On the day when Albano found Schoppe, Julienne would fain visit again
her friend Linda whom she had not seen since the evening of the
tragedy. All apartments in Lilar were closely curtained against
daylight. Julienne found her sitting in darkness, with downcast,
half-open eyelids, outwardly very tranquil, only at long intervals a
little tear stole out from her eyes. The sweeping stream went high over
the wheels of her life and they stood far under it and still. "Is it
thou, Julienne?" she said, softly. "Pardon the darkness; night is green
now, to my eyes. It pains me to see anything." The bridal torch of her
existence was quenched; she wished now night for night.
Julienne put anxious questions of astonishment; she gave no answer to
them. "Is there any trouble between thee and my brother?" asked
Julienne, in whom relationship always created a warmer concern than
friendship. "Only wait for the Knight," answered she; "I have sent an
entreaty to him to come hither."
Just at that moment he entered. She begged him to accommodate himself
to this short night. After some silence, she rose proudly from her
seat; her black-dressed, tall form raised, in the presence of the
Knight, whom she saw not, its great eyes to heaven, her proud life,
hitherto enveloped in the winding-sheet, flung back the cloth and rose,
blooming, from the dead, and she addressed the Knight: "Respected
Gaspard, you promised me, as also did my father, that he would appear
to me on my marriage day. The day is gone by. I am a widow: now let him
appear to me."
Here the Knight interrupted her: "Gone by? O quite right! Is he, then,
anything more discreet and moral than a man?" and jested, contrary to
his usual manner, with a glow of indignation, because he supposed it
was of Albano, whom he had so long trusted, that she was speaking.
"You misunderstand me," said Linda; "I speak of a deceased one."
Suddenly before Julienne Roquairol's shadow passed; distant according
tones from the Princess had ushered it in. "Almighty God!" she
screamed, "the cursed suicide's play is true?" "He played what actually
occurred," said Linda calmly. "We separate. I travel. I desire nothing
but my father." Here Gaspard held out toward the Countess an arm
petrified by palsy, as if armed with a drawn dagger,--the darkness made
the apparition blacker and wilder,--but he broke the ice of death
asunder again with cold hands, and stirred and answered with lamed
tongue: "God and the Devil! Thy father is at hand. He will take it
all--as it is. Does _he_ know it?" "Who?" asked Linda. "And what did he
determine? Heavens! I mean Albano." Gaspard had, in a passion, at once
Cromwell's imbecility of tongue and ingenuity of action; and remained
therefore as averse and as far from every ebullition, even of love, as
from tameness, which was to him (as he said) "even more odious than
downright crime."
"I know not," said Linda. "I belong to the dead one alone, who has
twice died for me. Say that to my father. O, I would have followed him
long ago, the monster, into the deep realm; I would not stand here
before the cold reproach of malice or Christian amazement, for there
are still daggers to be used against life!--But I am a _mother_, and
therefore I live!"
"I will see you again this evening," said Gaspard composedly, and
hurried away. "I believe, dear Julienne," said Linda, "we now no longer
quite understand each other, at least not to the highest point, just as
we earlier differed about your _belle-sœur_, and you thought her
coquetry, but I precisely her prudery, great and immoral." "That may
well be true," said Julienne, coldly; "you are so truly poetic,
I am so prosaic and old-maidishly pious and orthodox. To love a
monster for this, because he cheats me as horribly as he does his
regiment-treasury, or because he generally allows himself as much
freedom as his regiment, or because after his death he still leaves
parts for the remaining players, or letters to me, deceived one--" "Did
he so?" asked Albano. "She praised it even as a sign of genius in him,"
replied Julienne. "To love such a one, said I, or such people as love
him, I cannot find it in my heart to do that. Fare you then as well as
may be." Linda answered, "I hate all wishes"; gave her her hand,
pressed not hers, and remained in profound silence, looking into her
night. She knew little of the easy and careless departure of her lost
friend.
That same night Linda, after a long private talk with the Knight,
travelled off entirely alone, wrapped in her veil, in a carriage
without torches, and no one knew whether she had wept or not.--
When Albano had heard his sister out, he said, with a soft voice of
emotion: "Make peace with the past; man cannot assail it. Leave to the
great unhappy one the night into which she of herself has been drawn.
But why were you so eager to have me with you? Particularly if thou
knowest aught of my Schoppe, I entreat thee to impart it." "I will
answer thee," said she, weeping and wondering; "but, brother, assure me
that thy silence is not again the curtain of a new misfortune. I
recognize you men by that, one must hate you all, and I do so, too." "I
have nothing sad in my mind; before God I affirm it. You women, you who
will only quench your hell with tears, and kindle it with the breath of
sighs, comprehend not, that often a single hour's thinking can give a
man a staff or wings, which shall lift him at once out of hell, and
then it may burn on for all him." "Show me, then," said she, in a
tearfully comic manner, "_thy_ wing." "This," replied he, "that I build
not upon man, but upon God in me and above me. The foreign ivy winds
around us, runs up on us, stands as a second summit beside ours, and it
is thereby withered. Spirits should grow beside each other, not upon
each other. We should, like God, as imperishable ones, love the
perishable."
"Very good," said she, "if it only insures thee peace. As touching thy
poor Schoppe, he has been thrust into the madhouse by way of
punishment; but first let me give you a regular account. He dressed up
a story about a second sister of thine before thy already so much
excited father. One could have let this new distraction of intellect
pass; but thy uncle was called, who told him to his face he had
murdered the Baldhead; and the choice was haughtily left him between
imprisonment and the madhouse; so he betook himself to the latter.
Stay, stay! The weightiest is to come. Whatever I may think of him, I
see he is thy honest friend; and to speak out freely, even Linda,
before her departure, inserted in her last letter to me an intercession
for him. He not only made the farcical journey to Spain for thee, he
also effected thy cure; perhaps thou owest him thy life. I wonder that
I, or somebody or other, has never before mentioned it to thee."
She began now upon Idoine's sound and generous character, her Arcadia,
and the last day she had spent with her and looked into her clear soul.
She passed on to his bed of fever and his mourning beside Liana's bier,
and old Schoppe's talks and runnings to and fro, and his noble victory,
when he had brought at length the glorified Liana, in Idoine's form,
before his eye, that she might pronounce the healing words: "Have
peace!"
Now was he in a storm, and Julienne at peace. "Therefore," she
continued, "I hold it to be my duty to interest myself a little in thy
friend. The poor devil is innocent,--through stingings of conscience
and even by his present situation he may completely lose what
understanding he still has,--altogether innocent, I say; for thy uncle,
whom I have long hated, and who only a short time ago for the first
time, but in vain, sought to come as a ghostly and murderous apparition
to my sick brother,--he would also have probably done the same with
Liana, if she had lived to admit of it,--this man is--(why may I not
make it notorious, now that all has changed and revolutionized
itself?)--one and the selfsame person with the Baldhead, and is a
ventriloquist! Brother?"
But Albano had already flown from her.