Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 26

The whole starry sky cleared up. The company went homeward. Albano and Dian, with Chariton, stayed by the corpse.

THIRTY-THIRD JUBILEE.

Albano And Linda.--Schoppe and the Portrait.--The Wax Cabinet.--The Duel.--The Madhouse.--Leibgeber.

131. CYCLE.

Albano meant to incarcerate himself the next day, weep bitterly, and do penance, and not cheer himself with the sunshine of love; but he found at evening the following billet, written by an unknown hand, on his table:--

"Sir Count: You are hereby informed, that on Friday night, when you were gone journeying, the deceased Captain R. von Froulay played your part with the Countess Romeiro through _all_ the acts, in the flute-dell. You must, for the sake of rivals, get yourself another voice, and the Countess eyes to use by night, although to her it may not be altogether disagreeable to be often deceived respecting you in this manner. Farewell, and be in future a little more discreet!"

With pale face he stared at the skeleton which two giant hands forcibly held up before him, drawn out all at once from the flesh of blooming, youthful limbs. But the fire of pain speedily shot up again and illumined the whole circle of woe. With the might of agony, with b.l.o.o.d.y arms, must his spirit hurl back and forth the thought, heavy as a rock, the tombstone of his life, in order to prove whether it fitted into the burial vault;--the dreadful thought fell in so completely with Roquairol's whole play and end and life,--but not, on the other hand, with Linda's character, and with the divine moment which he had spent with her in Liana's last garden,--and yet it did, again, very much with her sudden reconciliation and with single, detached words,--and yet, perhaps, after all, this poisoned letter was only a fruit of the vengeance of the Princess, of whose indignation at Roquairol's murder of himself and the ape Dian had told him.

So painfully did he move himself on his wounds to and fro, and at last he resolved, this very evening to seek out Linda, wherever she might be, when he received from her the following billet:--

"Come to me, I pray, this evening, to Elysium; it will certainly be fair. I give the invitation now, as thou didst lately. Thou shalt lead me upon the fair mountains, and it shall be enough for me if only thou canst see and enjoy. Julienne we need less and less. Thy father urges our union with proposals which you shall this evening hear and weigh.

Come without fail! In my heart there are still standing so many sharp tears about the evil tragedy. Thou must change them into tears of another kind, my beloved!

"The Blind One."

He laughed at the _changing_. "Into frozen ones, rather," said he. Hot love was to him a pa.s.sionate kiss into his wound. He went to Lilar gloomily and hastily, deeply enveloped in a red cloak, as if against foul weather,--blind and deaf to himself and the world,--and like a dying man who awaits the moment when he either shall vanish in smoke and be annihilated, or soar away reanimated into divine worlds.

When he entered the precincts of Lilar, the garden did not distort itself as lately, but it merely disappeared, from him. He went along close by some disguised people, who seemed to be making a grave. "It's wrong, I vow," said one of them; "he ought to be buried out in the meadow, like other cattle." Albano looked that way, saw a covered corpse, and thought with a shudder it was the suicide, until he heard the second grave-digger say, "An ape, Peter, if he is kept with distinction, in clothes, looks more reputable than many a man, and I believe he, too, would rise again from the dead, if he were only regularly baptized."

Just as this Gibbon of the Princess, whom they were burying here, recalled before his soul that stormy Friday, he espied Linda, not far from the Dream-temple, on the arm of a seeing gentlewoman. She gave him, according to her manner before others, only a slight greeting, and said to the woman, "Justa, stay here in the Dream-temple; I am going to walk up and down here."

By this limitation of herself to the visual range of the Dream-temple she excluded every fair, visible sign of love, and Albano knew already that silent contentment of hers, with the mere presence of the beloved one, just as he did sometimes the wildness of her sweet lips. When he touched her with trembling, and saw her again near him, then did this powerful being come back to him with the whole divine past. But he deferred not the infernal question, "Linda, who was with thee on Friday evening?" "No one, dearest; where?" replied she. "In the flute-dell,"

he stammered. "My blind maiden," she answered, calmly. "Who else?" he asked. "G.o.d! thy tone distresses me," said she. "Roquairol killed the ape that night. Did he meet thee?"

