65. CYCLE.
Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and shepherd-boys had not, like the grass, shot up taller during his absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much prolonged to his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.
In the castle how profusely was his heart covered with hearts, and the youngest love drowned by the old, from the easily weeping mother, Albina, even to the hand-extending old servants, who, on his account, stirred more briskly their petrified limbs! He found all his loves—Liana excepted—in Wehrfritz's study,[172] because he loved "young folk" and discourse, and always insisted that they should set out the breakfast on his table of papers, which, he said, was as good as a breakfast-table with varnished scrap-pictures that nobody saw. Albano tormented himself with the fear that the Minister's lady had been the church-robber of a very goddess, and carried Liana back yesterday,—till the Captain hastily explained the non-appearance. The good soul had had yesterday to atone for the commotion of her sympathizing heart with sick-headache. Her loved teacher, Spener, with his sublime soul-stillness,—those eyes, which wept no more over the earth, buried with the princely pair,—standing with his head under the cold polar star of eternity, so that now, like the pole, it no longer saw any stars rise or set,—calmly, and with hands apostolically folded in one another, speaking so all-persuasively upon the sorrow and the great end of this pale life, pressing, with his inspired speech, men's hearts to the verge of tearful emotion, and yet with exalted tenderness drawing them back from extreme grief, that so only the heart may weep without the eye,—and then the consecration of the coupled coffins and of the church,—O, in the delicate Liana these emotions could not surely fail to grow into sorrows, and all that her teacher buried in silence was in her spoken aloud. In addition to this, she had not taken the usual medicine of keeping still, but had disguised all her pangs behind active joy, so as to give her departing mother no pains, although herself far too great ones.
Into the midst of this explanation she herself entered pleasantly, in a white morning-dress, with a nosegay of Chinese roses,—a little pale and tired,—looking up with a dreamy softness,—her voice somewhat low,—the roses on her cheeks closed into buds,—and, like a child, smiling upon every heart;—thou angel of heaven! who may dare to love and reward thee? She beheld the lofty youth;—all the lilies of her still face were, contrary to her wont, baptized into a heavenly morning-red of joy, and a tender purple lingered upon them.
She asked him, with an open manner, why he had not come yesterday to the festivities, and disclosed, as a matter of moment, that they would all to-day visit the pious father, for whom she had been tying her dwarf-roses. He took gladly the fourth voice in the concert of the pleasure-party. What a magnificent hanging garden, with its loveliest flowers and prospects, is built out into the evening-hours! How many happy ones a single roof covers!
The ingenuous Rabette, more brisk and busy for her still gladness, was, unweariedly, Liana's sick-nurse and Roquairol's lion-keeper and maîtresse de plaisirs, who made every one of the mother's ground-plans of pleasure broader by a half, and her whole being was so happy! Ah, her poor innocent heart had not yet, indeed, been loved by any one, and therefore it glows, with the fresh energies of the first love, so brightly and truly before a mighty one which seems to come down to it with a blessing, like a loving god, drawing after it a whole heaven! Roquairol saw how bewitchingly a busy activity shook aside in the play-room of her character and her occupations the heavily hanging foliage, which in the visiting parlor darkly overspread her real worth; she was even made more lovely by the darker, neat house-dress, since he by his preaching had sent back every white drapery of her brunette person into the wardrobe. She would not obey her mother in this matter, till he had demanded it. Nay, he had yesterday brought her to the point of really wearing about with her the watch which the proud Minister's lady had presented her, though she blushed like fire at the unwonted ornament. Meanwhile he proposed to take with her, as it were, a true serpentine flowery way to the altar of his love's loud Yes,—the silent one he was saying all the time;—he knew she would get in at once so soon as he rode forth with the conch-chariot of Venus, to which he had tackled a dove and a hawk.
How gloriously the forenoon flew away on golden wing-shells and on transparent wings! The beloved Albano was introduced into all the changes of the house; the finest was in his study-chamber, which Rabette had transformed into her toilet-chamber, sewing-room, and study, and which again, since yesterday, had become guest-chamber and library to Liana. How gladly did he step to the western window, where he had so often caused his invisible father and the beloved one to appear, in an unearthly manner, in the crystal mirror of his fancy! On the panes were many L's and R's drawn by his boyish hand. Liana asked what the R's meant; "Roquairol," said he, for she did not inquire after the L. With infinite sweetness did the thought flow around his heart, that his beloved was indeed to live through some blooming days in the dreamy cell of his first fresh life. Liana showed him with childlike joy how she shared everything, that is, the chamber, fairly with Rabette, in her double housekeeping and chum-ship, and how she made her very hostess her guest.
I have often admired with envy the fine, light, nomadic life of maidens in their Arcadian life-segments; easily do these doves of passage flutter into a strange family, and sew and laugh and visit there, with the daughter of the house, one or two months, and one takes the ingrafted shoot for a family twig; on the other hand, we house-pigeons are inhabitive and hard to transplant, and generally, after a few days, journey back again. Since we, as more brittle material, less easily melt in with the family ore; since we do not weave our work into that of others so easily as maidens do theirs,—because carriages full of working-tools must follow after us,—and since we need much and contrive much;—from all this our claim to a passport is very well deduced, without the least detriment to our characters.
After a half-eternity of dressing,—since, in the neighborhood of the loved one, an hour of absence lasts longer than a month when she is far off,—the maidens entered, equipped for travelling, in the black dress of brides. How charmingly the roses become Rabette, in her dark hair, and the lace edging on the white neck, and the timid flames of her pure eye, and the flitting blushes! And Liana—I speak not of this saint. Even the good old Director, when the innocent face looked upon him so childlike from beneath the white veil of India muslin, sprinkled with gold wire, which was simply thrown over her head after the manner of the nuns, could not but give his satisfaction words: "Like a nun, like an angel!" She answered: "I wanted once really to be one with a friend; but now I take the veil later than she," she added, with a wondrous tone.
She hung to-day with tender enthusiasm upon Rabette, perhaps from the weakness of ill health, perhaps from love for Albano and the parents, and perhaps because Rabette, in her love, was so good and beautiful, and because she herself was nothing but heart. She had, besides, the sacred fault of forming too enthusiastic conceptions of her female friends,—into which the nobler maidens easily fall, and which belongs less to married women,—carried to an unusual height; thus, for instance, her friend Caroline, who had met her like a heroine of romance only on the romantic playground of friendship and beautiful nature, she could not, in the beginning, without a rending away of the saintly halo, at all conceive of as having hands, which drove the needle and flat-iron, and other implements of the female field of labor.
Whoso will feel the tenderest participation in joy, let him look not at happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina—across whose face time had struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no step-motherly discord appeared—look oftener to and fro, and more benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and perturbations of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the "hypocrisy and spiritlessness[173] of the young people now-a-days," compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day assigned himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had he—(others have the devil, the deuse)—the journeyman's greeting of genius, Rascal, together with the derivatives, rascality, &c. But how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits. The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly.
The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art, by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom!