Speechless with astonishment at these effusions, Albano led him by the hand to Lilar before Linda"s residence. All was dark therein; not a light was stirring. "Speak thy word softly up there, my Schoppe, and to-morrow we journey farther!" said Albano below, in a soft tone at parting, and left him to go up alone into the gloomy castle of mourning. "What a meeting!" said Albano, on his way back through the garden.
133. CYCLE.
Long did Albano wait for his friend on the following day; no one appeared, no man knew anything of him. On the second morning a report got wind that the Countess in the night, and Gaspard in the morning, had travelled off. "Has Schoppe driven both away by the truth?" he asked himself, forsaken and alone. In vain did he try to track Schoppe for several days after; not once had he been seen. "Thou, too, dear Schoppe!" said he, and shuddered at the barbarity of fate toward himself. As he thus surveyed himself, and looked out over the still, dark waste of his life, all at once it seemed to him as if his life suddenly lighted up, and a sun-glance fell upon the whole liquid mirror of the dark time which had elapsed. A voice, spake within him: "What has there been then? Men, dreams, blue days, black nights, have flown hither without me, without me flown away again, like the flitting summer, which the hand of man can neither weave nor hold fast. What is there left? A wide woe over the whole heart; but the heart, too, remains,--empty, of course, but firm, sound, hot. Loved ones are lost, not love itself; the blossoms are fallen, not the branches. Verily, I still wish; I still will; the past has not stolen from me the future.
Arms I still have to embrace withal, and a hand to lay upon the sword, and an eye to survey the world. But what has gone down will come again, and flee again, and only that will remain true to thee which is forsaken,--thyself alone. Freedom is the glad eternity; calamity is for the slave the breaking out of a fire in the prison. No; I will _be_, not _have_. What! can the holy storm of tones only stir a particle of dust, while the rude, agitated air displaces mountains of ashes? Only where like tones and strings and hearts dwell, there do they move softly and invisibly. Only sound on, then, sacred string-music of the heart, but wish not to change anything in the rough, hard world, which owns and obeys only the winds, not tones."
At this moment, he was found by the Lector Augusti, who brought, by word of mouth, instant entreaties from the Princesse Julienne to go with him to Gaspard"s chamber, where she had the weightiest words to say to him about Schoppe. He complied readily; he expected, first and chiefly, to find with her a key to his Schoppe"s covered fate; he saw, too, from the bold choice of a messenger, how important to his poor sister his appearance must be.
In Gaspard"s apartment Augusti suddenly left him to announce him, and--leave him, alone. Through his life rolled now a slow thunder; whether it came from heaven, from a stream, or only from a mill, as yet he knew not. Julienne burst in, weeping, unable to speak for the violent beating of her heart. "Thou art going away?" asked she. "Yes!"
said he, and besought her to be less pa.s.sionate; for he knew how easily another"s impetuosity set him on fire, as he could not even play chess or fence, for any length of time, without becoming angry. She entreated him still more pa.s.sionately only to stay till Gaspard came back. "Is he coming back?" asked Albano. "How otherwise? But not the unworthy bride," said she. "Julienne," replied he, seriously, "O, be not as hard against her as fate has been, and let me be silent!" "I hate now all men, and thee, too," said she. "That comes of your poetical souls. O, what honest bride would have let herself so easily be blinded by such a suicide? Who? But I see thou dost not know all." "But is it of any use?" he asked.
Surprised at this question, she began without reply the narration:--
On the day when Albano found Schoppe, Julienne would fain visit again her friend Linda whom she had not seen since the evening of the tragedy. All apartments in Lilar were closely curtained against daylight. Julienne found her sitting in darkness, with downcast, half-open eyelids, outwardly very tranquil, only at long intervals a little tear stole out from her eyes. The sweeping stream went high over the wheels of her life and they stood far under it and still. "Is it thou, Julienne?" she said, softly. "Pardon the darkness; night is green now, to my eyes. It pains me to see anything." The bridal torch of her existence was quenched; she wished now night for night.
Julienne put anxious questions of astonishment; she gave no answer to them. "Is there any trouble between thee and my brother?" asked Julienne, in whom relationship always created a warmer concern than friendship. "Only wait for the Knight," answered she; "I have sent an entreaty to him to come hither."
