Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 13

The two young men loved and exercised each other for a time in romantic freedom, without so much as asking each other's name. They fought, read, swam. The Corsican almost idolized Albano's form, strength, head, and soul, and poured his whole heart into one which he could not wholly comprehend; as many maidens do only when in love, so did he only when playing war show soul and sense. Albano's clear gold complacently reflected back the strange form, without, like gla.s.s, annihilating its own at the same time.

On one occasion the glow of the Corsican grew into a flame, which showed up the whole character of his life to his friend in a bright illumination, and his peculiar aim and thirst, namely, for Frenchmen's blood, "which," he said, "he hoped to quench in the approaching war."

Had Albano been like him, then would they, like fighting stags, have mortally entangled themselves in each other's antlers; for the obstinate, inflexible courage of the Corsican--more a sensual courage as Albano's was more a spiritual--could not endure a contradiction.

Like his cla.s.s, he desired of Albano a right strong backing word to his speech; but Albano said: "This is the very greatness in war, that one can and dare do without exasperated pa.s.sion, without personal enmity, all that which the weakling can do only by such means; verily it were n.o.bler," said he, "to kill in battle a loved than a hated one." "Silly chimeras!" said the Corsican, angrily; "what? Thou wilt kill the French and yet love them?" Albano's magnanimity threw off at once every timid mask, and he said: "In one word, I shall some time fight _for_ the French and with them." "Thou, false one?" said the Corsican, "impossible! Against me?" "No," replied Albano, "I pray G.o.d that we may never meet in that hour!" "And I will supplicate Him right earnestly,"

said the Corsican, "that we never may meet again at all except one day at the point of the bayonet. Adio!" So saying, he turned on his heel in a fury and never came back again.

106. CYCLE.

Unlike other fathers, Gaspard had been, since the first battle about war, the same as ever, yes, almost better than ever; with his old respect for every strong individuality, he took it quite agreeably that the sun of the youth entered so perceptibly into the signs of summer, and soared above the earth higher as well as warmer.

He gave him the nearest proof of his undiminished regard in the fact, that, amidst the gradual preparations for returning to Pestiz, he answered in the affirmative to a quite unexpected wish of his son's for--separation. That is to say, Albano, who now, like ivy, wandered with all his blossoms and twigs among the monuments of the heroic past, and twined himself faster and faster around them, would not part from Rome without having seen Naples. To reinforce his own longing came also Dian's inspiration for the daughter-land of his father-land, for the splendor of its sky and earth, for its Grecian ruins, which the Architect preferred to the Roman. "In Rome," Dian had said, "you have the past; in Naples, on the other hand, the bold present. I will accompany you to and fro, and we will go home together. For you are not, to be sure, as yet, properly speaking, versed in the beautiful, but in nature, in the heroic and in effect. Naples is the place, then."

The Knight--although the whole object of the journey had been already gained by Albano's having regained his spirits--consented without hesitation to the appendix of a second, on the condition that he should not stay behind longer than a month.

But just at this time, when his inner world seemed at liberty to tune itself so harmoniously, came hostile discords nearer and nearer, which at a distance he still took for harmonies. The discord evolved itself slowly out of his indefinite connection with the Princess, because every such connection with women decided itself uncomfortably at last, seldomer ending in love than in hatred.

The Princess. .h.i.therto had done and suffered everything, in order to be dangerous to him, even before she became intelligible. She played Liana as well as she knew how, and took out of her theatrical wardrobe the nun's veil of a religious virginity, although women of genius are mostly sceptical, as men of genius are credulous. She made him the confidant of her past life, and gave the history of those who had died for her, or at least pined away, and she told all this, after the manner of women, with more satisfaction than remorse; only her connection with his father she indulgently let rise from its grave behind a touching nun's veil, and in fact imitated the son in his respect for the Knight, whom in her soul she bitterly hated. When Albano for hours forgot the present, and steadfastly gazed into the sacrificial fire of the past and of art, and showed her on the mountains of his world flames which burned not on her altar, then did she patiently accompany him on this road of art, and only stopped when she could, before spots where one had a view of the--present.

