And when they saw and embraced each other again, they were even more
enraptured and devoted to each other than any happy heart could have
foreseen. Linda sat still and soft, looked upon the fair youth, and let
him and his sister tell their stories, the latter often interrupting
herself to kiss both. He spoke with great joy about Linda's letter. Men
always make more out of what is written than women. Linda spoke
indifferently: "Ah, well, once written and read, let it be forgotten.
In yours, too, there is occasionally a northern _faux brillant_." "The
Countess," said Julienne, "never praises any one to the face, but
herself." Linda bore the joke with characteristic good-nature. Albano,
often pleasing and often offending her when he was not conscious of it,
forgave love ever so easily. Friendship finds it harder to get
forgiveness from offended vanity.
"Yes, indeed!" cried Julienne, suddenly starting under the veil of
mirthfulness for a serious discourse; "thy project of emigrating to
France is a _faux brillant_. Canst thou then believe that they will
allow a princess-sister of Hohenfliess to sign a pass to her brother
for a democratic campaign? Never! And nobody at all will do it who
loves thee!" Albano smiled, but at last grew serious. Linda was silent,
and cast down her eyes. "Can you show me," said he, softly, as half in
earnest and half in jest, "a purer field of spurs on the whole map?"
"A poorer field of spurge!"[103] said she, playing on the words.
"Hardly, I should think!" Now she began to shadow forth, with
aristocratic, feminine, and princely colors at once, with tri-colored
paints, all the flames, smoke-clouds, and waves with which the _Monte
Nuovo_ of the Revolution had come up from the ground, and added,
"Better an idle count than that!" He grew red. Always had this womanly
fettering of man's energy, this affectionate fastening of one down
to flowers, this unrighteous forging over of the love-ring into a
galley-ring, been to him a crying and odious thing. "In a world which
is only a fair-week and mask-ball, not to be able to maintain even the
freedom of fair and masquerade, is tough," Schoppe had once said; and
he had never forgotten it, because it came right out of his own soul
back into it again. "Sister, either thou art not my brother, or I am
not thy sister," said he, "else we should understand each other more
easily." Linda's hand quivered in his, and her eye rose slowly towards
him, and quickly sank again. Julienne seemed to be touched with the
reproach cast upon her sex. Albano thought of the time when he had
crushed a heart of wax with one of iron, and said, more brightly and
coldly, "Julienne, I should be very willing not to say no to thee, if
thou wouldst not take the absence of a negative for an affirmative." He
could, it occurred to him, easily hide his contradiction behind the
future, since in fact no war was as yet decided upon in Europe; but he
did not deem that honorable and dignified enough. "Do not torment!"
said Linda to her. "Certainly," said Julienne, with quickness, "I can,
indeed, only think of this and that; what do I know?" and looked very
serious. "Two days longer," she added, and sought to escape from the
serious mood, "can we spend like gods, yes, like goddesses, upon the
island,--although, at all events, I should answer for a god, only not
for a goddess; that requires a taller person. I am only a foil to the
Countess out of infinite good-nature." For Julienne's stature lost by
the neighborhood of the majestic Linda.
The war of the loving beings had, however, not concluded with a peace,
and therefore remained an armistice. As Vesuvius throws glowing stones,
so does man throw his objections up in himself, alternately flinging
them aloft and swallowing them again, till at last a more lucky
direction sends them out over the brink.
In Albano, as may well be supposed, the question was working, what
Linda's silence in the little war imported respecting and against the
great one; but he did not propose it. Conscious of the unchangeableness
of his purpose, he was milder toward his sister, whom he, as he
believed, should surely one day exceedingly wound by it. Thus had he
become soft by the cold and warm alternation of life, as a precious
stone, by rapid heating and cooling, is transformed into medicine.
Swiftly and sweetly glided the last days of joy over the island, which
after the rain glistened in greenness like a German garden. The soft,
cool air, the fragrance of myrtles and oranges, single clouds of
brightness in the warm sky, the magic-smoke of the coasts, the golden
sun at morning and evening, and love and youth decked and crowned the
rare season. High burned on the blooming earth the sacrificial flame of
love into the still, blue heavens. As two mirrors stand before one
another, and one pictures the other and itself and the world, and the
other represents all this and also the pictures and the painter, so
tranquilly stood Albano and Linda before each other, attracting and
imaging soul within soul. As Mont Blanc majestically mirrors himself
down in the still lake of Chede in a paler heaven, so stood Albano's
whole, sound, light spirit in Linda's. She said he was an honest and an
honorable man at once, and had, what was so rare, a _whole_ will; only,
as is often the case with men, he wanted to love still more than he did
love, and therefore did not sufficiently recognize his quiet, original
sin, from egotism. There was nothing against which he bristled up more
indignantly and excitedly than against this latter charge, and he would
not forgive it in any one save the Countess. He refuted her as strongly
as he could; but her opinion became, under the best annihilation, only
a mock corpse, and came back alive against him the very next hour.
