The old foster-father called him Prince, indeed, and no longer thou;
but, in patriotic rapture, he fervently pressed the nursling of his
house to his heart. Augusti handed him, with grave courtliness and a
brief congratulation, the following epistle from Julienne:--
"Dearest Brother: Now, at length, I can, for the first time, call thee
rightly brother. I have in one eye tears of mourning, and yet in the
other tears of gladness, now that all clouds are taken from thy birth;
and in Haarhaar, too, all goes tolerably well. The Lector is despatched
to tell thee all: where should I find time? He must also tell thee of
Herr von Bouverot, whose red nose and bent-up chin, and greedy
barbarity toward his few people and many creditors, and whose grossness
and sensuality and dry malice I hate to such a degree. However, he is
now so properly punished by thy manifestation. Of course all is, like
myself, in disorder and confusion. Ludwig's testament was opened this
morning, according to his will, and he gave thee thy whole right. I
will not be angry about this, brother, in the midst of weeping. He was
properly hard toward his brother and sister,--toward me exceedingly so;
for he hated all women, even to his wife, who is only of some use when
it goes well with her, and works of art themselves really hardened him
against men. But let him rest in his peace, of which, indeed, he has
found little! He must this very evening, on account of the nature of
his complaint, and on account of the length of the way to Blumenbühl,
be interred temporarily. Here am I now with thy foster-parents, in the
neighborhood of our buried parents. On this account, come without fail!
Thou art my only solace in the night of sadness. I must hold thee again
to my heart, which will beat hard against thine, and weep and speak, if
it only can. Do come! Now, at length, surely, as all stands ready in
the hall for the dance, God will let no cold spectres or frightful
masks creep in, I pray. Ah, only on thy account am I so happy, and weep
enough.
"Julia."
Hardly had Albano given his foster-father the joyful promise to be this
evening at his house, when the latter, without further words, hastened
off to prepare his "folks" for the joy of the twofold visit.
The Lector was now entreated for his news, with which he seemed to
hesitate cautiously on account of Siebenkäs, till Albano begged him
freely to impart all to him and his new friend. His account, including
some interpolations which came to Albano afterward, was this:--
Bouverot (with whom he began at the questioning of Albano, whose
curiosity was excited) had been hitherto in secret league with the
aspiring Prince of Haarhaar, and had, in the confident calculation of
making through him his permanent fortune, and even an unexpected
marriage, upon his word unhung his order-cross of a German _Herr_,
linked at once to infamy and income, and caused to be delivered to the
sister of this Prince, Idoine, through the Prince himself, who stood
pledged to him for the repeal of her similar vow,[154] a miniature of
her, which he insisted that he had stolen in his flight, together with
half a picture-gallery, and with many fine allusions to his adopted
name _Zefisio_, as that of a Romish Arcadian, and to the name of her
Arcadia. "_Oh la différence de cet homme au diable, comme est-elle
petite!_" said Augusti, with quite an unexpected vehemence. Albano must
needs ask why. "He passed off an entirely different picture for that of
the Princess," said the Lector. Of course it was Liana's own, Albano
concluded, and had easily, by a few questions, drawn out that mournful
history of the blind Liana chased by the tiger Bouverot.
"O wretched me!" cried Albano, half in fury, and half in pain. It
distressed him to think of the sufferings wherewith the holy heart had
had to pay for its short, pure, chary love toward him,--who became
blind the first time because she so loved his father,[155] and the
second time because the son misunderstood and loved her. But he
restrained himself, and spoke not on the subject; the past was to him,
as echo is to bees, hurtful. Siebenkäs testified his joy at Bouverot's
punishment through the miscarriage of all his plans.
Albano heard that even Luigi had assumed the appearance of supporting
Bouverot's connubial intentions, merely for the sake of seeing him fall
from so much the higher elevation. "With what a long, cold, bitter,
malicious pleasure," thought Albano, "could my brother, in the hope of
the ditch which his death would dig for the hostile court and its
adherents, look upon all their expectations, and graciously accept all
their measures, from the marriage of the Princess even to the
congratulations thereto appertaining, while he hated the Princess and
all! And how could he maintain that life-long silent coldness toward
me?" But Albano neglected to consider two reasons,--his own proud
deportment toward the Prince, and the customary avarice of princes,
which is shy of apanage[156] moneys.
Gaspard's transactions in Haarhaar, which the Lector gave, only with
some omissions enjoined by Julienne, were these:--
With characteristic pleasure and silence had the Knight looked, of old,
upon the intricacies of human relations, and given them over to their
own disentanglement or dilaceration. Here he let all the dreams of
others grow more and more lively and wild, until, with one snatch at
the breast, he swept them all from the sleeper at once. His old
indignation at the proud refusal of the princely bride was appeased,
when he could show them, below the glittering triumphal gate of their
wishes and efforts, the documents of Albano's birth, from the hand of
the old Prince down even to that of the brother Luigi, as just the same
number of armed guards, who should drive them back again out of the
gate of victory. A sympathetic astonishment was expressed; nothing was
agreed to. Albano had neither been presented to the country nor the
empire. Gaspard brought on very calmly an early acknowledgment from
Joseph II. This, too, was found out of rule and invalid. Thereupon he
confessed, with the determined anger with whose lightning-sparks he so
often suddenly pierced through men and relations, that he was going to
unveil, without further ceremony, the whole conduct of the court toward
Luigi in his eighth year and in his travelling years to all the courts
of Europe.
