Part 38

"For the space of three years thou wast obliged, for appearance' sake, to stay on Isola Bella with thy pretended twin-sister, Severina, although under the eye of the Prince, while I, with Julienne, went back to Germany. Longer, however, it could not last, much as thy foster-mother wished it; thou wast too much like thy father. This resemblance cost me many tears,--for on this account thou couldst never go from B. to P. (Pestitz) so long as the Prince still wore youthful features,--even the portraits of his youthful form I had, therefore, gradually to steal away and give in charge to the faithful Spener. Yes, this learned man told me that a convex mirror, which transformed young faces into old ones, had to be put aside, because thou immediately stoodst there as the old Prince when thou didst look into it. O, when my good, pious prince in his feeble days unconsciously prattled all sorts of things, and made me more and more anxious about the fate of the weighty secret, how I trembled, when he one morning (fortunately only Spener and a certain daughter of the Minister von Fr., a gentle, pure spirit, were by), said right out and joyfully, 'Our dear son, Eleonore, was up at the altar last evening; he is certainly a good young man, he knelt down and prayed beautifully, and I said to him only, for I would not discover myself, Go home, go home, my friend; the thunder is already near.'[150] I know that several individuals have already let fall hints about a natural son of the Prince.

"The Countess C. (Cesara) went off with S. (Severina) to V. (Valencia); previously, however, giving herself the name R. (Romeiro), and her daughter the name L. (Linda). The Prince di Lauria had to be drawn into this game, and his consent obtained, for the sake of the inheritance. By this change of names all could be covered up as closely as it now stands. Nine years after, the noble R. (Romeiro) died, and the Count had, under the prerogative of a guardian, the daughter in his sole protection and care.

"I saw her here shortly after the death of her mother.[151] When the flower has entirely unfolded itself out of this full bud, it belongs, as the fullest rose, to thy heart; only may the ghostly game, which I have too light-mindedly sworn to the Countess, pass over without mishap! Should I come to my death-bed before the Prince, I must also draw thy sister and thy brother into thy secret, so as to close my eyes in perfect assurance. Ah, I shall not live to be permitted openly to clasp my son in my arms! The symptoms of my decline come more and more frequent. May it go well with thee, dearest child! Grow up to be holy and honest as thy father! God guide all our weak expedients for the best!

"Thy faithful mother,

"Eleonore.

"P. S. Certain other very weighty secrets I cannot trust to paper, but my dying lips shall let them sink into the heart of thy sister. Farewell! Farewell!"

143. CYCLE.

Albano stood for a long time speechless, looked to heaven, let the leaf fall, and folded his hands, and said, "Thou sendest peace,--I must not choose war,--well, my lot is fixed!" Joy of life, new powers and plans, delight in the prospect of the throne, where only mental effort tells, as rather physical does on the battle-field, the images of new parents and relations, and displeasure at the past, stormed through each other in his spirit. He tore himself loose from his whole former life, the ropes of the whole previous death-chime were broken, he must, in order to win Eurydice out of Orcus, like Orpheus, shun looking back upon the way which he had past. He unveiled all to his new friend, for he battled, he said, now at length, on a free open field for his hitherto concealed right, and should set out immediately for the city. During the recital, the long and daring game which had been played with his holiest rights and relations incensed him still more, and his mistrust of his powers and weapons against the adversaries to whom Luigi fell a victim, and that very brother himself, who could hitherto embrace him in so hard and unbrotherly a mask. "How different was the true sister!" said he. "Why," he went on, "did they oblige me to owe so many thanks to so many a proud, stern spirit for my mere--birthright? Why did they not trust my silence quite as well? O, thus was I forced to misinterpret the poor dead one over yonder,[152] because she, in that hostile night, at the altar sacrificed her fair heart to my revealed rank! Thus was I compelled by presumptions and purposes to injure so many a genuine soul! How innocent might I be but for all this!" "Calm yourself," said Siebenkäs, with keen resentment, "the strength of the foe is driven to resistance, and drawn off from the defeat; and what would a victory have been on an empty battle-field?"