Just at that moment he entered. She begged him to accommodate himself to this short night. After some silence, she rose proudly from her seat; her black-dressed, tall form raised, in the presence of the Knight, whom she saw not, its great eyes to heaven, her proud life, hitherto enveloped in the winding-sheet, flung back the cloth and rose, blooming, from the dead, and she addressed the Knight: "Respected Gaspard, you promised me, as also did my father, that he would appear to me on my marriage day. The day is gone by. I am a widow: now let him appear to me."
Here the Knight interrupted her: "Gone by? O quite right! Is he, then, anything more discreet and moral than a man?" and jested, contrary to his usual manner, with a glow of indignation, because he supposed it was of Albano, whom he had so long trusted, that she was speaking.
"You misunderstand me," said Linda; "I speak of a deceased one."
Suddenly before Julienne Roquairol"s shadow pa.s.sed; distant according tones from the Princess had ushered it in. "Almighty G.o.d!" she screamed, "the cursed suicide"s play is true?" "He played what actually occurred," said Linda calmly. "We separate. I travel. I desire nothing but my father." Here Gaspard held out toward the Countess an arm petrified by palsy, as if armed with a drawn dagger,--the darkness made the apparition blacker and wilder,--but he broke the ice of death asunder again with cold hands, and stirred and answered with lamed tongue: "G.o.d and the Devil! Thy father is at hand. He will take it all--as it is. Does _he_ know it?" "Who?" asked Linda. "And what did he determine? Heavens! I mean Albano." Gaspard had, in a pa.s.sion, at once Cromwell"s imbecility of tongue and ingenuity of action; and remained therefore as averse and as far from every ebullition, even of love, as from tameness, which was to him (as he said) "even more odious than downright crime."
"I know not," said Linda. "I belong to the dead one alone, who has twice died for me. Say that to my father. O, I would have followed him long ago, the monster, into the deep realm; I would not stand here before the cold reproach of malice or Christian amazement, for there are still daggers to be used against life!--But I am a _mother_, and therefore I live!"
"I will see you again this evening," said Gaspard composedly, and hurried away. "I believe, dear Julienne," said Linda, "we now no longer quite understand each other, at least not to the highest point, just as we earlier differed about your _belle-s[oe]ur_, and you thought her coquetry, but I precisely her prudery, great and immoral." "That may well be true," said Julienne, coldly; "you are so truly poetic, I am so prosaic and old-maidishly pious and orthodox. To love a monster for this, because he cheats me as horribly as he does his regiment-treasury, or because he generally allows himself as much freedom as his regiment, or because after his death he still leaves parts for the remaining players, or letters to me, deceived one--" "Did he so?" asked Albano. "She praised it even as a sign of genius in him,"
replied Julienne. "To love such a one, said I, or such people as love him, I cannot find it in my heart to do that. Fare you then as well as may be." Linda answered, "I hate all wishes"; gave her her hand, pressed not hers, and remained in profound silence, looking into her night. She knew little of the easy and careless departure of her lost friend.
That same night Linda, after a long private talk with the Knight, travelled off entirely alone, wrapped in her veil, in a carriage without torches, and no one knew whether she had wept or not.--
When Albano had heard his sister out, he said, with a soft voice of emotion: "Make peace with the past; man cannot a.s.sail it. Leave to the great unhappy one the night into which she of herself has been drawn.
But why were you so eager to have me with you? Particularly if thou knowest aught of my Schoppe, I entreat thee to impart it." "I will answer thee," said she, weeping and wondering; "but, brother, a.s.sure me that thy silence is not again the curtain of a new misfortune. I recognize you men by that, one must hate you all, and I do so, too." "I have nothing sad in my mind; before G.o.d I affirm it. You women, you who will only quench your h.e.l.l with tears, and kindle it with the breath of sighs, comprehend not, that often a single hour"s thinking can give a man a staff or wings, which shall lift him at once out of h.e.l.l, and then it may burn on for all him." "Show me, then," said she, in a tearfully comic manner, "_thy_ wing." "This," replied he, "that I build not upon man, but upon G.o.d in me and above me. The foreign ivy winds around us, runs up on us, stands as a second summit beside ours, and it is thereby withered. Spirits should grow beside each other, not upon each other. We should, like G.o.d, as imperishable ones, love the perishable."