He became through her more nearly acquainted with himself than even
with her. He called her the Uranide, because she seemed to him, like
the heavens, at once so near and so far off; and she had no objection
to this full laurel-wreath. There is a heavenly unfathomableness, which
makes man godlike, and love toward him infinite; so did the ancients
make Friendship the daughter of Night and of Erebus. When Albano thus
looked out over the broad, rich spirit of Linda,--at once living for
her love, and harboring every other's love, and yet, as it were,
intoxicated with the thirst for knowledge; at once a child, a man, and
a virgin; often hard and bold with the tongue for and against religion
and womanhood, and yet full of the tenderest, most childlike love
toward both; melting in her glow before the beloved, and quickly
stiffening at a cold assault; without any vanity, because she always
stood before the throne of a divine idea, and man is never vain before
God, but entirely confiding in herself and submissive to no one,
without, however, any comparison of herself or others; full of bold,
manly uprightness, and full of respect for talent and for shrewd
understanding of the world; so perfectly free from selfishness, and
with such a childlike delight in others' gladness, without special
anxiety or respect for persons; so inconstant and inflexible, the one
in wishing, the other in willing; but with her eye and life ever
directed toward the sun and moon of the spiritual kingdom, character
and love, toward her own and toward a beloved heart;--when Albano saw
all this playing and flitting before him, then did he live, as it were,
on the single and yet immense, the movable and yet almighty sea, whose
limit is only the clear sky, which has itself none.
In the heaven of the three loving ones appeared at length the dawn of
the day of departure. It was determined by the two friends that Albano
might accompany them only as far as Naples, where their people waited
for them, then find them once in Rome accidentally, then on Isola Bella
for the last time accidentally,--a very unfriendly subjection to
worldly appearance, upon which Linda, however, insisted as strongly as
Julienne, and to which Albano himself, who by his birth was more
hardened to the constraints of rank than a plebeian youth of like soul,
easily yielded up the bitter yes, under the heavy veil which hung over
all his connections. Julienne decided upon all lesser ways and means;
she had been during the whole tour the business-agent of the Countess,
who, as she said, had not head enough to buy herself a hat for it, so
impetuous, absent in money matters, and dreamy was she. The sister was
so lively, and entirely restored, but said, all the five and thirty hot
springs of the island could not have done half so much for her recovery
as the same number of tears of joy which she had fortunately shed.
Singular did all around them appear on the morning of departure. A
bright, warm cloud dropped silvery drops; the sun looked in between two
mountains; the enraptured islanders sang a new popular song, amidst the
rain-harvest or drop-gleaning; while their friends were hastily borne
away by the waves out of their circle of joy. Agata stood, in order to
cool herself, on the shore, with a snake in her hand, and Albano felt a
pain at the sight which he knew not how to explain to himself.[104] At
this moment Epomeo parted the cloud-heaven, and shining fragments of
cloud sailed slowly along before them toward the Apennine to the north,
the heavenly dwelling-place of the mist, and swiftly and lightly glided
the shadows of the sky over the swarming peaks of the waves.
"Ever mayest thou," said Albano, looking toward the island, which was
swimming backward to the west, "stand fast with thy mountain; never may
a calamity tear the fairest leaf out of the book of the blest!" "How
will it be with us all," said Linda, "when we meet again, and seek
again the lovely soil?" Just then they espied a high-arched rainbow;
that stood half on the island and half on the waves, which seemed to
fling it out as a gay, arching water-column upon the shore. "We are
going," said Julienne, delighted, "to pass under the arch of peace." At
this word the rain and the wreath of colors disappeared, and the sun
alone shone behind them.
The passage ran through the torch-dance of the waves. The distances
shone and smoked magnificently. "Why do distances take so mighty a hold
of the soul, although painted with the same colors as what is nearer?"
said Albano. "That is the very question," said Dian. Mightily lay the
sea like a monster along the coasts stretched out over their whole way
to Rome, and tossed up and down the scales of waves. Albano said, "When
I saw on Vesuvius the mountain and the sea, I thought how pettily and
falsely narrow man sunders the two Colossi of the earth into little,
familiar members, and acts as if the same sea did not stretch round the
whole earth."
His friends were too deeply and sadly moved to make any reply, and
before strange eyes neither words nor hardly looks were at their
command. When Albano saw again more nearly the battle-field of
time,--the ruin-coasts, which ever grasp and lift the man; the old
temples and Thermæe, like old ships, dying on the land; here a crushed
and crumbling giant temple, there a city street down on the bottom of
the sea;[105] the holy memorial-columns and light-houses of former
greatness deserted and extinguished amidst the eternally youthful
beauty of ancient nature,--he forgot the neighborhood of his own
transitoriness, and said to Linda, whose eye he saw directed thither,
"Perhaps I can guess what you are now thinking of,--that the ruins of
the two greatest times, the Greek and the Roman, remind us only of a
_strange_ past, whereas other ruins, like music, only admonish us of
our _own_. That was perhaps your thought." "We think of nothing at all
here," said Julienne; "it is enough, if we weep that we are obliged to
go away." "Truly the Princess is right," said Linda, and added, as if
displeased at Albano and everything, "and what is life, more than a
glass door to heaven? It shows us what is fairest and every joy, but it
is, after all, not open."
By the accident of strangers' company they were compelled to leave each
other with cold show, and, according to the custom of teasing,
tantalizing fate, to conclude a great past with a little present.
Albano travelled as hastily as his sensibility would allow over the
sublime world round about him. When he arrived in Mola, he heard the
singular intelligence that they had found in Gaeta a whole leathern
dress, with a mask, swimming far out to sea, which must have belonged
to the ascended monk, and in respect to which they found nothing so
inexplicable as the empty casing, without the dead body. In Mola, the
fair island of Ischia at length breathed out its last fragrance; the
high citadel of heaven and the ascending pole hid among other southern
constellations this warm one also, which had so long gleamed over him
with suns of bliss; and the last star of the short spring went down.
Such is life; such is bliss. Like the playing moon, it consists of
first and last quarters, and slowly waxes and slowly wanes. In its
hope, in its fear, a brief flash is the full moon of the deepest
rapture; a short invisibility the new moon of the deepest
desolateness;--and always is the light game, like the moon, beginning
its circle anew.