At last he stepped upon a stone which sank with him; then a section of the wall fell down; and a tangled wood, full of clumps of trees, whose stems twined together into bush-work, intercepted every beam of the moon. As he looked round him under the gate, there hung over the shadowy stairway a pale head like a bust of the murder-field, and pa.s.sed down without a body, and the bloodless dead seemed to awake and run after it;--the cold h.e.l.lstone[116] of horror contracted his heart: he stood: the death"s-head hovered immovable over the last step!
All at once his heart sucked in warm blood again; he turned toward the misshapen wood with drawn sword, because he was bearing along his life in his hand near armed Death. He followed in the darkness of the moss-green towers the roar of the subterranean flood and the rocking of the ground. Unfortunately he looked round again, and there stood the death"s-head behind him still, but high in the air on the trunk of a giant. The extreme of horror always drove him with compressed eyes full upon a phantom; he called twice through the echoing wood, "Who"s there?"
But when, at this moment, a second head seemed all at once to stand beside the first, then his hand clove, frozen, to the ice-cold key of the gate of the world of the dead, and he tore it away bleeding.
He fled, and plunged through thicker and thicker twigs, till at last he came out into an open garden and into the splendor of the moon; here, ah here, when he saw the holy, immortal heavens and the rich stars in the north gleaming again, which never rise nor set, the pole-star and Friederich"s-Ehre,[117] the Bear and the Serpent, and Charles"s Wain and Ca.s.siopaea, which looked down upon him mildly, as if with the bright winking eyes of eternal spirits, then his spirit asked itself, "Who can lay hands on me? I am a spirit among spirits"; and the courage of immortality beat again in his warm breast.
But what a singular garden! Great and little flowerless beds, full of yew, rue, and rosemary, divided it among them; a circle of weeping birches drooped like a funeral train around the mute spot; under the garden murmured the buried brook, and in the middle stood a white altar, near which lay a man.
Albano was strengthened by the appearance of the common dress and the mechanic"s bundle on which the sleeper rested; he stepped quite close to him, and read the golden inscription of the altar: "Take my last offering, all-gracious one!" The heart of the Prince must here be mouldering in the altar.
Ah, after these rigid scenes, it soothed his soul even to tears to find here human words and a human sleep, and the remembrance of G.o.d; but as he looked with emotion at the sleeper, suddenly that sister"s voice which he had heard on Isola Bella said softly in his ear, "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." "Ah, good G.o.d!" he cried, and turned round; and there was nothing on either side of him, and he held himself up by the corner of the altar. "I give thee Linda de Romeiro," it said again; frightfully the thought seized him, that the hovering death"s-head might be speaking near him, and he shook the sound sleeper, who woke not, and shook and called still more violently, when the voice spake for a third time.
"What?" said the drowsy man, "directly! What will he?--you?" and raised himself reluctantly and with a yawn; but at the sight of the naked sword fell down on his knees, and said: "Mercy! I will, indeed, give up all!"
"Zesara!" a cry came from the wood,--"Zesara, where art thou?" and he heard his own voice; but now he boldly called back, "At the altar!" A black form rushed out, with a white mask in hand, and hesitated in the moonlight before the armed one. Then at length Albano recognized the brother of Liana, for whom he had so long panted; he flung his sword behind him, and ran to meet him. Roquairol stood before him mute, pale, and with a sublime repose on his countenance. Albano continued to stand near him, and said with emotion, "Hast thou been seeking me, Charles?"
Roquairol nodded silently, and had tears in his eyes, and opened his arms. Ah, then could the blissful man, with all the flames and tears of love fall upon the long-loved soul, and he kept saying incessantly, "Now we have each other! now we have each other!" And more and more pa.s.sionately he embraced him, as the pillar of his future, and melted into tears, because now, indeed, the buried love of so many years and so many choked up fountains of the poor heart could at once gush forth.
Roquairol, trembling, only clasped him to himself gently with one arm, and said, but without pa.s.sion, "I am a dying man, and that is my face,"
holding forth the yellow death-mask; "but I have my Albano, and will die on his bosom."