Here they broke off in terror the forenoon's negotiations, to prepare
themselves for new ones in the afternoon. In these--which the Lector
was ordered to conceal from Albano--the wish of a continued nearer
union between the two houses was shown at a distance. By the union was
meant Idoine, whose resemblance to Liana, and thereby Albano's love for
the latter, had long been known as gossip. But the involving of this
guiltless angel ran counter to Gaspard's whole plan of his complete
satisfaction; he--who with his high, jagged antlers easily flew through
the confused low brush-wood of worldly life--pushed against the
barriers of his complete power, gave a downright No! and they broke off
in a rage, with the courtly reminder that Herr von Hafenreffer was to
accompany him as plenipotentiary and transact the rest of the business
in Pestitz.
So both arrived. Hafenreffer, quite as fine and cold as he was honest,
easily searched out all the real relations of the case. Gaspard
imparted to Julienne--still fancying that she retained her old love for
his daughter Linda--the wish of the rival Court; but he was astounded
at her disclosures, which spoke as much for Idoine as her former secret
influences upon Albano. In addition to this, she further provoked him,
in the confused twilight of her situation, by the well-meant offer to
make good to him in some measure his paternal outlays upon Albano. "The
Spaniard reads no household accounts, he merely pays them," said he,
and sensitively took leave forever, in order to travel over all the
islands of the earth. Albano he wished not to see any more, from
chagrin at the accident that he had been cheated out of the enjoyment,
by Schoppe's church- and grave-robbery, of punishing and humbling
Albano, by the disclosure that he was only Linda's father and not his,
for cherishing bold doubts of his worth. Whither Linda had gone on that
night of his discovery as father, he coldly concealed from all.
Thereupon he took also solemn leave of his former bride, the Prince's
widow. "He held it as his bounden duty," he said to her, "to let her
into the secret of the newest succession, since he had in some measure
let himself be entangled in the progress of the business." Never was
her look more proud and poisonous. "You seem," said she, composedly,
"to have been led off into more than one error. If it so interests you,
as you seem upon the whole to be interested for this land, then I take
pleasure in telling you, that I dare no longer hesitate about making
known the good fortune which I anticipate, of sparing the country,
perhaps, by a son of their beloved, deceased Prince, the necessity of
any change. At least, we cannot, before time has decided the thing,
admit any foreign admixture." Gaspard, enraged at what he had expected,
spoke in reply merely an infinitely impudent word--because he had a
faculty of more easily forgetting and violating _sex_ than _rank_,--and
thereupon took his courteous leave of her, with the assurance that he
was certain, wherever he might be, to receive confirmation of this
already so agreeable intelligence, and that it would then pain him to
be obliged, out of love for the truth, to make public against her some
extraordinary--judicial papers, which he would not gladly put in
circulation. "You are a real devil," said the Princess, beside herself.
"_Vis-à-vis d'un ange? Mais pourquoi non?_" replied he, and departed
with the old ceremonies.--
Albano, whose heart had in all these depths and abysses naked, wounded
roots and fibres, could not say a word. But his friend Siebenkäs
declared, without further ceremony, that "Gaspard, at every step, and
with his everlasting, fine dallying and hesitating,--as, for example,
about the marriage of his daughter, and other things,--had betrayed
nothing but the incarnate Spaniard, as Gundling, in the first part of
his _Otia_, so well portrays him." Augusti wondered at this openness,
while it seemed to him more tolerable and decorous than Schoppe's
roughness. "What would strike me most," added Siebenkäs, who, as it
seemed, had taken the world's history as a subordinate department,
"would be the long concealment of so weighty a pedigree among so many
partakers of the secret, if I did not know too well from Hume, that the
Gunpowder Plot, under Charles I., had been kept secret for a whole year
and a half by more than twenty conspirators."
Much wounded, and yet thoroughly cleansed, Albano departed, in the
afternoon after these narrations, into the discordant kingdom, but with
cheerful, holy boldness. He was conscious to himself of higher aims and
powers than any of the hard souls would dispute with him; from the
serene, free, ethereal sphere of eternal good he would not let himself
be drawn down into the dirty isthmus of common existence; a higher
realm than what a metallic sceptre sways, one which man first creates,
in order to govern it, opened itself before him; in every, even the
smallest country, was something great,--not population, but prosperity;
the highest justice was his determination, and the promotion of old
foes, particularly of the sensible Froulay. Thus did he now, full of
confidence, leap out of his former slender vessel, propelled only by
strange hands, on to a free earth, where he can move himself alone
without strange rudder, and instead of the empty, bare watery way, find
a firm, blooming land and object. And with this consolation he parted
from the dead Schoppe and the living friend.