"Very good," said she, "if it only insures thee peace. As touching thy poor Schoppe, he has been thrust into the madhouse by way of punishment; but first let me give you a regular account. He dressed up a story about a second sister of thine before thy already so much excited father. One could have let this new distraction of intellect pa.s.s; but thy uncle was called, who told him to his face he had murdered the Baldhead; and the choice was haughtily left him between imprisonment and the madhouse; so he betook himself to the latter.
Stay, stay! The weightiest is to come. Whatever I may think of him, I see he is thy honest friend; and to speak out freely, even Linda, before her departure, inserted in her last letter to me an intercession for him. He not only made the farcical journey to Spain for thee, he also effected thy cure; perhaps thou owest him thy life. I wonder that I, or somebody or other, has never before mentioned it to thee."
She began now upon Idoine"s sound and generous character, her Arcadia, and the last day she had spent with her and looked into her clear soul.
She pa.s.sed on to his bed of fever and his mourning beside Liana"s bier, and old Schoppe"s talks and runnings to and fro, and his n.o.ble victory, when he had brought at length the glorified Liana, in Idoine"s form, before his eye, that she might p.r.o.nounce the healing words: "Have peace!"
Now was he in a storm, and Julienne at peace. "Therefore," she continued, "I hold it to be my duty to interest myself a little in thy friend. The poor devil is innocent,--through stingings of conscience and even by his present situation he may completely lose what understanding he still has,--altogether innocent, I say; for thy uncle, whom I have long hated, and who only a short time ago for the first time, but in vain, sought to come as a ghostly and murderous apparition to my sick brother,--he would also have probably done the same with Liana, if she had lived to admit of it,--this man is--(why may I not make it notorious, now that all has changed and revolutionized itself?)--one and the selfsame person with the Baldhead, and is a ventriloquist! Brother?"
But Albano had already flown from her.
134. CYCLE.
Albano would fain set his friend free before avenging him; therefore he would hasten first to Schoppe and then to his uncle. But as he pa.s.sed by the lighted apartments of the latter, a sudden indignation seized him, and he must needs go up. The tall, haggard uncle came slowly to meet the excited youth, with the jay on his hand. Albano, without any circ.u.mstances, with flaming eyes, charged him with his double part, his heaven-crying destruction of Schoppe, and the illusory operations against himself, and demanded answer and satisfaction. "Yes, yes," said the Spaniard, stroking his _diablesse_; "I have the pistols: I have no time,--no time for talking." "You must have it," said Albano. "I have none, _Deo patre et filio et spiritu sancto testibus_; it will soon be between eleven and twelve, and the gloomy one stands here." "Heavens!
why this silly, tragic scenery? O G.o.d, is it not possible, then, that you are even a man,"--looking with horror at the skin of his face, which absolutely could not look joyful or loving,--"so that you can tremble, blush, repent, exult? What knew you of my Schoppe, when you once in Ratto"s cellar made believe as if you knew a frightful deed of his?" "No one needs know anything," he replied; "one says to a man, "I am acquainted with thy villanous deed"; the man sends his thoughts back, he finds such a one." "But what had he done to you?" asked Albano, with agitation. Dryly he replied, "He said to me, "Thou hound!"
It strikes eleven o"clock; I say nothing more than what I will."
Here the Spaniard brought two pistols and a bag, showed him that they were not loaded, asked him to load one (giving him powder and lead), but not the other. "Into the bag, each into the bag," said he; "we draw lots!" The bolder, the better, thought Albano. The Spaniard shook both up, and requested Albano to tread upon one of them, as a sign of his choice. He did so. "We shoot at the same time," said the uncle, "as soon as it has struck the two quarters." "No," said Albano, "you fire at the first stroke, I at the second." "Why not?" replied he.
