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 passionate 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 glass 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 Æolian 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 noble 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 pass 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 noble 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.
