At length he embarked, with a face that was growing pale, in the Charon"s boat, as he said, and ferried over alone. Then the other players sailed over one after another. All were lost behind the trees; and now, from behind in the embowered western parts of the island, the immortal overture from Mozart"s Don Juan rose like an invisible spirit-realm slowly and grandly into the air.
"_Diablesse!_" cried thereupon the brother of the Knight to the jay, and clapped his hands at the same time as a signal.
"Open the coffin," the creature began, in a hollow voice, accompanied by single, lugubrious, tones of the orchestra,--"open the coffin in the churchyard, and show for the last time the breast of the corpse and his dry eyelid, and then shut it to forever."
At this moment Lilia (Chariton) and Carlos (Dian) stepped forth,--two lovers yet in the earliest time of the first love. No sad rain of tears yet swept away the golden morning dew, they are so true to each other.
Lilia rejoices with him that her brother Hiort is just coming back from his travels to find his youthful friend Carlos her eternal one.
"Perhaps he, too, is right fortunate," said Lilia. "O, certainly so,"
said Carlos; "he is indeed that, and everything else." At times both were silent in happy contemplation of each other; then tones went up out of the veiled west of the island and bore the mute joy into the ether, and showed it to them hovering and glorified. A sweet sympathy diffused itself among the spectators for Dian"s and Chariton"s imitation of their own fair reality, so delicate, yet mingled with southern glow; they heard and saw Greeks. All at once Lilia fled behind the flower-bushes, for her enemy, _Salera_, Carlos"s father, came, personated by Bouverot.
Salera angrily announced to his son the arrival of his bride, _Athenais_. Carlos made known to him now the mystery of his earlier love, and showed himself armed against a whole future. Salera cried, with exasperation, "Would that she were not, as she is, beautiful, so that I might have the pleasant duty of forcing and punishing thee! But thou wilt see her, and obey me, and yet I shall hate thee." Carlos replied, "Father, I have already seen Lilia." Salera went off with angry repet.i.tions, and Carlos wished now still more ardently for Hiort"s return, in order with him more easily to abduct his sister through his persuasion and attendance. Here closed the first act.
The brother of the Knight called to the jay, "_Diablesse!_" and sc.r.a.ped with his foot, as a signal.
"Appear, pale man!" spake the creature; "the clock vibrates the hour; man of sorrow, land upon the still island!"
Hiort stepped forth, with his cheeks painted pale, with open breast, looked upon the tomb, and said, from his innermost soul, "At last!" The music played a dance. "Yes, indeed, island of slumber thou may"st well be called; our days end with a sleep," he added. Now came his Carlos.
"Hiort, art thou dead?" cried he, in terror, over the corpse. "I am only pale," said he. "O, how dost thou come back so out of the beautiful, gay earth?" said Carlos. "Exhausted, Charles, with stillborn hopes; my present is disinherited by the past; the foliage of the sensual is fallen off; not even beautiful nature do I longer fancy, and clouds like mountains are more dear to me than real mountains. I have truly reaped the bitter weeds of life, and yet must I, in this empty breast, carry about with me a destroying angel, who eternally digs and writes, and every letter is a wound. No advice! You call it conscience.
But bring me a little sleep-draught hither on the island of sleep, Charles!"
They brought wine. He now gave his friend an account of his life,--his faults, among which he adduced the very one in which he was just persisting, namely, drinking; his self-reproducing vanity, even with its self-acknowledgment; his conquests of women, which made him a magnetic mountain, full of the attracted nails from ships that had thereby fallen to pieces; his propensity, like Cardan, to offend his friends, to break in upon his own or another"s good fortune, as, even when a child, he longed to interrupt the preacher,[128] or in the midst of the finest tune to smash the harpsichord, and in a fit of enthusiasm to think the most licentious thoughts.
"Once I had still, after all, two distinct and different selves,--one that promised and lied, and one that believed the other; now they both lie to each other, and neither believes." Carlos answered, "Horrible!
