57. CYCLE.
As to Liana's secret inclination and Zesara's prospects I shall never once institute any conjectures, although I might erase them again before printing. I remember what came of it, when I and others, on a former occasion, covered over with our hands Hafenreffer's official reports upon matters of consequence, and undertook to unfold at length, by pure fancy, how things might have gone on;—it was of no use! And naturally enough; for women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, many doors and few windows, and it is easier to get into their hearts than to look into them. Particularly maidens', I mean; since women, physiognomically and morally, are more strongly marked and boldly developed, I would rather undertake to guess at and so portray ten mothers than two daughters. The bodily portrait-painters make the same complaint.
Whoever observes the influence of night, will find that the doubts and anxieties which he had contracted the evening previous about the heroine of his life it has, for the most part, completely killed by the time it gets to be towards morning. Albano, in the spring morning, opened his eyes upon life as in a triumphal car, and the fresh steeds stamped before it, and he could only let them have the reins.
He alighted with his friend at Liana's after a few years, that is, days; the Minister had not yet come back. Heavens! how new and bloomingly young was her form, and yet how unchanged her demeanor! Why is it, thought he, that I can get only her motions, not all her features, by heart? Why can I not imprint this face, even to the least smile, like a holy antique, cleanly and deeply upon my brain, that so it may float before me in eternal presence? For this reason, my dear: young and beautiful forms are the very ones which are hard for the memory as for the pencil; and coarse, old, masculine ones easier for both. Again he filled himself with joys and sighs by looking at her,—and these were increased by the nearness of the garden, wherein June with his evening splendor lay encamped. O, if only one moment could come to him, in which his whole soul might speak its inspiration! Out of doors there lay the young, fiery spring, basking, like an Antinoüs, in the garden, and the moon, impatient for the fair June-night, stood already under the gate of the east, and found the living day and the lingering sun still in the field. But the mother refused to the asking look of Liana the sight of sunset,—"on account of the unwholesome Serein."[136] Albano, with his heart full of manly blood, thought this maternal barrier around a child's health very small.
The hour for shutting gates upon to-day's Eden would have struck for him the next minute, had it not been for the Captain and the Cereus serpens.
The Captain came running down from the Italian roof, and announced that the Cereus would bloom this evening at ten o'clock, the gardener said, and he should stay there. "And thou too," he said to Albano. All that the double limitations of forbearing tenderness toward sister and friend would allow he lovingly set at stake, for the sake of pleasing the latter. Liana herself begged him to wait for the blooming; she was so delighted to find it was so near! Her soul hung upon flowers, like bees and dew. Already had her friend, the pious Spener, who fixed an enraptured eye upon these living arabesques of God's throne, made her a friend to these mute, ever-sleeping children of the Infinite; but still more had her own maidenly and her suffering heart done it. Have you never met tender, female souls, into whose blossoming time fate had thrown cold clouds, and who now, like Rousseau, sought other flowers than those of joy, and who wearied themselves with stooping, in valleys and on rocks, to gather and to forget, and to fly from the dead Pomona to the young Flora? The thorough-bass and Latin, wherewith Hermes proposes to divert maidens, must yield here to the broad, variegated hieroglyphics of Nature, the rich study of Botany.
A nameless tenderness for Liana came into Albano's soul at the little four-seated supper-table; it seemed to him as if he were now nearer to her, and a relative; and yet he comprehended not his kinswoman, when, from every serious mood into which her mother sank, she strove to win her back with pleasantries. Out of doors the nightingales were calling man into the lovely night; and no one pined more to be abroad than he.
For the soul's eyes, the blue of heaven is what the green of earth is to the bodily eyes, namely, an inward strengthening. When Zesara, at length, came free and clear out of the fetters of the room,—out of this spiritual house-arrest into the free realm of heaven, and beneath all the stars and on the magic Olympus of statues, at which he had so often longingly looked up,—then did his forcibly contracted breast elastically expand: how the constellations of life moved to meet each other in brighter forms; how did spring and night sit enthroned!
