Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 21

"Three weeks later.

"Nota Bene!

"I had been, since thy departure, in a manner d.a.m.nably unlucky until about one o'clock this morning. At two o'clock I took up my resolution; I have just (at five) taken the pen; and at six, when I have drunken myself full and written myself empty, I take my travelling cane, the point of which, after two months, shall stand sticking in the Pyrenees.

O heavens! there must have been something th.o.r.n.y this long time standing by me, which I so long took for a hedgehog, whereas it is the best musical barrel full of pins, out of which I can get nothing less (I turned it a few hours ago) than the best arrangement of flute-pipes, unadulterated music of the spheres, and rotatory music for the bravura-airs of the three men in the furnace, a whole living Vaucanson's wooden flute-player, and unheard-of things wherewith the machine blows till it bursts--not itself, but certain knaves, whereof need I particularly name the Baldhead?

"O listen, youth! It concerns thee. I will now, for thy sake, be what the world calls frank, namely, shameless, for verily I had rather uncover my haunch than my heart, and am less red when I do so.

"There was, once on a time, in old times, a young time, one full of fire and roses, when old Schoppe, for his part, was also young enough; when the alert, contriving bird easily nosed out where the hare lay, and the female hare, too; when the man could still put himself on good terms with the well-known four quarters of the world; or else, just as easily as a steer, thrust with his horn at every fly; when he (now a silver pheasant of cool times) still strode or flew up and down through all Italy as a warm gold pheasant, perched now on Buanorotti's Moses, now on the Colosseum, now on aetna, now on the dome of St. Peter's, and crowed for joy, flapped his wings, and soared toward heaven.

"It was at this time that the still unpicked storm-bird, hovering one day to and fro through the waterfalls of Tivoli, preciously blest, saw there occasionally, suddenly, overhead, in Vesta's temple, for the first time, nothing more than--the Princess di Lauria, afterward, I conjecture, carried off by a Knight of the Fleece, as his golden fleece. To see her,--to transform one's self from a storm-bird into a c.o.c.k-pigeon to the chariot of Venus; to tear one's self loose from team and bridle; to fly before that G.o.ddess; to float round her in narrower and narrower circles,--all this was not one thing, but three things. I had first to grow and paint myself up into a bird of Paradise, in order to fly into a Paradise; that is to say, I had to learn painting, in order to be permitted her presence.

"When at length I had the portrait-pencil and profile-scissors in my power, and one morning appeared with both before the Princess and the old Prince, I had to paint and cut the Prince himself; his daughter had already been married and secretly travelled off; for thy grandfather (unlike others who prophesy their movements beforehand), prophesies his only afterward, and opens his mouth merely to hear.

"I soon cut out the man,--packed up,--went out into all the world.

After nearly three years I stood again on the tenth terrace of Isola Bella, quite unexpectedly, before the Countess Cesara. Heaven and h.e.l.l!

what a woman was thy mother! She threw everybody into both of _those places_ at once; I know not whether she did thy father, too. The writer of this stood in his last ornithological transformation before her, as silent pearl-c.o.c.k (guinea-peac.o.c.k), (tears must be the pearls), and got a likeness of her after a few weeks.

"She had two children, thee--I clearly remember thy then already sharpened contour--and thy sister, the so-called Severina. Thy father was not there, but his wax image was, by which I instantly recognized him eighteen years later in Rome. Thy sister, too, was repeated in wax; only thou not. A wax figure, like thee at a distance, which illusively prefigured thee as a man always held up before thee, the brother of thy father, who was there, too, as a file-leader of thy future, saying, 'Here thou art, cubed beforehand, and already forced up into full size, filled out from flask into cask,'--seeking thus to enkindle thee, so that thou mightest grow up and be a man. They had a uniform put on thee, like that which the wax man wore,--I know not of what sort. Then didst thou, striding around thine own micromegas, boldly call him out, out of the future into the present. Now thou knowest what thou hast become, and mayst well, and with more right, look down in thy turn as proudly upon the little one, as the little one formerly looked up to the great one. I could never approve in thy uncle this machine for spiritual ductility; besides, I have for all wax puppets such an abominating, shuddering dread.

