Yes, thou needest only carry thither thy shy pangs! Liana turned, and saw her hastily and violently drying her eyes. Ah, hers too were indeed full. When Rabette saw it, she said, courageously, "I absolutely cannot hear it,—I must scream,—I am really ashamed of myself." "O thou dear heart," cried Liana, joyfully falling upon her neck, "be not ashamed, and look into my eye! Sister, come to me, as often as thou art troubled; I will gladly weep with thy soul, and dry thy eye even sooner than my own." There was an overmastering enchantment in these tones,—in these looks of love, because Liana fancied she was mourning over some eclipsed star or other of her life. And never did trembling gratitude embrace more freshly and youthfully a venerated heart than did Rabette Liana.
And now came Albano. Awakened by the dying away of the cradle-song, he had hurried after her, leaving all the cold and other drops unwiped from his fiery cheeks. "What ails thee, sister?" he asked, hastily. Liana, still lingering in the embrace and the inspiration, answered quickly, "You have a good sister; I will love her as her brother does." The sweet words of the so deeply affected souls and the fiery storm of his being carried him away, and he clasped the embracing ones and pressed the sisterly hearts to each other and kissed his sister; when, at the sight of Liana's confused bending aside of her head, he was terrified and flamed up crimson.
He must needs fly. With these wild agitations he could not stay in the presence of Liana, and before the cold, mirroring glances of the company. But the night was to be as wonderful as the day; he hastened with live looks, that appeared like angry ones, out of the city to the Titaness, Nature, who at once calms and exalts us. He went along by exposed mill-wheels, about which the stream wound itself in foam. The evening clouds stretched themselves out like giants at rest, and basked in the ruddy dawn of America, and the storm swept among them, and the fiery Briareuses started up; night built the triumphal-arch of the milky-way, and the giants marched gloomily under. And in every element Nature, like a storm-bird, beat her rustling wings.
Albano lay, without knowing it, on the woodland bridge of Lilar, under which the wind-streams went roaring through. He glowed like the clouds with the lingering tinges of his sun; his inner wings were, like those of the ostrich, full of spines, and wounded while they lifted him; the romantic spiritual day, the letter of his father, Liana's tearful eyes, his boldness, and then his bliss and remorse about it, and now the sublime night-world on all sides round about him, passed to and fro within him and shook his young heart; he touched with his fiery cheek the moistened tree-tops, and did not cool himself, and he was near to that sounding, flying heart, the nightingale, and yet hardly heard her. Like a sun, his heart goes through his pale thoughts, and quenches on its path one constellation after another. On the earth and in the heavens, in the past and in the future, stood before Albano only one form; "Liana," said his heart, "Liana," said all nature.
He went down the bridge and up the western triumphal-arch, and the glimmering Lilar lay before him in repose. Lo! there he saw the old "pious father" on the balustrade of the arch, fast asleep. But how different was the revered form from the picture of it which he had shaped to himself according to that of the deceased Prince. The white locks, flowing richly down under the Quaker hat, the femininely and poetically rounded brow, the arched nose and the youthful lip, which even in late life had not yet withered, and the childlikeness of the soft face, announced a heart which, in the evening-twilight of age, takes its rest and looks toward the stars. How lonely is the holy sleep! The Death-angel has conducted man out of the light world into the dark hermitage built over it; his friends stand without near the cell; within, the hermit talks with himself, and his darkness grows brighter and brighter, and jewels and pastures and whole spring-days gleam out at last,—and all is clear and broad! Albano stood before the sleep with an earnest soul, which contemplates life and its riddles;—not only the incoming and the outgoing of life are hidden with a manifold veil, but even the short path itself; as around Egyptian temples, so around the greatest of all temples sphinxes lie, and, reversing the case as it was with the sphinx, he only solves the riddle who dies.
The old man spoke, behind the speech-grating of sleep, with dead ones who had journeyed with him over the morning meadows of youth, and addressed with heavy lip the dead Prince and his spouse. How sublimely did the curtain of the venerable countenance, pictured over with a long life, hang down before the pastoral world of youth dancing behind it, and how touchingly did the gray form roam round with its youthful crown in the cold evening dew of life, taking it for morning-dew, and looking toward the east, and toward the sun! The youth ventured only to touch lovingly a lock of the old man; he meant to leave him, in order not to alarm him with a strange form, before the rising moon should have touched his eyelids and awakened him. Only he would first crown the teacher of his loved one with the twigs of a neighboring laurel. When he came back from it, the moon had already penetrated with her radiance through the great eyelids, and the old man opened them before the exalted youth, who, with the glowing rosy moon of his countenance, glorified by the moon overhead, stood before him like a genius with the crown. "Justus!" cried the old man, "is it thou?" He took him for the old Prince, who, with just such blooming cheeks and open eyes, had passed before him in the under-world of dreams.
But he soon came back out of the dreamy Elysium into the botanical, and knew even Albano's name. The Count, with open mien, grasped his hands, and said to him how long and profoundly he had respected him. Spener answered in few and quiet words, as old men do who have seen everything on the earth so often. The glory of the moonlight flowed down now on the tall form, and the quietly open eye was illumined,—an eye which not so much penetrates as lets everything penetrate it. The almost cold stillness of the features, the youthful gait of the tall form, which bore its years upright as a crown upon the head, not as a burden upon the back, more as flowers than as fruit, the singular mixture of former manly ardor and of womanly tenderness,—all this called up before Albano the image of a prophet of the Eastern land. That broad stream which came roaring down through the alps of youth, glides now calmly and smoothly through its pastures; but throw rocks before it, and again it starts up roaring.
The old man looked upon the youthful youth, the oftener the more warmly. In our days youth is, in young men, a bodily and spiritual beauty at once. He invited him to accompany him this beautiful night to his quiet cottage, which stands overhead there near the church-spire, that looks down from above into flute-dell. On the singular, mazy paths which they now took, Lilar was transformed to Albano's eyes into a new world; like flying silver clouds of night, the glimmering beauties were continually shifting and arranging themselves together into new groups, and occasionally the two companions penetrated through exotic shrubbery with lively-colored blossoms and wondrous odors. The pious father asked him with interest about his former and present life.
They came to the opening of a dark passage into the earth. Spener, in a friendly manner, took Albano's right hand, and said this way led up to his mountain-abode. But soon it seemed to go downward. The stream of the vale, the Rosana, sounded even in here, but only single drops of moonlight trickled through scattered mountain openings overspun with twigs. The excavation extended farther downward; still more remotely murmured the water in the vale. And yet a nightingale sang a lay that grew nearer and nearer. Albano was composed and silent. Everywhere they went along before narrow gates of splendor which only a star of heaven seemed to fling in. They descended now to a distant, illuminated magic bower of bright red and poisonous dark flowers, arched over at once with little peaked leaves and great broad foliage; and a confusing white light, partly sprinkled about by the living rays that gushed in, and partly flying off from the lilies only as white dust, drew the eye into an intoxicating whirl. Zesara entered with a dazzled eye, and as he looked to the right, in the direction of the fire that rained in, he found Spener's eye sharply fixed upon something to the left; he looked thither, and saw an old man, entirely like the deceased Prince, dart by and stalk into a side cavern; his hand quivered with affright, so did Spener's,—the latter pressed hastily on downward; and at last there glistened a blue, starry opening: they stepped out....
Heavens! a new starry arch; a pale sun moves through the stars, and they swim, as in play, after him,—below reposes an enraptured earth full of glitter and flowers; its mountains run gleaming away up toward the arch of heaven, and bend over toward Sirius; and through the unknown land delights glide, like dreams over which man weeps for joy.