He became daily her warmer friend, without so much as dreaming of her intentions. Only a man--no woman--can wholly overlook another's love; the love which is long overlooked seldom, if ever, becomes a reciprocated love. Albano was too delicate to presuppose in the beloved of his father, and in the wife of another, and in a friend of his own beloved, this desire of an impropriety. Moreover, he always placed quite as small a reliance upon his desert as he did a great reliance on his right.

She doubted, but despaired not of a warmer feeling on his part. A woman hopes as long as a second does not hope with her. Albano's nocturnal visits to the Capitol and the Colosseum were always found by the eyes which followed him to be worthy of his n.o.ble character. Daily did the firm youth become dearer to her by his new bloom and by his manly development. Sometimes she strongly hoped, beguiled by his friendly sincerity and by that heroic melancholy which was not to be explained by her on any other principle, far or near. This to her so unusual rising and sinking on her waves shook her health and her character, and she became involuntarily more like Liana, with whose dove's plumage she had in the beginning been fain only to array herself in white; the sparkling sun-rainbow became a moon-rainbow; with her strong powers she flung half of her former self away,--her mania for decoration, art, and pleasing,--and she became intensely uneasy when a Roman fair one, with southern liveliness exclaimed, as often happened, behind the Count, as he walked before her, "How beautiful he is!" Sorely was she punished for her earlier malicious sportings with others' hearts and sorrows by her own; but such dark days are the very ones in which love more especially roots itself, as trees are best grafted in cloudy days.

Albano observed her change. The charming melancholy of her once vigorous countenance, this reflection of her silent cloud, moved him to a sympathizing inquiry into her health and happiness. She answered him so confusedly and confoundingly,--sometimes even imputing to Albano, with all his sharp-sightedness, dissimulation and wickedness,--that she led him into the strangest error.

Namely, under so great a certainty that some earth-shadow had pa.s.sed across her whole life, and would not stir, he must needs seek the body which cast it,--which was, in his mind, Gaspard, whom she, as he imagined, still loved. He carried this presumption back very reasonably through all her earlier conversations and looks. It was so natural that they who were at an earlier period separated by a throne should now, in this lovely land of free connections, long for each other again. Beside all this, the Knight had, according to his inexorable irony, received her show of courting him with show on his part,--that is to say, with seriousness,--and therefore always served himself up as a side-dish to her enjoyment of his son, and carried over an after-winter into the spring. This double show Albano recalled to himself as double truth.

Then, too, fate stepped in suddenly among his new conclusions. His father was taken dangerously sick of an unnerving spring-fever, caught from the sirocco-wind. "Take no special interest," said Gaspard to him, "either in my sufferings or expressions. I have, in such situations, a weakness which I am afterwards ashamed of, and yet cannot avoid."

Albano was moved, by many an unexpected outbreak of the sick man's heart, even to the warmest love. If the ruins of a temple inspire melancholy, thought he, why shall not the ruins of a great soul affect me so still more? There are men full of colossal relics, like the earth itself. In their deep heart, already grown cold, lie fossil flowers of a fairer period; they resemble northern rocks, on which are found the impress of Indian flowers.

The sickness undermined itself. Gaspard remained without sympathy for himself; only his affairs, not his end, troubled him. He held private interviews with his step-father Lauria, by way of impressing the finishing black seal of justice on his life. An express must stand in readiness to fly, the moment after his death, with a letter to Linda; his son must himself break one open, and deliver a sealed one to the Princess. Very harshly and imperiously did he demean himself toward the son, when he demanded of him an oath, immediately after his death, to travel off to Pest.i.tz; for when Albano, who so longed to see Naples, and upon whom all these conditions, presupposing his father's death, fell hard, hesitatingly declined, Gaspard said, "That is so really human and common, to bewail the pains of others immoderately, and sympathize with them sincerely, and yet ungraciously to sharpen them so soon as the smallest thing must be done." Albano gave his word and oath, and never let himself be seen by his father again, when he wept out of a child's love.

