40. CYCLE.
With beating heart and burning cheek he made his way into the midst of the motley promenading throng with some old lady or other, who, in her vanity, misunderstood him, and at once hung on his arm like a spring-bracelet, and who got nothing from him but—answers. With flying and piercing glances he stepped into the bright hall, which seemed as if it were made of crystallized light, and into the sea of heads. He was just making some answer when he caught, in the tumult behind him, the low words, "I certainly hear my brother,"—and immediately the still lower refutation, "It is my Count." He turned round; between the Lector and her mother stood the dear Liana, a modest, timid, pale-red angel, in a black silk dress, over which ran only the glittering spring-frost of a silver chain, and with a light ribbon in her blond hair. The mother presented her to him, and the tender cheek bloomed more redly,—for she had, indeed, confounded the similar voices of the guest and the brother,—and she cast down those beautiful eyes which could see nothing. Ah, Albano, how violently thy heart trembles now that the past has become present, the moonlit night a spring morning; and this still form, now so near thee, works far more mightily than in any dream! She was too holy in his sight for him to have been able to utter a lie before her about the apparent recovery; he preferred silence;—and thus the warmest friend of her life came to her the first time only veiled and dumb.
The Lector soon led her away to her seat under the second lustre; opposite her sat her mother (probably, for this reason, that the good, unconscious daughter, who surely could not always be letting her eyelids fall, might raise them with friendliness and propriety towards a beloved being); the German gentleman, as an acquaintance, seated himself, without further ceremony, on her right, Augusti on her left,—Zesara, as Count, came far up above beside the highest lady.
Deuse take it! that is, unfortunately, so often my own case! I assert the upper seat of honor,—and observe, a mile below me, the daughter, but, like a myops, only half of her, and can bring about nothing the whole evening. Do pray transpose me without any scruples down beside her,—you have to deal with nothing more than a puffed-up man,—why, on earth, as in the heavens, must, then, the largest planets be placed exactly the farthest from their sun?
I now draw my readers to the Minister's table, not to show them the ministerial pomp ingrafted upon avarice, or his dance of honor hemmed in between the parallel lines of etiquette, or even his family arms, which were carried round on every chafing-dish and salt-cellar, and with the ice and mustard,—enough for us to know the ubiquity of the insignia upon his flower-pots, shirts, bed-clothes, dog's cravats, and all his thoughts; but the reader shall just now look only at my hero.
He is very prominent. Upon such a new-comer, people, in a residence-city, have already, before he has fairly given the driver his drinking-money, got all possible light of nature and revelation; nineteen of the company were fastened upon him as his moral odometers. The boldness of his nature and his rank made up with him for worldly tact, which was missed nowhere except in this, that he never took sides except in the very strongest manner, and always ran off into general and cosmopolitan observations. But see, I pray you!—O, I wish Liana could see it,—how the rosy glow and the fresh green of his healthiness shines among the yellow sicklings of the age, out of whom, as from ships on the African coast of youth, all the pitch that held them together had run out,—and how the cheek-redness of spiritual health, a tender, ever-returning suffusion (from anxiety about Liana) graces him, whereas most of the world's people at the table seem, like cotton wool, to take all colors more easily than red!
He looked and listened, against the salvation-laws of visiting, too much to Liana. She ate, under the heightened redness of a fear of mistaking, only sparingly, but without embarrassment; the Lector, with easy hand, barred up against her the smallest road to error. What astonished him was, that she covered such a sensitive and easily weeping heart with such an unembarrassed cheerfulness of countenance and conversation. Young man! that is, with the most delicate maidens, free from pangs of love, no covering and disguise, but an enjoying of the moment and habitual courtesy! She retained so considerately (what she had probably learned beforehand) the relative rank of the familiar voices, that she never directed her answer to the wrong place. She, however, looked often to her mother with full eyes, and smiled then still more serenely, not, however, for the purpose of deceiving, but from real, hearty love.