"My only object on the beautiful island was to get away from it, and from the fair islander, so soon as I had painted her. 'Stupid century,'

said I, 'do I then want anything more of thee?' She sat to me gladly, as upon a throne. I, half in tempest, half in rainbow, sketched her, and naturally had to leave the picture uncopied. But, young man, some letters, which formed my name at that time, and which I wrote and concealed on the picture in the region of the heart under the water-colors, may serve thee as a Tetragrammaton, eleven Dominical letters and mothers of the reading (_matres lectionis_) of thy existence, in case I reach Spain safely, and in Valencia wash away on the likeness the coloring from my letters, and can now read in its heart, _Lowenskiold_. So was I then called in Danish.

"Then is the Countess Linda de Romeiro, without mercy, thy sister Severina. G.o.d grant only that thou mayst not haply have seen and married her before the receipt of this letter. She must, according to what I heard yesterday, have set out for Italy.

"For when I saw the Countess Linda here for the first time, it was to me, in the market square of Pest.i.tz, as if I were standing up on the terrace of Isola Bella, and beholding the Alps, thy mother, my youth, hardly three paces distant from me! By Heaven, just as if in the pier-mirror of time the white rosy image of thy buried mother had been s.n.a.t.c.hed at once out of the depths of distance, and brought close to the gla.s.s, and now hung before it in blooming redness, so stood Linda before me! For the divine resemblance of the two is so great! No Arian _h.o.m.oiousion_[118a] whatever, but a complete Orthodox _h.o.m.oousion_[118b]

is to be believed here. Thus would I write to thee, hadst thou the necessary church-history at hand for the understanding of such an allusion.

"I painted Linda, too, this winter. What she related to me of the character of her mother was entirely the same, as I had been able to report to her of the character of the Princess di Lauria.

"Linda's father, or Herr von Romeiro, would never appear, and still, I hear, has not yet disappeared.

"Linda's mother called herself a Roman and a relative of the Prince di Lauria.

"In Spain, where I have twice been and inquired, I never could find a residence of a lady by the name of Cesara.

"Trillion spiders'-strands of probability spin themselves into an Ariadne's thread in the Labyrinth.

"A new, unknown sister is introduced to thee in the Gothic house with veils and in mirrors.

"And indeed the illusion is produced upon thee through real mirrors by the honest Baldhead,--who wants something more to be a Christ's-head than the locks, and whom I in autumn called a dog.

"The aforesaid Baldhead, or head of Anubis, stood, then, (Heaven and the Devil best know why, but I believe the fact,) as Father of Death on Isola Bella; he lay as travelling journeyman on the Prince's grave and in every sort of ambush, to give thee thy sister for wife--in case I suffered it; but so soon as ever I have sealed this, I sally forth to Spain, break into Linda's picture cabinet, look after a certain likeness of her mother, the place and chamber whereof I have taken pains clearly to ascertain; and if it is the picture by me, then all is right and the thunder may strike into the midst of the whole business.

"The Baldhead himself is a fifth quarter of a proof,--he is one of the few men who, when hardly of a spider's thickness, wickedly made water in their mothers' womb.

"Perhaps I may find thy uncle, who knew me again here, he said, and who has actually gone off to Valencia.[119]

"O Heavens! if I should succeed (but why not, since my tongue remains of iron and this leaf comes, in iron, under charge of the honest Wehrfritz, whose heart is an old German, and does not _Germany_ rightly represent the _heart_ in the virgin Europa?)--if, I write, I should succeed in kindling a fire upon a cursed mystery of a straw-door, tearing all up and down and away, blind gates and sacrificial gates, and a strong light should fall in upon the brave Linda and the brave youth, illuminating the neighboring Baldhead (perhaps somebody else), who even in the darkness will fain make a slanting thrust with two grafting and slaughtering knives down into a brother and sister----

"If I should once succeed in this, that is to say, in the harvest month,--for then I should come back again to Pest.i.tz and have the likeness in my pocket,--and I should have boldly avenged myself and two innocent beings upon guilty ones: then would I hold myself fully at liberty to seize hold of my head and say, '_a bas, gare_, heads off!'