Wildly they twined around each other; the sap of life, Love, ran through them with a creative power; the ground over the rolling, subterranean flood shook more violently; and the starry heaven, with the white, magic breath of its trembling stars, floated around the magic glow.
Ah ye happy ones!
52. CYCLE.
Some men are born fast friends; their first finding of each other is only a second, and they then, like those who have been long parted, bring to each other not only a future, but a past also;--this latter our happy ones demanded of one another impatiently. Roquairol answered Alban"s question, How he came hither, in a fiery manner: "He had been following him this whole evening,--he had gazed at him at the window during the funeral pomp with such a painful longing, and had almost been constrained to fly and embrace him,--he had already, but a moment ago, stood close by him, and at his question, "Who"s there?" immediately taken off his mask." Now did Albano"s fallen arm strike again tensely through the thin magic-lantern show of ghostly fear, as he now learned that the two-headed giant had grown entirely out of an optically-magnifying, mistaken notion of the distance of a form which was so near, and the death"s-head had forfeited its body on the stairway only by the dark curtains and its black dress; even the hard spirit-scene at the altar seemed to him now less insuperable through the rich gain of living love.
Roquairol asked him what woe or joy had driven him hither at midnight to a _Moravian_ churchyard, and whither he had sent the man with the sword.
Albano did not know that Moravians reposed here; and, moreover, he had not observed that the sword, probably from fear of its being used, had been stolen. He answered, "My dead sister was fain to speak with me at the altar; and she has spoken"; but he feared to say more of this. Then Roquairol"s countenance suddenly changed; he stared at him, and demanded confirmation and explanation; during this he looked into the air as if he would draw faces from it by his looks, and said monotonously, fixing his eyes, however, on Albano the while, "Dead one, dead one, speak again!" But only the death-flood went on speaking under them, and nothing more. But he threw himself before the altar on his knees, and said in measured tone, and yet with trembling lips: "Fly open, spirit-gate, and show thy transparent world. I fear not you, the transparent ones; I become one of you, when you appear, and walk with you, and become an apparition myself." "O my good one, forbear," Albano entreated, not only from piety, but from love also; for an accident, a night-bird shooting over, might, indeed, kill them by horror: this horror stood, too, not far from them; for on the illuminated side of the weeping birches stepped out a white, majestic old form. But when Roquairol, frantic with wine and fancy, reached out the dying mask into the air, and said, turning toward the grave of the heart, "Take this face, if thou hast none, old man, and look at me from behind it!" Alban seized him; the white form stepped back with bowed head and folded arms into the branches; the round tower on the battle-field struck the hour, and the dreamy region, murmuring, struck a response.
"Come to my warm heart, thou pa.s.sionate soul. O that I were permitted to receive thee on my very birthday, at my very birth-hour!" This sound melted at once the ever-changing man, and he hung upon him with wet eyes of joy, and said: "And to keep me even till our dying hours! O look not upon me, thou unchangeable, because I appear so wavering and broken; in the waves of life man breaks and crinkles as the staff flickers in the water, but the essential being stands nevertheless firm as the staff. I will follow thee into other parts of Tartarus; but still relate the history."
To give this history amounted to opening a _sanctum sanctorum_ of the inner man, or even a coffin to the light of day; but do you believe that Albano bethought himself a minute? or would you yourselves? We are all better, franker, warmer friends than we know and show; only let the right spirit meet you,--such a one as thirsting Love ever demands,--pure, large, clear, and tender and warm,--and you give him everything, and love him without measure, because he is without fault.
Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the rainy season;--hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained, was a stream with waterfalls.
Charles led him into the so-called catacomb, while he listened to the ghost-story of Isola Bella, which, however, from having been exhausted by the former, he heard with diminished fear. A dreary, charred vale, full of sunken shafts, basked gray in the moonshine; out of the wood crept forth the death-flood below their feet, and leaped down a stony stairway into the catacombs. The two followed it on another that ran by its side. The entrance bore as frontispiece an old dial-plate, of which the lightning had once struck away the hour _one_. "One?" said Albano; "singular!--just our coming hour!"
