Part 36

Late in the evening Albano arrived at the Prince's garden. He saw some carriages at the yard of the little garden castle. At last people of his father's met him, who could tell him Schoppe had walked about, tranquil and cheerful, for some time in the garden, with a Mr. von Hafenreffer of Haarhaar, and had gone with him to the city. "With a man he has, to be sure, a guardian genius and keeper again," thought Albano, and the cold rain which had hitherto annoyed him passed away, although the heavens still remained dull. With his agitated heart, surrounded as it was in this landscape only by a dark horizon, he shunned all society, and therefore now the pleasure-castle. Passing by at a distance, he ventured to cast mournful glance at the island of slumber, where Roquairol's grave-hill, like a burnt-out volcano, was to be seen near the white Sphinx. "There, at last, lies the ungovernable balance-wheel, broken and still, lifted out of the stream of time; only with the grave closed the Janus-temple of thy life, thou tormented and tormenting spirit," thought Albano, full of pity, for he had once loved the dead one so much. Over on the garden-mountain, with the linden-tree, reposed the gentle sister, the friendly, lovely angel of peace, amidst the war-din of life,--she, eternal peace, as he, eternal war. He determined to go up thither, and to be alone with the bride of heaven, and to seek out, on the soil consecrated to flowers, the bed beneath which her flower-ashes lay covered up from storms. At the mere thought of such a purpose, streams of tears, like sorrows, burst from his eyes; for he had been dissolved into dreaminess by his previous night-vigils and anxieties, and by so many a misfortune, too, which in so short a time had pierced through his fair, firm life, from one end to the other, with poisonous sting and tooth.

As he went up the hill in the yet moonless, but richly starred twilight, wherein the evening star was the only moon, as it were a smaller mirror of the sun, he saw a couple of gray-clad persons make earnest signs out of the Prince's garden, as if they would forbid his proceeding. He went on unconcerned; indeed, he did not even know whether his brain, glowing from its vigils and agitated by the shocks of life, did not cause these forms to flutter before him, as out of a concave mirror.

As if he were entering a roofless, Grecian temple, so did he step into the holy cloister-garden of the still nun, wherein the linden-tree spoke loud, and the silent flowers, like children, played above the reposing one, and nodded and rocked. High and far stretched the starry arches, like glimmering triumphal arches, over the little spot of earth, over the hallowed spot, where Liana's mortal veil, the little luminous and rosy cloud, had sunk down, when it had no longer to bear the angel, who had gone up into the ether, and needed no cloud any more. Suddenly the shuddering Albano beheld the white form of Liana leaning against the linden, and turned toward the evening star and the ruddy evening glow. Long did he contemplate, in the averted form, the heavenly descending facial line with which Liana had so often unconsciously stood as a saint beside him. He still believed some dream, the Proteus of man's past, had drawn down the airy image from heaven, and made it play before him, and he expected to see it pass away. It lingered, though quiet and mute. Kneeling down, as before the open gate of the wide, long heaven full of transfiguration and divinity, and as if he had been caught up out of these earthly vales, he exclaimed, "Apparition, comest thou from God? art thou Liana?" and it seemed to him as if he were dying.

Quickly the white form looked round, and saw the youth. She rose slowly, and said, "My name is Idoine; I am innocent of the cruel deception, most unhappy youth." Then he covered his eyes, from a sudden, sharp pang at the return of the cold, heavy reality. Thereupon he looked at the fair maiden again, and his whole being trembled at her glorified resemblance to the departed. So smiled once Liana's delicate mouth in love and sorrow; so opened her mild eye; so fell her fine hair around a dazzling-white, sweet face; so was her whole beautiful soul and life painted upon her countenance. Only Idoine stood there greater, like a risen one, prouder and taller her stature, paler her complexion, more thoughtful the maidenly brow. She could not, when he looked upon her so silently and comparingly, repress her sympathy for the deceived and unhappy one, and she wept, and he too.