To which, certainly, (since, indeed, the question is not of any stupid packing off of the body by a Werther-powder, but only of the purpose to lose, upon occasion, what competent judges call my understanding,) my friends must agree, because they would still have me (since in this case the body is still retained), although as the night-piece of a man, because I would then carry on a rational discourse upon any subject (only let no one attack the fixed idea!) as well as another man, and certainly should not forget to sprinkle over it, now and then, a good moral joke (verily the true spice), and because the state should find me day and night equipped and saddled to save it, after the example of the Berlin Bedlamites, who once, upon a fire breaking out in the house, extinguished it and saved the house in the best style, and I would come in at the gap and the breach, when the dark intervals of its other civil servants could not otherwise be filled up than with our lucid ones.

"Farewell! I break off. The world smiles upon me gayly. In Spain I shall find a bit of youth again--as in this writing.

"Schoppe.

"Apropos! Has the Baldhead nowhere run against thee? I cannot tell thee how I labor now daily to impress upon myself and appropriate beforehand a real horror and dread at the wish of running him down hereafter in my madness, in order that afterward the possible act may not, as a late fruit of my previous rational, moral state, be reckoned over against me into the other.

"_Annihilate this letter!_"

When Albano raised his fiery eyes from the letter, he stood before Lilar under a high triumphal arch, and the sun went down in splendor behind Elysium. "Dost thou not know me?" asked Linda, in a low tone, who stood beside him in travelling dress, weeping in bright love and bliss; and Julienne came flying out and making a sign of caution to both, from the entrance thicket of the flute-dell, and cried, as a cunning pretext: "Linda, Linda, nearest thou not the flutes, then?" And Albano had forgotten the painful letter.

123. CYCLE.

Like a concert that suddenly flutters up with a hundred wings did the swift presence of old love and joy break over the forsaken youth (so troubled about his friend) in beautiful waves; and smitten with delight, he saw Linda again as on Ischia; but she saw him again as in another Elysium; she was more soft, tender, ardent, remembering his past scenes in this garden. She would not relate nor hear anything at all about her own travelling adventures. Albano buried his mystery of Schoppe in his mighty but trembling breast; only to his father he burned to disclose it. He was incessantly representing to himself the possibility of a relationship, and the facility with which Schoppe might confound the pretended sister with the true one, Julienne; this very evening he meant to ask his father.

He imparted to her the paternal consent to their alliance with great joy, but not with the greatest, because Schoppe's letter echoed in his bosom. Julienne perceived that only a cascade instead of a cataract came out of him to-day, and sought with a sly pleasantry to draw him out, by making him answer, which she easily did, through the whole range of questions touching important personalities of his and her acquaintance. She had some inclination to weave and to paint on the theatre curtain, or even to pierce a prompter's-hole in it. She began the questions at Idoine,--who shortly after his arrival had taken her departure back again from the city,--and left off with them at Schoppe,--inquiring after the object of his journey; but Albano had not seen the former, and as to the latter, Schoppe, he said, had confided it to him alone. A beautiful, inflexible marble vein of firmness ran through his being. Linda's black eye was an open, true German one, and looked upon him only to love him.

Out of the flute-dell came the rest of the company, the Lector and others; Julienne constrained the lovers to a separation, saying: "Here is no Ischia; without me you cannot see each other here in the palace at all; I will announce it to thee always through thy father, when I am here."

When he stood alone in Lilar with the heavy thought of Schoppe and Linda, and surveyed the lovely regions and scenes of fair hours, then it seemed to him all at once as if, in the twilight, Elysium, like a charming face, distorted itself into an expression of scorn at him and at life. Little malicious fays sit on the little children's tables, as if they were tender children, and very much loved to see men and human pleasure; anon they start up as wild huntresses, and run through the blossoms; a thousand hands turn up the garden with its blossoming trees, and point its black, gloomy thicket of roots like summits up into heaven; Gorgon heads look out of the twigs, and up in the thunder-house there is an incessant weeping and laughing;--nothing is fair and soft but the great, daring Tartarus.