How adventurously does the catacomb now wind onward! The long death-flood murmurs obscurely far in through the darkness, and glimmers at times under the silvery stream which the moonlight sends in through the shaft-openings; immovable creatures--horses, dogs, birds--stand drinking on the dark bank, that is to say, their stuffed skins; small gravestones, worn smooth by time, with a few names and limbs, are the pavement; on a brighter niche we read that a nun was immured here; in another stands the petrified skeleton of a miner, who was buried alive, with gilded ribs and thighs; in scattered spots were black paper hearts of men shot by the arquebuse, and heaped-up nosegays of poor sinners; the rod which had whipped a forgiven penitent to death, a gla.s.s bust with a phosphorus point in the water, chrisom-cloths[118] and other children"s clothes and playthings, and a dwarf skeleton.
As the explanatory words of Roquairol, whose life-path always ran down into vaults and out over graves, beat out life more and more thin and transparent before him, Zesara, after his manner, at once shaking his head, heaving forward his breast, stamping in the sand, and cursing (which he easily did in terror and in strong emotion), broke out with the words: "By the Devil! thou crushest my breast and thine own. It is not so! Are we not together? Have I not thy warm, living hand? Burns not within us the fire of immortality? Burnt-out coals are these bones, and nothing more; and the heavenly flame which has consumed them has again seized upon other fuel, and blazes on. O," he added, as if comforted, and stepped into the brook and looked through the opening of the shaft up to the rich moon, which streamed down from heaven, and his great eyes filled with splendor,--"O, there is a heaven and an immortality; we remain not in the dark hole of life; we, too, sweep through the ether like thee, thou shining world!"
"Ah, thou glorious one," said Charles, whose soul consisted of souls, "I will now bring thee to a more cheerful place." They had hardly gone eight steps, when it darkened behind them, and a sword, flung in overhead, came perpendicularly down, and struck with its point in the sand under the waves. "O thou infernal devil up there!" cried the infuriate Roquairol; but Albano was softened at the thought of the iron virgin[119] of the death-hour, who had folded her sharp arms together so near him. They clasped each other more warmly, and went silent and sad towards a low music and a grave-mound. They seated themselves upon it opposite an avenue which formed a right angle with the tormenting catacomb, lined with green moss, and of which crumbled sparks of rotten wood pointed out the extent. It lost itself in an open gate, and a prospect of Elysium, of which only the white summits of some silver-poplars were distinguishable, and in the distance was seen the spring redness of midnight blooming in the heavens, and two stars twinkling overhead. The gate, however, was grated, and guarded by a skeleton with an aeolian harp in his hand, which seemed to strike upon it the thin minor tones which the draught of wind just now wafted into the cavern.
"Here," said Charles, at the beautiful spot, and made more curious by the deadly fling of Albano"s sword, "finish your narrative of to-day!"
Albano reported to him candidly the word which the sister"s voice had spoken: "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." In the tumult of his inner being he thought not of the anecdote, that she was the very one for whom Charles when a boy had proposed to die. "Romeiro?" he started up. "Be still! She? O thou mocking executioner, Fate! Why she, and to-day? Ah, Albano, for her I early braved death," he continued, weeping, and sank upon his breast, "and that is what has made my heart so bad, because I have lost her. Do thou only take her, for thou art a pure spirit; the glorious shape which appeared to thee on the sea, so she looks, or now still fairer. Ah, Albano!" This n.o.ble youth trembled at the complicated plot, and at the destiny, and said: "No, no, thou dear Charles, thou thinkest falsely about everything."
Suddenly it was as if all the constellations rang, and a melodious spirit-choir thronged in through the gate. Albano was startled.
