Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 3

Schoppe said, he p.r.o.nounced 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, _Aventic.u.m_, which was laid in ruins by the Romans, the plan of the streets and walls may be traced by the thinner strips of gra.s.s; whereas, in fact, the same stereographic projections of the past lay manifestly all about in every meadow,--every mountain was the sh.o.r.e 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 cl.u.s.tered 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, "G.o.d, what is the matter now?" Liana looked (so it seemed) to the heavens, wherein only a few stars burned, and then for a long s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed, 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 unenc.u.mbered 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 pa.s.sions; just as the compa.s.s-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 pa.s.sion-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 h.e.l.l, 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.

Unspeakably did the man struggle against the spoon in which fate offered him the powder wherein he was to let the swallowed diamonds of his plans go down; he delivered the strongest sermons,--so did he, like Horace, name his Satires against "his women"; he was a war-G.o.d, a h.e.l.l-G.o.d, a beast, a monster, a satan,--everything;--he was in a frame now to undertake anything and everything,--but what availed it?--Much, when the German gentleman surprised him just in this mood of moral feeling. He made no scruple of refreshing the paternal memory on the subject of the promised sitting of the daughter for a miniature, and a.s.serting his claim to it; for the rest he was all-knowing, and seemed to know nothing. For the sitting-scene of a blind girl he had cut out certain original, romantic situations, according to the notices which he had drawn out of the Captain. His artistic love for Liana had hitherto suffered little, and his slow, stealthy advances and reconnoitrings were in accordance with his viper-coldness and his worldsman-like energy. The old father--who in life, as in an imperial advertiser, always sought a partner with 60-80,000 dollars for his business--declared himself anything but averse to the match. These two falcons on one pole, trained by one falcon-master, the Devil, understood and agreed with each other excellently well. The German gentleman gave to understand that her miniature-likeness would, through her striking resemblance to Idoine, who, like her, had never been willing to sit, be serviceable for many a piece of pleasantry with the Princess, but still more indispensable to his "flame" for Liana, and just now, in her blindness, one might, indeed, sketch her without her knowledge,--and he would write under the picture, _La belle aveugle_, or something of the kind. The old Minister, as was said, swallowed the idea with perfect _gout_. As the Italian female singers carry a so-called mother instead of a pa.s.sport on their journeys, so did he regard himself as in a similar sense a so-called father; he thought to himself: at all events there is little more to be done with the girl; she lies there as so much dead capital, and pays a miserable interest; I can take the G.o.d-penny-medal which the German gentleman in his G.o.dfatherly capacity offers to me as the father like a name for the child, and just put it in my pocket.

This duplicate of rogues was held back in mid-current merely by a drag-rake, which threatened to draw the prey out of their pike-like teeth. An old, scolding, but true-souled chambermaid from Nuremberg was the rake; she could not be drawn away from Liana, or reduced to silence. Bouverot, to be sure, a Robespierre and destroying angel to his servants, would, in Froulay's place, have caused the Nuremberg dame, a couple of days beforehand, to be furnished by a servant with some complex fractures, and then thrown upon the street; but the Minister--his heart was soft--could not do that. All that was possible for him was this: He sent for her to his chamber; represented to her that she had stolen his Magdeburg ear; remained, in his present state of hearing, deaf to every objection, but not to every incivility, and at last found himself under the necessity (a word and a blow) of driving the thievish wench out of service. With every successor to the office, as being a new one, money would have weight, he knew.

He proposed thereupon to beg of the Princess an invitation for himself and his lady to tea and supper, to bespeak the miniature-painter, to instruct the new chambermaid, and put all things in a right train.