The old gardener, who, simply from a grateful attachment to "the good-souled, condescending Fräulein," had, with rare pains, forced these early blossoms from the Cereus serpens, stood up there already, apparently as an observer of the flowers, but in fact as an expectant of the greatest praise, with a brown, indented, pitted, and serious face, which did not challenge praise with a single smile.
Liana thanked the gardener before she came to the blossoms; then she praised them and his pains. The old man merely waited for every other one of the company to be astonished also; then he went drowsily off to bed, with a firm faith that Liana would to-morrow remember him in such a way as to make him contented.
The exotic beads of nectar-fragrance which hung in five white calyxes, crowned as it were with brown leaf-work, seized the fancy. The odors from the spring of a hotter clime drew it away into remote dreams. Liana only stroked with a soft finger, as one glides over eyelids, the little incense-vases, without touching with predatory hand the full little garden of tender stamina which crowded together in the cup. "How lovely, how very tender!" said she, with childlike happiness. "What a cluster of five little evening stars! Why come they only by night,—the dear, shy little flowers?" Charles seemed to be on the point of breaking one. "O let it live!" she begged; "to-morrow they will all have died of themselves. Charles! thus does so much else fade," she added, in a lower tone. "Everything!" said he, sharply. But the mother, against Liana's will, had heard it. "Such death-thoughts," said she, "I love not in youth; they lame its wings." "And then," replied Liana, with a maiden-like turning of the tables, "it just stays with us, that's all, like the crane in Kleist's fable, whose wings they broke, so that he could not travel with the rest into the warm land."
This gay, motley veil of deep earnestness was not transparent enough for our friend. But by and by the good maiden took pains to look just as the careful mother wished. The benumbing lily which the earth wears on her breast, the moon; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens; and the city, with its pierced-work of night-lights; and the high, majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and the nightingales singing out of distant gardens;—did not all this stir omnipotently every heart, till it would fain confess with tears its longing? And the softest heart of all which beat at this moment below the stars, could it have succeeded in wholly veiling itself? Almost! She had accustomed herself, before her mother, to dry away with her eye, so to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall.
Singular was her appearance, the next minute, to the Count. The mother was speaking with her son; Liana stood, far from the latter, with face turned half aside, and a little discolored by the moon, near a white statue of the holy Virgin, and looking out into the night. All at once she looked upon him and smiled, just as if a living being had appeared to her in the abyss of ether, and her lip would speak. Earthly form more exalted and touching had never before met his eyes; the balustrade by which he held swayed to and fro (but it was he himself who shook it), and his whole soul cried, "To-day, now, I love the heavenly one with the highest, the deepest love I have felt." So he also said lately, and so will he say oftener: can man, with the innumerable waves of love, institute measurements of altitude, and point to that one which has mounted the highest? Thus does man, whereever he may be standing, always imagine himself standing in the centre of heaven.
Ah, at this moment he was again surprised, but it was with an "Ah!" Liana went to her mother, and when she felt in the hand of her darling a slight shudder, she importuned her to go out of the night-air, and would not give over till she left with her the magic spot.
The friends stayed behind. According to Albano's reckoning, it would not, of course, have been too much, if, in this frank time, wherein our holier thoughts, hidden by the common light of day, reveal themselves like stars, they had all lingered on the roof till toward morning. The two walked for a time up and down in silence. At last the incense-altar of the five flowers held them fast. Albano clasped accidentally the neighboring statue with both hands, and said: "On high places, one wants to throw something down,—even himself oftentimes; and I, too, would fain throw myself off into the world, into far-distant lands, as often as I gaze into the nightly redness yonder, and as often as I come under orangery-blossoms, as under these. Brother, how is it with thee? The heavens and the earth open out so broadly: why, then, must the spirit so creep into itself?" "Just so do I feel," said he; "and in the head, generally, has the spirit more room than in the heart." But here, by a delicate guess, he arrived, through agreeably circuitous routes, at the accidental discovery of the reason why his sister had hurried down so soon.
