Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 18

His friends were too deeply and sadly moved to make any reply, and before strange eyes neither words nor hardly looks were at their command. When Albano saw again more nearly the battle-field of time,--the ruin-coasts, which ever grasp and lift the man; the old temples and Thermaee, like old ships, dying on the land; here a crushed and crumbling giant temple, there a city street down on the bottom of the sea;[105] the holy memorial-columns and light-houses of former greatness deserted and extinguished amidst the eternally youthful beauty of ancient nature,--he forgot the neighborhood of his own transitoriness, and said to Linda, whose eye he saw directed thither, "Perhaps I can guess what you are now thinking of,--that the ruins of the two greatest times, the Greek and the Roman, remind us only of a _strange_ past, whereas other ruins, like music, only admonish us of our _own_. That was perhaps your thought." "We think of nothing at all here," said Julienne; "it is enough, if we weep that we are obliged to go away." "Truly the Princess is right," said Linda, and added, as if displeased at Albano and everything, "and what is life, more than a gla.s.s door to heaven? It shows us what is fairest and every joy, but it is, after all, not open."

By the accident of strangers' company they were compelled to leave each other with cold show, and, according to the custom of teasing, tantalizing fate, to conclude a great past with a little present.

Albano travelled as hastily as his sensibility would allow over the sublime world round about him. When he arrived in Mola, he heard the singular intelligence that they had found in Gaeta a whole leathern dress, with a mask, swimming far out to sea, which must have belonged to the ascended monk, and in respect to which they found nothing so inexplicable as the empty casing, without the dead body. In Mola, the fair island of Ischia at length breathed out its last fragrance; the high citadel of heaven and the ascending pole hid among other southern constellations this warm one also, which had so long gleamed over him with suns of bliss; and the last star of the short spring went down.

Such is life; such is bliss. Like the playing moon, it consists of first and last quarters, and slowly waxes and slowly wanes. In its hope, in its fear, a brief flash is the full moon of the deepest rapture; a short invisibility the new moon of the deepest desolateness;--and always is the light game, like the moon, beginning its circle anew.

THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.

Tivoli.--Quarrel.--Isola Bella.--Nursery of Childhood.

--Love.--Departure.

116. CYCLE.

Albano alighted again at the Prince Lauria's, who had hitherto swum in such a flood-tide of new incidents, that he had hardly been conscious of the absence, and was disposed to wonder at the return. Meanwhile the German war against France had been settled upon. This news he brought to his grandson, full of the joyful expectation what great scenes such a struggle must unfold. Even Albano was for a long time carried away with him by this high stream, before he thought that this intelligence would work otherwise and more dishearteningly on his sister than on him. But the heroic fire, into which he talked himself with the political Lauria, preluded to him easy victory over a sister's affection.

He was going to announce his arrival to his two friends, when he heard from the Prince that they had both, as he had heard from the Princess Altieri, with whom they resided, already gone to Tivoli. How happily he departed, guessing the friendly design of this episode journey, out of Rome, radiant as it was with love and spring, and looked quite as gayly towards the future, where his life opened so bloomingly before him, as toward Tivoli, where he hoped to press two hearts to one.

He found, when he arrived in the town of Tivoli, that the ardent maidens had already stolen away to the cascade. As a man in the Vale of Tempe, or before the Lake of Geneva, pa.s.ses along only in a careless dream over the sh.o.r.e by the watery images of the heavens and the earth, because the blooming originals round about seize and kindle him,--even so the rocks of the thickly peopled landscape, and the round Temple of Vesta, and the vales dissolving into one another, from the Roman gate to the temple,--this shining procession glided by only as dream- and water-images before a heart, in which a living loved one bloomed, and crowded out a world with a world's fulness.

He roved around amidst the swarm of prospects, without finding the fairest, when a short, pale-yellow, richly dressed man eyed him with a shrivelled up face, and with a silken arm pointed unasked the way to the falls, saying if he were looking after the ladies, he would find them at the great cascade.

