At this moment Lilia (Chariton) and Carlos (Dian) stepped forth,—two lovers yet in the earliest time of the first love. No sad rain of tears yet swept away the golden morning dew, they are so true to each other. Lilia rejoices with him that her brother Hiort is just coming back from his travels to find his youthful friend Carlos her eternal one. "Perhaps he, too, is right fortunate," said Lilia. "O, certainly so," said Carlos; "he is indeed that, and everything else." At times both were silent in happy contemplation of each other; then tones went up out of the veiled west of the island and bore the mute joy into the ether, and showed it to them hovering and glorified. A sweet sympathy diffused itself among the spectators for Dian's and Chariton's imitation of their own fair reality, so delicate, yet mingled with southern glow; they heard and saw Greeks. All at once Lilia fled behind the flower-bushes, for her enemy, Salera, Carlos's father, came, personated by Bouverot.
Salera angrily announced to his son the arrival of his bride, Athenais. Carlos made known to him now the mystery of his earlier love, and showed himself armed against a whole future. Salera cried, with exasperation, "Would that she were not, as she is, beautiful, so that I might have the pleasant duty of forcing and punishing thee! But thou wilt see her, and obey me, and yet I shall hate thee." Carlos replied, "Father, I have already seen Lilia." Salera went off with angry repetitions, and Carlos wished now still more ardently for Hiort's return, in order with him more easily to abduct his sister through his persuasion and attendance. Here closed the first act.
The brother of the Knight called to the jay, "Diablesse!" and scraped with his foot, as a signal.
"Appear, pale man!" spake the creature; "the clock vibrates the hour; man of sorrow, land upon the still island!"
Hiort stepped forth, with his cheeks painted pale, with open breast, looked upon the tomb, and said, from his innermost soul, "At last!" The music played a dance. "Yes, indeed, island of slumber thou may'st well be called; our days end with a sleep," he added. Now came his Carlos. "Hiort, art thou dead?" cried he, in terror, over the corpse. "I am only pale," said he. "O, how dost thou come back so out of the beautiful, gay earth?" said Carlos. "Exhausted, Charles, with stillborn hopes; my present is disinherited by the past; the foliage of the sensual is fallen off; not even beautiful nature do I longer fancy, and clouds like mountains are more dear to me than real mountains. I have truly reaped the bitter weeds of life, and yet must I, in this empty breast, carry about with me a destroying angel, who eternally digs and writes, and every letter is a wound. No advice! You call it conscience. But bring me a little sleep-draught hither on the island of sleep, Charles!"
They brought wine. He now gave his friend an account of his life,—his faults, among which he adduced the very one in which he was just persisting, namely, drinking; his self-reproducing vanity, even with its self-acknowledgment; his conquests of women, which made him a magnetic mountain, full of the attracted nails from ships that had thereby fallen to pieces; his propensity, like Cardan, to offend his friends, to break in upon his own or another's good fortune, as, even when a child, he longed to interrupt the preacher,[[128]] or in the midst of the finest tune to smash the harpsichord, and in a fit of enthusiasm to think the most licentious thoughts.
"Once I had still, after all, two distinct and different selves,—one that promised and lied, and one that believed the other; now they both lie to each other, and neither believes." Carlos answered, "Horrible! But thy sorrow is verily itself a help and a gift." "Ah, what!" he replied. "Man condemns less his iniquity than the past situation wherein he committed it, while, in a fresh situation, he finds it new and sweet again, and loves it as much as ever. What lies cold yonder, that is my image [pointing to the Sphinx], that stirs itself, living, in my bloody breast. Help me! draw out the rending monster!"
Albano fired with rage in his innermost soul at the guilty repetition of that tender confessional night with him.[[129]] "He is bold enough," said Gaspard, in a whisper to Albano, "because, as I hear, he is really to personate himself; but when he sees himself so, he is surely better than he sees himself." "O," said Albano, "so I thought once! But is, then, the contemplation of a bad condition itself a good condition? Is he not so much the worse that he bears this consciousness, and so much the weaker that he sees an incurable cancer-sore growing upon him? The highest thing he has, at all events, lost,—innocence." "A fleeting cradle virtue! He has, after all, a bright, bold, reflecting faculty," said Gaspard. "Only effeminate, shameless, double-meaning, many-sided debility of heart he has; talks of power, and cannot tear through the thinnest mesh of pleasure," said Albano.
"Charles," said Hiort, tenderly, as if answering him, "yes, there is yet one help. When on the ground of life one fresh color after another fades,—when existence is now nothing, neither comedy nor tragedy, only a stale show-piece,—still is there one heaven open to man, which shall receive him,—love. Let this close against him, and he is damned forever. Carlos, my Carlos, I could still be happy, for I have seen Athenais; but I can be still more unhappy than I am, for she loves me not. In my heart lies this blazing, but continually sharp-cutting diamond, upon which it bleeds as often as it beats." Everywhere now did Roquairol let Linda's image play in. At this crisis, Carlos at first threw his friend into an internal uproar, with the intelligence that Athenais had been selected by his father for his bride, and was coming soon; but he calmed him, when his sister Lilia appeared, by quickly taking her hand, and saying, "This one only do I love." They spoke of the obstacles on the part of old Salera, whom Carlos called a glacier, which bore fruit under no sun, and could not be built upon. "Stand by me, Charles," said Hiort; "think what thou wrotest to me: 'Like two streams will we blend together, and grow, and bear, and dry up together.'"[[130]] Thus did the three beings mutually understand, bind, elevate each other; all had one end,—their common welfare. Carlos swore eternal rebellion against his father; Hiort, to protect his sister, and cried, "At last the empty cornucopia of Time, which hitherto has given out nothing but hollow sounds, pours out flowers again." "O, the women! How common and commonplace are almost all men! But almost every woman is new." Gaspard said, with a smile, "Women say the reverse of us and themselves." The second act closed in gladness and peace.
"Diablesse!" cried the Spaniard, and stretched his right hand high in the air.