"O horrible murderer! Me?" he cried; "I was travelling all night long; I was not with thee in any flute-dell." "Speak out, man," cried Linda, grasping him violently with both hands; "didst thou not write to me of having given up thy journey, and then didst thou not come?" "No, nothing like it," said he; "all infernal lies. The dead monster Roquairol used my voice,--thy eyes,--and so it was,--tell the rest."

"_Jesu Maria!_" screamed she, struck by the dashing flood into which the black cloud burst, and grasped with both arms through the leafy branches of the wooded avenue, and pressed them to her, and said supplicatingly, "Ah, Albano, thou wast certainly with me."

"No, by the Almighty, not! Tell the rest," said he.

"Fly from me forever; I am _his_ widow!" said she, solemnly. "That thou remainest," said he, severely, and called Justa out of the temple of dream.

"So it must live on,--thy pain, my pain: I see thee nevermore. I will say a farewell to thee. Say thou none to me!" said he. She was silent, and he went. Justa came, and he still heard her praying in the arbor: "Leave me, O G.o.d, this eclipse to-morrow; spare the gloomy widow thy daylight!" The maiden roused her, took her by the hand, and she rejoiced, when hanging on her arm, in her night-blindness.

Albano went out into the night. All at once he stood as if he had been carried up on a jagged, rocky peak, below which dashed a foaming stream. He turned back and said, "Thou mistakest, evil genius; I loathe suicide; it is too easy, and belongs to ape-murderers,--but there is something better, and thou shalt attend me."

He lost himself,--could not find his way to the city,--thought he was in Lilar again, and ran round anxiously without any way of egress, until at last he sank exhausted, and as if drawn down into the arms of slumber. When he awoke in the morning, he was in the Prince's garden, and the slumber island waved with its tree-tops before him. A jagged rocky peak over a rushing stream there was not in the whole landscape.

He looked upon the heavens, and the day, and his heart. "Yes, such, then, is life and love," said he. "A good, true fire-work, especially when one is to have a Linda after many preparations! Long it stands there with a gay, high scaffolding, full of statues, with smaller edifices, columns, and wondrous is it, and promises still more than it hides and betrays. Then comes the night in Ischia; a spark darts, the moulds burst, white, shining palaces and pyramids and a hanging city of the sun hover in heaven,--in the night-air a busy, flying world unfolds itself majestically between the stars, and fills the eye and the poor heart, and the happy spirit, itself a fire between heaven and earth, hovers too,--for the s.p.a.ce of a whole instant; then it becomes night again and a blank waste, and in the morning there stands the scaffolding dull and black."

132. CYCLE

"War,"--this word alone gave Albano peace; science and poetry only thrust their flowers into his deep wounds. He made himself ready for a journey to France. Only one thing still delayed his breaking up,--Schoppe's non-appearance, whom he with his riddles must await and, if possible, induce to go away with him. He kept himself in the woods all day so as to avoid his father and Julienne and everybody. Linda's unhappy night had sunk deep into his breast, and only he alone saw down into it, no stranger. He hoped that she herself would keep silent toward Julienne, because the latter, according to the sacred, womanly rules of her order, knew no indulgence for this sin. His first jealous ebullition had now given place to a painful sympathy for the deceived Linda, whose holy temple had been rifled. What pained him insufferably was the feeling of humiliation with which the proud fair one must now, as he imagined, think of him, and which he, with his present bitter contempt of Roquairol, entertained so much the more strongly. "Never, never, though she were my sister, can we see each other more; I can well see her bleeding before me, but not bowed down," he said to himself. Sometimes there came over him a cold fury against a destiny, which always swept with a sudden whirlwind through his embraces, and forced all asunder,--then an indignation against Linda, who had not acted like a Liana, and who was herself partly guilty of the error of the subst.i.tution by her principle of forgiving love everything,--then again deep sympathy, since she could not have confounded persons without any spiritual resemblances, as the secret tribunal of conscience told him, and since she now alone was atoning for it, that she was willing to sacrifice herself to him, even to him.