However, as it was the shortest way to his father, Albano went, stern and angry, through the garden, over the swan bridge, along by the Temple of Dream, by Chariton's little cottage, by the rose arbors, and over the woodland bridge, and soon was in the princely palace with his father, who had just come back from the sick Luigi. With ironical expression of countenance, his father related to him how the patient had begun to swell again, merely because he feared that his dead father, who had promised to appear to him a second time as a sign of death, would give the sign and immediately call him away. Then Albano related, without any introduction, and without mention of Schoppe and of his connections, the hypothesis of the most singular relationship, without putting, out of respect for his father, any long, searching questions, or even more than the short, swift one, "Is Linda my sister?" His father quietly heard him through. "Every man," said he, angrily, "has a rainy corner of his life, out of which foul weather proceeds, and follows after him. Mine is the carrying about of mysteries with me. From whom hast thou the latest?" "On that subject sacred duty bids me be silent," he replied. "In that case," said Gaspard, "thou wouldst better have been silent altogether: he who gives up the smallest part of a secret, has the rest no longer in his power.

How much dost thou suppose that I know of the matter?" "Ah, what can I suppose?" said Albano. "Didst thou think upon my consent to thy union with the Countess?" said Gaspard, more angry. "Should I then keep silence? and did not sister Julienne in the end disentangle herself from all mysteries?" Here Gaspard looked at him sharply, and asked, "Canst thou rely upon the earnest word of a man, without wavering, swerving, however eloquently appearances may discourse to the contrary?" "I can," said Albano. "The Countess is not thy sister; rely upon my word!" said Gaspard. "Father, I do so!" said Albano, full of joy; "and now not a word further on the subject."

But the old man, now more composed, went on to say that this new error gave him an occasion now earnestly to insist upon Linda's consent to a speedy union, because her father, perhaps himself the mysterious wonder-worker who had hitherto baffled all attempts at detection, had absolutely fixed, as the time of his appearance, the wedding-day. He indicated yet once more to his son his desire to know the way in which he had arrived at that hypothesis; but to no purpose: holy friendship could not be desecrated or deserted, and his breast closed mightily around his open heart, as the dark rock closes about the bright crystal.

So he parted, warm and happy, from his silent father. In the hard hour of the letter-reading, he had only climbed an artificial, rocky region of life, and there lay the gay gardens again, stretching away even to the horizon; yet, after all, the vain, painful error of his Schoppe, and the thought of that spirit so desolated by love and hatred, which, even in the tone of the letter, seemed to bow itself down, and the prospect of his madness, pa.s.sed like a distant funeral chime dolefully through his fair landscape, and the happy heart grew full and still.

124. CYCLE.

Soon after this, Albano's kind sister again let a Hesperian hour strike and play on the musical clock of his happiness, whose keeper she was,--an hour with which his whole life, up and down, sounded in unison, and cleared away, and in which, as in Switzerland, when a cloud opens, all at once heights, glaciers, mountain-peaks, now look out from the sky. He saw his Linda again, but in new light, glowing, but like a rose before the blushing evening red. Her love was a soft, still flame, not a leaping of eccentric, stinging sparks. He concluded that his father, who was a man of his word, had already made his request to her for a priestly union, and even got her consent. Julienne told him she wished to speak with him the next evening, at six o'clock, in his father's chamber; that made him still more sure and glad. With new and still more tenderly adoring emotions, he parted with Linda: the G.o.ddess had become a saint.

When he came the next day into the paternal apartment, he found no one there but Julienne. She gave him a slight and almost imperceptible kiss, in order to be speedily ready with her intelligence, since her absence was limited to so many minutes as the Princess needed to go from the sick-bed of her husband to the apartment of the Princesse.

