So stood matters with her when Charles once playfully stole behind her and covered her eyes with his hand, in order, under the mask of her brother's voice, to give her soft, sisterly names. She confounded the similar voices; she pressed the hand heartily, but her eye was hot and moist. Then she discovered the mistake, and flew with the concealed evening and morning redness of her countenance out of the room. Now he looked closer into the eyes of Liana, who blamed him for it, and hers too had wept. She would fain at first conceal from him the object of the sisterly emotion; but another's No was to him, of old, an auxiliary verb,—a fair wind blowing him into port. Liana grew more and more agitated; at last she related how Rabette's account of Albano's youthful history had drawn from her in turn the history of his early relations, and that she had portrayed to her the bloody night of the masquerade, and even shown his bloody dress. "And then," said Liana, "she wept with me as heartily as if she had been thy sister. O, it is a dear heart!" Charles saw the two linked together like two pastures, namely, by the rainbow which stands over both with its drops; he drew her with thankful love to his breast. "Art thou then happy?" asked Liana, in a tone ominous of something sad.
She must needs disclose to him her full heart, and tell him all. He heard with astonishment, how that whole Tartarus-night, on which the unknown voice had promised Linda de Romeiro to his friend, had been made known to her. By whom? She held an inexorable silence; he contented himself, because, to be sure, it could only have been Augusti, who was the only one that knew of it. "And now believest thou, thou heart from heaven," said he, "that I and the brother of my soul could ever separate by robbing each other? O, it is all otherwise, all otherwise! He curses the mock-spirits and the object of the mimicry. O he loves me; and my heart will rejoice in the day when it is his!" The touching ambiguity of these last words dissolved him in a sacred melancholy.
But she, in the midst of the heartiest overflow of feeling, took part, as if out of piety, with the spirits, and said: "Speak not thus of spiritual apparitions! They exist, that I know,—only one needs not fear them." Here, however, with firm hand she held fast the veil over her experiences; he too had known long since, that, notwithstanding her most tremblingly delicate feelings, which shrunk even from the sight of the blue veins on the lily hand, as from a wound, she had appeared unexpectedly courageous before the dead and in the ghostly hours of fantasy.
Behind the waves of so different an emotion which now drove his heart up and down, Rabette was eclipsed. He burned now only for the hour when he could tell his Albano the singular treachery of the Lector.
61. CYCLE.
Even before the Captain disclosed to his friend Augusti's probable treachery, Albano was almost entirely at variance with his two tutors. In a circle full of young hearts which beat for one another, and still more fondly fight for one another, two always take an indissoluble hold of each other, and become one at others' expense.
Albano boldly broke with every one whom Charles displeased. Besides, Schoppe had long been loved by few, because few can endure a perfectly free man; the flower-chains hold better, they think, when galley-chains run through them. He, therefore, could not bear it, when one "with too close a love clambered up round him so tightly that he had the freedom of his arms no more than if he wore them in bandages of eighty heads."[164] The sarcastic liveliness of his pantomime chilled the Captain, by having the appearance of a somewhat stricter observation, more than did the composed face of the Lector, who from that very circumstance took everything more sharply into his still eye.
The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isinglass," as he expressed it,—toward the tender errors of the heart, the sacred excesses by which man weaves into this short life a still shorter pleasure. On one occasion Charles walked up and down with arms akimbo and drooping head, as on a stage, and said, accidentally, so that the Titular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody shake, in jest, a baker's dozen[165] of hornets, a basket of crabs, a mug of wood-pismires, all at once over the Librarian's skin, and take a flying observation of the effect of the stinging, nipping, biting; then can one, in a measure at least, conceive what a quivering, swelling, and irritation there was in him, so soon as he heard the above-mentioned phraseology. "Mr. Captain!" he began, drawing in a long breath, "I can stand through a good deal on this rusty, stupid earth,—famine, pestilence, courts, the stone, and fools from pole to pole; but your phraseology surpasses the strength of my shoulders. Sir Captain, you may, most certainly, use this rhetoric with perfect justice, because you, as you say, are not understood. But, O heavens! O devils! I hear, in fact, thirty thousand young men and maidens, from one circulating-library to another, all with inflated breast, saying and groaning round and round, that nobody understands them, neither their grandfather nor their god-parents, nor the conrector, when, in fact, the wrapping-paper,[166] commonplace pack does not itself understand. But the young man means by this merely a maiden, and the maiden a young man; these can appreciate each other. Out of love will I undertake, as out of potatoes, to serve up fourteen different dishes; let one just shear off, as they do off of the bears in Göttingen, its beastly hair, and no Blumenbach would any longer recognize it.
"Mr. Von Froulay, I have somewhat often compared this cursed exaltation of souls, merely from low motives, with the English horsetails, which also always stand pointing to heaven, only because their sinews have been cut. Must not one be mad, when one hears every day, and reads every day, how the commonest souls, the very doggerels and trumpeters' pieces of Nature, think themselves exalted by love above all people, like cats that fly with hogs' bladders buckled on to them; how they rendezvous in the hare's form and emporium of love, the other world, as on a Blocksberg, and how, on this finch-ground, in this theatrical green-room (or dressing-room, which then becomes the opposite), they drive their business until they are coupled. Then it's all over; fancy and poesy, which now should be to them for the first time serviceable, are caught! They run away from them like lice from the dead, although on these the hair continues to sprout out. They shudder at the next world; and when they become widowers and widows, they do their courting very well without the hogs' bladders, and without the decoy-feathers, and the folding screen of the next world. Such a thing as this now, Sir Captain, provokes one, and then, in the heat, the just must suffer with the unjust, as your ears unfortunately attest!"
Alban, who never light-mindedly forgave, silently separated himself from a heart, which, as he unjustly said, quenched the flames of love with satiric gall.