Siebenkäs had, at the revelation of his friend's illustrious rank, and at seeing the fire of his passionateness, which he knew only in common, not in noble manifestations, stepped back some paces,--a movement which Albano did not observe, because he had not presumed upon it. Siebenkäs sought as well as he could,--for his inner man was gradually unfolding again its limbs, which had been frozen stiff in the grave of his friend,--to win back his gentle mirthfulness, and with these flowery chains to bind the impetuous youth. "I rejoice," said he, "that I am the first to offer you wishes on your birth- and coronation-day, all which, however, merge in the single one that you may always assert your baptismal name,--for Alban is the well-known patron saint of the peasants. Except the Haarhaar Prince, whom the Knight truly hits off with the device of the founder of his order, Philip: _ante ferit quam flamma micet_,[153] no one, perhaps, is to be pitied in this connection but the financial stamp-cutter, who now receives nothing new to cut, as the old line continues in power." He added lightly, because he had never seen the heavy wooded and cloud-bearing rock, Gaspard: "What a singular game of names, which few _Cavalleros del Tuzone_ have ever played, it is, that he happens to call himself _De Cesara_, since, as you know, the Spaniards, like the old Romans, often appropriate to themselves the names of their actions or accidents. Thus it is everywhere known from the _Pieces Interassantes_, Tom. I., that Orendayn, for example, took the name _La Pas_, because he, in 1725, signed the peace between Austria and Spain,--he baptized himself with a third name, _Transport Real_, in order to remember and remark that he had carried away the Infante to Italy. _Cesara_ is of course more accidental."

Albano was, for the first time, by such resemblances of spirit to the free Schoppe, really drawn to his heart. He took leave of him, and said, "Friend of our friend, will we keep together?" "Verily, the doubt which rests upon the decision of your fate, Prince," replied Siebenkäs, "were alone sufficient to settle that, if only my heart alone had the business of settling it; but--" Albano shrugged his shoulders, as if irritated, but was silent; "meanwhile I will remain here," the other continued, more softly, "until the earth rests on the deceased; then I set up the black wooden cross over it, and write all his names thereupon." "Well, so be it!" said Albano. "But his dog I take, because he has been longer acquainted with me. I am a young man, still young in lost years, but already very old in lost times, and understand as well as many another who is bent by age what it is to lose fellow-creatures. Singular it is, that I always find on graves mirrors wherein the dead walk and look, alive again. Thus I found on Liana's grave her living image and echo; my old prostrate Schoppe I found, also, as you know, erect and stirring, behind a looking-glass, which my hand could as little break through. I assure you, even my parents were conjured before me; my father I can see in a cylindrical mirror, and my mother through an object-glass. Here, now, there is nothing to do, when one stands in a night, where all stars of life move downward, but stand very firm therein. But to my old humorist must I still say _Adio_."

He went into the chamber of death. Silently Siebenkäs followed him, struck with the unwonted quaintness of his--grief. With dry eyes, Albano drew the white cloth from the earnest face, whose fixed eyebrows no longer shaped themselves for any joke, and which slept away in an iron sleep without time. The dog seemed to be shy of the cold man. Albano sought, by sharp, vehement, dry looks, to imprint the dead face, even to every wrinkle, deeply on his brain, as in plaster, especially as the most living copy, the friend, had escaped him. Then he lifted the heavy hand, and placed it on the brow which was to wear the princely hat, as if therewith to bless and consecrate it. At last he bent down to the face, and lay for a long time on the cold mouth; but, when he finally raised himself up, his eyes were weeping, and his whole heart, and he tremblingly held out his hand to the spectator, and said, "Well, so mayest thou, too, fare well!" "No," cried Siebenkäs; "I cannot do that, if I go. Schoppe! I stay with thy Albano!"

Just then came Wehrfritz and Augusti, and interrupted the weeping solemnity of the threefold love with gay looks and words.

144. CYCLE.

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.

145. CYCLE.

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.