More and more heartily delighted at his delight, she offered to lead him into Liana's chamber. A simple little chamber,—under a green twilight of glimmering vine foliage, some books of Fénelon and Herder, old flowers still in their water-glasses, little Chinese dishes, Julienne's portrait, and another of a deceased youthful friend, whose name was Caroline, an unstained writing-stand, with English-pressed paper,—was what he found. The holy spring hours of the virgin passed by before him, dropping dew like sunny clouds.
He happened to touch a penknife, when Chariton brought quills to be cut, "because," she said, "they had so much trouble on this score since her master had gone away." For a woman can more easily drive any pen—even the epic and Kantian—than make one; and here, as in several other cases, the stronger sex must lend the weaker a hand.
Albano wished to see, also, the working-chamber of his teacher; but this she decidedly—although an hour's eating together had not given her any new courage—refused, because her master had forbidden it. He begged once more; but she smiled more and more painfully, and adhered to her gentle no.
He now dreamed away the murmur of the morning in the magic garden, on whose waters and paths the moonshine and reflection of memory played. Out of the nine million square miles of common earth, how do certain poetical lands stand out to a poetical heart! On the mountain with the altar, where he once saw her disappear down below, the afternoon chime of Blumenbühl came wafted to him with the fanning of a freer ether; and his childhood's life, and the present scenes yonder, and Liana, gave him a tender heart, and he surveyed, with dimmer eyes, the transfigured land.
At evening came happy church-goers from Blumenbühl, and praised the consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all, overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,—the constellations over Blumenbühl shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.
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!