But thy sorrow is verily itself a help and a gift." "Ah, what!" he replied. "Man condemns less his iniquity than the past situation wherein he committed it, while, in a fresh situation, he finds it new and sweet again, and loves it as much as ever. What lies cold yonder, that is my image [pointing to the Sphinx], that stirs itself, living, in my b.l.o.o.d.y breast. Help me! draw out the rending monster!"
Albano fired with rage in his innermost soul at the guilty repet.i.tion of that tender confessional night with him.[129] "He is bold enough,"
said Gaspard, in a whisper to Albano, "because, as I hear, he is really to personate himself; but when he sees himself so, he is surely better than he sees himself." "O," said Albano, "so I thought once! But is, then, the contemplation of a bad condition itself a good condition? Is he not so much the worse that he bears this consciousness, and so much the weaker that he sees an incurable cancer-sore growing upon him? The highest thing he has, at all events, lost,--innocence." "A fleeting cradle virtue! He has, after all, a bright, bold, reflecting faculty,"
said Gaspard. "Only effeminate, shameless, double-meaning, many-sided debility of heart he has; talks of power, and cannot tear through the thinnest mesh of pleasure," said Albano.
"Charles," said Hiort, tenderly, as if answering him, "yes, there is yet one help. When on the ground of life one fresh color after another fades,--when existence is now nothing, neither comedy nor tragedy, only a stale show-piece,--still is there one heaven open to man, which shall receive him,--love. Let this close against him, and he is d.a.m.ned forever. Carlos, my Carlos, I could still be happy, for I have seen _Athenais_; but I can be still more unhappy than I am, for she loves me not. In my heart lies this blazing, but continually sharp-cutting diamond, upon which it bleeds as often as it beats." Everywhere now did Roquairol let Linda"s image play in. At this crisis, Carlos at first threw his friend into an internal uproar, with the intelligence that Athenais had been selected by his father for _his_ bride, and was coming soon; but he calmed him, when his sister Lilia appeared, by quickly taking her hand, and saying, "This one only do I love." They spoke of the obstacles on the part of old Salera, whom Carlos called a glacier, which bore fruit under no sun, and could not be built upon.
"Stand by me, Charles," said Hiort; "think what thou wrotest to me: "Like two streams will we blend together, and grow, and bear, and dry up together.""[130] Thus did the three beings mutually understand, bind, elevate each other; all had one end,--their common welfare.
Carlos swore eternal rebellion against his father; Hiort, to protect his sister, and cried, "At last the empty cornucopia of Time, which hitherto has given out nothing but hollow sounds, pours out flowers again." "O, the women! How common and commonplace are almost all men!
But almost every woman is new." Gaspard said, with a smile, "Women say the reverse of us and themselves." The second act closed in gladness and peace.
"_Diablesse!_" cried the Spaniard, and stretched his right hand high in the air.
"Fleeting," began the black jay, amid tones of music, "is man, more fleeting is his bliss, but earlier than all dies the friend with his word."
The third act followed immediately upon the heels of the preceding, and broke up, by the uninterrupted continuance of the artistic enchantment, which should belong to every play and every work of art that is to be read, all cold, prosaic astonishment, even that which arose from the wonderful speaking of the jay on the lake. A great, beautiful, proud lady appeared,--Athenais (personated by the merchant"s wife, Roquairol"s by-mistress), full of hope in her old friend Lilia, who called herself "the little Athenais," and, sweetly dreaming over the dream of former days, Lilia sinks into her arms with twofold tears; Athenais does indeed bear in her hand three heavens and three h.e.l.ls.
"How beautiful thou returnest! My poor brother!" said Lilia softly.
"Name him not," said she proudly, "he can die for me, but I cannot live for him." Here Carlos flies in to his Lilia,--stops and stiffens in his flight,--collects himself, and approaches Lilia. She says, "Count Salera,--Athenais--" He grew pale, she red. A constraining, painful confusion entangled them all three; every honey drop was taken from a thorn-hedge. Lilia, with a shudder, is made more and more strongly aware of Athenais"s sudden victory over her fortune and love. Athenais went away. The two lovers look upon each other for a long time with trembling. "Am I right?" asked Lilia. "Am I in fault?" said Carlos.
