Part 4

Long did he lie, up in the thunder-house, with his eyes buried in his arms, and when he at last, and quite late, without knowing where he was, roused himself, as from a dream, he saw the whole landscape illumined by a serene day, the sunshine unveiled and warm in the pure blue, and the close carriage with the blind one rolled rapidly across the woodland bridge. Then Albano sank down again on his arms.

NINETEENTH JUBILEE.

Schoppe's Office of Comforter.--Arcadia.--Bouverot's Portrait-painting.

82. CYCLE.

Now that Albano lived without love or hope; now that he had seen the polar-star of his life fall like a shooting-star into a wilderness still as death; now that every one of his actions and every recollection darted out a scorpion-sting, and he sent back Liana's letters, forsook Lilar, the house of the Doctor, the Lector, Liana's relatives, and the pious father; now that he directed his face, gradually growing pale, only to books and stars; men who know no higher sorrow than selfish sorrow must needs imagine that nothing weighs upon his bosom but the ruins and rubbish of the shattered air-castles of his hope and youthful love. But he was more nobly unhappy and disconsolate: he was so, because he had for the first time made a human creature and the best of beings miserable,--his beloved blind! Into this abyss of his heart all neighboring fountains of sorrow flowed together. The smallest gayly-painted shards of his urn of fortune were as if shattered afresh, when he heard from day to day that the poor girl, although daily stationed in the bath-house before the healing fountains, was nevertheless brought back each time without a ray of light or hope, and that she now feared nothing more, lamented nothing more on this robbers' earth, than that death might perhaps close her eyes before they had seen her mother again.

O, the wound of conscience is no sear, and time cools it not with his wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe! Albano called back to remembrance Liana's bitter entreaty for indulgence; and then it was no consolation to him, that, during that eclipse of the sun, he had not wished to sacrifice her eyes, but only her heart. In the burning-glass and magnifying-mirror of consequences fate shows us the light, playing worms of our inner man as grown-up and armed furies and serpents. How many sins pass through us unseen and with soft looks, like nightly robbers, because, like their sisters in dreams, they steal not out from the circle of the breast, and get no outward object to fall upon and strangle. The fair soul readily detects in an accident a sin. Only those hard stormers of heaven and earth before whose triumphal chariots there starts up beforehand a wagon-rampart full of wounds and corpses,--that is, the fathers of war, which, in the long course of history, ministers have oftener been than princes,--only these can calmly kindle all the volcanoes of earth, and let all their lava-torrents stream down, merely that they may have--fair prospects. They manure Elysian fields into a battle-field, in order to raise therein a redder rose-bush for a mistress.

The first thing Albano did, when he arrived at the Doctor's house, was to trudge out of it down into the remote valley town, in order neither to see the suspected Lector, still less to hear daily the malicious Doctor Sphex upon the relapse of the blindness. Only the faithful Schoppe jogged off with him, especially as he, by a well-adapted course of behavior, had contrived to get up an opposition party against himself in the Sphex family, which could no longer suffer him in the house. The Librarian's warmth toward the Count had grown very much with the Lector's coldness, and on similar grounds. The bold march out to Lilar and the passionate wildness of the youth had fastened him more closely to Albano's side. "I thought at first," said Schoppe, "the young man was coming to be nothing but an elderly one, when I saw him stalking along so to school. I often held the man in the moon--where notoriously, from an absence of thirst and atmosphere, there is nothing to drink--to be a greater tippler than he. But at last he strikes out. A youth must not, like old Spener, represent everything in bird's-eye perspective, from the apex downward. He must, in the beginning, like incipients in authors' studies and painters' studios, make all lines a little too large, because the little ones come of themselves. There are thunder-steeds, but no thunder-asses and thunder-sheep; as, however, the tutors and lectors would be glad if there were, and would be glad to have such to drive along before them,--they who, like the billiard-markers, suffer no open fire in the pipe, but only one under cover."

Albano lived alone now among books. Liana's brother came to him seldom, and then ice-cold, and said nothing of the patient, although he always stayed for her sake. As he himself had once woven the first web of her blindness, he must, of course, especially with his _un_painted fire of love for his sister, have a real hatred for him who had drawn it over her again; so Albano thought, and gladly bore it as a punishment. So much the oftener did the Captain let himself be drawn to the German gentleman's, upon whose good graces he now, contrary to what was to be expected, always won. It is a question--that is to say, there can be no question--whether his talent and inclination for winding himself around the most unlike men was not mere coldness toward all hearts, all of which he only travels over, because he does not mean to dwell in any one.