Inexpressibly did he hate the dead seducer, because by his act his death had become only a cowardly flight. The poor deserter, whose escape had been reported during the tragedy, he saw led along as a prisoner before him; but his captain had escaped the hand of vengeance forever. After some days papers of the dead were put into his hands; but, full of abhorrence, he could not look on them. They contained justifications, and at the same time additional sins. Roquairol had, after the pleasure-night, spent the whole morning in the Prince's garden writing, in order to color the remembrance, which alone (so he wrote) had rewarded and satisfied him, that he had not that very night played out the fifth act of the drama of life.

The Lector delivered in Albano's absence short letters from Julienne, wherein she begged him to make his appearance, and appointed him place and time at the castle, whither she had gone from Lilar. He went not.

Sometimes it seemed to him as if distant men tracking him stole round him in wide circles.

Once at evening he was still standing at the foot of a woody hill, when he espied overhead a wolf stalk out of the thicket; the wolf saw him, sprang down upon him, and changed into Schoppe's wolf-dog. Soon his friend himself, with an old man, stepped out from the trees above, saw him, hurriedly gave the man money, and came down to him slower than he went up to him. "Ah, a good evening, Albano," said Schoppe, with the old coldness with which he spoke, when he did not write, and smiled at the same time with so many lines and wrinkles that he appeared to Albano altogether strange. Albano pressed him tightly to his heart, and transformed the hot words which his friend did not love into hot tears.

It was an old star out of the spring morning when his Liana still lived and loved; it had gone down before him on a grave in that night of his journey; now it rose, and Albano was again unhappy.

Schoppe surveyed with visible complacency Albano's ripened form, and drew asunder, as it were, the young man's shining wings. "Thou hast,"

said he, "spread out and colored thyself right well,--hast May and August on one bough, like an orange-tree." Albano took no pleasure in this. "Only relate to me thy life, my brother," said he. "Thou shouldst tell thine first, methinks; I am tired even to stupidity," said Schoppe, seating himself and unbuckling his hunting-pouch. "Hereafter,"

replied Albano, "what thou hast occasion for I will tell thee. I got thy letters,--I really loved the well-known one,--a misfortune divided us,--I am innocent and she is great;--O G.o.d, be satisfied with this for to-day!" Never could he complain of misfortunes to his friends; still less now expose the misery of a beloved. "And still longer," replied Schoppe; "only say, does it add new misery if I bring with me from Spain and proceed to unpack proofs of your being related as brother and sister?" "No," said Albano, "I need tremble at no past." "Thou art still going to France?" asked Schoppe. "To-morrow, if thou wilt go too," replied Albano.

"By all means, as thy regiment chaplaincy. Not for want of the spirit of art, as thou writest from Rome, but from a superfluity of it, thou goest among soldiers. I should see it with pleasure, if thou wert to consider that even Dante, Caesar, Cervantes, Horace, served before they wrote so preciously,--only students invert it, and compose something short and sweet, and take up service afterward. To come to my travels,--it costs me much, namely, time, merely to tell thee that I caught thy absurd uncle with a carriage full of baggage in the little nest of _Ondres_, a post and a half from Bayonne. I owned to him I was going to Valencia to dissect the silk-stocking-weavers' looms in that place, to enjoy, at the same time, my drop of ice and a waistcoat-pocket full of Valencia almonds, and to visit the few professors who had produced the best compends for three thousand reals.[134] He should certainly arrive before me, he said. We arranged to put up at the same inn in Valencia. I found my account in him, as he could most easily introduce me to Romeiro's house. But I waited and watched there for him fourteen days in vain. With the steward of the house I found no hearing, although I cut out his stupid profile five times, with the request that he would unlock to a travelling painter the picture cabinet, where I wished to find the maternal picture of the Countess.