Unexpectedly there presented himself before this sickbed Gaspard's nearest and earliest kinsman, his brother. Albano stood by when the strange being came up and spake to the mortally sick man, and turned two stiff, gla.s.sy eyes, which looked as if they had been set in, quite away from him with whom he spake,--so fantastic, and yet full of the cold world toward his dying brother,--with loosely hanging face-skin upon significant face-bones,--a gray were-wolf on his hind legs, just charmed out of the beastly hide into the human skin,--like the destroying angel, a destroying man, and yet without pa.s.sion. It stretched out toward Albano its long hand, but he, repelled by something unnamable, could not grasp it. This brother said he had come from Pest.i.tz,--handed over two letters from there, one to Gaspard, one for the Princess,--and began to say something about his travels, which seemed uncommonly acute, fantastical, learned, incredible, and oft really unintelligible. Once Albano said, "That is a downright impossibility." He began the narration again, made it still more incredible, and insisted it was actually so. Thereupon he went away, to Greece, as he said, and took the coolest leave imaginable of his dying brother.

Gaspard now said to Albano, "I should like to have you, after my death, rightly estimate this strangeling, if he ever comes near you, or rather avoid him altogether, as he never says a true word, and that from a pure and disinterested delight in pure lies; still more," he continued, "shun the deep, deadly scorpion-sting of Bouverot, as well as his cheating hand at play." Albano was surprised at the aspect of this speech (agreeably so at its moral sharpness), for he had hitherto imagined that he found in his father quite other sentiments regarding Bouverot.

The next day he found his father already with his foot on the steps to come up out of the tomb. The express had been discharged,--all letters remanded,--the Prince Lauria stood there with beaming face. "Simply another's sickness has cured me of mine," said the father. The letter which his brother had brought him from Pest.i.tz had contained the intelligence that his old friend, the reigning Prince, was swiftly approaching his last hour, because they had held his dropsy to be _embonpoint_, and had delayed the treatment of it. "I hope," said Gaspard, "to have been so wholesomely agitated by my sympathies in this matter, that I shall still be able to make the journey in season for the last hour of friendship." He added, that then this journey would make way again for Albano's to Naples.

Then came the Princess in consternation about the letter, which announced her husband's danger and her own departure. Gaspard answered by giving his son a hint expressive of his desire for a private interview with her. They remained alone together for a long time. At last the Princess came back quite changed, and begged him, with almost stammering hesitation, to accompany her to the _opera seria_. She was moved and embarra.s.sed, her eyes glistening, her features inspired; his father, too, he found excited, but apparently strengthened.

Here a long beam of noonday shot through his whole previous labyrinthine wood, namely, the confirmed presumption of his father's love, which now, through the approaching dissolution of the marriage chain of the Princess, and in the debility of sickness had broken out more strongly; hence Gaspard's letter to the Princess, hence their keeping together in Rome and on the way thither, &c.

Never did Albano love his energetic father more than after this discovery of a tender sentiment; and toward the Princess his heart now grew from a friend to be all at once a son. Besides, as among the five prizes of hereditary human love he had gained only one,--a father (no mother, no brother, no sister, and no child),--so was he filled with this new delight at the gain of a mother. All that respect could do, warmth express, and hope betray, he indulged.

It was a night when in Rome spring already threw flowers again through the clouds of winter. At the theatre they gave Mozart's _t.i.to_. How on a foreign soil is one carried away by a strain from one's native land, which has followed him hither! The lark that sings over Roman ruins exactly as over German fields is the dove which, with her well-known song, brings us the olive-branch from our native land. Up to this time, Albano, on the Alpine road over ruins, had sent his eye eagerly forward only along the future race-ground of war, and had seldom raised it toward the heaven where the glorified Liana was, and he had forcibly dashed away every rising tear. But now his sick father had lifted the curtain of the bed under the ground where her remains slept; now did the clear stream of tones which had pa.s.sed through the lands of his youth and his paradises come all at once strongly over the mountains, and murmur down so near to him with its old waters. At first his spirit defended itself against the old, slumbering days, which spoke in their sleep; but when at length the tones which Liana herself had once played and sung before him came across over the bier of the mountains, and hung down as shining tapestries of golden days,--when he reflected what hours he and Liana might have found here, but had not found,--then his dark grief ran up the scale of tones as an evil, plundering genius, and Albano saw his dreadful loss stand clearly in heaven. Then he turned not his eye toward the Princess, but in the consecration of music pressed the hand by which the departed saint was once to have come into these fields. By and by he said, "I shall, in the rich Naples, long more and more after my only female friend, and envy the happy man who is permitted to accompany her." She fell into great emotion at this new intelligence of his intended separation, and into a still greater at his pa.s.sionate transformation, which she knew how to deduce, with the richest dowry for her tenderest hopes, from her departure, and even the approaching departure of her spouse. But she concealed the greater emotion behind the lesser. They parted from each other with mutual joys and errors. Albano was made more and more happy by the improvement of his father's health; the Princess was made so by the increase of the son's warmth, and her life mounted out of the ship of war into an express-balloon, an air-vessel winged with tidings of peace. Thus did both approach closer and closer to the curtain, whose pictures they took for the scenery of the stage itself, only to be so much the more astonished when it rose.