Albano said nothing, went onward, saw two, and recognized Linda by her tall form. At length the three friends saw, found, embraced each other, and the magnificent water-storm breathed into the delight. Linda spake tender words of love, and felt as if she were dumb, for the beautiful tempest of streams tore the tender syllables to pieces like b.u.t.terflies. They had not heard each other, and stood before each other, pining for their sounds, encompa.s.sed with five thunders, with weeping eyes, full of love and joy. Holy spot, where already so many thousand hearts have sacredly burned and blissfully wept, and been constrained to say, Life is great! Serenely and steadily sparkles the city overhead in the sunshine down over the watery crater; proudly does the rent Temple of Vesta, garlanded with almond-blossoms, look down from its rock upon the whirlpools which undermine it; and opposite to it the tempestuous Anio preludes at once all that earth and heaven have of greatness,--the rainbow, the eternal lightning and thunder, rain, cloud, and earthquake.

They gave each other signs to go, and to seek the more quiet vale. How sounded to them therein the words, brother, sister, Linda, like new human tones in Paradise! Here, before ascending the hill full of new waterfalls, lightnings, and colors, they sought to report to each other their journeys and their news. Julienne made the happy report that her brother, the Prince, gave again hope of recovery, since he had, with waking eyes, as he insisted, seen his dead father, who had promised him a longer life. The fair Linda bloomed in the Paradise like a veiled G.o.ddess who had long been seeking and at last found her beloved on the earth. She took his hand often, and pressed it against her eyes and lips, and whispered, hardly audibly, when he spoke to her or Julienne, "Dear! friendly man!" As to the scenery she was silent, for she never spoke of any till she had once come out of it.

Julienne, so happy about her brother's recovery, began all manner of jokes,--said she regretted having sent to her Lewis, from Naples, a vain specific against his malady, and at length asked Albano, "Dost thou know a youth named _Cardito_? He wants to know thee." He said, "No," but related how a little stout man had seemed to know him hereabouts, and showed him the way to the cascade. Julienne started, and said it was decidedly the Haarhaar Prince, who so maliciously built his hopes upon Luigi's death and throne. He lived in Tivoli, in the house of the Duke of Modena, and was certainly going about as a spy upon them all. In order to tune herself again after this hated discord, she continued her question about _Cardito_, and said, "It is a very beautiful, sound Corsican (that living deformity is surely the Prince), and he declares very seriously war against thee."

"That shall he verily have," said Albano, who now comprehended all, and--related all. Cardito was that Corsican with whom he had formerly split on the subject of the Gallic war. "Brother, that is still thy serious meaning?" said Julienne, with protracted accent. "Now especially," said he, with decision, in order immediately to exclude all strife. Linda with intensity pressed his hand to her eyes, as if she would cover them with it. "Well, argue thy case with me, as reasonably as thou canst, and let's hear thy grounds of justification; but first let us ascend the hill, that one may have something to see at the same time," said the sister.

On the hill, before the green of the flashing vale, where the stream, like a wounded eagle, has beat its wings all about on the earth, before the three lesser cascades that leap down with their lightnings upon the flowers, Albano began, with emotion and inspiration: "I have only one reason, dear sister; I am not yet anything,--I am no poet, no artist, no philosopher,--but nothing, namely, a Count. I have, however, powers for much; why shall I not say so? Verily, if a Da Vinci is all things, or a Crichton, or if a Richelieu, though he a.s.serts the political throne, will yet mount the poetic, also, shall not another be justified in lesser wishes? And, by Heaven! properly speaking, a man will, after all, be everything, for he cannot help it; he longs and aspires after that, and the inner, stifled heart weeps drops of blood, which no human hand can wipe away,--only the high iron barriers of necessity hold him back. Sister, Linda, what have I, after all, yet done upon the earth?"

