In the twilight he came upon the mountain, whence he could overlook,
but with other eyes than once, the city, which was to be the circus and
the theatre of his powers. He belongs now to a German house,--the
people around him are his kinsmen,--the prefiguring ideals, which he
had once sketched to himself at the coronation of his brother, of the
warm rays wherewith a prince as a constellation can enlighten and
enrich lands, were now put into his hands for fulfilment. His pious
father, still blessed by the grandchildren of the country, pointed to
him the pure sun-track of his princely duty: only actions give life
strength, only moderation gives it a charm. He thought of the beings
who lay sunk in graves around him, hard and barren indeed as rocks, but
high as rocks, too,--of the beings whom fate had sacrificed, who would
fain have used the _milky-way_ of _infinity_ and the _rainbow_ of
_fancy_ as a bow in the hand, without ever being able to draw a string
across it. "Why did not, then, I, too, go down like those whom I
esteemed? Did not, in me also, that scum of excess boil up and
overspread the clearness?"
Fate now carried on again games of repetition with him; a flaming
carriage rolled away on a road leading off sidewise from the Prince's
garden; slowly moved the hearse of the brother with dead lights up the
Blumenbühl mountain. "The slow carriage I know; whose is the swift
one?" asked Albano of the Lector. "Herr von Cesara has left us,"
replied he. Albano was silent, but he experienced the last pang which
the Knight would give him. He begged the Lector earnestly to let him go
alone on the way to Blumenbühl, because he should take altogether
circuitous routes.
He wished to visit in Tartarus the grave of the paternal heart without
a breast. As he passed through the noisy suburbs, an old man stared at
him for a long time, suddenly fled away with terror, and cried to a
woman, who met him, "The old man is walking round!" The man had been in
his youth a servant of the Prince, had become blind and had recovered
again a short time since; therefore he took the son for the father
whom he so resembled. In the city the usual public joy at change was
making itself heard. In one house was a children's ball, in another a
group of players at proverbs; while the public mourning shut up every
dancing-hall and every theatre. Strange, merry sons of the muses were
looking out of Roquairol's chamber. In the hotel of the Spaniard a boy
had the jay by a string. He heard some people say in passing, "Who
would have dreamed of it?" "Quite natural," replied the other; "I was
helping make, at the very time, a wall to the princely vault, and saw
him as I see thee." In the upper city all the rows of windows in the
palace of mourning were brightly illuminated, as if there were a
happier festival. In the house of the Minister all were dark; overhead
among the statues on the roof a single little light crept round.
"No," thought Albano, "I need not reflect, why I, too, sank not with
them. O enough, enough has fallen from me into graves. I must surely
yearn forever after all the beings who have flown from me; like divers,
the dead swim along with me below, and hold my life-bark or bear the
anchor." He saw the old corpse-seeress standing out there on the
Blumenbühl road, who once met him in the company of the Baldhead; she
stared up after the lighted hearse and fancied she was seeing dreams
and the future, when she was looking at reality. Everywhere in his path
lay the quivering spider-feet which had been torn out from the crushed
Tarantula of the past. He saw life through a veil, though not a black
but a green one.
Passing through Tartarus, he longingly, but with a shudder, because the
past with its spirits glided after him, arrived at the Moravian
churchyard, where, in a garden without flowers, surrounded by sunken,
slumbering mourning-birches, the white altar with the paternal heart
and the golden inscription glimmered: "Take my last offering,
all-gracious one!" Before the heart shut up in a breast of stone, in
which nothing stirred, not even a particle of dust, he made his
childlike prayer to God, and felt that he would have loved his parents,
and swore to himself to please them, if their lofty eyes still looked
down into the low vale of life. He pressed the cold stone like a breast
to himself; and went away with soft steps, as if the old man were
walking along beside him in this his own form, so like his.
He looked up from his road to the mountain where his father had found
him at evening on Whitsuntide and Sacrament day, as to a Tabor of the
past; and in his walk through the little birch wood he still
recollected well the spot[157] where once two voices (his parents) had
pronounced his name. Thus consecrated by the holy past, he arrived in
the village of his childhood, and saw the church, as well as the house
of Wehrfritz, filled with lights, the former, however, for a mournful
object, and the latter for the glad one of welcoming of guests.