107. CYCLE.

The dried-up bed of the Knight's life had been richly inundated again by the agitations of his heart. Even because, in well days, he held himself together, like mountains, with ice and moss, so in sick days, it seemed, did a real, internal commotion more easily restore his old energy and repose. He armed and equipped himself for travelling, which best built up and built upon his capricious body. The Princess put off her departure from day to day, merely in the firm and ardent expectation that Albano would impart to her, to take with her on her way, the fairest concluding word of her whole life. In Albano this blooming land awakened longings for--Spain, and Naples, he hoped, would appease them. Spring was already dawning upon Rome, and rising in Naples; the nightingale and man sang all night long, and the almond-trees were everywhere in bloom. But it seemed as if the three travellers were waiting for each other. Could the Princess hurry away from the heart upon which her being bloomed and took root,--she, like a torn-up rosemary twig, whose roots, at the same time with those of a germinating wheat-grain, take a double hold of the earth? Albano, too, would not hasten the hour which cast him into remote corners of the earth, far away at once from his father and his friend,--them into an after-winter, him into an early and latter spring,--and least of all just now. His spirit had appeased itself, and become reconciled with itself, by the resolution of war. His Portici was gloriously built up on the buried Herculaneum of his past.

A letter from Pest.i.tz decided matters. The mortally sick Prince wrote to the Princess, and begged to see her again; the letter was like a fire, bursting the common ground and scattering all that stand thereupon; the three confederates formed the purpose to set off on one and the same day,--on one morning,--so that one dawn might shed its gold into three travelling-carriages at once.

Yet one thing the Princess desired on the evening previous to the departure, namely, Albano's company to the dome of St. Peter's in the morning; she wished to take Rome once more into her parting soul, when the dawn in its redness and splendor gilded the city. Albano, too, was glad to drink the must of a fiery hour, which might clear itself up into an eternal wine for the whole of life; for he knew not that the lively Princess,--made still more lively by Italy,--after waiting so long and impatiently for the fairest word from his lips, at last ventured indignantly upon a parting hour, in which it must escape from him.

Early before sunrise, when, in Rome, many more go to bed than get up, he waited upon her; only her faithful Haltermann accompanied them. She still glowed with her night-long vigils, and seemed very much moved.

Rome still slept; occasionally they were met by coaches and families, which were just finishing their night. The sky stood cool and blue over the dawning morn, the fresh son of the fair night.

The wide circus before St. Peter's Church was solitary and dumb as the saints upon the columns; the fountains spoke: one constellation more went out above the obelisk. They went up by the winding stairway of a hundred and fifty steps to the roof of the church, and came out through a street of houses, columns, little cupolas and towers, through four doors into the monstrous dome,--into a vaulted night. In the depths below the temple rested, like a broad, gloomy, lonesome valley with houses and trees, a holy abyss, and they walked along close by the mosaic-giants, the broad colored clouds on the heaven of the dome.

While they were ascending in the high vault, Aurora's golden foam glistened redder and redder on the windows, and fire and night swam into each other among the arches.