"Thou hast made this question, and this is enough in the sight of G.o.d,"

said Julienne, moved by the proud, wounded modesty of the youth, and by his beautiful voice, which, when indignant, sounded as if he were tenderly touched. "Words! what are words?" said he. "O one surely may well be ashamed that one has even to think and speak of anything before he does it, although poor, imperfect man cannot otherwise, but every action, like a statue, must first be modelled in the miserable wax of words. Ah, Linda, do not here deeds lie everywhere around us, instead of words and wishes? Have not I, also, an arm, a heart, a beloved, and powers, as well as others, and shall I go out of the world with a musty, mouldy Spanish or German Count's life? O my Linda, do thou contend for me!"

"I am not," said she, looking sharply toward the princ.i.p.al little cascade, which stormed down from among the trees overhead,--"I am not of many or eloquent words; and, moreover, I do not quite understand you. I must always translate words for myself into ideas and truths, and I cannot always do it. In the case of your words, Count, I cannot form any idea at all. He whom love alone does not satisfy, cannot have been filled with it. Of course, so all-forgetting with their hearts as we, so concentrated upon one idea of life, men never are. Ah, and so little is man to man, an image of man is more to him, and every little future!"

"Thou, too, Brutus!" said Albano, astonished. "Would you," he continued, collecting himself, "lay out an eternity of that elysium-life in Ischia as adequate to a man? Would you send him as a youth into the cloister of the most blissful repose? Certainly only as an old man. The former would be like planting the tree top downward in the dark earth."

"There spoke the German again," said she; "for ever and ever real, indefatigable industry. The tranquil Neapolitans, the people on the Apennines or the Pyrenees, on the Ganges, in Otaheite, full of enjoyment and contemplativeness, are to this Spaniard an abomination. I should think, if a man were only somewhat for himself, not for others, that would be all-sufficient. What _great actions_ are I do not know at all; all I know is a _great life_; for something like them every sinner can do."

"Verily, that is true," said he; "there is nothing more pitiable than a man who will show himself by this or that, which appears to himself great, rare, and without relation to his being, and therefore does not belong to him at all. Every nature puts forth its own fruit, and cannot do otherwise; but its child can never seem great to it, but always only small, or just as it should be. If it be otherwise, then it must be that an entirely foreign fruit has been hung upon its branches."

"Albano, how true! But you had once never more than half a will; how is it?" said Linda. "Neither have I now," said he, without severity. "One is gentlest when one is strongest in a resolution." He endeavored now carefully to spare and avoid his own words,--which were the oil and wind to his fire,--and he did it the more because words, after all, are of no help against anything, but much rather blow up instead of blowing out the feelings of another. He was also mindful, in this connection, of the frequent cases in which he had, by a single word, with all innocence, excited Linda to a flame. They stopped, and he looked out over the divine land, when Linda, after a silent look into his face, in spite of her apparently calm philosophizing, at once pa.s.sionately grasped his hand and cried, "No, thou canst not!--by my happiness, by all saints, by the holy Virgin, by the Almighty,--thou canst, thou must not!" There is a robbery against which man always protests with an irrepressible fire, and though a G.o.ddess committed it out of love, and offered him in compensation a world of paradises; it is the robbery of his freedom and free development. Yes, its being love,--despotic, however, at once exercising and robbing freedom,--only exasperates him the more, and out of the _cloud_ of error grows by and by the _tempest_ of pa.s.sion. Linda repeated, "Thou canst not." He looked upon her excited, brilliant countenance, whose Southern intensity resembled more, however, an enthusiasm than indignation, and said, firmly, "O Linda, I shall indeed both dare and do!" "No! I say no!" cried she.

"Brother!" the sister began. "O sister," cried he, "speak softly; I am a man, and have violent faults." The sublime war of the water with the earth and with rocks, the intermingling storms of the flashing rain-constellations around him, drew him as on wings into the whirl,--the great cascade flung its shower out of high trees, and out of heaven sprinkled incessantly a glimmering world,--and in the east the sea showed itself afar in dark sleep, and the setting sun sank gleaming into the general splendor.