Rabette, also, wrote the Count several bills of impeachment about the Captain's growing coolness. In one she even says, "Could I only see thee, in order for once to have some one who would let me weep, for laughter I have not for a considerable time any longer known." The good Albano entered this desertion also upon his sin-register, as if it were grandchild to his devil's children.

The Princess prevailed occasionally to allure him out of solitude, when she put the gentle bird-whistle to her fair lips. She seemed, for the father's sake, to take a veritable interest in the melancholy son, who showed no grief, to be sure, but also no joy. Besides, the masculine woman, more helmeted than hooded, loves to place the pillow of rest under the sick head, and under the faint head her arm as a chair-back; and such a one consoles fondly and tenderly, often more tenderly than the too feminine woman. Almost every day she visited her future court-dame and visionary sister[19] at the Minister's, and could therefore tell the lover all about her. Meanwhile, she acted as if she knew nothing of Albano's relations to the blind one;--the very dissembling betrays tender forbearance toward two beings at once, Albano said;--so she could freely give him all the medical reports of the fair sufferer's case, as well as the opinions entertained about her in general. After the manner of the strong women, she bestowed upon her all just praise, without any petty womanish deduction, and wished nothing so much as her restoration and future company.

"I am capable of doing everything _for_ an uncommon woman, as well as everything _against_ a common one," said she, and asked whether his father had already written him about her plan with Liana. He said no, and begged her for it. She referred him, however, to the paternal letter, which must soon come. She found fault only with Liana's propensity to be always embroidering fantasy-flowers into the groundwork of her life, and called her a rich Baroque pearl.

But from all these conversations Albano returned only more confused to Schoppe; he heard only lip-solace, and the death-sentence, that the long-suffering soul from whom he had stolen creation was becoming more and more immured in the deepest cavern of life, near which only the deeper one of the grave lies bright and open. Every soft, soothing, warm gale wafted to him by the sciences or by human beings passed over that cold cavern, and became to him a sharp norther. O, had he been called to release her from his sinking arms amidst lovely days, into a long, eternal Paradise, and had she forgotten him in the intoxication of rapture, he too could have forgotten that; but that he should have thrust her away into a cold realm of shadows, and that she must needs remember him for sorrow,--this must he forever remember.

Schoppe knew no "plaster" for all this distress (to use his own fine play on words) "except the plaster of Paris,"[20] namely, an excursion. At least, he concluded, when one is out in the country, all inquiries about one's health are done with, and all these poisonous anxieties about the answer; and on return one finds much pain spared or in fact all the trouble gone.

Albano obeyed his last friend; and they rode off into the Principality of Haarhaar.

83. CYCLE.

Whoever thinks that Schoppe, on the way, was to Albano a flying field-lazaretto of consolation,--an _antispasmodicum_,--a Struve's table of ailments and remedies,--a pulverized _Fox's lung_ for the hectic of the heart, &c., and that at every milestone he delivered a consolatory sermon,--whoever thinks so, Schoppe himself laughs him to scorn.

"What then," said he, "if misfortune does knead a young man thoroughly and soundly in her kneading-trough? The next time, he, who is now in the power of grief, will have her in his power. Whoso has never borne anything, never learns to bear up under anything."[21] As regards weeping, he, as a Stoic, was, as may well be imagined, an enemy to it at least; Epictetus, Antonine, Cato, and several such, men made less of ice than of iron, would very willingly, as he so often said, have allowed the body these extreme unctions of sorrow, provided only the spirit beneath and behind all had kept itself dry. The true disconsolateness is to desire and to accept consolation; why will not one then for once just go through with the pang out and out without any physic?

But his view of things and his actual life became, without his express intention, powerful over the Count, whom everything great only enlarged, as it belittles others. Schoppe sat like a Cato upon ruins, but, to be sure, upon the greatest of all; if the wise man ought to be a barometer-tube at the Equator, in which even the tornado produces little displacement, he was a wise man. Accidentally he tore open the Count's glued-up wings at an inn by means of the _Hamburg Impartial Correspondent_, which he found lying there. Schoppe read aloud out of it two extensive battles, wherein, as by an earthquake, lands instead of houses were buried, and whose wounds and tears only the evil genius of the earth could be willing to know; thereupon he read,--after the death-marches of whole generations, and the rending open of the craters of humanity,--with uninterrupted seriousness, the notices, under the head of Intelligence, where one solitary individual mounts upon an unknown little grave and announces and asseverates to the world, which surely condoles with him,--"Frightful was the blow which laid our child of five weeks--"; or, "In the bitterest anguish which ever--"; or, "Overwhelmed with the loss of our father in the eighty-first year of his age," &c.