They hastened yet higher and looked out, just as a single living ray darted upon the world, as out of an eye, from behind the mountains; around the old Alban mountain smoked a hundred glowing clouds, as if his cold crater was again bringing forth a flame-day, and the eagles with golden wings baptized in the sun flew slowly along over the clouds. All at once the sun-G.o.d stood upon the fair ridge; he stood erect in heaven, and rent away the network of night from the covered earth; then burned the Obelisks and the Colosseum and Rome from hill to hill, and on the solitary Campagna sparkled in manifold windings the yellow giant snake of the world, the Tiber,--all clouds dissipated themselves into the depths of heaven, and golden light ran from Tusculum and from Tivoli, and from the vine-hills into the many-colored plains, over the scattered villas and cottages, into the citron and oak groves; low in the far west the sea was again as at evening, when the hot G.o.d visits it, full of splendor, ever kindled by him, and became his eternal dew.[86]

In the morning world below lay far and wide the great, still Rome,--no living city, a solitary, enormous, enchanted garden of the old, hidden, heroic spirits, laid out on twelve hills. The unpeopled pleasure-garden of spirits announced itself by its green meadows and cypresses between palaces, and by its broad, open stairways and columns and bridges, by its ruins and high fountains and garden of Adonis, and its green mountains and temples of the G.o.ds; the broad city avenues had pa.s.sed away; the windows were barred up; on the roofs the stony dead looked steadfastly at each other; only the glistening fountain waters were awake and alive and active, and a single nightingale sighed, as if she would die at last.

"That is great," said Albano, at length, "that all is solitary down below and one sees no present. The old heroic spirits can pursue their existence in the vast vacuity, and march through their old arches and temples and play, up on the columns, with the ivy."

"Nothing," replied the Princess, "is wanting to the magnificence but this dome, which from the Capitol we might in fact see besides. But never shall I forget this spot."

"What were all beside?" said he. "The flat regions of life in general pa.s.s by without a memorial; from many a long past no echo reverberates, because no mountain breaks the broad surface! But Rome and this hour with you will live within us forever."

"Albano," said she, "why must we find each other so late and part so early? Yonder goes your way along by the Tiber,--G.o.d grant into no devouring sea!"

"And yonder goes yours over the bright mountains," said he. She took his hand, for his tone expressed and excited so much emotion. Divinely gleamed the world from the dark spring flowers even up to the lofty Capitol, and the bells sounded down the hours; the festal fires of day blazed on all heights; life was broad and high as the prospect; his eye stood under a tear,--no sad one, however, but such a tear as when the world's eye glances sunnily under the water, and has higher hues, which the dry world destroys. He pressed her hand, she his. "Princess, friend," said he, "how I esteem you! After this holy hour we separate.

I would fain give you a sign that shall not pa.s.s away, and say a bold word to my father, which should express myself and my respect, and which, perhaps, might solve many a riddle."

Her eye fell, and she merely said, "May you venture?" "O forbid it not!" said he; "so many a divine bliss has been lost by one hour's hesitation. When shall man act extraordinarily, then, except in extraordinary situations?" She was silent, awaiting the morning-sound of love, and in a continued pressure of hands they went down from the lofty place. Alban's being was a trembling flame. The Princess comprehended not why he still deferred this spring-tone; no more did he see through her, unskilled in reading women and their broken words, those picture-poems, half form and only half speech. Just as if an eagle had flown down from his morning splendor, and, as a predatory genius, flapped his wings over his eyes; so had the flashing morn dazzled him so exceedingly that he meant to venture, now in the parting hour, to be mediator between his father and the Princess, by a word which should take away the part.i.tion-wall between their loves. His delicacy made many an objection against this proceeding, but when a weighty object was in sight, there was nothing he so abhorred as quailing caution; and daring he held to be worth as much to a man as winning.