"Do I, too, distress you?" said he, in the highest emotion. With the tone of the virgin who lay beneath the flowers, Idoine innocently said, "I only weep that I am not Liana." Quickly she added, "Ah, this place is so holy, and yet the human heart is not enough so." He understood not her self-reproach. Reverence and openheartedness and inspiration mastered him; life stood up and stood out shining from the narrow bounds of troublous reality, as out of a coffin; heaven came down nearer with its lofty stars, and the two stood in the midst of them. "Noble Princess," said he, "we have neither of us any apology to make here; the holy spot, like a second world, takes away all sense of mutual strangeness. Idoine, I know that you once gave me peace; and, before the hidden tabernacle of the spirit in whose sense you spoke, I here thank you."

Idoine answered, "I did it without knowing you, and therefore I could allow myself the short use or abuse of a fleeting resemblance. Had it depended upon me, I certainly never would have so painfully awakened your recollections with so insignificant a resemblance as an external one is. But her heart deserves your remembrance and your sorrow. They wrote me you were no longer in the linden city." She sought now to hasten her departure. "In a few days," he answered, "I, too, shall travel. I seek comfort in war from the peace of the grave, and the solitude which makes my life still." "Earnest activity, believe me, always reconciles one with life at last," said Idoine; but the tranquil words were borne by a trembling voice, for, by help of her sister, she had got a sight of the whole gray, rainy land of his present existence, and her heart was full of deep sympathy for her kind.

Here he looked at her sharply; her nun-like eyelids, which always, during her speaking, drooped over the whole of her large eyes, made her so like a slumbering saint. He was reminded by her last words of her beneficent life in Arcadia, where the gay flower-dust of her ideas and dreams, unlike the heavy, dead gold-dust of mere riches, lightly fluttering round in cheerful life, enlivening all with unobserved influence, at length displayed its fruit in firm woods and gardens on the earth. Everything within him loved her, and cried, "She only could be thy last as well as thy first love"; and his whole heart, opened by wounds, was unfolded to the still soul. But a serious, severe spirit closed it again: "Unhappy one, love no one again; for a dark, destroying angel goes behind thy love with a sword, and whatever rosy lip thou pressest to thine he touches with the sharp edge or poisoned point, and it withers or bleeds to death!"

He saw already the glitter of this sword glide through the long darkness; for Idoine had made a vow never to stretch out her hand in the covenant of love below her princely rank. So stood the two beside each other, separate in one heaven, a sun and a moon, divided by an earth. She hastened her departure. Albano thought it not right to accompany her, as he now divined that the gray-clad persons who had beckoned him back were her servants, placed there to guard her solitude. She offered him her hand at the garden-gate, and said, "May you live to be more happy, dear Count; one day I hope to find you again as happy as you ought to make yourself." The touch of the hand, like that of a heavenly one offering itself out of the clouds, streamed through him with a glorified fire from that world where risen ones hover, light and luminous, and the lofty, awe-awakening form inspired his heart. He could not say what he subdued and buried within him, but neither could he say any other cold, disguised word. He knelt down, pressed her hand to his bosom, looked with tears to the starry heaven, and only said, "Peace, all-gracious one!" Idoine turned hastily away, and, after a few swift steps, passed slowly down the little hill into the Prince's garden.

A few minutes after, he saw the torches of her carriage fly through the night, in which she loved to brave the danger of travelling. Around the hill it was dark; the evening redness and the evening star had gone down; the earth was a smoke and rubbish-heap of night; a mausoleum of clouds reared itself on the horizon. But in Albano there was a certain incomprehensible gladness, a luminous point in the darkness of the heart; and, as he looked upon the gleaming atom, it spread itself out, became a splendor, a world, a boundless and endless sun. Now he recognized it; it was the real infinite and divine love, which can be still and suffer, because it knows only _one_ good, but not its own.