They posted themselves over against each other in opposite corners of the chamber, with the pistols in their hands, awaiting the stroke of half past eleven. The Spaniard closed his eyes in dumb listening. As Albano looked into this blind, bust-like face, it seemed to him as if no sin at all could be committed upon such a being, least of all a death-stroke. Suddenly there was a murmuring in the still chamber of five voices among each other, as if they came from the old philosophers" busts on the walls; the father of death, the Baldhead, the jay seemed to speak, and an unknown voice, as if it were the so-called Gloomy One. They said to one another, "Gloomy One, is it not so, have I told any falsehood? I bring five tears, but cold ones,--I bear the wheels of the hea.r.s.e on my head,--I lead the panther by the noose,--I cut him free,--I point with white finger at _him_,--I bring the mist,--I bring the coldest frost,--I bring the terrible thing!"
Here the bell sounded the first stroke, and the Spaniard fired,--at the second Albano blazed away;--both stood there without a wound; powder-smoke floated round, but nowhere was there any appearance of a splintering, as if the ball had been only a gla.s.s ball filled with quicksilver. With grim contempt, Albano looked at him on account of the previous voices. "I was forced to," said the uncle.
Suddenly the Lector broke in, breathless, whom Julienne had despatched to hinder a probable duel. "Count!" he stammered, "has anything happened?" "Something," replied the uncle, "must have happened in the neighborhood, the smoke came in; we were just on the point of embracing and bidding each other good night." He rang, and commanded the servant to ask the host who was firing so late at night. Albano was astounded, and could only say in parting, "So be it! But fear the madman, whom I unchain!" "Ah, do it not!" said the Spaniard, and seemed to fear.
Augusti waited upon him down to the street, nor did he let him go till after he had given his word of honor not to go up there again. But Albano flew, even at this late hour of the night, to the house of woe and to the tormented heart.
135. CYCLE.
Hardly had Albano made known to the overseer of the madhouse, a young, sleek, rosy little man, his name, which the little man already knew, and his pet.i.tion for Schoppe"s liberty, together with his security for him, when the overseer smiled upon him with uncommon complacency, and said, "I have quietly watched the whole house for years. I seize greedily the minutest traits for a future, philosophical public; and so also did I apply myself very seriously to Mr. Schoppe. But never, Sir Count, never have I detected in him a trait or trick which would have promised insanity; on the contrary, he reads all my English and German works on the subject, and converses with me upon the modes of treatment in hospitals for the insane. A disciple of Fichte he may be (I infer it from his "I"), and a humorist, too; now if each of these is, of itself, hard to distinguish from craziness, how much more their union! with what joyful antic.i.p.ation of the coincidence of our observations I give you here the key to his chamber, conceive for yourself!" "If he is not a fool," said his wife, "why then does he smash all the looking-gla.s.ses?" "For that very reason," replied the overseer; "but if he is a fool, then is thy husband a still greater."
Never did Albano open a door with heavier heart than this to Schoppe"s little chamber. "I am come to take thee away, my brother," he cried immediately, by way of sparing himself and him the redness of shame.
But when he looked at the old lion more nearly, he found him in this trap quite altered,--not tame, creeping, wagging, but broken in two, and with shattered claws weighed down to the earth. The charge of murder, which he had honestly admitted, united to Gaspard"s unmerciful sentence, had filled and eaten up his proud, free breast with poisonous shame. "I fare well here, only I feel symptoms of ill health," said Schoppe, with l.u.s.treless eye and toneless voice. Albano could not hide his tears; he clung around the sick man, and said, "Magnanimous man, thou gavest me once in my sickness, health and salvation again, and I knew it not, and thanked thee not. Go with me; I must nurse thee in this thy sickness, heal and comfort thee as I can; then we travel."
"Dost thou imagine, my Criton," he replied, strengthened by the balsam of his wounded pride, "that I am not a sort of Socrates, but will really go out of my _torre del filosopho_? A word of _honor_ is a thick chain." "Tell me all, spare no one; but I will tell thee thereafter a piece of news, at which thy chain shall instantly melt down!" said Albano.
"Ha! Meanwhile, this place here, for its part, is well enough, as aforesaid, a _torre del filosopho, quai de Voltaire_, and Shakespeare"s street, and whatever else one might, could, would, or should name.