Touching her salad, the best and most fit to be a prince's table-guest among my female readers, who had seen her mix it, would have taken several fork-loads thereof. Uncommonly charming was it, when, growing more earnest and red, she drew off her glove before the blue, celestial hemisphere of glass; with white hands and supple arms, without a silken fold, worked away in the green, between the blue of the glass and the black of the silk; considerately felt for the vinegar-and oil-castors, and poured out as much as her practice (and the deciphered advice of the Lector,—at least so it seems to me) directed. By heavens! the dressing is, in this case, the salad; and the vain Minister, who had no understanding of pictures, had a great eye for things that would make good pictures.
The mother seemed scarcely to look at the leaf-mixing. To the Count, the Minister's lady seemed to-day to have only good-breeding and no pious strictness; but he did not yet sufficiently know those polished women, who have refinement without wit, sensibility without fire, clearness without coldness; who borrow of the snail his feelers, his softness, his coolness, and his dumb gait, and who demand and deserve more confidence than they obtain.
At this moment came in Cephisio, like an angel among three men in the fiery furnace, but a dark angel. To the Count, his contiguity of seat, and every word he addressed to Liana, was already a crucifixion,—only to pass with a look from her to him was an agony, little different from that which I should have, if I had spent a day at Dresden in the antique Olympus of ancient gods, and then, on going out, should fall into a refectory full of swollen monks, or into a naturalist's cabinet full of stuffed malefactors' skins and bottled embryo-spiders. However he was pacified—in my opinion, only deceived—by one thing, that the German gentleman did not blaze away in lyrics beside her, was neither in heaven nor out of his head, but in his head, and quite composed and very polite. There are no pigeons, Count,—ask the farmers,—which the hawks oftener pounce upon than the glossy white ones!
The German gentleman now produced a snuff-box, with a neat picture of Lilar, and asked Liana how it pleased her; he liked the sentimentality of it particularly.
The Lector was terrified, leaned forward toward the box-piece, and threw out a few opinions beforehand which should guide the half-blind one in forming her own; but after she had passed it two or three times obliquely against the lights and near before her eyes, she was able to express an original opinion herself, that the child illuminated by the half-sunken sun, who is drawn aloft by a flower-chain under the triumphal arch, was, to her feelings, "so very lovely." Here—and I have observed the same case in a half-blind lady of powerful fancy and receptive sense of art—the effort and the artistic sense, or the spiritual eye, came to meet the bodily half-way. The box, as well as its snuff, was presented farther on, and came down along to the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, upon whom the new Prince's love of the arts and the favorite's knowledge in them now placed new crowns; he found fault with nothing but the white of the blossoms. "Spring," said he, "is, by reason of its wearisome whiteness, a mere monochrome; I have visited Lilar only in autumn." "There is the nightingale's song, too, which we of course cannot paint, but yet we can hear it," said Liana, cheerfully; he was her teacher, and now, in the technology of painting, even her father's. Over all her acquisitions and inner fruits and blossoms the rose of silence had been painted; to that her tyrannical father had entirely accustomed her, and especially before men, in whom she always revered copied fathers.
When the landscape came to Albano, and he held before him in miniature that spring night when Lilar and the noble old man appeared to him so enchantingly,—and as he touched what the dear soul had handled,—and now in his own soul all accordant strings trembled,—just then the Devil struck again a dissonant chord of the seventh:—
"The Prince, gracious sir," said the Minister to the German gentleman, "was yesterday buried in private; only eight days hence we have the public interment. We are obliged to hasten, because the suspension of the court-mourning lasts until the inauguration, on ascension-day, is gone by." I am too much excited to express myself upon the eternal master of ceremonies, Froulay, who would have raised a lantern-tax in the sun, and bridge-toll before park-bridges and asses'-bridges; but Albano, dazzled by so many side-lights and glancing rays,—reminded of Liana's sorrow over the old man, of his birthday, of the heart without a breast, and of the madness of the world,—was not in a condition, however much he had intended appearing in gentleness and lambs' clothes before Froulay, to keep the latter on; but he must needs (and louder than he meant), in opposition to his next neighbor, the Church Counsellor, Schäpe, with too great youthful exasperation (not lessened by the eager listening of Liana for the brotherly voice) declare himself against many things,—against the everlasting dead sham-life of men,—against the ceremonial haughtiness of a soulless form,—against this starving on love merely from making false shows of it;—ah, his whole heart burned on his lip!
