The dried-up bed of the Knight's life had been richly inundated again
by the agitations of his heart. Even because, in well days, he held
himself together, like mountains, with ice and moss, so in sick days,
it seemed, did a real, internal commotion more easily restore his old
energy and repose. He armed and equipped himself for travelling, which
best built up and built upon his capricious body. The Princess put off
her departure from day to day, merely in the firm and ardent
expectation that Albano would impart to her, to take with her on her
way, the fairest concluding word of her whole life. In Albano this
blooming land awakened longings for--Spain, and Naples, he hoped,
would appease them. Spring was already dawning upon Rome, and rising
in Naples; the nightingale and man sang all night long, and the
almond-trees were everywhere in bloom. But it seemed as if the three
travellers were waiting for each other. Could the Princess hurry away
from the heart upon which her being bloomed and took root,--she, like a
torn-up rosemary twig, whose roots, at the same time with those of a
germinating wheat-grain, take a double hold of the earth? Albano, too,
would not hasten the hour which cast him into remote corners of the
earth, far away at once from his father and his friend,--them into an
after-winter, him into an early and latter spring,--and least of all
just now. His spirit had appeased itself, and become reconciled with
itself, by the resolution of war. His Portici was gloriously built up
on the buried Herculaneum of his past.
A letter from Pestitz decided matters. The mortally sick Prince wrote
to the Princess, and begged to see her again; the letter was like a
fire, bursting the common ground and scattering all that stand
thereupon; the three confederates formed the purpose to set off on one
and the same day,--on one morning,--so that one dawn might shed its
gold into three travelling-carriages at once.
Yet one thing the Princess desired on the evening previous to the
departure, namely, Albano's company to the dome of St. Peter's in the
morning; she wished to take Rome once more into her parting soul, when
the dawn in its redness and splendor gilded the city. Albano, too, was
glad to drink the must of a fiery hour, which might clear itself up
into an eternal wine for the whole of life; for he knew not that the
lively Princess,--made still more lively by Italy,--after waiting so
long and impatiently for the fairest word from his lips, at last
ventured indignantly upon a parting hour, in which it must escape from
him.
Early before sunrise, when, in Rome, many more go to bed than get up,
he waited upon her; only her faithful Haltermann accompanied them. She
still glowed with her night-long vigils, and seemed very much moved.
Rome still slept; occasionally they were met by coaches and families,
which were just finishing their night. The sky stood cool and blue over
the dawning morn, the fresh son of the fair night.
The wide circus before St. Peter's Church was solitary and dumb as the
saints upon the columns; the fountains spoke: one constellation more
went out above the obelisk. They went up by the winding stairway of a
hundred and fifty steps to the roof of the church, and came out through
a street of houses, columns, little cupolas and towers, through four
doors into the monstrous dome,--into a vaulted night. In the depths
below the temple rested, like a broad, gloomy, lonesome valley with
houses and trees, a holy abyss, and they walked along close by the
mosaic-giants, the broad colored clouds on the heaven of the dome.
While they were ascending in the high vault, Aurora's golden foam
glistened redder and redder on the windows, and fire and night swam
into each other among the arches.
They hastened yet higher and looked out, just as a single living ray
darted upon the world, as out of an eye, from behind the mountains;
around the old Alban mountain smoked a hundred glowing clouds, as if
his cold crater was again bringing forth a flame-day, and the eagles
with golden wings baptized in the sun flew slowly along over the
clouds. All at once the sun-god stood upon the fair ridge; he stood
erect in heaven, and rent away the network of night from the covered
earth; then burned the Obelisks and the Colosseum and Rome from hill to
hill, and on the solitary Campagna sparkled in manifold windings the
yellow giant snake of the world, the Tiber,--all clouds dissipated
themselves into the depths of heaven, and golden light ran from
Tusculum and from Tivoli, and from the vine-hills into the many-colored
plains, over the scattered villas and cottages, into the citron and oak
groves; low in the far west the sea was again as at evening, when the
hot god visits it, full of splendor, ever kindled by him, and became
his eternal dew.[86]
In the morning world below lay far and wide the great, still Rome,--no
living city, a solitary, enormous, enchanted garden of the old, hidden,
heroic spirits, laid out on twelve hills. The unpeopled pleasure-garden
of spirits announced itself by its green meadows and cypresses between
palaces, and by its broad, open stairways and columns and bridges, by
its ruins and high fountains and garden of Adonis, and its green
mountains and temples of the gods; the broad city avenues had passed
away; the windows were barred up; on the roofs the stony dead looked
steadfastly at each other; only the glistening fountain waters were
awake and alive and active, and a single nightingale sighed, as if she
would die at last.
"That is great," said Albano, at length, "that all is solitary down
below and one sees no present. The old heroic spirits can pursue their
existence in the vast vacuity, and march through their old arches and
temples and play, up on the columns, with the ivy."
"Nothing," replied the Princess, "is wanting to the magnificence but
this dome, which from the Capitol we might in fact see besides. But
never shall I forget this spot."
"What were all beside?" said he. "The flat regions of life in general
pass by without a memorial; from many a long past no echo reverberates,
because no mountain breaks the broad surface! But Rome and this hour
with you will live within us forever."
"Albano," said she, "why must we find each other so late and part so
early? Yonder goes your way along by the Tiber,--God grant into no
devouring sea!"
"And yonder goes yours over the bright mountains," said he. She took
his hand, for his tone expressed and excited so much emotion. Divinely
gleamed the world from the dark spring flowers even up to the lofty
Capitol, and the bells sounded down the hours; the festal fires of day
blazed on all heights; life was broad and high as the prospect; his eye
stood under a tear,--no sad one, however, but such a tear as when the
world's eye glances sunnily under the water, and has higher hues, which
the dry world destroys. He pressed her hand, she his. "Princess,
friend," said he, "how I esteem you! After this holy hour we separate.