"Now was I half and half resolved to become pregnant, and in this guise to demand everything for my satisfaction, which even the Spanish King refuses to no pregnant woman.[135] In Italy they carry the child on the arm, in order to beg; in Spain it needs not so much as this visibleness. But fortunately thy uncle came. The picture-gallery door was thrown open. I set myself to copying a stupid kitchen-piece, and looked everywhere after my island portrait. But nothing was to be seen." (Here he drew a wooden case out of his hunting-bag, and laid it before him and went on.) "Until at last I saw it,--a picture leaned on the floor against the wall, turning toward me its back- and wintry-side,--it was the child of my pencil, and I was touched by the neglect it had suffered,--inwardly vexed, but outwardly calm, I put it by,--and snapped off short in the kitchen-piece in the middle of a half-finished pole-cat. Look at the likeness!"

He took off the box-cover, and Linda beamed upon his friend with a stream of mind and charms, only dressed in older fashion. Albano could scarcely stammer for emotion. "That were my father's spouse and my dear mother? And thou knowest a.s.suredly that this picture here is the one you made of her on Isola Bella?"

"I'll just make it manifest," said he, and scoured away at a rose in the picture about the region of the heart. "My then Paphos-name _Loewenskiould_ lies _sub rosa_ and will be immediately forthcoming.

Had I already sc.r.a.ped it open on the road, then you would have believed I had on the road for the first written myself in." As from a ghostly writing hand Albano started back shuddering, when actually an L and an o came forth from under the rose: "I shall clear away no further now,"

said Schoppe, "the rest I keep for her." Albano now poured out his heart before his honest heart's-friend; to him he could say and object that Julienne was his sister,--"against which I have nothing at all to say," said Schoppe,--and that Gaspard had approved an intended marriage between him and Linda. "There is no getting away from it," he added; "if she is his daughter, then I am not his son,--I cannot possibly make his sacred word of honor a lie--and, G.o.d! into what a monstrous pit and pool of crime must one then look down!" "Touching the word and the pool," said Schoppe, quite coldly, "there are specious proofs to be adduced (although, to be sure, I have before this spoken superfluously on the subject with thy father, and with the Countess), that the Baldhead, who, as he confessed to me, has been thy father's ma.s.s-a.s.sistant, groomsman, and bear-leader, was not a man of the freshest morals, but that he--although otherwise upright in many saddles _except_ the moral--had his hours and centuries when he acted as such a dog and highwayman, that my hound there is a calendar-saint and father of the Church to him. Only I ought not to have blown out the lamp of his life, which of course stank more than it shone."

Albano could not disguise from him his horror at the deed. "I cannot repent it; listen," said Schoppe, and gave this account: "Even in Valencia thy uncle told me that he had met in Madrid such and such a fellow,--exactly like the Baldhead,--who carried round for show a wax-figure-cabinet of nothing but crazy creatures; often the whole cabinet would speak, and he himself would sit therein too, and help discourse; thy superst.i.tious uncle procured and lent him spirits, too, and made evil and frightful things out of it all.

"Once in a _Posada_[136] I heard in a sleeping chamber near mine all sorts of voices murmuring through each other and saying, 'Schoppe also is coming to us.' I rose; the strange chamber was shut. I listen and hear it again, the devilish cry, 'Schoppe comes in also.' My room had a balcony out of which I could, through the neighboring window, see by the moonlight into the noisy chamber. In horrible, frizzled shapes sat a ma.s.s of wax therein and spake, the waxen baldhead in the midst; but I sought the living one. The wax beasts exchange with one another their fixed ideas and slip me in among them: 'There is our honorary fellow-member peeping in,' said the wax baldhead. By Heaven! I must be short, my blood boils and burns again through my heart. I grow furious, take my weapon, and pet.i.tion G.o.d for a peaceable, forbearing disposition. Unfortunately I observe, in a back corner not lighted by the moon, near a father of death and a pregnant woman of wax, a black cloak which stirs, and out of which peeps the living tone-leader, the Baldhead. 'Black master of ventriloquism,' cried I, 'hold thy tongue for G.o.d's sake; I see thee behind there and fire in.' I took it for ventriloquism.

"Now for the first time the crazy-house properly began; I heard it laugh,--call me in and dub me a comrade and member of the club.

'_Presses_,' said I, 'I am notoriously a man, and see thee quite distinctly.' It availed nothing; the waxen baldhead so much the more replied, 'Yes, there sits brother Schoppe already,' and I actually saw myself also embossed and modelled on the spot. 'He is to be had here also,' cried I, grimly, and fired away at the master of the lodge, who tumbled bleeding to the floor.