Two tigers, according to the legend, digged the Apostle Paul's grave; so do our two men here scratch away at one for a saint. So much the more confidently do I say this, as I do not otherwise see through--if nothing is to be made but a picture--the meaning of so many circ.u.mstances. But the father I could almost excuse. In the first place, he said expressly to the German gentleman, the Abigail might, in his opinion, as well stay in the chamber, or in the adjoining one, in case the patient wanted anything; secondly, the otherwise soft man had contracted, from his ministerial commerce with justice, a certain grit, a certain barbarity, which is so much the more natural to Themis, pa.s.sing sentence behind the bandage, and, as an Areopagus, without the sight of the pains, as even Diderot[23] a.s.serts that blind people are more cruel than others; and, thirdly, no one could well be more ready than he to pity the more deeply, in case she should die, the very child whom he, as it was once pretended Jews and witches did with Christian children, crucified, in order, like them, to do something with the blood (as parents generally, and particularly human parents, can indeed get over easily the misfortunes of those who are near and dear to them, but hardly their loss, just as we, in the case of the hair of the head, which is still nearer to us, feel not the singeing or cutting of it, but very painfully the tearing of it up by the root); and, fourthly, Froulay had always the misfortune that thoughts which in his head had a tolerable, innocent hue, became, like muriate of silver or good ink, black on the spot, when they once came to light.

Otherwise, and without taking these alleviating circ.u.mstances into view, there remains, indeed, much in his conduct which I do not vindicate.

The evening appeared. The Minister's lady went on her husband's arm to the court. The new chambermaid had, as Bouverot's bridesmaid, already, three days beforehand, made the most necessary arrangements or man[oe]uvres. She had, with great ease, borrowed for him Liana's letters to Albano, as the mother, from habit, forgot that a present eye was not necessarily a seeing one; and he could extract from them the historical touches or watercolors, wherewith he could a.s.sume, before the blind one, in case of a recognition on the stage, the semblance of her hero,--namely, Albano's. With Roquairol he had played often enough to have his voice, consequently Albano's, in his power. Methinks his preparation-days for the festal evening were suitably spent.

He could, as little residences drink tea earlier than others, make his appearance quite as early as a miniature-painter in September absolutely must. When he beheld the silent form in the easy-chair, with the discolored flower-cups of the cheeks, but more firmly rooted in every purpose, a more coldly commanding saint, then did the exasperation and inflammation which he had imbibed at once from her letters kindle each other into a higher flame. Only in such chests, strung at once with metal and catgut, with cruelty and sensuality, is such an alliance of l.u.s.t and gall conceivable. Bouverot's whole past, the books of his life's history, ought, as those of Herodotus are to the nine Muses, to have been dedicated to the three Fates, one to each.

He stole to the window, seated himself, set down his paint-box, and began hastily to dot. Meanwhile Liana heard her very cultivated, well-read chambermaid read to her out of the second volume of Fenelon's _[Oe]uvres Spirituelles_. Zefisio was not affected by the Archbishop in the least,--what he caught about pure love (_sur le pur amour de Dieu_) he perverted into an impure by applications, and let himself be devilishly inflamed by the divine,--for the rest what there was touching in Liana's relations he left as it was, as he had now to paint. Odiously did his motley-colored panther-eyes lick like red, sharp tiger-tongues over the sweet, soft countenance!--"Dear Justa, stop, the reading is disagreeable to thee, thou breathest so short!"

said she at last, because she heard the portrait-painter breathe. It was no sacrifice to him, but a foretaste, a sweet early-bit, to put off the kiss of this tender little hand and lip and the whole exhibition of his burning heart, until he saw her outline dotted off with the poison-tints on the white ivory by the rapid dotting machine of his hand. At length he had her, many-colored[24] on white. "Very well, dear Justa," said she, "the prayer bell tolls; thou canst not see any longer. Rather lead me to the instrument,"--namely the harmonica. She did so. Bouverot gave Justa a sign to retire. She did that too. The yellow garden-spider now ran up to the tender, white flower. The spider heard her evening choral not without enjoyment, and the devout upcasting of her ruined eyes seemed to him a right picturesque idea, which the true _painter_[25] resolved to transfer to the ivory leaf, if it could be done.