I would fain give you a sign that shall not pass away, and say a bold
word to my father, which should express myself and my respect, and
which, perhaps, might solve many a riddle."
Her eye fell, and she merely said, "May you venture?" "O forbid it
not!" said he; "so many a divine bliss has been lost by one hour's
hesitation. When shall man act extraordinarily, then, except in
extraordinary situations?" She was silent, awaiting the morning-sound
of love, and in a continued pressure of hands they went down from the
lofty place. Alban's being was a trembling flame. The Princess
comprehended not why he still deferred this spring-tone; no more did he
see through her, unskilled in reading women and their broken words,
those picture-poems, half form and only half speech. Just as if an
eagle had flown down from his morning splendor, and, as a predatory
genius, flapped his wings over his eyes; so had the flashing morn
dazzled him so exceedingly that he meant to venture, now in the parting
hour, to be mediator between his father and the Princess, by a word
which should take away the partition-wall between their loves. His
delicacy made many an objection against this proceeding, but when a
weighty object was in sight, there was nothing he so abhorred as
quailing caution; and daring he held to be worth as much to a man as
winning.
The Princess, misunderstanding, but not mistrusting, followed him into
his father's house with an expectation--bolder than his--that he would
perhaps actually confess to the Knight his love for her. They found the
father alone and very serious. Albano, although aware of his aversion
to bodily signs of the heart, fell on his neck with the half-choked
words of the wish: "Father! a mother!" To this childlike relation had
his previous feelings raised and refined themselves. "Heavens, Count!"
cried the Princess, astounded and enraged at Albano's assumed
insinuation. The Knight, sparkling with wrath, and full of horror,
seized a pistol, saying, "Unlucky--" but before one knew at which of
the three he would shoot it off, his numbness seized and held him like
a coiling snake imprisoned in a murderous embrace. "Count, did I
understand you?" said the Princess, flinging the word at him,
indifferent toward the petrified foe. "O God," said Albano, moved by
the sight of the paternal form, "I meant no one!" "None were capable of
that," said she, "but a base creature. Farewell. May I never meet you
again!" So saying, she went off.
Albano stayed, unconcerned as to whether he himself was not meant by
the pistol at the side of the sick man, who had stiffened exactly
opposite to a man's corpse across the way which they were just busied
in painting. Gradually life wrestled again out of winter, and the
Knight, as cataleptics must, finished the address which he had begun
with the word "Unlucky--" "woman, of whom art thou mother?" He came to
himself and looked wakefully around; but soon the lava of wrath ran
again through his snow: "Unlucky boy, what was the talk about?" Albano
disclosed to him, with innocent soul, that he had cherished the hope,
in the probable event of the Prince's death, of a union between his
father and the Princess, and for himself, of the good fortune of having
a mother.
"You young people always imagine one cannot have any genuine love
without carrying it out and directing it to some one," replied Gaspard,
and began to laugh hard and to find something very comic in the
"sentimental misunderstanding"; but Albano asked him now very seriously
about the origin of his misunderstanding. Gaspard gave him the
following account: Lately, in his sickness, he had, upon the first news
of the Prince's approaching death, a desperate battle with the
Princess, who in the event of this death desired a regency,--or
guardianship,--even on the bare ground of the possibility of an heir to
the princely hat. The Knight said to her decidedly this _possibility_
was an impossibility, and he would, without further preamble, attack
her with new proofs yet unknown to her. He gave her directly to
understand that he was even armed against the case of an ocular
demonstration of the contrary (a Hereditary Prince) being presented to
him. The Princess replied with bitterness, she could not conceive why
he need in the least concern himself any more about the Haarhaar line
and succession, or take any more care for it than for that of
Hohenfliess. He brought her even to tears, for he could unsparingly
hurl the most barbarous words, like harpoons, deep into her heart; he
had the perfect resolution of a statesman, who, like a great bird of
prey, drives the victim, which he can neither conquer nor draw away, to
a precipice, and beats it over the brink with his wings, in order that
he may find it subdued for him down below. A life which even as it
passes away, like the sinking glaciers, discovers old corpses! Just as
the happy one spreads out his love of an individual warmingly over
humanity, so does the misanthrope hold the stinging focus (or
freezing-point) of his broad and general coldness toward humanity at
_one_ great foe alone, whereas previously every smaller offence was
forgiven the individual, and imputed only to mankind in a mass.
This, then, was that secret interview whose traces Albano had taken for
fairer emotions than of hatred. "And now," said the Knight openly, in
order to punish his high feeling with cutting impudence, "when thou
madest to me the concise and obscure speech: 'A mother!' I could not
but take thee for the father, and from this thou mayst easily explain
the rest." "Father," said he, "that was a crying injustice to each";
and departed with three hot wounds, torn in him by the trident of fate.
At his departure Gaspard reminded him to keep his word of returning in
a month, and added jokingly, that the old man whom they were painting
over yonder was a German gentleman, with whom he once carried on the
joke of a sudden conversion.[87]
Before an hour Albano was travelling with his Dian out of the
illuminated Rome. The blue heavens, floating down, undulated on the
heights and on the dome of St. Peter's, and long shadows, begemmed with
pearls of dew, still slept on the flowers; but the blessed morn had
flown far back out of the hard day. They met before the gate a circular
crowd, who stood around the beautiful form of one murdered, and who
repeated, with a pleased expression, over the prostrate body, instead
of casting the word with indignation in the teeth of the murderer,
"_Quanto e' bello!_"[88] And Albano thought how often they had
exclaimed behind his back, "_Quanto e' bello!_"