So painfully did he move himself on his wounds to and fro, and at last he resolved, this very evening to seek out Linda, wherever she might be, when he received from her the following billet:—
"Come to me, I pray, this evening, to Elysium; it will certainly be fair. I give the invitation now, as thou didst lately. Thou shalt lead me upon the fair mountains, and it shall be enough for me if only thou canst see and enjoy. Julienne we need less and less. Thy father urges our union with proposals which you shall this evening hear and weigh. Come without fail! In my heart there are still standing so many sharp tears about the evil tragedy. Thou must change them into tears of another kind, my beloved!
"The Blind One."
He laughed at the changing. "Into frozen ones, rather," said he. Hot love was to him a passionate kiss into his wound. He went to Lilar gloomily and hastily, deeply enveloped in a red cloak, as if against foul weather,—blind and deaf to himself and the world,—and like a dying man who awaits the moment when he either shall vanish in smoke and be annihilated, or soar away reanimated into divine worlds.
When he entered the precincts of Lilar, the garden did not distort itself as lately, but it merely disappeared, from him. He went along close by some disguised people, who seemed to be making a grave. "It's wrong, I vow," said one of them; "he ought to be buried out in the meadow, like other cattle." Albano looked that way, saw a covered corpse, and thought with a shudder it was the suicide, until he heard the second grave-digger say, "An ape, Peter, if he is kept with distinction, in clothes, looks more reputable than many a man, and I believe he, too, would rise again from the dead, if he were only regularly baptized."
Just as this Gibbon of the Princess, whom they were burying here, recalled before his soul that stormy Friday, he espied Linda, not far from the Dream-temple, on the arm of a seeing gentlewoman. She gave him, according to her manner before others, only a slight greeting, and said to the woman, "Justa, stay here in the Dream-temple; I am going to walk up and down here."
By this limitation of herself to the visual range of the Dream-temple she excluded every fair, visible sign of love, and Albano knew already that silent contentment of hers, with the mere presence of the beloved one, just as he did sometimes the wildness of her sweet lips. When he touched her with trembling, and saw her again near him, then did this powerful being come back to him with the whole divine past. But he deferred not the infernal question, "Linda, who was with thee on Friday evening?" "No one, dearest; where?" replied she. "In the flute-dell," he stammered. "My blind maiden," she answered, calmly. "Who else?" he asked. "God! thy tone distresses me," said she. "Roquairol killed the ape that night. Did he meet thee?"
"O horrible murderer! Me?" he cried; "I was travelling all night long; I was not with thee in any flute-dell." "Speak out, man," cried Linda, grasping him violently with both hands; "didst thou not write to me of having given up thy journey, and then didst thou not come?" "No, nothing like it," said he; "all infernal lies. The dead monster Roquairol used my voice,—thy eyes,—and so it was,—tell the rest." "Jesu Maria!" screamed she, struck by the dashing flood into which the black cloud burst, and grasped with both arms through the leafy branches of the wooded avenue, and pressed them to her, and said supplicatingly, "Ah, Albano, thou wast certainly with me."
"No, by the Almighty, not! Tell the rest," said he.
"Fly from me forever; I am his widow!" said she, solemnly. "That thou remainest," said he, severely, and called Justa out of the temple of dream.