, which the
Architect preferred to the Roman. "In Rome," Dian had said, "you have
the past; in Naples, on the other hand, the bold present. I will
accompany you to and fro, and we will go home together. For you are
not, to be sure, as yet, properly speaking, versed in the beautiful,
but in nature, in the heroic and in effect. Naples is the place, then."
The Knight--although the whole object of the journey had been already
gained by Albano's having regained his spirits--consented without
hesitation to the appendix of a second, on the condition that he should
not stay behind longer than a month.
But just at this time, when his inner world seemed at liberty to tune
itself so harmoniously, came hostile discords nearer and nearer, which
at a distance he still took for harmonies. The discord evolved itself
slowly out of his indefinite connection with the Princess, because
every such connection with women decided itself uncomfortably at last,
seldomer ending in love than in hatred.
The Princess hitherto had done and suffered everything, in order to be
dangerous to him, even before she became intelligible. She played Liana
as well as she knew how, and took out of her theatrical wardrobe the
nun's veil of a religious virginity, although women of genius are
mostly sceptical, as men of genius are credulous. She made him the
confidant of her past life, and gave the history of those who had died
for her, or at least pined away, and she told all this, after the
manner of women, with more satisfaction than remorse; only her
connection with his father she indulgently let rise from its grave
behind a touching nun's veil, and in fact imitated the son in his
respect for the Knight, whom in her soul she bitterly hated. When
Albano for hours forgot the present, and steadfastly gazed into the
sacrificial fire of the past and of art, and showed her on the
mountains of his world flames which burned not on her altar, then did
she patiently accompany him on this road of art, and only stopped when
she could, before spots where one had a view of the--present.
He became daily her warmer friend, without so much as dreaming of her
intentions. Only a man--no woman--can wholly overlook another's love;
the love which is long overlooked seldom, if ever, becomes a
reciprocated love. Albano was too delicate to presuppose in the beloved
of his father, and in the wife of another, and in a friend of his own
beloved, this desire of an impropriety. Moreover, he always placed
quite as small a reliance upon his desert as he did a great reliance on
his right.
She doubted, but despaired not of a warmer feeling on his part. A woman
hopes as long as a second does not hope with her. Albano's nocturnal
visits to the Capitol and the Colosseum were always found by the eyes
which followed him to be worthy of his noble character. Daily did the
firm youth become dearer to her by his new bloom and by his manly
development. Sometimes she strongly hoped, beguiled by his friendly
sincerity and by that heroic melancholy which was not to be explained
by her on any other principle, far or near. This to her so unusual
rising and sinking on her waves shook her health and her character, and
she became involuntarily more like Liana, with whose dove's plumage she
had in the beginning been fain only to array herself in white; the
sparkling sun-rainbow became a moon-rainbow; with her strong powers she
flung half of her former self away,--her mania for decoration, art, and
pleasing,--and she became intensely uneasy when a Roman fair one, with
southern liveliness exclaimed, as often happened, behind the Count, as
he walked before her, "How beautiful he is!" Sorely was she punished
for her earlier malicious sportings with others' hearts and sorrows by
her own; but such dark days are the very ones in which love more
especially roots itself, as trees are best grafted in cloudy days.
Albano observed her change. The charming melancholy of her once
vigorous countenance, this reflection of her silent cloud, moved him to
a sympathizing inquiry into her health and happiness. She answered him
so confusedly and confoundingly,--sometimes even imputing to Albano,
with all his sharp-sightedness, dissimulation and wickedness,--that she
led him into the strangest error.
Namely, under so great a certainty that some earth-shadow had passed
across her whole life, and would not stir, he must needs seek the body
which cast it,--which was, in his mind, Gaspard, whom she, as he
imagined, still loved. He carried this presumption back very reasonably
through all her earlier conversations and looks. It was so natural that
they who were at an earlier period separated by a throne should now, in
this lovely land of free connections, long for each other again. Beside
all this, the Knight had, according to his inexorable irony, received
her show of courting him with show on his part,--that is to say, with
seriousness,--and therefore always served himself up as a side-dish to
her enjoyment of his son, and carried over an after-winter into the
spring. This double show Albano recalled to himself as double truth.
Then, too, fate stepped in suddenly among his new conclusions. His
father was taken dangerously sick of an unnerving spring-fever, caught
from the sirocco-wind. "Take no special interest," said Gaspard to him,
"either in my sufferings or expressions. I have, in such situations, a
weakness which I am afterwards ashamed of, and yet cannot avoid."
Albano was moved, by many an unexpected outbreak of the sick man's
heart, even to the warmest love. If the ruins of a temple inspire
melancholy, thought he, why shall not the ruins of a great soul affect
me so still more? There are men full of colossal relics, like the earth
itself. In their deep heart, already grown cold, lie fossil flowers of
a fairer period; they resemble northern rocks, on which are found the
impress of Indian flowers.
The sickness undermined itself. Gaspard remained without sympathy for
himself; only his affairs, not his end, troubled him. He held private
interviews with his step-father Lauria, by way of impressing the
finishing black seal of justice on his life. An express must stand in
readiness to fly, the moment after his death, with a letter to Linda;
his son must himself break one open, and deliver a sealed one to the
Princess. Very harshly and imperiously did he demean himself toward the
son, when he demanded of him an oath, immediately after his death, to
travel off to Pestitz; for when Albano, who so longed to see Naples,
and upon whom all these conditions, presupposing his father's death,
fell hard, hesitatingly declined, Gaspard said, "That is so really
human and common, to bewail the pains of others immoderately, and
sympathize with them sincerely, and yet ungraciously to sharpen them so
soon as the smallest thing must be done." Albano gave his word and
oath, and never let himself be seen by his father again, when he wept
out of a child's love.