"She will not marry thee," she began, softly, "notwithstanding that thy father expressed himself so strongly and finely to her, at the first reception after the journey, upon the new good fortune of his son, for which he had now nothing more to desire, he said, than the seal of perpetuity. It was still more finely silvered and gilded; I have forgotten the precise words. Thereupon she replied in her speech, which I never can retain, that her will and thine were the real seal; every other seal of policy imposed chains and slavery upon the fairest life."

Deeply was Albano hurt by an open refusal, which hitherto, coming upon him as a silent one and as philosophy, had floated about untouched, as a mere unsubstantial shadow. "That was not right; she might say _a good while hence_, but not _never_," said he, sensitively. "Moderation, friend!" said Julienne; "thereupon thy father reminded her, in a friendly manner, of the conditional appearance of her own, by saying that he could not but wish very much to transfer her fortunes out of his own hands into nearer ones. No arbitrary condition could compel or annihilate a will, she said. Thy father went on calmly, and added, he had sketched, in that case, the fairest plan of life for you two; but, in the other case, his approval of their love stood open only as long as his stay here, which would end at his friend's death. Then he went coolly and composedly out, as men are wont to do when they have provoked us to a real rage."

"Hesperia, Hesperia!" cried Albano, angrily. "But did Linda really repeat her no?" "O, too true! But, brother?" asked Julienne, with astonishment. "Suffer me," he replied; "for is it not unrighteous, this meddling of parents with the fairest, tenderest strings, whose vibration and melody they at once kill, in order to call forth from them a new tune? Is it not, then, sinful to degrade divine gifts into state-revenues and match-moneys,--yes, match[120]-moneys indeed? Good Linda, now we stand again on the ground, where they set up the flowers of love for sale as hay, and where there are no other trees in paradise than boundary-trees. No, thou free being! never through me shalt thou cease to be so!"

Julienne stepped back some paces, and said, "I will only laugh at thee," which she did, and then added, in earnest, "_She_, then,--is that thy will?--shall appoint _thee_ the day when the old father is to become visible?" "That does not follow by any means," said he. She calmly remarked, that an excited person always complained of the heat of another, and that Albano, in his very calmness, insisted too sternly upon his own and others' rights; that such people went on to demand, in pa.s.sion, something beyond the right, as a pin, which fits too nicely into the clock, when warmed stops it by its size. Then she begged him affectionately just to leave the disentangling of the "whole snarl" to her fingers, and to remain mild and still, lest yet more people--perhaps, in fact, her _belle-s[oe]ur_--might interfere with their union. Albano took it in friendship, but begged her earnestly only not to make any plans, because he should be too honorable toward Linda for that, and should immediately tell her the whole word of the charade.

She disclosed to him that she had made no other plan whatever than a plan for a happy day to-morrow, namely, to visit with Linda the Princess Idoine in Arcadia, to whom she owed still greater things beside a visit, particularly half of her heart. "Thou wilt ride accidentally after us, and find us in the midst of pastoral life," she added, "and surprise thy Linda." He said very decidedly, "No," both out of a shrinking from Idoine's resemblance to Liana,--although he only knew that Liana had personated her in the Dream Temple, and not, also, that Idoine had counterfeited her before his sick-bed,--and because he disliked to come into the presence of the Minister's lady, from a dread as well of bitter as of sweet recollections, of both which, in such a case, Roquairol would have brought up the rear. Julienne mischievously objected: "Only have no fear for the Princesse; she was obliged, in order only to rid herself of the detested bridegroom, to engage with an oath to all her friends never to choose one below her rank,--and that she will keep, even with thee." He answered the joke merely with the serious repet.i.tion of his no. Well, then she should insist upon it, she replied, that he should at least come to meet them half-way, and await them in the "Prince's Garden,"--a park which had been laid out by Luigi as hereditary prince, and forgotten when he came into the princely chair. He a.s.sented to this proposition very joyfully.

She still asked, jocosely, as they parted, "Who has been presenting thee with a new sister, lately?" He said, "That is what my father could not draw from me." "Brother," said she, softly, "it was a gentleman who easily takes princesses for countesses, and who, in the next place, thinks to be still more crazy than he already is,--thy Schoppe," and flew off.