The German gentleman went on, and now placed beside each other Raphael's Joseph, telling his brothers a dream, and the older Joseph, interpreting one to a king, and began to translate the three Raphaels into words, and that with so much felicity, and not only with so much insight into mechanics and genius, but also with such a precise setting forth of every human and moral lineament, that Albano took him for a hypocrite, and Liana for a very good man. She seized every word with a wide-open heart. When Bouverot painted the prophesying Joseph, as at once childlike, natural, still, and firm as a rock, and glowing and threatening, there stood the original at her side.
There also dropped from the German gentleman much thought about Da Vinci's boy Christ in the Temple, about the magnificently executed fraternization and adoption of the boy and the youth in one face. Liana had also copied the copy, but she and her mother were modestly silent on the subject.
But at last Franciscus Albani disturbed the calm that had hitherto prevailed, by his "Repose during the Flight." While he acted the dream-interpreter to these picturesque dreams, and Rabette had her eyes fastened sharply on the Saint Joseph of this picture, sitting beside Mary, with an open book, Liana said, unluckily, "A fine Albani!" "I should think not," Rabette whispered; "brother is much more beautiful than this praying Joseph!" She had confounded Albani with Albano; her whole picture-gallery lay in the hymn-book, whose hymns she separated from each other with golden-red saints. The others did not comprehend; they knew him only as Count of Zesara,—but Liana, sweetly blushing, flung at Rabette a tenderly reproving glance, and looked, with mute endurance, more closely at another picture. Never before in Albano,—in whom the strongest and the tenderest feelings coupled, as the echo makes thunder louder and music lower,—had the bitter-sweet mingling of love and pity and shame wrought more warmly, and he could have at once knelt down before the maiden, and yet have kept silent.
The German gentleman had finished, and said to the men, with a look full of victory, "He had, however, something more in his case, which bore away the palm from the Raphaels; and he would beg them to follow him into the adjoining apartment." On the way, he observed, that few works were executed with such magnificent freedom and bold abandon. In the room he unpacked a little bronze Satyr, against whom an overtaken nymph is defending herself. "Divine!" said Bouverot, and held the group by a thread, in order not to rub off the rust. "Divine! I set the Satyr against the Christ!" Few have even a moderate idea of the amazement of my hero, when he saw the critic set virtue and vice at once at a round table, without any quarrel for precedency.
With a fiery glance of contempt, he turned away, and wondered that the Lector remained. It seems to be unknown to him that painting, like poetry, only in its childhood related to gods and divine service, but that by and by, when they grew up to a higher stature, they must needs stride out from this narrow churchyard,—as a chapel[169] was originally a church with church-music, until both were left out, and the pure music retained. Bouverot had the regard for pure form in so high a degree, that not only the smuttiest, most immoral subject, but even the most pure and devout, could not contaminate his enjoyment; like slate, he stood the two proofs of heating and freezing, without undergoing any change.
Albano had seen the maidens through the window in the alley, and hastened down to take leave of his sister, and to something more weighty. He came, with fuller roses on his cheeks than those which glowed around him, to a grassy bank, where Liana, with his sister, was sitting behind the red parasol, with half-drooping eyelids, and head bent aside, softly absorbed in the harvest of evening, suffused with a sunny redness by the parasol, in white dress, with a little slender black cross on her tender bosom, and with a full rose; she looked upon our lover so simply, her voice was so sisterly, and all was such pure, careless love! She told him how delighted she was with the scenes of his youth, and with country life, and how Rabette would conduct her everywhere; and particularly to the consecration discourse, which her father-confessor, Spener, was to deliver on Sunday. She talked herself into a glow, with picturing how greatly the great breast of the old man would be moved by the dirge and pæan over the ashes of his princely friend.
Rabette had nothing in her mind but the solitary minute, which she would fain leave her brother to enjoy with her. She begged her, in a lively manner, to play for her yet once more on the harmonica. Albano, at this proposal, plucked for himself a moderate nosegay from the—foliage of the tree that hung over his head. Liana looked at her warningly, as much as to say: "I shall spoil thy cheerfulness for thee again." But she insisted. At the entrance into the water-house, a light blush flitted across Albano, at the thought of the latest past and the nearest future.
Liana speedily opened the harmonica, but the water, the colophonium[170] of the bells, was wanting. Rabette was just going to fill a glass down at the fountains, for the sake of leaving them alone; but the Count, from manly awkwardness about entering at once into a ruse, stepped courteously before her and fetched it himself. Hardly, at length, had the lovely, pleasing creature laid, with a sigh, her delicate hands on the brown bells, when Rabette said to her, she would go down into the alley to hear how it sounded at a distance. As if at the painful sunstroke of a too sudden and great pleasure, his heart started up, he heard the triumphal car of love rolling afar off, and he was fain to leap into it and rattle away into life. The credulous Liana took the withdrawal for a veil which Rabette wished to throw over her eye, sweetly breaking into tears at music, and immediately removed her hands from the bells; but Rabette kissed her entreatingly, pressed back her hands upon them, and ran down. "The true heart!" said Liana; but this pure, guileless confidence in her friend touched him, and he could not say, Yes.
When, in the meadows of Persia, a happy one, who, on the luxuriant enamel has been sleeping down among the pinks and lilies and tulips, blissfully opens his eyes at the first evening call of the nightingale upon the still, tepid world, and the motley twilight, through which some gold threads of the evening sun float glowingly: that blissful one is like the youth Albano in the enchanted chamber,—the Venetian blinds scattered round broken lights, trembling green shadows; and there was a holy twilight as in groves around temples; only murmuring bees flew, out of the loud, distant world, through the silent cell, into the noise again. Some sharp streaks of sunshine, like lightnings before sleepers, were wafted romantically to and fro with the rose; and in this dreamy grotto, amid the rustling wood of the world, the solitude was not disturbed by so much as the shadowy existence of a mirror.
Into this enchantment she let the tones fly out of her hands like nightingales,—the tones were propelled towards Albano, as by a storm, now more clearly, and now more faintly; he stood before her, with folded hands, as if in prayer, and hung with thousand looks of love on the downward gazing form; all at once she lifted upon him that holy eye, full of sympathy, but she suddenly cast it down before the sun-glance of his.