Unexpectedly there presented himself before this sickbed Gaspard's
nearest and earliest kinsman, his brother. Albano stood by when the
strange being came up and spake to the mortally sick man, and turned
two stiff, glassy eyes, which looked as if they had been set in, quite
away from him with whom he spake,--so fantastic, and yet full of the
cold world toward his dying brother,--with loosely hanging face-skin
upon significant face-bones,--a gray were-wolf on his hind legs, just
charmed out of the beastly hide into the human skin,--like the
destroying angel, a destroying man, and yet without passion. It
stretched out toward Albano its long hand, but he, repelled by
something unnamable, could not grasp it. This brother said he had come
from Pestitz,--handed over two letters from there, one to Gaspard, one
for the Princess,--and began to say something about his travels, which
seemed uncommonly acute, fantastical, learned, incredible, and oft
really unintelligible. Once Albano said, "That is a downright
impossibility." He began the narration again, made it still more
incredible, and insisted it was actually so. Thereupon he went away, to
Greece, as he said, and took the coolest leave imaginable of his dying
brother.
Gaspard now said to Albano, "I should like to have you, after my death,
rightly estimate this strangeling, if he ever comes near you, or rather
avoid him altogether, as he never says a true word, and that from a
pure and disinterested delight in pure lies; still more," he continued,
"shun the deep, deadly scorpion-sting of Bouverot, as well as his
cheating hand at play." Albano was surprised at the aspect of this
speech (agreeably so at its moral sharpness), for he had hitherto
imagined that he found in his father quite other sentiments regarding
Bouverot.
The next day he found his father already with his foot on the steps to
come up out of the tomb. The express had been discharged,--all letters
remanded,--the Prince Lauria stood there with beaming face. "Simply
another's sickness has cured me of mine," said the father. The letter
which his brother had brought him from Pestitz had contained the
intelligence that his old friend, the reigning Prince, was swiftly
approaching his last hour, because they had held his dropsy to be
_embonpoint_, and had delayed the treatment of it. "I hope," said
Gaspard, "to have been so wholesomely agitated by my sympathies in this
matter, that I shall still be able to make the journey in season for
the last hour of friendship." He added, that then this journey would
make way again for Albano's to Naples.
Then came the Princess in consternation about the letter, which
announced her husband's danger and her own departure. Gaspard answered
by giving his son a hint expressive of his desire for a private
interview with her. They remained alone together for a long time. At
last the Princess came back quite changed, and begged him, with almost
stammering hesitation, to accompany her to the _opera seria_. She was
moved and embarrassed, her eyes glistening, her features inspired; his
father, too, he found excited, but apparently strengthened.
Here a long beam of noonday shot through his whole previous
labyrinthine wood, namely, the confirmed presumption of his father's
love, which now, through the approaching dissolution of the marriage
chain of the Princess, and in the debility of sickness had broken out
more strongly; hence Gaspard's letter to the Princess, hence their
keeping together in Rome and on the way thither, &c.
Never did Albano love his energetic father more than after this
discovery of a tender sentiment; and toward the Princess his heart now
grew from a friend to be all at once a son. Besides, as among the five
prizes of hereditary human love he had gained only one,--a father (no
mother, no brother, no sister, and no child),--so was he filled with
this new delight at the gain of a mother. All that respect could do,
warmth express, and hope betray, he indulged.
It was a night when in Rome spring already threw flowers again through
the clouds of winter. At the theatre they gave Mozart's _Tito_. How on
a foreign soil is one carried away by a strain from one's native land,
which has followed him hither! The lark that sings over Roman ruins
exactly as over German fields is the dove which, with her well-known
song, brings us the olive-branch from our native land. Up to this time,
Albano, on the Alpine road over ruins, had sent his eye eagerly forward
only along the future race-ground of war, and had seldom raised it
toward the heaven where the glorified Liana was, and he had forcibly
dashed away every rising tear. But now his sick father had lifted the
curtain of the bed under the ground where her remains slept; now did
the clear stream of tones which had passed through the lands of his
youth and his paradises come all at once strongly over the mountains,
and murmur down so near to him with its old waters. At first his spirit
defended itself against the old, slumbering days, which spoke in their
sleep; but when at length the tones which Liana herself had once played
and sung before him came across over the bier of the mountains, and
hung down as shining tapestries of golden days,--when he reflected what
hours he and Liana might have found here, but had not found,--then his
dark grief ran up the scale of tones as an evil, plundering genius, and
Albano saw his dreadful loss stand clearly in heaven. Then he turned
not his eye toward the Princess, but in the consecration of music
pressed the hand by which the departed saint was once to have come into
these fields. By and by he said, "I shall, in the rich Naples, long
more and more after my only female friend, and envy the happy man who
is permitted to accompany her." She fell into great emotion at this new
intelligence of his intended separation, and into a still greater at
his passionate transformation, which she knew how to deduce, with the
richest dowry for her tenderest hopes, from her departure, and even the
approaching departure of her spouse. But she concealed the greater
emotion behind the lesser. They parted from each other with mutual joys
and errors. Albano was made more and more happy by the improvement of
his father's health; the Princess was made so by the increase of the
son's warmth, and her life mounted out of the ship of war into an
express-balloon, an air-vessel winged with tidings of peace. Thus did
both approach closer and closer to the curtain, whose pictures they
took for the scenery of the stage itself, only to be so much the more
astonished when it rose.