"Certainly I will speak softly," said the Princess, who, much more sensitive and resonant than Linda, had some trouble in tuning her tone of speech to her promise; "nothing further is needed than the consideration that our quarrel is premature; I make merely the request to adjourn it till October, and the promise that _then_ the issue will be quite different." "O let it be!" said Albano. Linda nodded softly and slowly, and, contrary to expectation, laid his hand with both hers on her heart, and looked upon him weeping, with her large eyes, to which fire was more usual than water. He was melted at beholding that this powerful nature had only intensity without hate or wrath, and infinitely was he refreshed by his former secret suppression of his pa.s.sionate flames.

The sister was softened by both, and a minute of the tenderest love soon entwined the three beings in one embrace. The hyperboles of anger are never so serious with man as those of love; the former only the other party must believe, the latter he believes himself. All had been brightened and cleared up by this free expression.

If generally a cold past moment shuts up to lovers, as a cold night does to bees, the flowers out of which they take the honey, here, however, after the storm, the clear blue air of heaven had become purer and stiller, and the tranquillity became bliss, as the bliss tranquillity. Through Albano, although rapidly, the Fury of fear had pa.s.sed, who holds an inverted telescope, and through it shows man a very distant, empty heaven, without stars. But not so through Linda; she had throughout spoken in love and hope, and for her glowing heart there were no icy places. Therefore was he now so happy and so blessed by the contemplation of that vigorous nature! A long, deep chain of valleys, wherein wine and oil flowed in the fragrance of blossoms, led them all towards the great Rome. For a s.p.a.ce the youth could accompany them; at last, for a long separation, he must tear heart and eye away from the loved ones, when over the green, glistening vales the mighty dome of St. Peter's already sparkled, and the cypresses, proudly encircled only with cypresses, bore the gold of evening on their twigs without stirring them. All had their eyes on the fair Rome, but their hearts were only on Isola Bella, where they promised to find each other again.

117. CYCLE.

On the way to Isola Bella, he thought of his hour of contention with the vehement Linda, and the character of this war-G.o.ddess. He shuddered at the very recollection of the steep precipice upon which, within a few days, he had leaned so far over; for Linda is so decided, knows no alternative between pa.s.sion and annihilation. And yet, in this time of cool reflection, he felt her imperious demand upon his liberty more severely than ever, and said to himself, firmly, "Woman must not be allowed to circ.u.mscribe or rule the holy domain of man's development."

On the other hand, it was, to be sure, all love, and an excess of it; and the longer he journeyed and compared, so much the darker and lonelier was it on that spot of his life upon which she alone cast the great flame. She moved before him much more clearly and nearly in spirit by his still contemplation of her spirit, than in bodily presence, because the former presented her at once in harmony, the latter with the individual dissonances without the solution. Her power of all-sided impartiality towards all characters had appeared to him, for a woman, quite as rare as it was great, especially as he himself let this power work more in the shape of respect for her and in a glad, free appreciation of great, eccentric, poetical manifestations, but not of all, even the flat and the worthless.

Alike mighty and full-grown stood Love and Liberty within him, side by side. They were bound together and reconciled only by a new resolution to be gentle, not merely strong, to lay before her with all frankness his right of freedom and his loving soul, and to be to her the n.o.ble character which belonged to her. "Am I not such, if I really will it?"

said he.

In the highest joy of life, in perfect oneness with himself and destiny, he made his journey to Isola Bella as rapidly as if he were going to find there a beloved, instead of merely awaiting one. How many a thing seemed now smaller along his road, to which he applied the Roman measure, and not the German, and before which he now, as his father had foretold him, pa.s.sed along flying!

At last he saw the artificial Alp of Isola Bella standing in the waves, and disembarked joyfully with his teacher, Dian, in the garden of childhood, where he was to expect so much, and, with fresh Italian life-blossoms on his heart, bid farewell to the land of promise.