"No," said she, "for thou art a mortal, and, what is still worse, a man." "What shall I do, then?" replied Carlos. "Thou shalt," said she, solemnly, "after one year go into a garden on a hill, and look around thee and seek me in the garden,--in the garden--under the beds,--deep below one,--I know not how deep." She hastened away, as if frantic, and sang, "All over, all over with loving and living!"
Carlos stood some minutes with his wild look on the ground, and said, in a low, hollow tone, "G.o.d, it is thy work!" and went off,--met his friend, who called out impetuously and joyfully, "She is here!" but he hastened on proudly, and only called back, "Not now, Hiort!" To him came Lilia, weeping, and led him onward. "Come," said she, "do not look upon the tomb; we are both too unhappy."
Then came out old Salera with Athenais,--seized on ice for fire, and took his cold coin for warm,--praised her like a man, and his son like a father,--and said, as in a play, There comes himself. "Here, son,"
said he, "I set before thee thy happiness, if thou canst deserve it."
Carlos had lost Lilia"s heart,--his father"s wish, the might of beauty, the omnipotence of loving beauty, stood before him, his longing and the thought of cruelty toward this G.o.ddess, and finally a world within him, which stood so near to her sun, prevailed over a double fidelity;--he sank on his knee before her, and said, "I am guiltless, if I am happy."
The pair go off on one side; Salera on the other, and encounters Lilia, whose hand he takes, with the words, "You, as a friend of my house and son, certainly take the deepest interest in his latest happiness as the possessor of Athenais." So ended the third act, which, by its unjust, all-distorting allusions, filled and fired Albano with an exasperated desire for the end, merely that he might call Roquairol to account for this a.s.sa.s.sin-like brandishing of the tragic dagger. "The old fellow,"[131] said Gaspard, laughing, "fancies he is painting me too herein; I wish, however, he would take stronger colors."
Before the fourth act commenced, the Spaniard threw up his left hand, and the black jay spoke immediately: "Sin punishes sin, and the foe the foe; untamable is love, untamable also vengeance. See, now comes the man whom they no more love, and brings with him his wounds and his wrath." There stood Hiort, as if before his grave, which drew down his head,--weeping and drinking enormously,--soft evening tones of music melted away with his dissolving life. "Ah, so it is," cried he, out of a deep, agonized breast,--"only throw them away at length, the two last roses of life:[132] too many bees and thorns lurk in them; they draw thy blood and give thee poison-- O, how I loved! thou Almighty One on high, how I loved!--but ah, not thee! And so now I stand empty and poor and old: nothing, nothing is left me,-not a single heart,--no, not my own: that is already gone down into the grave. The wick is drawn out of my life, and it runs away in darkness. O ye children of men! ye stupid children of men! why do ye then believe that there is still any love here below? Look at me, I have none. An airy colored ribbon of love, a rainbow, draws itself out and winds itself around under us shifting clouds, as if it would bind the clouds and bear them.
Ridiculous! it is itself cloud and mere falling weather,--in the beginning glisten gay drops of gladness, then dash down black drops of rain!"
He was silent,--went slowly up and down,--looked seriously at a war-dance and masquerade of internal spectres,--then stopped. The shadows of dark deeds played through each other around him: suddenly he started up; a lightning-flash of a thought had darted into his heart; he ran to and fro, cried, "Music! let me have horrible music!" and the wedding music from Don Juan, which had hitherto accompanied him, raised the murder-cry of terror. "Divine!" said he; and only single words, only tiger spots, appeared and vanished on the monster as he pa.s.sed by.
"Devilish! the rose"s being, the blossom"s being,--aye, well! I will bury myself in the avalanche, and roll down; and then I die beautifully on my slumber-island," he concluded, in a soft, faint voice.
"O Lilia! insure me one prayer!" cried he, going to meet his approaching sister. "Any one which hinders not my dying," said she. He laid before her the prayer, that she would this very night persuade her friend Athenais into the "night-arbor" of the island, under the pretext that her bridegroom, Carlos, wished to show her to-day two mysteries about Lilia. "I have," he added, "Carlos"s voice; with it I can declare to her my loving heart, and then, if she loves me, I will call myself Hiort." "Is thy request sincere?" asked the sister. "As true as that I will be still alive to-morrow," said he. "Then is it soon fulfilled, for Athenais expects me even in the night-arbor; only follow me after seven minutes." She went; he looked after her, and said to himself, "Hasten, arrange the heaven! Fair slumber-island, at once the sleeping-place for the bridal-chamber and for the eternal sleep. O, how few minutes stand between me and her heart!"
