Albano meant to incarcerate himself the next day, weep bitterly, and do
penance, and not cheer himself with the sunshine of love; but he found
at evening the following billet, written by an unknown hand, on his
table:--
"Sir Count: You are hereby informed, that on Friday night, when you
were gone journeying, the deceased Captain R. von Froulay played
your part with the Countess Romeiro through _all_ the acts, in the
flute-dell. You must, for the sake of rivals, get yourself another
voice, and the Countess eyes to use by night, although to her it may
not be altogether disagreeable to be often deceived respecting you in
this manner. Farewell, and be in future a little more discreet!"
With pale face he stared at the skeleton which two giant hands forcibly
held up before him, drawn out all at once from the flesh of blooming,
youthful limbs. But the fire of pain speedily shot up again and
illumined the whole circle of woe. With the might of agony, with bloody
arms, must his spirit hurl back and forth the thought, heavy as a rock,
the tombstone of his life, in order to prove whether it fitted into the
burial vault;--the dreadful thought fell in so completely with
Roquairol's whole play and end and life,--but not, on the other hand,
with Linda's character, and with the divine moment which he had spent
with her in Liana's last garden,--and yet it did, again, very much with
her sudden reconciliation and with single, detached words,--and yet,
perhaps, after all, this poisoned letter was only a fruit of the
vengeance of the Princess, of whose indignation at Roquairol's murder
of himself and the ape Dian had told him.
So painfully did he move himself on his wounds to and fro, and at last
he resolved, this very evening to seek out Linda, wherever she might
be, when he received from her the following billet:--
"Come to me, I pray, this evening, to Elysium; it will certainly be
fair. I give the invitation now, as thou didst lately. Thou shalt lead
me upon the fair mountains, and it shall be enough for me if only thou
canst see and enjoy. Julienne we need less and less. Thy father urges
our union with proposals which you shall this evening hear and weigh.
Come without fail! In my heart there are still standing so many sharp
tears about the evil tragedy. Thou must change them into tears of
another kind, my beloved!
"The Blind One."
He laughed at the _changing_. "Into frozen ones, rather," said he. Hot
love was to him a passionate kiss into his wound. He went to Lilar
gloomily and hastily, deeply enveloped in a red cloak, as if against
foul weather,--blind and deaf to himself and the world,--and like a
dying man who awaits the moment when he either shall vanish in smoke
and be annihilated, or soar away reanimated into divine worlds.
When he entered the precincts of Lilar, the garden did not distort
itself as lately, but it merely disappeared, from him. He went along
close by some disguised people, who seemed to be making a grave. "It's
wrong, I vow," said one of them; "he ought to be buried out in the
meadow, like other cattle." Albano looked that way, saw a covered
corpse, and thought with a shudder it was the suicide, until he heard
the second grave-digger say, "An ape, Peter, if he is kept with
distinction, in clothes, looks more reputable than many a man, and I
believe he, too, would rise again from the dead, if he were only
regularly baptized."
Just as this Gibbon of the Princess, whom they were burying here,
recalled before his soul that stormy Friday, he espied Linda, not far
from the Dream-temple, on the arm of a seeing gentlewoman. She gave
him, according to her manner before others, only a slight greeting, and
said to the woman, "Justa, stay here in the Dream-temple; I am going to
walk up and down here."
By this limitation of herself to the visual range of the Dream-temple
she excluded every fair, visible sign of love, and Albano knew already
that silent contentment of hers, with the mere presence of the beloved
one, just as he did sometimes the wildness of her sweet lips. When he
touched her with trembling, and saw her again near him, then did this
powerful being come back to him with the whole divine past. But he
deferred not the infernal question, "Linda, who was with thee on Friday
evening?" "No one, dearest; where?" replied she. "In the flute-dell,"
he stammered. "My blind maiden," she answered, calmly. "Who else?" he
asked. "God! thy tone distresses me," said she. "Roquairol killed the
ape that night. Did he meet thee?"
"O horrible murderer! Me?" he cried; "I was travelling all night long;
I was not with thee in any flute-dell." "Speak out, man," cried Linda,
grasping him violently with both hands; "didst thou not write to me of
having given up thy journey, and then didst thou not come?" "No,
nothing like it," said he; "all infernal lies. The dead monster
Roquairol used my voice,--thy eyes,--and so it was,--tell the rest."
"_Jesu Maria!_" screamed she, struck by the dashing flood into which
the black cloud burst, and grasped with both arms through the leafy
branches of the wooded avenue, and pressed them to her, and said
supplicatingly, "Ah, Albano, thou wast certainly with me."
"No, by the Almighty, not! Tell the rest," said he.
"Fly from me forever; I am _his_ widow!" said she, solemnly. "That thou
remainest," said he, severely, and called Justa out of the temple of
dream.
"So it must live on,--thy pain, my pain: I see thee nevermore. I will
say a farewell to thee. Say thou none to me!" said he. She was silent,
and he went. Justa came, and he still heard her praying in the arbor:
"Leave me, O God, this eclipse to-morrow; spare the gloomy widow thy
daylight!" The maiden roused her, took her by the hand, and she
rejoiced, when hanging on her arm, in her night-blindness.
Albano went out into the night. All at once he stood as if he had been
carried up on a jagged, rocky peak, below which dashed a foaming
stream. He turned back and said, "Thou mistakest, evil genius; I loathe
suicide; it is too easy, and belongs to ape-murderers,--but there is
something better, and thou shalt attend me."
He lost himself,--could not find his way to the city,--thought he was
in Lilar again, and ran round anxiously without any way of egress,
until at last he sank exhausted, and as if drawn down into the arms of
slumber. When he awoke in the morning, he was in the Prince's garden,
and the slumber island waved with its tree-tops before him. A jagged
rocky peak over a rushing stream there was not in the whole landscape.
He looked upon the heavens, and the day, and his heart. "Yes, such,
then, is life and love," said he. "A good, true fire-work, especially
when one is to have a Linda after many preparations! Long it stands
there with a gay, high scaffolding, full of statues, with smaller
edifices, columns, and wondrous is it, and promises still more than it
hides and betrays. Then comes the night in Ischia; a spark darts, the
moulds burst, white, shining palaces and pyramids and a hanging city of
the sun hover in heaven,--in the night-air a busy, flying world unfolds
itself majestically between the stars, and fills the eye and the poor
heart, and the happy spirit, itself a fire between heaven and earth,
hovers too,--for the space of a whole instant; then it becomes night
again and a blank waste, and in the morning there stands the
scaffolding dull and black."