"Even to obstinacy," said he, "she pushes her care for her mother. The last time, when she observed that mother saw her grow pale under the dance, she immediately ceased. To me alone she shows her whole heart, and every drop of blood, and all innocent tears therein; especially does she believe something in respect to the future, which she anxiously conceals from mother." "She smiled to herself just before she went away," said Albano, and drew Charles's hand over his eyes, "as if she saw up there a being from the veiled world." "Didst thou too see that?" replied Charles. "And then did her lip stir? O friend, God knows what infatuates her; but this is certain, she firmly believes she is to die next year." Albano would not let him speak further. Too intensely excited, he pressed himself to his friend's breast; his heart beat wildly, and he said: "O brother, remain always my friend!"
They went down. In the apartment which adjoined Liana's they found her piano-forte open. Now that was just what the Count had missed. In passion—even in mere fire of the brain—one grasps not so much at the pen as at the string; and in that state alone does musical fantasying succeed better than poetic. Albano, thanking, meanwhile, the muse of sweet sounds that there were forty-four transitions,[137] seated himself at the keys, with the intention now to beat a musical fire-drum, and roar like a storm into the still ashes, and drive out a clear, sparkling swarm of tones. He did it, too, and well enough, and better and better; but the instrument struggled, rebelled. It was built for a female hand, and would only speak in female tones, with lute-plaints, as a woman with a friend of her own sex.
Charles had never heard him play so, and was astonished at such fulness. But the reason was, the Lector was not there; before certain persons—and he was one of them—the playing hand freezes, so that one only labors and lumbers to and fro in a pair of leaden gloves; and, secondly, before a multitude it is easier playing than before one, because the latter stands definitely before the soul, the former floats vaguely. And, besides all that, blessed Albano, thou knowest who hears thee. The morning air of hope flutters around thee in tones,—the wild life of youth stalks with vigorous limbs and loud strides up and down before thee,—the moonlight, undesecrated by any gross earthly light, hallows the sounding apartment. Liana's last songs lie open before thee, and the advancing moonshine will let thee read them soon,—and the nightingale in the mother's neighboring chamber contends with thy tones, as if summoned by the Tuba to the field.
Liana came in with her mother, not till late, because the heavy din of tones had something in it hard and painful to both. He could see the two sitting sidewise at the lower window, and how Liana held her mother's hand. Charles, after his manner, walked up and down with long steps, and sometimes stood still near him. Albano, in this nearness of the still soul, soon came out of the wilderness of harmony into simple moonlit passages, where only a few tones moved delicately like graces, and quite as lightly linked as they. The artistical hurly-burly of unharmonious ignes fatui is only the forerunner of the melodious Charites; and these alone insinuate themselves into the softer souls. It seemed to him—the illusion was complete—as if he were speaking aloud with Liana; and when the tones, like lovers, went on ever repeating the same thing from heartiness and zest, did he not mean Liana, and say to her, "How I love thee! O how I love thee!" Did he not ask her, "Why mournest thou? why weepest thou?" And did he not say to her, "Look into this mute heart, and fly not from it, O pure, innocent one, my own!"
How did the good youth blush, when suddenly the caressing friend placed his hands over his friend's eyes, which hitherto, unseen in the darkness, had been overflowing for love! Charles stepped warmly to his sister, and she, of her own accord, took his hand and said words of love. Then Albano took refuge in the murmuring wilderness of sounds, until his eyes were dried enough for the leave-taking by lamp-light; by slow degrees he let the cradle of our heart cease rocking, and closed so mildly and faintly, and was silent for a little while, and then slowly rose. O, in this mute, young bosom lived every blessed thing which the most glorious love can bestow!
They parted seriously. No one spoke of the music. Liana seemed transfigured. Albano dared not, in this spirit-hour of the heart, with an eye which had so recently calmed itself, rest long upon her mild blue ones. Her deeply touched soul expressed itself, as maidens are wont, to her brother only, and that by a more ardent embrace. And from the holy youth she could not, in parting, conceal the tone and the look, which he will never forget.
That night he awoke often, and knew not what it was that so blissfully rocked his being. Ah! it was the tone whose echo rang through his slumber, and the dear eye which still looked upon him in his dreams.