In the chain of friendship with Augusti, one ring after another absolutely broke in twain. The Count found in the Lector a spirit of littleness which was more revolting to him than any bad spirit. The elegance of a good courtier, his propensity to keep the smallest secrets as faithfully as the greatest, his passion for starting up behind every action a long plan, his thirsty curiosity for genuine historical sources, at court and in the city, and his coldness toward philosophy, so dried up the overstrained image which Albano had formed of him, that it wrinkled up and grew full of rents. Such dissimilarities never rise among cultivated men to open feuds; but they secretly put upon the inner man one piece of armor after another, till he stands there in solid mail, and strikes out.
Now, in addition to all this, the Lector bore the Captain a hearty grudge, because he cost the Minister's lady many anxious hours, and Liana, and even the Count, much money, and because he seemed to him to pervert the youth. The otherwise directly ascending flame of Albano was now, by the obstacles thrown in the way of his love, bent on all sides, and, like soldering fire, burned more sharply; but this sharpness Augusti ascribed to the friend. Albano appeared to those whom he loved warmer, to those whom he endured colder, than he was, and his earnestness was easily confounded with defiance and pride; but the Lector imagined that Albano's love was stolen from him by Charles.
He undertook, with equal refinement and frankness, to play off on the Count a good map-card of the spots which were thickly sown in the heavenly body of this Jupiter. But he tore every map. Charles's painful confessions on that night extinguished all additions by other hands. And Albano's grand faith, that one must shield a friend entirely, and trust him entirely, warded off every influence. O it is a holy time, in which man desires offerings and priests, without fail, for the altar of friendship and love, and—beholds them; and it is a too cruel time, in which the so often cheated, belied bosom prophesies to itself, on another's bosom, in the midst of the love-draught of the moment, the cold neighborhood of bankruptcy!
As the Lector saw perfectly that Alban, at many of his charges against Charles,—for instance, of his wildness and disorder,—remained cold, for the reason that he might deem himself to be reproached over another's shoulders, as the French (according to Thickness) give strangers praise over their own; he now, instead of the point of similarity, took hold of an entire dissimilarity of the Captain, his light-mindedness toward the sex. But this only made the matter worse. For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-worshipper, and the Lector only the one whom the coal of this fire blackens. Augusti cherished, in regard to love, pretty nearly the principles of the great world, which, merely for honor's sake, he never coined into action, and he assigned only the cloud-heaven near the earth to love. The Captain, however, spoke of a third heaven, or heaven of joy, as belonging thereto, wherein only saints are the blest. Augusti, after the manner of the great world, spoke much more freely than he acted, and sometimes as openly as if he were dining in the hall of a watering-place. Charles spoke like a maiden. The virgin ear of Albano, which was mostly closed in good visiting-parlors, and which in study-chambers remained open, united to his want of the experience that a cynical tongue is often found in the most continent men, for instance, in our buffoonery-loving forefathers, and an ascetic one in modest libertines,—these two things must naturally have involved the pure young man in a double error.
Thus did Augusti start up within him more and more storm-birds. Both came often to the verge of a complete feud and challenge; for the Lector had too much honor to fear any one thing, and dared in cold blood as much as another in hot.
Now, at length, did Charles disclose fully to his friend, though with all the tenderness of friendship, Liana's acquaintance with that Tartarus-night. "The otherwise reserved Lector must be after nearer advantages with his tattling," Albano concluded, and now the toad of jealousy, which lives and grows in the living tree without any visible way in or out, nursed itself to full size in his warm heart. Unanswered love is besides the most jealous. God knows whether he is not scenery-master of these ghost scenes working in and through each other with so many wheels. All these are Albano's private conclusions; open accusations were forbidden by his sense of honor. But his warm heart, always expressing itself, demanded a warmer society, and this he found when he followed the pious father, and went to Lilar into the Thunderhouse, into the midst of the flowers and summits, in order, lying nearer to the heart of Nature, to dream and enjoy more sweetly.
There was only one warm, sun-bright spot for him in Charles's historical picture; namely, the hope that perhaps only the mistakes about his relation to the Countess, out of which Liana had been helped by her brother, had dictated to her the evenly cold deportment which she had hitherto maintained towards him. On this sunny side Rabette threw a billet, in which she wrote him that she was going back to her parents on Saturday, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence, the prospect of less favorable circumstances, his going to Lilar,—all this decided him in the purpose of snatching to himself a solitary moment, and therein casting off before Liana the veil from his soul and hers.
62. CYCLE.
Singularly did events cut across each other on the day when Albano came into the Ministerial house to take leave of Rabette, and (a trembling voice said within him) of Liana, too. Rabette beckoned to him, from the window, to come to her chamber. She had folded together the Icarus's wings of her apparel into the trunks. Over her inner being a prostrating storm swept to and fro. Charles had disturbed the equilibrium of her heart by his warmth, and had not restored it again by a word of recompense. Like the doves, she flutters around the high conflagration. O may she not, like them, escape with singed feathers, and come back again, and at last fall into it! She said she had longed for her friends, ever since she saw yesterday a flock of sheep driven through the city. She should accompany, on Saturday, Liana and her mother to attend the consecration of the church, and the interment of the princely couple. He begged her, so abruptly and eagerly, to contrive for him to-day a solitary moment with her friend in the garden, that he absolutely did not hear her sweet news of Liana's intention to stay there and make her a visit.
Alas! he found with the Minister's lady that showman of magnificent pictures, who, like Nature, made not only a beginning of his spring, but an end of his autumn, with poisonous flowers,[167] Mr. Von Bouverot. Dian had sent him four heavenly copies from Rome; these he opened with dry, artistic palate. Liana received the Count again as ever. Was, perhaps, Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, in whose heaven-descended palladium her tender soul was absorbed, the seal-keeper of her holiest mystery? The all-forgetting artistic passion became her so gracefully! Her optic nerves had become, by her long painting, like delicate feelers, which closed fast around lovely forms. Certain female forms, like this one, stirred up her whole soul. For she had, in childhood, sketched in her inner heaven shining constellations of the heroines of romances, and in general of unseen women; great ideas of their spirit, their heavenly walk, their exaltation above all that she had ever seen; and she had felt equal shyness and longing to meet one such. Hence she went forth out of this colossal nympheum[168] of her fancy, so easily dazzled, and with such warm, heartfelt reverence, to meet pure female friends and the Countess Romeiro. Now certain pictures brought back these altar-pieces like copies. The good girl thought not of this, but her friend may well have done so, that one needed only to quicken into life the eyes of this loving, down-gazing Mary, and merely to warm these lips with tones, and then one had Liana.