"Thou art still here, surely?" said he, and looked for his pistol.
"Now," cried he, solemnly, in departing, "is the time for the _clear-obscure_ deed, then the bier-cloth is thrown over it," and went swiftly into the arbor.
The Spaniard threw a twig into the water, and the black jay spake, in a low tone, "Silent is bliss; silent is death."
"The man," said Gaspard, "has something through the whole play like real earnest. I will not answer that he does not shoot himself dead before us all." "Impossible!" said Albano, alarmed; "he has not the force for such a reality." Nevertheless, he could not, after all, properly free himself from the anxious thought of this possibility.
Disturbed, impetuous, with dishevelled hair, Hiort came back, and said, in a low voice, "It is done; I was blest; no one will be so after me."
"With that yellow one,[133] and now in the night-hour, I will answer for nothing," said Gaspard. Albano reddened with shame at the impudent presumption, and still more at Roquairol"s crime of dishonoring and seducing, even in the play, his holy beloved. "Music, but tender and good!" he cried, and let himself be fanned by the zephyr of harmony, and drank incessantly "funeral draughts," or wine,--both to the annoyance of the Knight, who abhorred drinking, and shunned music, because this or both made one weak.
He laid himself down on the turf, and the pistol beside him, and said, stammering, "So, then, I lie in the warm ashes of my burnt-out life, and my cold ashes will be added soon." He put his double opera-gla.s.s close to his eyes, and cast sparkling looks over at Linda. "I have had her on my heart, the divine beauty, my eternal love,--my tulip, which at evening closes at length over the bee, that he may die in the flower-cup. On the roses of my life I rest and die; I still look with bliss on the sweet one; I cannot repent. Only forgive, poor Carlos; I wipe away the crime with blood, but with tears of penitence I cannot.
Should that which time has washed away from this sh.o.r.e cleave again to the sh.o.r.e of eternity, then it must fare badly with me there: I can change there as little as here."
At this moment a cannon-shot was fired in the city to announce a deserter. He took his pistol into his hand. "Yes, yes, a shot signifies a fugitive,--a fugitive out of the world, too. O, when shall the sharp sickle lift itself in the east, and cut life in twain? I am so weary!"
He looked toward the eastern heavens, but a cloud, which already faintly thundered, overcast the gateway of the moon. He smiled bitterly.
"Even this little, last joy also destiny begrudges me! I shall see the moon no more. Well, I shall, perhaps, mount higher than it or its storm-cloud,--only my dear spectators and auditors of my death are driven away from me by the rain. Yes, if thou art out, then am I out!"
He pointed to the flask.
"Wild, awful tones, come up from the deep! Bring me my b.l.o.o.d.y bridal dress! It is time; declining joy casts behind a long, lengthening shadow." Albano and Julienne recognized with a shudder, in the little coat which they brought him, the blood-sprinkled one which he had worn at the masquerade, when, as a boy, he had meant to murder himself before Linda. "You must lay it on my cold breast," said he, as he received it from Falterle. The thunder rolled nearer, the lightnings became more glowing, and one cloud after another swelled the tempest.
He drank the gla.s.ses fast. "Nothing can now harm me," said he; "even the lightning not specially, although I lie under trees; in this tube there is a lightning that defies all lightnings,--a real lightning-rod." The hastening storm drove him, on the spectators"
account, to the conclusion, and he was roused to indignation at the mockery of Providence over his theatrical preparations.