He waited several long days, yearning and anxious for his two friends, although his sunny companion was always reminding him to make allowance for the rapidity of his own journey. His determination to be gentle grew continually more and more unnecessary and involuntary. The very island itself, with its springs born of perfumes and with the distant garland of Alps, melted his soul. In the former year he had seen it more in leaves than in blossoms. It was, indeed, his land of childhood.

From many places on the lake stars glimmered up to him out of a deep, early, after-midnight hour of life. Here had he for the first time found his father, and for the first time seen Linda's form across the waters; here he finds and loses them again, after the longest separation, for a still longer one; and here he stands in the gateway between north and south. The free, fragrant land, full of islands, the Jacob's-ladder of his life mounts back into the ether, and he goes down into a cold region full of constraint and eyewitnesses; his love is judged by his father, it is a.s.sailed by the downfallen friend. "Ye days in Ischia," he sighed, "ye hours in Vesuvius and in Tivoli, can you reverse your course? can you ever come back again and overflow anew the insatiable heart, that it may drink, and say, 'It is enough'?"

To his Dian, as if by way of justifying himself and his illimitable longing, he spoke frequently of Chariton and their children, and asked him how it was with his heart when he thought of them. "Don't talk to me so much of them," said he, after his manner, feeling more than he suspected or betrayed, "we are still so cruelly far off from them; one only spoils one's journey without cause. But when I have them all....

Well, ah G.o.d!" Then he paused, s.n.a.t.c.hed the youth to his arms, and did not kiss him.

On a fresh, blue morning Albano stood, before the resurrection of the sun in heaven, on the high, bloom-encircled pyramid of terraces, where he had once, on awaking, seen his dear father flee without farewell; and he gazed with emotion down into the vacant, broad lake, and around on the summits of the glaciers, which already bloomed in the reflection of Aurora riding down from on high,--and no one was with him but the past. He looked upon himself and into his breast, and thought: "What a long, heavy time has already pa.s.sed through this bosom since that day! A whole world has become a dream within me! And the heart still beats fresh and sound within thee!" All at once he saw, in the light morning-smoke of the lake, a skiff rowing along. Slowly, lazily it waded, for he saw it from a great distance. At last it glided, it flew; the sail bloomed up in the morning-blaze, and the green waves became a wild-fire, playing around it, as formerly in Ischia, on that evening, around Linda's skiff.

Linda it was, and his sister. They looked up, and motioned a greeting.

He cried, in hasty joy, "Dian! Dian!" and ran down the long flight of steps, all astonished and enraptured at the wide-spread splendor, because, on account of the glad apparition, he had not seen the sun rise, for it was he who was strewing before the loved one the fair flames, like morning flowers along the path of the waters.

"Is it you again, ye divine ones? O speak, weep for joy, that I am blest and have you once more. Come ye then again with your real old love?" Thus he went on speaking in eloquent ecstasy, born of his long-dreaming expectation. Linda looked with secret angelic pleasure, with lovely reflection into the high-playing flames of his love; and his sister enjoyed in a sweet emotion of sympathy the beautiful mildness on both their countenances, which, in union with energy, is as enchanting as moonlight on a mountain. Descriptions of travels were begun by both parties, but ended by neither; arrangements for the day and plannings out of the island were projected, but none chosen.

Julienne held up before his heart his own word and her stipulation, that at evening he must pursue his journey, as a slight cooling against the fire of joy that burned therein; sadly he looked up to the friendly, serene morning sun, as if it were not mounting higher, but already going downward.

They went now on a lovely stroll through the island; everywhere bloomed beside the present a still past, under the rose a forget-me-not. Here, in this grotto before the leaping waves, had he once played with his sister Severina, and on this island was her death announced to him.

"But, Julia, thou art my Severina, and more," said he. "I think," said she, softly, "quite as much." Not far from the arcade was it that he had for the first time gazed into the face of his father. "But O when wilt thou find _thy_ father at last? Speak about this, good Linda!"

said he. She blushed, and said, "I shall find him when fate permits."