"I made off with myself in the same hour. As to the uncle, I came across his track afterward for a short time. He dreads madmen, and would not have me long with him, for fear I myself should strike up a bargain with the aforesaid set. He asked me whether the director of the wax-figure travelling madhouse had encountered me. I could not place much confidence in him; I have the secret alone."

"Thou art a wild, true man," said Albano, with such an intense desire to embrace him; "thou dost much for others, and art, after all, much for thyself. I can now leave thee no more. My former life-island, with all its flowers, lies deep under water, and I must cast myself into the infinite sea of the world. Give me thy hand, and swim with me. We travel to-morrow to France."

"To-morrow?" said Schoppe. "Well, yes! then I go this evening to the Countess, and then to Don Cesara." "Tell her," begged Albano, "that I would not visit her even as a brother, if I were such, not from coldness, but because I revere her great spirit; say that to her, and G.o.d help thee!" Albano was about to go, and leave him to wander alone into the neighboring Lilar. "No, accompany me, my master," said Schoppe, vehemently; "I have discharged the old churl over there in the woods by fair payment of escort-money, and should now be alone _vis-a-vis de moi_." "I do not understand thee," said Albano; "what art thou afraid of?" "Albano," said he, in a low and important tone, and his generally direct looks glanced shyly sidewise, and innumerable great wrinkles encircled his smiling mouth, "the 'I' might come; yes, yes!"

Wondering, and asking who that might be, Albano looked into his face.

"Plague take it!" said Schoppe; "I apprehend you full well; you hold me to be not one eighth as rational as yourself, but mad. Wolf, come up!

Thou, beast, wast frequently, on lonely roads and lanes, my exorcist and devil-catcher, against the 'I.' Sir, he who has read Fichte, and his vicar-general and brain-servant Sch.e.l.ling, out of sport as often as I, will make serious work enough out of it at last. The thing called 'I' presupposes itself, and the person called 'I,' together with that remainder which most call the world. When philosophers deduce anything--for example, an idea or themselves--out of themselves, so do they also deduce whatever else there is about them--the remaining universe--in the same manner. They are exactly that drunken churl who made water into a fountain, and stood there all night before it, because he heard no cessation, and of course set down all the subsequent continuing sound to his own account. The 'I' conceives itself; it is therefore ob-subject, and at the same time the residing-place of both. Gadzooks! there is an empiric and a pure 'I.'

The last phrase which the crazy Swift, according to Sheridan and Oxford, uttered, shortly before his death, was, 'I am I.' Philosophical enough!"

"And what fearful conclusion dost thou draw from it all?" said Albano, with the deepest sorrow. "I can bear anything and everything," said Schoppe, "only not the _me_,--the pure, intellectual _me_,--the G.o.d of G.o.ds. How often have I not already changed my name, like my namesake and cousin in renown, _Scioppius_, or _Schoppe_, and become every year another person! but still the pure 'I' perceptibly runs after me and besets me. One sees this best on journeys, when one looks at one's legs, and sees them stride along, and then asks, Who in the world is that marching along so with me down below there? I tell you he is eternally talking with me; if he were once to start up in bodily presence before me, I should not be the last to grow weak and deadly pale. To be sure, no dog has occasion to use tooth-powder; but children one should paint up, it stands to reason and propriety. For my part, I have observed the age so so, and smile, because I say nothing. Men, like napkins, are broken up into the finest and greatest variety of forms,--into night-caps, pyramids, cross-bills--zounds, Albano! into what shape are they not folded? But the consequence, brother,--O heavens, the consequence! I say nothing: curse it, I am still as a mouse,--few as much so; but times may come when a gentleman shall haply remark, Men and music-notes, music-notes and men; short and sweet and plain, with both it is now heads up, now tails,--that is to say, when it has to go quick. These are similes, I am well aware, best friend; but the bakers announce a slack batch by a stony or clayey one in the shop, whereas men announce their hardest things, among which belongs the heart, by their softest, to which appertain words."