The honest Schäpe, whom I just now called a scoundrel, took, with several expressions of countenance, Albano's part. But I do not by any means, friend Albano!—thou hast yet to learn for the first time that men, in respect to ceremonies, modes, and laws, like a flock of sheep, will, in a body, provided the bell-wether can only be got to leap over a pole, continue to leap carefully over the same place when the pole has been taken away;—and the most and highest leaps, in the state, are those we make without the pole. But a youth would be an ordinary one who should love civil life very early, however certain it is that he and we all judge too bitterly the faults of every office which we do not ourselves hold.
The company listened in silence, and, out of politeness, only inwardly admired; on Liana fell a tender seriousness.
They rose,—the closeness vanished,—so did his zeal;—but, whether it came from the speaking, or the contemplation of the loved object, or from a youthful over-leaping of the hedges of visiting-propriety,—(it arose not, however, from want of manners),—the fact is not to be denied (and I do my best, too, to give it exactly) that the Count left the poor old lady who had been escorted in by him,—Hafenreffer himself knows not her name,—left her standing, and, I believe unconsciously, took Liana under his escort. Ah, her! What shall I say of the magic nearness of the dreamed-of soul,—of the light resting of her hand, felt only by the arm of the inner man, not of the outer,—of the shortness of the heavenly way, which should have been at least as long as Frederick Street? Verily, he himself said nothing,—he thought merely of the abominable Inhibitorial-room, where their separation must take place,—he trembled at every effort to speak. "You have, perhaps," said Liana, lightly and openly, who loved to hear the friendly voice, especially after the warm discourse, "already visited our Lilar?"—"Truly not; but have you?" he said, too much confused. "My mother and I have made it our favorite home every spring."
Now were they in the parting-chamber. Alas! there and thus he stood with her, who saw nothing, for some seconds immovable, and looked straight before him, wanting to say something, till he was aroused by her mother, who was eagerly seeking, for her affection, which the whole evening had been nourishing, a sequestered hour on her daughter's heart,—and so all was over, for both vanished like apparitions.
But Alban was as a man who is deserted by a glorious dream, and who all the morning is so inwardly blest, but remembers the dream no more. And yet, stands not Lilar open to him, and will he not surely see it, so soon as ever Liana can see it too?
Never was he more gentle. The attentive Lector, in this warm, fruitful seed-time, threw in some good seed. He said, as they looked out together into the moonlit night, Albano had this evening hardly brought forward anything but thorny and exaggerated truths, which only imbitter, but do not enlighten. At another time the Count would have asked him whether he should have carried himself like Froulay and Bouverot, who, with all possible tolerance, presented theses and antitheses to each other, like an academical respondent and opponent, who previously prepare in concert logical wounds and plasters of equal length;—but to-day he was very kindly disposed towards him. Augusti had so delicately and affectionately cared for mother and daughter,—he had, without blackening or whitewashing, said much good, but nothing hastily, and his expositions had been calmly listened to: he had neither flattered nor offended. Albano, therefore, replied, softly: "But it is surely better to imbitter, dear Augusti, than to put to sleep. And to whom shall I then say the truth but to those who have it not nor any faith in it? Surely not to others." "One can speak any truth," said he, "but one cannot reckon as truth every mode and mood in which he speaks it."
"Ah!" said Albano, and looked up; beneath the starry heaven stood the marble Madonna of the palace, like a patron saint, softly illuminated,—and he thought of her sister,[81]—and of Lilar,—and of spring,—and of many dreams,—and how full his heart was of eternal love, and that he had as yet no friend and no loved one.