"But when is that?" "I know nothing about it," said she, with a soft hesitation. Then Julienne touched him, nodding, and said, in as much French Latin as she could muster together, but in an indifferent tone, as if she were soliloquizing to the air, "_Non eam interroga amplius, nam pater veniet_ (_ut dicitur_) _die nuptiarum_."[106] He looked at her with astonishment; she nodded repeatedly. "Julia," said Linda, smiling, "is like women, as cunning in acting as she is open in speaking. I could not have disguised myself from a brother so long."

"When the brother and sister," replied she, "do not find each other till they are equally grown up and with all perfections, they can easily become lovers of each other, while other sisters have first for many years to conquer the faults of the brother growing up."

Now they came upon the gallery, amid lemon-blossoms, where Gaspard had let his son see so many veils and masks hanging about the future; then Albano said, with displeasure, "Here I had to let many riddles be announced to me,--and there"--he meant the spot in the sea where Linda's image had first appeared to him on the waves--"even this precious form was mimicked." "My G.o.d!" said Linda, vehemently, "why speak any more of it at all? O it was so wicked to do it!" "No one, however, has lost much by it," said Julienne, joking, "except a couple who have lost their hearts, and I my anonymousness!" "Could we not both answer, Albano?" said Linda, softly, and raised her eyes. "By Heaven, that we could!" said he, strongly, for without those preludes they would have sought and found each other earlier.

Amidst these lookings into a past so singularly interwoven with futurity, they had stepped into the Borromaean palace, which to-day was fortunately without occupants; because Albano, at Linda's request, was to usher them both into the chamber, where he and Severina were brought up. The palace-keeper, supposing they were only in quest of a prospect,--for the nursery apartments were in the fifth story,--would have led them out on the roof; he insisted they were dusty children's-chambers, and had been locked up from time immemorial.

With difficulty the man turned, with a rusty key, a rust-eaten lock.

They stepped into the bedusted, clear-obscure, high, empty chamber, wherein a vacant cradle, a flower-pot with a little Chinese rose-bush dried up like its earth, a child's pewter watch, a girl's baby-kitchen with old-fashioned utensils, a rolled-up shining harpsichord string, a German almanack of 1772, many black seals with bare antique heads, a dried-up twig of the liana, and the like, lay as cast-off lumber round about. Man looks with emotion down into the far, low-lying time, when the spindle of his life ran round as yet almost naked without threads; for his beginning borders more nearly upon his end than the middle, and the outward bound and the homeward bound coasts of our life hang over into the dark sea. Albano was touched with melancholy at the scene around him, and at this glimpse of human life and this out-look upon his own green fields yet standing in wintry lowness,--and at the sight of the spot where he had lived with a mother and a sister, who had vanished from the earth, yes, even out of his imaginings. He took up the pewter watch, and said, "Is there a better watch for that age which knows no time but only eternity, than this one with only an index and no wheel-work?"

Linda was surprised as she drew away a curtain from a gla.s.s casket and a waxen child, of angelic beauty, lying therein, caught the light in her clear eyes. "It is the dead Severina," said Albano, hastily, with the harsh adjective "dead," which Linda could not well endure. It became more and more uncomfortable to him in the clear-obscure chamber,--a streak of sunshine burned in singularly down through the lofty window,--animated resurrection-dust played therein,--the spirits of the sister and of Liana might at any moment flash across the earthly light,--and the mountains out in real life receded into the distance.

When he looked again upon the blooming Linda, all at once she appeared to him changed, strange, supernatural, as if she appeared among spirits, and was going hence again. She looked upon him significantly, with the words, "One is not at home here, let us go!" "Woman!" said he, with strong voice, in German, making answer to an inward terror, and grasped her hand, "we will hold together like a live heart, if one should try to tear it asunder." Linda replied, "I cannot stay longer, Julienne!" and they went.