"Nothing is more pleasant and timely than this tempest," said Gaspard; "however, talking and waiting seem to gratify him tolerably." The other spectators were agonized by the scene, and yet not one tore himself away. Orders had been given to the fellow-performers to take the shot as the signal-word, and not to come before it. He said, "The death-snake rattles in the neighborhood; yonder, on the wave of the future, the corpse comes swimming on." They perceived that he spoke at random and extempore, vexed by the storm. He looked upon the pistol. "A glance at thee! So is the look at life taken, and again hidden under the eyelid. A spark, a single spark, and the theatre-curtain blazes up, and I see the spectators stand, spirits, or even nothing at all, and the eternal, heavy cloud fills the wide ether of the world. So stand I, then, by the dead sea of eternity; so black, still, wide, deep it lies below me; one step, and I am in there, and sink forever. Let it come! I swam therein even before my birth. Now, now," said he, while it sprinkled, and he took the last gla.s.s, "the rain will chill the poor wretch already sinking into the chill of death. Play now something soft and beautiful, good people!"
Thereupon he c.o.c.ked his weapon, stood up, said, weeping, "Farewell, beautiful and hard life! Ye two fair stars, ye that still look down from above, may I come nearer to you? Thou holy earth, thou wilt still often quake, but no more shall he quake with thee who sleeps in thy bosom; and ye good, far-off beings who loved me, and ye near ones whom I so loved, may you fare better than I, and condemn me not too harshly!
I do verily punish myself, and G.o.d immediately judges me. Farewell, my dear, offended, but very hard Albano, and thou, thou even unto death ardently loved Liana, forgive me, and weep for me! Liana, if thou still livest, then stand by thy brother in the last hour, and pray for me before G.o.d!" Here he suddenly pointed the weapon at his forehead, fired, and fell headlong; some blood flowed from the cloven skull, and he breathed yet once, and then no more.
Bouverot flew out, according to his part, and began it: "Even now, my dear Hiort, my Carlos bethinks himself"; but he started back before the corpse, stammering, "_Mais! mon Dieu! il s"est tue re vera! Diable! il est mort! Oh! qui me payera?_" Linda sank powerless on Julienne"s bosom, and the latter stammered, "O, the sinner and suicide!" The Princess exclaimed, indignantly, "_Oh, le traitre!_" Albano cried, "Ah, Charles! Charles!" and plunged into the lake, and swam over, threw himself upon the shattered form, and groaned, weeping, "O, had I known this! Brother and sister dead! and I am to blame! O, had I remained unsuccessful! Ah, my Charles, Charles, forgive! I was not thy foe. How deplorably shattered it lies there,--the great temple!" "Be more calm, I pray," said Gaspard, who had at last come over in the boat, and who bore every mutilation with an anatomical coldness and curiosity; "he had his regiment debts also, and feared the investigation which a new administration would bring about. Now, one can, after all, have respect for him; he has actually carried through his character."
Albano raised himself up erect, and said, in the deafness of anguish, "Who spake that? you, miserable Bouverot? you know nothing but debts!"
"Monsieur le Comte!" said he, defyingly. "I said it," said Gaspard to his son. "O my Dian!" cried Albano, and stretched out his hand toward him, who, himself weeping, held his weeping Chariton, "come thou hither; let us bandage him; there may yet be help for it."
The Counsellor of Arts Fraischdorfer stepped up to the astounded Princess, who remained upon her side of the lake, with the words, by way of diverting her attention, "Viewed on the side of art merely, it were a question whether this situation was not borrowed with effect.
One must, as in that wonderful creation of Hamlet, weave a play into the play, and in that make the pretended death a real one; of course it were then only a show of show, playing reality in real play, and thousand-fold, wonderful reflex! But how it rains now!" Something was whispered in the ear of the Princess by her Haltermann. She flung up her arms, and cried, "O, monster! homicide! My poor, innocent Gibbon!
Thou monster!" She had heard of the ape"s murder, and departed inconsolable.
All at once the naked moon emerged into the deep blue, and every one remarked it; but the rain previous no one but Fraischdorfer had been aware of. Albano saw now full clearly the dead eyes and white, stiff lips. "No, they stir not," said he. Then it sounded as if out of Roquairol"s breast and iron mouth, "Be still; I am judged!" And immediately began the jay, as concluding chorus of the last act, "The poor man now lies fast asleep, and you can cover him up!"
Gaspard looked very earnestly at his brother. "By heavens!" replied the latter, "it is written so in his part."