"Linda, I will be more gentle," said he. "I swear it by the saint in whose garden we stand!" "Be so, dear one; in Lilar thou wast not so!" said she. He understood it of his storminess toward Liana. "Bury this recollection in thy love!" said he, reddening. She looked upon him like a virgin,—her inner being had remained virginal and innocent,—as the peach turns its red and glowing side toward the sun, but keeps under the leaves the tender white. Her eye drank from his, his drank from hers; the heavens mingled with her heaven, the purple sun glimmered back out of the warm dew of loving eyes. "O that I might now kiss thee!" said Albano. "Ah, that thou mightest!" said Linda. "So goldenly did the sun once go down into the sea!" said he. "And afterward we gave each other the first kiss!" said she. "We will see each other now much oftener," said he. "Yes, indeed, and longer by day; by night I, poor one, have, indeed, no eye. Even now is my eye already going down yonder," said she, as the sun sank from sight.
It was a good, gentle spirit, or Liana's own,—that spirit which conducts man by the gradual transition of twilight over into night, which pours soothing tears into sorrow and into ecstasy, and which suffers not the short path of love's evening star to be overcast with clouds,—this spirit it was which saved their tongues and ears from the terrible sound which would at once have torn up the golden magic circle of evening into an all-surrounding blaze of hell.
"Who is that coming so hastily yonder?" said Linda. "My foe," said Albano. Roquairol had missed him, and had heard of Linda's arrival; in the hell-torment of anxiety, lest what had happened the night before might reveal itself before them this evening, he hurried, under the pretext of going to get Dian as a performer and Albano as a hearer, up the mountain. Like a centaur, half man, half wild beast, he broke in upon the melodious souls and joys with the hollow, confused war of his whole being. But hardly had he perceived in their looks the consecration of rapture, and seen that the black curtain still lay fast upon his murder, when the grim spirit of jealousy reared itself within him. "She is now my betrothed," he said to himself; and the solar eclipse of confused repentance was eclipsed by the tempest of chagrin. Linda, kindling into anger from an inward shudder at his similarity of voice, stood before him like a diamond, clear, sparkling, hard and cutting; but Albano, amidst the echoes of the harmony, stood gently on the churchyard of the sister of this brother, and not without some confusion. Roquairol was haunted again by yesterday's unclean suspicion, that perhaps Albano and Linda were no longer innocent.
Angrily, he now invited Linda to make one of the spectators at his tragedy. "You told me," said she to Albano, "it concluded so tragically; I am no friend of that." "He is not at all acquainted with it," said Roquairol. "No," said Albano. As the serpent looked down upon the paradise of the first pair, so looked he with the pleasing consciousness that he could hand them the apple from the tree of knowledge which should immediately drive them out from theirs. "Besides," she subjoined, "I see badly in the evening, or not at all." Roquairol affected to be surprised at that, joked upon the gain which it would be to him as first lover in the play, if she only heard him, and begged Dian to unite in entreating her. Not inborn, but acquired coldness, has at command the highest falsehood; the former is capable only of dissimulation, the latter of simulation also, because it at once knows and uses all ways and means of kindling a fire, and keeps its firm standing on slippery ice by the ashes of former heat. When Albano himself at length advised her to take part in the tragic enjoyment, and grant her friends of both sexes below there the fair, pure enjoyment of her presence, then she consented, not without wondering at his retraction.
She took Chariton into her carriage. The men walked on ahead. On the way Roquairol said to Dian, who had to play the character of Albano in the piece, "So soon as I have said, in the fourth act, 'Even spiritual love goes to meet sensual, and, after all, like a seafarer on his way eastward, arrives at last in the lands of sundown,' then you fall in." Dian laughed, and said, "I'll fall in. In Italy, however, the passage begins at once as a southerly and westerly one." Albano was silent for vexation, and repented having helped persuade Linda to this doubtful festival. The Princess cast sundry rapid glances of contempt at the cheated Linda, and she answered them with the like; distinguished women betray their sex most in hostile contact with distinguished ones.
130. CYCLE.
Most of the spectators had in the beginning come more for the sake of the spectators and performers than of the play; but soon they were attracted by the mystery and by the extraordinary stage itself. The scene was laid on the so-called Island of Slumber in the Prince's garden, which was covered with a wild, thick tangle of flowers, bushes, and high trees. Its eastern side showed an open, free foreground, on which the performance was to take place, with a white Sphinx on an empty tomb farther in among the green. The wings of the scenes were the dark leafy parts; pit and boxes the shore opposite, which was separated from the island by a lake, about as broad as a moderate-sized ship. From two trees of the two opposite shores hung down like a lantern out over the middle of the lake the cage of the jay or chorus, suspended there by way of bringing her deep, dull voice nearer to the spectators. "I am, to tell the truth, 'curious," said the Knight to his son, "to know whence you will draw the tragical." "Leave me alone for that!" said Roquairol, who had hitherto been walking backward and forward silently and uneasily, with his eyes on the ground; "only I must make a general request of the company to be pardoned the delay. When I address the moon in the fifth act, I can very well use the real one, if I only begin just so that her rising shall coincide with the last scene."
At length he embarked, with a face that was growing pale, in the Charon's boat, as he said, and ferried over alone. Then the other players sailed over one after another. All were lost behind the trees; and now, from behind in the embowered western parts of the island, the immortal overture from Mozart's Don Juan rose like an invisible spirit-realm slowly and grandly into the air.
"Diablesse!" cried thereupon the brother of the Knight to the jay, and clapped his hands at the same time as a signal.
"Open the coffin," the creature began, in a hollow voice, accompanied by single, lugubrious, tones of the orchestra,—"open the coffin in the churchyard, and show for the last time the breast of the corpse and his dry eyelid, and then shut it to forever."