He was rejoiced at having veiled his breast, and at his resolve not to see her again in the city. "So silently," he said, half praying, half aloud, "will I love her forever. Her peace, her bliss, her fair aspiration, shall be ever holy to me, and her form hidden from me, and remote as that of her heavenly sister; but when the battle for right begins, and the tones of music flutter with the banners in the air, and the heart beats more eagerly, to bleed more profusely, then let thy form, O Idoine, hover before me in the heavens, and I will fight for thee; and if, in the tumult, an unknown destroying angel draws the poisoned edge across my breast, then will I hold thee fast in my fainting heart till the earth is to me no more.".

He looked round serenely, after this prayer, at the churchyard of the virgin heart; he felt that Liana alone might be permitted to know, and that she would bless it.

138. CYCLE.

Albano could not spend a night in a region where the single columns and arches of the ruined sun-temple of his youth lay scattered round; but he betook himself, in a mournfully dreamy mood, toward the city. On the road he found the Provincial Director Wehrfritz on horseback, who was in quest of him. "Respected son," said he, "there have come to my hands the weightest things from thy intimate friend Mr. Schoppe, which I, in turn, have to deliver only into thine own, which I accordingly hereby make haste to do; for, by Heaven, I have little spare time. The Prince has dropped off this evening, from fright, because somebody said his old father, who had promised to appear to him a second time as a sign of his death, was to be seen in the mirror-room, which, however, I hear, turned out to be only something of wax. The articles which I have to deliver up are, first, a perspective-glass, wherewith thou wilt see thy mother and sister painted (I use carefully Mr. Schoppe's own expressions); secondly, a written packet addressed to 'Albano, foster-son of Wehrfritz,' half of which is still enclosed in a black, broken marble slab; and, thirdly, thy portrait." The portrait resembled Albano at his present age, it was discovered,--so far as the stars permitted one to see,--though, in fact, he had never let himself be painted. The black marble slab and the perspective-glass brought before his soul his father's prophecy on Isola Bella,[143]--that a female form would step toward him out of the wall of a picture-gallery, and describe to him a place where he was to find the black slab, having previously shown him one where he should find the telescope, of which the eye-glass would make for him, out of the old image of his sister, a young recognizable one, and the object-glass, out of the young image of his mother, an old recognizable one.

Albano put anxious questions about Schoppe and the history of the finding of the rare freight. "With Herr Schoppe it fares well enough," said Wehrfritz; "he must be somewhere in the neighborhood with a strange gentleman." Albano inquired after his dress; this, to his astonishment, had grown out of a green into a red again. Hardly had Wehrfritz begun giving the wonderful history how Schoppe came by those wonderful things, when Albano, who gathered therefrom the solution of the paternal prophecy, in the eagerness of his expectation interrupted the intelligence with the request that he would accompany him to the neighboring Chapel of the Cross, around which several lanterns stood. He had both medallions always with him, and was now so curious to see the face of his mother through the object-glass, as well as to read the paper.

At the outermost lantern they stopped. Albano took out the medallion of the decrepit form, under which was inscribed, "_Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère_"; he surveyed it through the eye-glass; behold, the old face was the young one of his Julienne. Confidently he held the age-imparting glass to the young image, under which was inscribed, "_Nous ne nous verrons jamais, mon fils_"; there appeared a friendly old face, smiling across out of a long life, whose original lay, as having been seen by him, in a deep, dark memory, but nameless; of Linda's mother it had, however, no feature.

All at once he heard a familiar voice: "_Ecco, ecco!_[144] my nephew, sir!" It was Albano's uncle, who seemed to drag along the black-dressed, wailing Schoppe, and weepingly addressed his nephew: "Ah, _neveu!_ O, I speak the truth, only truth _pour jamais_." He looked laughing, and thought he wept. The black coat stepped nearer, become a green coat, and said, "Sir Count, don't let yourself be deceived a minute; our acquaintance begins with a mutual loss." "My Schoppe," said Albano, agitated, "knowest thou me no more?" "O that I were he now! My name is Siebenkäs," replied the green coat, and threw up his hands into the air in token of lamentation. "He lies there, however, in the chapel," said the Spaniard; "I will relate all so truly that it is beautiful." Albano cast a glance into the chapel, and, with a cry of pain, fell headlong.