The Princess, misunderstanding, but not mistrusting, followed him into his father's house with an expectation--bolder than his--that he would perhaps actually confess to the Knight his love for her. They found the father alone and very serious. Albano, although aware of his aversion to bodily signs of the heart, fell on his neck with the half-choked words of the wish: "Father! a mother!" To this childlike relation had his previous feelings raised and refined themselves. "Heavens, Count!"

cried the Princess, astounded and enraged at Albano's a.s.sumed insinuation. The Knight, sparkling with wrath, and full of horror, seized a pistol, saying, "Unlucky--" but before one knew at which of the three he would shoot it off, his numbness seized and held him like a coiling snake imprisoned in a murderous embrace. "Count, did I understand you?" said the Princess, flinging the word at him, indifferent toward the petrified foe. "O G.o.d," said Albano, moved by the sight of the paternal form, "I meant no one!" "None were capable of that," said she, "but a base creature. Farewell. May I never meet you again!" So saying, she went off.

Albano stayed, unconcerned as to whether he himself was not meant by the pistol at the side of the sick man, who had stiffened exactly opposite to a man's corpse across the way which they were just busied in painting. Gradually life wrestled again out of winter, and the Knight, as cataleptics must, finished the address which he had begun with the word "Unlucky--" "woman, of whom art thou mother?" He came to himself and looked wakefully around; but soon the lava of wrath ran again through his snow: "Unlucky boy, what was the talk about?" Albano disclosed to him, with innocent soul, that he had cherished the hope, in the probable event of the Prince's death, of a union between his father and the Princess, and for himself, of the good fortune of having a mother.

"You young people always imagine one cannot have any genuine love without carrying it out and directing it to some one," replied Gaspard, and began to laugh hard and to find something very comic in the "sentimental misunderstanding"; but Albano asked him now very seriously about the origin of his misunderstanding. Gaspard gave him the following account: Lately, in his sickness, he had, upon the first news of the Prince's approaching death, a desperate battle with the Princess, who in the event of this death desired a regency,--or guardianship,--even on the bare ground of the possibility of an heir to the princely hat. The Knight said to her decidedly this _possibility_ was an impossibility, and he would, without further preamble, attack her with new proofs yet unknown to her. He gave her directly to understand that he was even armed against the case of an ocular demonstration of the contrary (a Hereditary Prince) being presented to him. The Princess replied with bitterness, she could not conceive why he need in the least concern himself any more about the Haarhaar line and succession, or take any more care for it than for that of Hohenfliess. He brought her even to tears, for he could unsparingly hurl the most barbarous words, like harpoons, deep into her heart; he had the perfect resolution of a statesman, who, like a great bird of prey, drives the victim, which he can neither conquer nor draw away, to a precipice, and beats it over the brink with his wings, in order that he may find it subdued for him down below. A life which even as it pa.s.ses away, like the sinking glaciers, discovers old corpses! Just as the happy one spreads out his love of an individual warmingly over humanity, so does the misanthrope hold the stinging focus (or freezing-point) of his broad and general coldness toward humanity at _one_ great foe alone, whereas previously every smaller offence was forgiven the individual, and imputed only to mankind in a ma.s.s.

This, then, was that secret interview whose traces Albano had taken for fairer emotions than of hatred. "And now," said the Knight openly, in order to punish his high feeling with cutting impudence, "when thou madest to me the concise and obscure speech: 'A mother!' I could not but take thee for the father, and from this thou mayst easily explain the rest." "Father," said he, "that was a crying injustice to each"; and departed with three hot wounds, torn in him by the trident of fate.

At his departure Gaspard reminded him to keep his word of returning in a month, and added jokingly, that the old man whom they were painting over yonder was a German gentleman, with whom he once carried on the joke of a sudden conversion.[87]

Before an hour Albano was travelling with his Dian out of the illuminated Rome. The blue heavens, floating down, undulated on the heights and on the dome of St. Peter's, and long shadows, begemmed with pearls of dew, still slept on the flowers; but the blessed morn had flown far back out of the hard day. They met before the gate a circular crowd, who stood around the beautiful form of one murdered, and who repeated, with a pleased expression, over the prostrate body, instead of casting the word with indignation in the teeth of the murderer, "_Quanto e' bello!_"[88] And Albano thought how often they had exclaimed behind his back, "_Quanto e' bello!_"

TWENTY-EIGHTH JUBILEE.

Letter From Pest.i.tz.--Mola.--The Heavenly Ascension of a Monk.--Naples.--Ischia.--The New Gift of the G.o.ds.

108. CYCLE.