"Lovely G.o.ddess!" cried he, suddenly, with Albano's stolen voice, into the midst of those holy tones, which Albano had once, in a happier hour, but more n.o.bly, interrupted. She listened with alarm, but hardly believing her own ear in this night. The astonishment did not displease the prospect painter--for her face was his prospect--by any means whatever; "remember this harmonica in the thunder-house." He confounded it with the water-house. "You here, Count?--Justa! where art thou?"

cried she distressfully. "Justa, come here!" he added, calling after her. The maiden followed his voice and his--eye. "Gracious damsel?"

asked she. But now Liana had not the heart to ask about the door and the admission-ticket of the Count. To speak French with her lover would not do, as the maid understood it; hence it was that in Vienna in the years of the Revolution they forbade this language very judiciously, because it so surely and pestilentially spreads a certain _equality_,--_freedom_ follows,--between the n.o.bility and the servile orders.

Maliciously and joyfully did Bouverot, to whom she now seemed to betray a serviceable mistrust about the Count, which pointed out a freer play-room for his character mask, remind the perplexed maiden of her commands for Justa; she must now cause her to bring a light.

"_Infidele_," he thereupon began, "I have overcome all obstacles, in order to throw myself at your feet and supplicate your forgiveness. _Je m'en flatte a tort pent etre, mais je l'ose_," he went on, made more pa.s.sionate through her. "_O cruelle! de grace, pourquoi ces regards, ces mouvements? Je suis ton Alban et il t'aime encore,--Pense a Blumenbuhl, ce sejour charmant,--Ingrate, j'esperais te trouver un peu plus reconnaisante. Souviens-toi de ce que tu m'a promis_," said he, by way of sounding her, "_quand tu me pressas contre ton sein divin_." ...

A pure soul mirrors, without staining itself, the unclean one and feels darkly the distressing neighborhood, just as doves, they say, bathe themselves in limpid water, in order to see therein the images of the hovering birds of prey. The short breath, the wavering tone of speech, every word, and an indefinable something, drove the frightful spectre close before her soul, the suspicion that it was not Albano. She started up; "Who are you? G.o.d, you are not the Count. Justa, Justa!"

"Who else could it be," replied he, coldly, "that would dare to a.s.sume my name? _O, je voudrais que je ne le fusse pas. Vous m'avez ecrit, que l'esperance est la lune de la vie. Ah, ma lune s'est couchee, mais j'adore encore le soleil, qui l'eclaire_."

Here he grasped the hand of this eclipsed sun fighting with a dragon.

Then his gnawed finger-nails and dry fingers, and a pa.s.sing touch of his order-cross, discovered to her the real name. She tore herself loose with a shriek, and ran away without seeing whither, and fell into his hands again. He s.n.a.t.c.hed her violently to his meagre hot lips: "Yes, it is I," said he, "and I love you more than does your Count with his _etourderie_."

"You are wicked and G.o.dless toward a blind maiden; what will you?

Justa! is there no one then to help me? Ah, good G.o.d, give me my eyes,"

she cried, flying, without knowing whither, and again overtaken.

"Bouverot! Thou evil spirit!" she cried, warding off in places where he was not. He, like gunpowder, cooling on the tongue, and singeing and shattering when greed kindled him, placed himself at a considerable darting-distance from her, threw a painter's eye at the charming waves and bendings of her tempest-struck flowerage, and said quietly, with that mildness which resembles the eating and devouring milk of spunges: "Only be calm, fairest; it is I still; and what would it all avail thee, child?"

Giddy with the snake-breath of distress, wandering nature began to sing, but only beginnings: "Joy, thou spark of Heaven-born fire!"--"I am a German maiden." She ran round and sang again: "Know'st thou the land?" "Thou evil spirit!"

At this moment the giant snake, thus charmed, reared himself aloft on his cold rings, with darting tongue, to spring and to coil; "_Mon c[oe]ur_," said the snake, who always in pa.s.sion spoke French, "_vole sur cette bouche qui enchante tous les sens_." "Mother!" cried she, "Caroline! O G.o.d, let me see, O G.o.d--my eyes!" Then did the All-gracious give them back to her once more; the agony of nature, the noisy preparations for the burial, opened again the eye of the tranced victim.