139. CYCLE.

Schoppe's history was, according to Wehrfritz's and the uncle's telling, this: He had started up glowing out of the constrained slumber; the snorting war-steed of vindictive fury against the Spaniard had hurried him away. In the hotel-yard of the latter the servant had directed him with a lie to the castle. Here, amidst the confused tumult about the suffering Prince, he had reached, unasked, unseen, the mirror-room where he had once begged of the Countess Linda Idoine's word of peace for his distracted friend. When the cylindrical mirror which graves the long years of age on the young face, and shakes thereon the moss and rubbish of time, threw out at him his image wasted with madness, said he, "Ho, ho! the old _I_ lurks somewhere in the neighborhood," and looked grimly round. Out of the mirrors of the mirrors he saw a whole people of _I_'s looking at him. He sprang upon a chair, to unhang a long mirror. While he was starting the nail of the same, a clock in the wall struck twelve times. Here the prediction of Gaspard came into his head, which his friend had confided to him, and all the rules which the latter had prescribed to him for the solution of the riddles. The prediction mentioned, indeed, a picture-gallery, but a mirror-room is itself one, only more vacillating, and deeper in behind the wall. He took down the mirror, according to the rules given by Gaspard, found and opened the arras-door corresponding to the size of the mirror; the wooden female form, with the open souvenir in her left hand and the crayon in her right, sat behind there. He pressed, according to the prescription, the ring on the left middle finger; the form stood up, with the rolling of an inward machinery, stepped out into the apartment, stopped at the opposite wall, drew a line down thereon with the crayon in its hand. He drew up the border of the wall-hanging; the perspective-glass and the waxen impression of the coffin-key lay in a compartment behind there. Now he pressed the ring-finger; the figure set the crayon upon the souvenir, and wrote, "Son, go into the princely vault in the Blumenbühl church, and open the coffin of the Princess Eleonore, and thou wilt find the black slab."

When that was done (the Knight had told Albano), if the marble slab, nevertheless, was not found in the coffin, then he must press the third ring on the little finger, whereupon something would appear which he himself did not foreknow. Schoppe tried the pressure of this finger before going into the Blumenbühl Church,--the figure remained standing,--but something began to roll inside,--the arms stretched themselves out and fell down,--wheels rolled out,--at last the whole form dismembered itself by a mechanical suicide, and there appeared an old head of wax.

Here Schoppe went off, to run to Blumenbühl and fetch out of the vault the light required for this night-piece. Though it was noonday, church and vault were left open,--perhaps because they were making room for the new cavern-guest who was just dying. Without stopping to transform the waxen key into an iron one, he violently broke open the coffin with an iron tool, and quickly snatched out the marble slab and Albano's portrait. He broke the slab behind a bush. When he read the superscription, he examined no farther; he hastened to Albano's house to deliver all. But the two were simultaneously seeking each other in vain. Meanwhile he lighted upon the honest Wehrfritz, through whom alone he could despatch such important booty; he himself was now on the scent after his deadly foe, the Spaniard, and no power could drive him off the hunting-ground of his wrath.

