Just at that moment he entered. She begged him to accommodate himself to this short night. After some silence, she rose proudly from her seat; her black-dressed, tall form raised, in the presence of the Knight, whom she saw not, its great eyes to heaven, her proud life, hitherto enveloped in the winding-sheet, flung back the cloth and rose, blooming, from the dead, and she addressed the Knight: "Respected Gaspard, you promised me, as also did my father, that he would appear to me on my marriage day. The day is gone by. I am a widow: now let him appear to me."
Here the Knight interrupted her: "Gone by? O quite right! Is he, then, anything more discreet and moral than a man?" and jested, contrary to his usual manner, with a glow of indignation, because he supposed it was of Albano, whom he had so long trusted, that she was speaking.
"You misunderstand me," said Linda; "I speak of a deceased one." Suddenly before Julienne Roquairol's shadow passed; distant according tones from the Princess had ushered it in. "Almighty God!" she screamed, "the cursed suicide's play is true?" "He played what actually occurred," said Linda calmly. "We separate. I travel. I desire nothing but my father." Here Gaspard held out toward the Countess an arm petrified by palsy, as if armed with a drawn dagger,—the darkness made the apparition blacker and wilder,—but he broke the ice of death asunder again with cold hands, and stirred and answered with lamed tongue: "God and the Devil! Thy father is at hand. He will take it all—as it is. Does he know it?" "Who?" asked Linda. "And what did he determine? Heavens! I mean Albano." Gaspard had, in a passion, at once Cromwell's imbecility of tongue and ingenuity of action; and remained therefore as averse and as far from every ebullition, even of love, as from tameness, which was to him (as he said) "even more odious than downright crime."
"I know not," said Linda. "I belong to the dead one alone, who has twice died for me. Say that to my father. O, I would have followed him long ago, the monster, into the deep realm; I would not stand here before the cold reproach of malice or Christian amazement, for there are still daggers to be used against life!—But I am a mother, and therefore I live!"
"I will see you again this evening," said Gaspard composedly, and hurried away. "I believe, dear Julienne," said Linda, "we now no longer quite understand each other, at least not to the highest point, just as we earlier differed about your belle-sœur, and you thought her coquetry, but I precisely her prudery, great and immoral." "That may well be true," said Julienne, coldly; "you are so truly poetic, I am so prosaic and old-maidishly pious and orthodox. To love a monster for this, because he cheats me as horribly as he does his regiment-treasury, or because he generally allows himself as much freedom as his regiment, or because after his death he still leaves parts for the remaining players, or letters to me, deceived one—" "Did he so?" asked Albano. "She praised it even as a sign of genius in him," replied Julienne. "To love such a one, said I, or such people as love him, I cannot find it in my heart to do that. Fare you then as well as may be." Linda answered, "I hate all wishes"; gave her her hand, pressed not hers, and remained in profound silence, looking into her night. She knew little of the easy and careless departure of her lost friend.
That same night Linda, after a long private talk with the Knight, travelled off entirely alone, wrapped in her veil, in a carriage without torches, and no one knew whether she had wept or not.—
When Albano had heard his sister out, he said, with a soft voice of emotion: "Make peace with the past; man cannot assail it. Leave to the great unhappy one the night into which she of herself has been drawn. But why were you so eager to have me with you? Particularly if thou knowest aught of my Schoppe, I entreat thee to impart it." "I will answer thee," said she, weeping and wondering; "but, brother, assure me that thy silence is not again the curtain of a new misfortune. I recognize you men by that, one must hate you all, and I do so, too." "I have nothing sad in my mind; before God I affirm it. You women, you who will only quench your hell with tears, and kindle it with the breath of sighs, comprehend not, that often a single hour's thinking can give a man a staff or wings, which shall lift him at once out of hell, and then it may burn on for all him." "Show me, then," said she, in a tearfully comic manner, "thy wing." "This," replied he, "that I build not upon man, but upon God in me and above me. The foreign ivy winds around us, runs up on us, stands as a second summit beside ours, and it is thereby withered. Spirits should grow beside each other, not upon each other. We should, like God, as imperishable ones, love the perishable."
"Very good," said she, "if it only insures thee peace. As touching thy poor Schoppe, he has been thrust into the madhouse by way of punishment; but first let me give you a regular account. He dressed up a story about a second sister of thine before thy already so much excited father. One could have let this new distraction of intellect pass; but thy uncle was called, who told him to his face he had murdered the Baldhead; and the choice was haughtily left him between imprisonment and the madhouse; so he betook himself to the latter. Stay, stay! The weightiest is to come. Whatever I may think of him, I see he is thy honest friend; and to speak out freely, even Linda, before her departure, inserted in her last letter to me an intercession for him. He not only made the farcical journey to Spain for thee, he also effected thy cure; perhaps thou owest him thy life. I wonder that I, or somebody or other, has never before mentioned it to thee."
She began now upon Idoine's sound and generous character, her Arcadia, and the last day she had spent with her and looked into her clear soul. She passed on to his bed of fever and his mourning beside Liana's bier, and old Schoppe's talks and runnings to and fro, and his noble victory, when he had brought at length the glorified Liana, in Idoine's form, before his eye, that she might pronounce the healing words: "Have peace!"
Now was he in a storm, and Julienne at peace. "Therefore," she continued, "I hold it to be my duty to interest myself a little in thy friend. The poor devil is innocent,—through stingings of conscience and even by his present situation he may completely lose what understanding he still has,—altogether innocent, I say; for thy uncle, whom I have long hated, and who only a short time ago for the first time, but in vain, sought to come as a ghostly and murderous apparition to my sick brother,—he would also have probably done the same with Liana, if she had lived to admit of it,—this man is—(why may I not make it notorious, now that all has changed and revolutionized itself?)—one and the selfsame person with the Baldhead, and is a ventriloquist! Brother?"