Chariton, as if all made up of salient points, was continually turning to Liana, and asking: "Shall we go this way? or in through there? or out through here? If my lord were only here! he knows all about it." She would gladly have led him round every fount and every flower, and looked into the youth's face as lovingly as into that of her friend. Liana said to her, on the cross way at the bridge: "I think the flute-dell yonder, with the gleaming gold ball, will perhaps be pleasantest, especially for a lover of music; and, besides, they will look for me there, when they bring the harp to my mother." She had promised to come back to her as soon as that arrived. She shunned every path toward the south, where Tartarus frowned behind its high curtain.
Liana spoke now of the contest between painting and music, and of Herder's charming official report of this strife. She, although a votary of the pencil, gave in her vote, as was natural to the female and the lyric heart, entirely for tones, and Albano, although a good pianist, was rather for colors, "This magnificent landscape," said Albano, "is in fact a picture, and so is every fair human form." "Were I blind," said Chariton, naively, "then I should not see my lovely Liana." She replied: "My teacher, the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, also set painting above music. But to me, when I hear music, it is as if I heard a loud past or a loud future. Music has something holy; unlike the other arts, it cannot paint anything but what is good."[90] Verily, she was herself a moral church-music, the angel-stop in the organ. The pure Albano felt, by her side, the necessity and the existence of a yet tenderer purity; and it seemed to him as if a man might injure, even unconsciously, a soul like this, whose understanding was hardly anything more than a finer feeling,—as window-glasses of pure transparency are often broken, because they appear as if they were not. He turned round mechanically, because he was always one step in advance, and not only the blooming Lilar, but also Liana's full form, shone at once and transfigured into his soul. To clasp her to his heart was not now his yearning, but to snatch this being, who had so often suffered, from every flame; to rush for her, sword in hand, upon her foe, to bear her mightily through the deep, cold hell-floods of life;—that would have illuminated his existence.
45. CYCLE.
They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with her into a pathless oak-grove;—she looked upon him so contentedly and open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears. Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,—but like an angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!
They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,—into that resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have gone round freely, without sleep. Chariton—from her earnestness much more busy—had, after a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the blooming veil, which retired as they approached;—and Albano beheld now the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the higher terrace,—everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs, from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold globe beside the sun,—the last mirror of his dying evening-glance. "Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually repeating.
Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height, behind a statue of a Muse,—for the Nine Muses beamed from the green Tempe,—seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile with the knitting-work which she had taken from her friend, "wishes very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your Charles like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.
All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and out of the bowers,—more and more continually joined them,—they quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,—at last flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared toward heaven;—they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps, and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue spring,—and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of May,—and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.
Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid summer-night;—but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,—certainly not against sun and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated form, played—a sublime contrast to himself—with the ringlets of the little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.
At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.
A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,—by heaven, I must say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed from him.