Moreover, I always hear by night one or another man speak close by me, and so I have no fear at all that the "I" will come. I throw every day five little bread-b.a.l.l.s: if they form a cross, then it signifies (think what thou wilt) that I do not yet appear to myself. But they always make one. I have been, in this Anticyra here, so quieted about so many a phantom, even by those books,--look at them, nothing but treatises on madness,--that I, although it touches my Mordian[137] quite as little as it does me, am glad to have been here. My intercourse is not the safest, I own, though I talk with the keeper and wife alone (a rhyme), both of whom cleverly understand the prison-fever that prevails here.
The man has got the fixed idea into his head, and his wife thereby into hers, that he is our present overseer, and has to a.s.sist, oversee, and read excellent books which fall in with his office. Those treatises are by the fool. It is to be presumed he has let his overseeing idea peep out too broadly in the city, and the medical college clapped him in with his serviceable idea; because, in the end, to be sure, every overseer must have it in order to exercise his office, whether he is mad or not. Amongst all here in the house, we two please each other most. He sounded me to my advantage, and I can make great use of him for my liberty, only I must not attack his foul, fixed spot. Only I often improvisate for them an evening blessing,--because they have no prayer-book,--and weave in with the blessing hints which might be of medical service to the pair, if they chose. So we two wander round in the mazes of this labyrinth along before the patients,--behind him, the incurable hub of the whole wheel, I walk quite tolerant. In the club, universal polemics and scepticism reign as in no other university hall.
"It is a thing to make one become crazy," he says to me, in a low tone.
"To make one _be_ crazy,[138] they say in this _palais d"egalite_," I reply. I cut him out the profiles of the patients for his ma.n.u.script.
As children still have something which appears to them childish, so have madmen something which seems even to them madness. But I never become any more pointed with him, and keep sharper jokes to myself. Ah, what is man, especially a discreet one, and how thin are his sticks and staves! Is there anything about me that moves thee, Albano? My dull, pale face, perhaps?"
But Albano could not possibly confess to him, that this wreck of a n.o.ble man, with his delusions, and even with his style, whose wings had also wheels on them, brought the tears into his eyes, but he said merely, "Ah, I think of many things, but now, at last, I pray, to thy story, dear friend!" But Schoppe had already forgotten again what he was to tell. Albano named the issue of the portrait-affair with the Countess, and Schoppe began:--
"The Princess Julienne was just jumping into her carriage, when I led the blind maiden up the steps, to let it be said, the Librarian Schoppe was here from Spain. I was ushered into a darkened apartment, wherein I walked quietly up and down waiting or watching for people, until the Countess greeted me out of the gloom "This darkness," said I, "is just what I like for the light which I have to give, only I would rather speak Irish or Lettonian[139] or Spanish, because I don"t know who may be eavesdropping about here." "Spanish!" said she, seriously. I related to her how I had known thy mother, and painted her, and so forth, and inserted my name indelibly into the likeness; after a long time, had met her in the market-place of this city, and taken her for the looking-gla.s.s image of thy mother, so like was she to her own. "I know not," said she, breaking in here with heated pride upon the midst of my narrative, "how far your secrets can become mine." "You may," said I, seriously, "by letting me ring for a light; for I hold here in my hand the portrait of the Frau von Cesara and von Romeiro, two names of one person." She comprehended nothing of it, wanted to know nothing of it, and I must not ring. I acknowledged to her that I saw myself necessitated to adorn myself with the rhetorical chessman, generally called repet.i.tion of the narrative, and proceeded to move the piece.
But as soon as in so doing I came upon thy name again, she said I had probably in my mind relations now entirely done away. "No," said I, "I have an eternal and restored relation in my mind, and bring with me his greeting, full of the most profound regard." The greeting seemed to touch her sensibilities, just as if one held her to be in need of such an a.s.surance, and she begged me rather to leave thee out. "Heavens! he is your brother, and here I have about me the portrait of your mother, stolen from Valencia, and only no light to show it by."