Schoppe said, he pronounced that to be right; for every distress, even a universal one, after all, housed itself only in one individual breast; and were he himself lying on a red battle-field full of fallen sheaves, he would sit up among them, if only he could, and deliver to those lying around him a short funeral sermon upon his shot-wound. "So has Galvani observed," he said, "that a frog which stands in electrical relations quivers as often as thunder rolls over the earth."

He adhered to this position, also, out of doors. He cited with disapprobation what Matthison remarks,--as a traveller's note by the way,--that in the modern town, _Avenches_, in Switzerland, on the site of the Helvetian capital, _Aventicum_, which was laid in ruins by the Romans, the plan of the streets and walls may be traced by the thinner strips of grass; whereas, in fact, the same stereographic projections of the past lay manifestly all about in every meadow,--every mountain was the shore of a deluged old world; every spot here below was actually six thousand years old and a relic; all was churchyards and ruins on the earth, particularly the earth itself; "Heavens!" he continued, "what is there, in fact, which is not already gone by,--nations, fixed stars, female virtue, the best Paradises, many just men, all Reviews, Eternity a _parte ante_, and just now even my feeble description of all this? Now, if life is such a game of nothingness, one must prefer to be _card-painter_ rather than _king of cards_."

A vigorous, high-minded man, like Albano, will hardly, then, in the midst of thirty-years' wars, last days, emigrating nations, crumbling suns, strip off his coat, and exhibit to himself or the universe the ruptured vein which bleeds on his breast.

So stood matters, when the two friends at evening climbed a half-open woodland height, from which they saw below them a wonderful glory-land, so friendly and foreign, as if it were the remains of a time when the whole earth was still warm, and an ever-green orient land. It seemed, so far as they could see for the trees and the evening-sun, to be a valley formed by the angle of mutually approaching mountains, and stretching away immeasurably toward the west. A party-colored windmill, flinging round its broad wings before the sun, confused the eye, which would fain analyze the throng of evening lights, gardens, sheep, and children; on both steeps white-clad children, with long, green hat-ribbons flowing behind them, were keeping watch; a motley Swissery ran through the meadow-green along the dark brook; on a high-arched hay-wagon there drove along a peasant-woman, dressed as if for a marriage festival, and at the side went country-people in Sunday finery; the sun withdrew behind a colonnade of round, leafy oaks,--those German liberty-trees and temple-pillars,--and they soared aloft, transfigured and magnified in the golden blue. At this moment the surprised travellers saw the shaded Dutch village near below,--composed, as it were, of neat, painted garden-houses clustered together, with a linden-circle in the middle, and a young, blooming hunter not far off, or an Amazon, who with one hand took off her hat, stuck full of twigs, and with the other let the crossbeam with the bucket mount high over the well.

"My friend," inquired Schoppe of an official messenger who came behind them with tin-plate and knapsack, "what do you call this village?" "Arcadia," was the reply. "But to speak without any poetic white-heat or culminating of fancy, my poetic friend, how is that canton down below there properly named?" asked Schoppe again. Petulantly the official messenger answered, "Arcadia, I say, if you cannot retain it,--it is an old crown-domain; our Princess Idone (Idoine) keeps herself there year in and year out for constancy, and does everything there at her own pleasure; what will you have more?" "Are you, too, in Arcadia?"[22] "No, in Sowbow," answered the messenger, very loud, over his shoulders, for he was already five steps ahead.

The Librarian, who saw his friend in great commotion at the messenger's discourse, put to him joyfully the question, whether they could have found better night-quarters than these, except these very same in the moon of May. But how was he astounded at Albano's plunging back into the limbo which conscience and his love had kindled! Idoine's illusive resemblance to Liana had suddenly flashed across his thoughts. "Know'st thou," said he, continuing to tremble more violently in his agitation by reason of the magic of evening, "wherein Idoine is unlike her? She _can_ see," he himself added, "for she has not seen _me_ yet. O forgive, forgive, firm man! truly I am not always so. She is dying at this moment, or some calamity or other draws near to her; like a smoke before a conflagration, it mounts up duskily and in long clouds within my soul. I must absolutely go back."