At sundown Schoppe espied the Spaniard, who, flying out of the Prince's Garden to escape the fac-simile, Siebenkäs, came running into his hands. He stiffened at the sight of the madman, cried, "Lord and God, are you behind me and before me, are you red and green?" and rushed sidewards into the old Chapel of the Cross, to fall on his knees and invoke the Holy Virgin. Schoppe stretched out his condor wings, shot off and dropped them together before the chapel. "Turn thyself round, Spaniard, I'll devour thee from top to toe," said he. "Holy mother of God, help me,--good, bad spirit, stand by me, O gloomy one!" prayed the Baldhead. "Step round, knave, without further trick," said Schoppe, describing from behind with his sword a horse-shoe in the air. He turned round piteously on his knees, and his head hung slackly down from his neck. Schoppe began: "Now I've got thee, villain! thou prayest to me to no purpose on thy knees; I hold the sword of judgment,--mad am I, too,--in a few minutes, when we have said our say, I stick this present cane-sword into thee,--for I am a madman, full of fixed ideas." "Ah, sir," replied the Baldhead, "you are certainly entirely rational and in your head and yourself; I beg to live; killing is so great a deadly sin." Schoppe replied: "As to my understanding, of that another time! I have already shot thee in effigy, now will I not carry round in vain the deadly sin and the sting of conscience, but set myself about it _in naturâ_, thou hangman of souls, thou trepan of hearts!"

"Schoppe, Schoppe!" cried at this moment, several times over, at great distances, a something with Albano's voice. He looked swiftly round; nothing was to be seen. "Good Schoppe," it continued, "let my uncle go!" Now Schoppe blazed up, and raised his dagger for a thrust. "Thou absolutely too abominably petrified ventriloquist! Should not one immediately stick the trumpery here as they do a wounded horse? Seest thou not, then, the hellish, cursed murder- and death-stroke before thy nose, thy pest-cart already tackled up, the stuffed-out skeleton of death cased in this flesh of mine, and just lifting the scythe? Confess, Spaniard, for Jesus' sake, confess! Fly, ere I stick, spit thee! Thou wilt thereby have some plea with the devils in hell; otherwise thou art, even down below there, an utterly ruined man."

"Where sits the Pater? I will confess, indeed," said the Spaniard.

"Here stands thy gallows-Pater; behold the shorn poll," said Schoppe, shaking off the hat from his bending, close-shaven head.

"Hear my confession! But by night the gloomy one suffers me not to tell the truth,--he comes certainly, he comes to take me, Pater! fumigate me, baptize me against the devil!"

"Step-penitent and thief, am I not father-confessor and Pater enough for thee, who will soon baptize thee? Just say all, hound, I absolve thee, and then strike thee dead for penitence. Say on, thou coronation-mint of the Devil, art thou not the Baldhead, and the Father of Death, and the monk at the same time, whose figure full of gas went up toward heaven in Mola, and hadst ventriloquism and wax-moulding and considerable knavery at hand?"

"Yes, father, ventriloquism and wax-images and the knave. But the evil spirit was always by; often I said nothing, and yet it was said, and the figures ran."

"Mordian," said Schoppe, waxing furious upon this subject, "seize the hound! Dost thou still lie,--thou cloaca dug in Paradise!--into the ear of the great Fatal Sister, thou mimic mummery? Does thy death's head without lip and tongue still bestir itself to lie? O God, what are thy human creatures!"

"O Pater, they are no lies! but the gloomy one wills them by night; I have made a league with him,--I have seen him this evening; he looked like you, and was in green. Holy Mary, O Pater, I have spoken the truth; there he comes in green,--O Pater, O Mary, and has your form and a fiery eye in his hand--"

"No one has my form," said Schoppe, agitated, "but the 'I.'"

"O glance round! The evil spirit comes to me--absolve--stab--I will die off!"

Schoppe at last looked behind him. The striding cast of his form came moving along towards him,--the fiery eye in the hand ascended into the face,--the mask of the _I_ was clad in green. "Evil spirit, I am just in the act of auricular confession; thou canst not come hither; I am holy," cried the Spaniard, and grasped Schoppe. The dog seized _him_. Schoppe stared at the green form,--the sword fell from his hand. "My Schoppe," it cried, "I seek thee, dost thou not know me?"