"Nothing; let be," said Charles. "It is not the skeleton; the _pious father_ is walking in the _flute-dell_, and is just drawing out his flutes, because he prays. But how sayest thou, I think falsely of everything?" "How?" repeated Albano, and could not, in the magic circle of these echoes, which all-powerfully brought back to him that Sunday morning, either think or speak. For did not the silver-poplars wave to and fro against the stars, and rosy clouds lie couched about the heavens, and did not the whole Elysium pa.s.s openly by with the sounds which had floated through it, with the tears which had besprinkled it, and with the dreams which no heart forgets, and with the holy form which eternally abides in his breast? And now he held so fast the hand of her brother; so near was he to love and friendship, those two foci in the ellipse of life"s pathway; impetuously he embraced the brother, with the words: "By Heaven, I say to thee, she whom thou hast just named concerns me not, and never will."
"But, Albano, thou dost not surely know her yet?" said Charles, pursuing his inquiries, perhaps, too hardly; for the n.o.ble youth beside him was too bashful and too steadfast to unlock the sanctuary of wishes to the kinsman of his loved one; to a stranger he could have done it much more easily. "O torment me not," he answered sensitively; but he added more softly, "Believe me, I pray you believe me, this first time, my good brother!" Charles yielded full as seldom as he; and although swallowing the inquisitive tone, and speaking in a right loving one, nevertheless said this: "By my bliss, I"ll do it, and with joy; a heart must have been heartily loved and divinely blessed which can renounce such a one."
Ah, does Albano, then, know that! He only leaned silently, with his fiery cheek full of roses, on Liana"s brother, shunning scrutiny for shame; but when the expiring calls of the flute-dell gathered together like sighs in his breast, and reminded him too often how that Sunday morning closed, how Liana stole away, and how he looked after her with dim, wet eyes from the altar; then, although his heart did not break, his eye broke into tears, and he wept violently, but silently, on his first friend.
Then, with mute souls, they turned homeward, and looked thoughtfully toward the long, vanishing ways of the future; and when they parted, they well felt that they loved each other right heartily, that is, right bitterly.
On the morrow the pious father lay prostrate under a shock which was more blissful than mournful; for he said he had in the night seen his friend, the deceased Prince, walking, clad in white, through Tartarus.
FOOTNOTES:
[92] [_Fauler Heinz._] Or Athanor, a chemical stove, which works on for a long time without poking. [Corresponding to our air-tight stove. _Athanor_, from the Greek, _undying_?--TR.]
[93] The translator had to resort to the Scotch to help him get this pun into English.
[94] Ezek. xiii. 18: "Woe to the women that sew pillows to all arm-holes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature, to hunt souls!"--TR.
[95] According to Lempriere.
[96] Sanhedrim, c. 2, Misch. 3.
[97] Cic. ad Quirit. post redit, c. 3.
[98] His sect represented Christ"s journey to h.e.l.l as having released all the wicked from that region, but not Abraham, Enoch, the prophets, &c.--Tertul. adv. Marcion.
[99] A t.i.tle given to black colors.
[100] The Corinthian, who was hidden from his enemies in a chest of cedar, ivory, and gold, richly adorned with figures in relief, and at last expelled the usurpers and mounted the throne.--TR.
[101] The line which is drawn from the aphelion to the perihelion, the two apsides, or the nearest and farthest points of a planet"s distance from the sun.
[102] A child coming into the world face foremost cannot afterward bend its head forward.--_The Mother of a Family_, Vol.
V.
[103] The name of the Invalid Hospital in Copenhagen.
[104] In Darwin"s Zoonomy, page 529, the case is adduced of a man who did this before spectators. In Paris another did the same by swallowing air.
[105] In Vienna there was an Inst.i.tute which made new sealing-wax out of old, and endowed poor persons with the proceeds.
[106] Such was the tasteless name by which Basedow was going to baptize a daughter, in memory of the appearing of an elementary work by subscription. See Schlichtegroll"s Necrology.
[107] _Wehestande_, a parody of _Ehestande_, wedded state.
[108] An issue.
[109] A name given in some places to the consumption.
[110] A micrometer consists of fine threads stretched across in the telescope, which serve to measure the smallest distance.
[111] The transit-instrument, or culminatory, observes when a star has reached the highest point in its course.