"Believe me," said Schoppe, "I shall one day tell you all that I now think; for the present, however, I will spare you." Neither did this, however, produce any effect; he turned about; but through the whole of the next day's journey his cup of sorrow, which Schoppe had scoured so shiny, continued to be stained with moisture and blackness. They could not arrive till evening, when a magic mist of twilight, moonlight, smoke, vapor, and cloud-red made the city a somewhat strange place. Albano's eagle eye clove the smoke in twain, and it vanished. He saw only the blind Liana, on the high Italian roof, run against the statues, or headlong down over the edge. Wildly, and without uttering a sound, he ran through the deep streets,--lost sight of the Palace buried in buildings, and ran so much the more furiously; he imagined to find her crushed to atoms on the pavement,--he sees the white statues again, she holds one entwined within her arms, and the old gardener, he of the _Cereus serpens_, stands with his hat on his head before her. When, at length, he arrived directly under the walls of the Palace, there stood overhead a strange maiden beside her, and below women, running together, looked up, asking one another, "God, what is the matter now?" Liana looked (so it seemed) to the heavens, wherein only a few stars burned, and then for a long space into the moon, and then down upon the people; but directly she stepped back from the statues. The gardener came out of the court, and said, as he passed, to his inquiring wife, "She can see." "O my good man," said Albano, "what do you say?" "Only just go up there!" he replied, and strode busily away. At this moment came Bouverot on foot,--Albano, with a short bow and greeting, stepped across his path. Bouverot looked at him a moment: "I have not the honor of your acquaintance," said he, wildly, and hurried off.

84. CYCLE.

Take now a nearer look at the blind Liana! From the day when her mother bore her home, a ruined creature, there gradually began for her, under her solar eclipse, a cooler and a tranquil life. Earth had changed; her duties towards it seemed rolled off from her; the silver-glance of youth, like a human look, now blinded; her short joys, those little May-flowers, plucked off already under the morning-star; the object of her first love, alas! as her mother had predicted, not so tender as she had thought, but very masculine, rough, and wild, like her father, time and the future extinguished, and the coming days for her only a blind, painted show-gate, which men's hands do not open, and through which she can no longer force her way, except with her unencumbered soul, when it has thrown back on the earth the heavy trailing mantle of the flesh.

Her heart clung now--as Albano did to a man's--more than ever to a female heart, which beat more tenderly and without the fever of the passions; just as the compass-needle shows itself as a spiral lily, so did virtue show itself to her as female beauty.

Her mother never left her blind-chair; she read to her, even the French prayers, and kept her up by consolation; and she was easily consoled, for she saw not her mother's distressed face, and heard only the quiet tones of her voice. Julienne, since the burial of the first love, had thrown off an old crust, and a fresh flame for her friend sprang up in her heart. "I have dealt by thee honestly," said she, upon one occasion; then they secretly declared themselves to each other, and then their souls, like flower-leaves, linked themselves together to form one sweet cup. The Princess spoke seriously about studies and sciences, and gained even the mother, whom in men's society she had pleased less. At evening, before retiring, Caroline flew down, still, as from the heaven of joy, into her realm of shadows, and grew daily in brilliancy and beauty of complexion, but spoke no more; and Liana fell softly to sleep, while they looked upon each other.

At times a pang came to her when she thought that she should perhaps never see her precious parents, especially her mother, any more; then it seemed to her as if she were herself invisible and already making her pilgrimage alone down the deep, dark avenue to the next world and heard her friends and companions at the gate far behind calling after her. Then she tenderly sent her love over, as if out of death, and rejoiced in the great reunion. Spener visited his pupil daily; his manly voice, full of strengthening and solace, was, in her darkness, the evening-prayer-bell, which leads the traveller out of the dusky thicket back to the more cheerful lights. Thus was her holy heart drawn up to still greater heights of holiness, and the dark passion-flowers of her sorrows shut themselves up to sleep in the tepid night of blindness. How different are the sufferings of the sinner and those of the saint! The former are an eclipse of the moon, by which the dark night becomes still blacker and wilder; the latter are a solar eclipse, which cools off the hot day, and casts a romantic shade, and wherein the nightingales begin to warble.

In this way Liana maintained, in the midst of the sighs of others around her, and in the tempestuous weather that enveloped her, a tranquil, healing bosom. So does the tender white cloud often in the beginning hurry away, a torn and tattered fugitive through the heavens, but at last move along in rounded form and slow pace overhead there, when down below the storm still sweeps over the earth, and whirls and tears everything. But, good Liana, all the thirty-two winds, let them waft pleasant days to thee or blow them away, hold on longer than the dead calm of repose!

85. CYCLE.

The Minister, when she came home from Lilar with murdered eyes, had set in _his_ right eye a hell, and into his left a purgatory, for no fatality had ever before so cheated him, namely, so completely upset all his projects and prospects,--the office of court-dame for his daughter, that ring guard on the finger of the Princess, and finally every chance of a haul with his double-woven net.