"Light was then ordered. As the flame set the tall, imposing form in gold, I said right out to myself, she was fully as deserving as her brother that one should make that long pilgrimage to the family tree of both, for she is not without her charms. Albano, were I her brother, as thou hast the honor to be, and had she a gondola, but no river of paradise for it, my blood would have to be made navigable for her; I would bear her up not only in my hands, but, like an aequilibrist, on my nose and mouth, the unfortunate one! She no sooner saw the portrait than she cried, "Mother, mother!" and kept pa.s.sing her hand over her eyes, complaining that they were now still worse than ever. I resumed my sc.r.a.ping, and at last dug out before her eyes my whole name, _Loewenskiould_, even with the addition, which had escaped me, "Loves much."
""Was that the painter"s name?" she asked. "Are you he? You loved her too?" "Beauty is a cliff," replied I, seriously, "on which one and another man seeks to shipwreck himself, because it lies full of pearls and oysters." She begged of me, in a friendly manner, the most distinct repet.i.tion of the repet.i.tion; she wished to attend better; hearing and thinking were as hard and heavy for her now as living. Albano, you should have despatched me to her with more preparatory information. As it was, I was half confused and cloudy, and when, during my picture of the Long Lake Isle,[140] something moist sprang from her eyes, I sank in the drops, and almost drowned therein, and not till after some time could I rub myself to life. At the end of my discourse, she stood up, folded her hands, and prayed, with weeping, as if she gave thanks: "O G.o.d, O G.o.d! thou hast spared me!"--which I, after all, do not wholly understand."
Albano understood it well,--namely, that she thanked fate for the accidental delay of Schoppe"s arrival, which had spared her the short but fearful transformation of Roquairol into a brother.
"Thereupon she broke out into too many thanks to the painter, robbers and purveyors of the painted birth-certificate. He whose heart has gone to sleep like an arm, and is feelingless and hard to move, finds a something very droll run through and over the awaking member when he stirs it. "I could not do less," said I, "for your holy brother; the sunny side is, then, the moon-side." She turned suddenly to the subject of thy father, and asked, as he was immediately coming, whether she or I should propose to him these riddles. "Or rather both!" I had hardly replied, when he stepped wildly in.
"Now, Gaspard is, to be sure and decidedly, thy own and thy sister"s natural father, and filial love toward him is never to be set down against _thee_ as a fault; but if I chose to tell thee he was no bear, no rhinoceros, no werewolf or other kind of wolf, I should do it more from singular politeness than from any other cause. He snorted to me a good evening; so did I to him. Many men resemble gla.s.s,--smooth and slippery and flat so long as one does not break them, but _then_ cursedly cutting, and every splinter stings. The matter was laid before him with the accompanying frontispiece of the portrait. Wert thou more distantly related to him, I would let myself out on this subject; for his face was overspread with the northern light of grim fury; out of his eyes yellow wasps flew at me; straight lines shot up on his tempestuous brow like electrical lances, particularly two perpendicular lines of discomfort. But, as was said, thou art, to my knowledge, his son. "My friend," he thundered away, "with what _right_ do you steal pictures, then?" "That ought to be a hard question for me to answer,"
replied I, gently; "but I have an _inability_ to look at an unrighteous deception; I march right in." "Countess," said he, gasping, "in three minutes you shall know this _gentleman_ well enough." O no, no! he used another word than _gentleman_, but I will one day clasp him to my breast for it, and though we stood on the highest steps of G.o.d"s throne, and wrestled in the glory." "Schoppe!" said Albano. "Don"t excite me!" replied Schoppe, and went on.
"He rang; a servant flew in with a card; we all were silent.
"Indulgence, Countess," said he, "only for the s.p.a.ce of one minute." He thereupon gave her some miserable court-news, but she looked silently on the ground. Then came thy tall uncle, nodded sixteen times with his little head, for that he takes to be an obeisance, and stepped far off from me. "Brother, simply say, what has this gentleman here done back of Valencia?" "Murdered, murdered!" said he, rapidly. "Under what circ.u.mstances?" asked thy father. Here he began to depose the minutest particulars of my shot of distress at the Baldhead with such an incomprehensible sharpness that I said, "That is true!" and went on myself, and kept asking, "Is it not so?" and he hurriedly nodded, till I had come to the end. Then I asked, "But, Spaniard, tell me, by Heaven! whence have _you_, then, derived this knowledge?" "From me!"
answered a strange, hollow voice, exactly like the Baldhead"s.