How eagerly she flew out of the chamber of torture! The disappointed, mortified beast of prey was still reckoning on blindness and distraction. But when Bouverot saw that she ran lightly up the stairway to the Italian roof, then he merely sent the maid, who came running in, after her, to see that she received no injury; and now again he held her previous blindness for dissimulation. He himself took from the chamber the miniature sketch, and dragged himself like a hungry, wounded monster sullenly and slowly out of the house.

TWENTIETH JUBILEE.

Gaspard's Letter.--Partings.

86. CYCLE.

"She can see again," cried Charles to the Count the morning after, in the intoxication of joy, without concerning himself at all about the cold relations of the recent period; and was entirely his old self. His enmity was more frail and fleeting than his love, for the former dwelt, in his case, on the ice, which soon melted and ran away, the latter upon the fluid element, on which he always sailed. Coloring, Albano asked who had been the ophthalmist. "A well-meant fright," said he; "the German gentleman made as if he would paint her, when my parents, according to appointment, were not there,--or he really painted her,--at this moment I have but a confused idea of the whole,--all at once she heard a strange man's voice, and terror and fright worked naturally like electric shocks!" Although the Captain heard, down on the bottom of his billowy sea, all voices only confusedly, nevertheless he had this time heard correctly; for Liana had extorted from her mother the concealment of the martyrology, in order to take away from her brother the occasion of proving his love to her by a duel with her adversary.

Albano laid up many questions about the dark history in his breast; and broke off the conversation by a description of his journey.

After some days he heard that Liana with her mother had left the city, and gone to visit the mountain-castle of a solitary old n.o.ble widow, which lay above Blumenbuhl. Out in the clean country, it was hoped light would fall again upon her life, and the maternal hand was to paint over anew its fading colors. The Minister, who, like other old men and like old hair, was hard to frizzle and to shape, was, in this last and deepest pitfall of fate, struck quite spiritless, so that he did not devour Liana, who was also caught therein, but let her go. The whole story was to the public eye very much covered over and beflowered like the wall of a park. Only the Lector knew it in full, but he could hold his tongue. He demanded back the miniature from the German gentleman, in the name of the mother; that personage gave in its stead cold, hollow lies; nevertheless Augusti, at the entreaty of mother and daughter, knew how to control himself, and sacrifice to them the challenge wherewith he was going to take satisfaction for all.

Our friend was now, since his conscience had been appeased with respect to accidental consequences, smitten with new and unmingled sorrow over the emptiness of his present condition; the most precious soul was nothing to him any longer; his hours were no more harmoniously sounded out by the chime of love and poesy, but monotonously by the steeple-clock of every-day routine. Therefore he took refuge with men and friendship, as under trees still blooming in greenness near the smouldering ruins of a conflagration; women he shunned, because they--as strange children do a mother who has lost hers--too painfully reminded him of his loss. How gayly, on the contrary, does a general lover, who celebrates only all-souls' and all-saints' days, go about like one new-born, when he has happily slipped the noose of a heart which had caught him, and now can reckon up all female forms again with the prospect of a redeemed estate! The very feeling of this freedom may animate him to surrender himself the oftener, by way of tasting it again, as prisoner to a female heart.

Albano let himself be drawn by the hands of Roquairol and Schoppe to wild festivals of men,--which would fain render the sphere-music of joy on the kettle-drum;--they were only the thorn-festivals after the feasts of roses. So there is a despair which relieves itself by revelry; as, for example, during the plague at Athens,--or in the expectation of the last day,--or in the antic.i.p.ation of a Robespierre's butcher-knife. The Captain went back deeper into his old labyrinth and wilderness, and drew, so far as he could, the innocent youth into his popular festivals with so-called sons of the muses, into his recruiting places of pleasure, just as if he had need on his own account to bring his friend down to himself a little.