"Do I, too, distress you?" said he, in the highest emotion. With the tone of the virgin who lay beneath the flowers, Idoine innocently said, "I only weep that I am not Liana." Quickly she added, "Ah, this place is so holy, and yet the human heart is not enough so." He understood not her self-reproach. Reverence and openheartedness and inspiration mastered him; life stood up and stood out shining from the narrow bounds of troublous reality, as out of a coffin; heaven came down nearer with its lofty stars, and the two stood in the midst of them. "Noble Princess," said he, "we have neither of us any apology to make here; the holy spot, like a second world, takes away all sense of mutual strangeness. Idoine, I know that you once gave me peace; and, before the hidden tabernacle of the spirit in whose sense you spoke, I here thank you."
Idoine answered, "I did it without knowing you, and therefore I could allow myself the short use or abuse of a fleeting resemblance. Had it depended upon me, I certainly never would have so painfully awakened your recollections with so insignificant a resemblance as an external one is. But her heart deserves your remembrance and your sorrow. They wrote me you were no longer in the linden city." She sought now to hasten her departure. "In a few days," he answered, "I, too, shall travel. I seek comfort in war from the peace of the grave, and the solitude which makes my life still." "Earnest activity, believe me, always reconciles one with life at last," said Idoine; but the tranquil words were borne by a trembling voice, for, by help of her sister, she had got a sight of the whole gray, rainy land of his present existence, and her heart was full of deep sympathy for her kind.
Here he looked at her sharply; her nun-like eyelids, which always, during her speaking, drooped over the whole of her large eyes, made her so like a slumbering saint. He was reminded by her last words of her beneficent life in Arcadia, where the gay flower-dust of her ideas and dreams, unlike the heavy, dead gold-dust of mere riches, lightly fluttering round in cheerful life, enlivening all with unobserved influence, at length displayed its fruit in firm woods and gardens on the earth. Everything within him loved her, and cried, "She only could be thy last as well as thy first love"; and his whole heart, opened by wounds, was unfolded to the still soul. But a serious, severe spirit closed it again: "Unhappy one, love no one again; for a dark, destroying angel goes behind thy love with a sword, and whatever rosy lip thou pressest to thine he touches with the sharp edge or poisoned point, and it withers or bleeds to death!"
He saw already the glitter of this sword glide through the long darkness; for Idoine had made a vow never to stretch out her hand in the covenant of love below her princely rank. So stood the two beside each other, separate in one heaven, a sun and a moon, divided by an earth. She hastened her departure. Albano thought it not right to accompany her, as he now divined that the gray-clad persons who had beckoned him back were her servants, placed there to guard her solitude. She offered him her hand at the garden-gate, and said, "May you live to be more happy, dear Count; one day I hope to find you again as happy as you ought to make yourself." The touch of the hand, like that of a heavenly one offering itself out of the clouds, streamed through him with a glorified fire from that world where risen ones hover, light and luminous, and the lofty, awe-awakening form inspired his heart. He could not say what he subdued and buried within him, but neither could he say any other cold, disguised word. He knelt down, pressed her hand to his bosom, looked with tears to the starry heaven, and only said, "Peace, all-gracious one!" Idoine turned hastily away, and, after a few swift steps, passed slowly down the little hill into the Prince's garden.
A few minutes after, he saw the torches of her carriage fly through the night, in which she loved to brave the danger of travelling. Around the hill it was dark; the evening redness and the evening star had gone down; the earth was a smoke and rubbish-heap of night; a mausoleum of clouds reared itself on the horizon. But in Albano there was a certain incomprehensible gladness, a luminous point in the darkness of the heart; and, as he looked upon the gleaming atom, it spread itself out, became a splendor, a world, a boundless and endless sun. Now he recognized it; it was the real infinite and divine love, which can be still and suffer, because it knows only one good, but not its own.
He was rejoiced at having veiled his breast, and at his resolve not to see her again in the city. "So silently," he said, half praying, half aloud, "will I love her forever. Her peace, her bliss, her fair aspiration, shall be ever holy to me, and her form hidden from me, and remote as that of her heavenly sister; but when the battle for right begins, and the tones of music flutter with the banners in the air, and the heart beats more eagerly, to bleed more profusely, then let thy form, O Idoine, hover before me in the heavens, and I will fight for thee; and if, in the tumult, an unknown destroying angel draws the poisoned edge across my breast, then will I hold thee fast in my fainting heart till the earth is to me no more.".
He looked round serenely, after this prayer, at the churchyard of the virgin heart; he felt that Liana alone might be permitted to know, and that she would bless it.
138. CYCLE.
Albano could not spend a night in a region where the single columns and arches of the ruined sun-temple of his youth lay scattered round; but he betook himself, in a mournfully dreamy mood, toward the city. On the road he found the Provincial Director Wehrfritz on horseback, who was in quest of him. "Respected son," said he, "there have come to my hands the weightest things from thy intimate friend Mr. Schoppe, which I, in turn, have to deliver only into thine own, which I accordingly hereby make haste to do; for, by Heaven, I have little spare time. The Prince has dropped off this evening, from fright, because somebody said his old father, who had promised to appear to him a second time as a sign of his death, was to be seen in the mirror-room, which, however, I hear, turned out to be only something of wax. The articles which I have to deliver up are, first, a perspective-glass, wherewith thou wilt see thy mother and sister painted (I use carefully Mr. Schoppe's own expressions); secondly, a written packet addressed to 'Albano, foster-son of Wehrfritz,' half of which is still enclosed in a black, broken marble slab; and, thirdly, thy portrait." The portrait resembled Albano at his present age, it was discovered,—so far as the stars permitted one to see,—though, in fact, he had never let himself be painted. The black marble slab and the perspective-glass brought before his soul his father's prophecy on Isola Bella,[[143]]—that a female form would step toward him out of the wall of a picture-gallery, and describe to him a place where he was to find the black slab, having previously shown him one where he should find the telescope, of which the eye-glass would make for him, out of the old image of his sister, a young recognizable one, and the object-glass, out of the young image of his mother, an old recognizable one.
Albano put anxious questions about Schoppe and the history of the finding of the rare freight. "With Herr Schoppe it fares well enough," said Wehrfritz; "he must be somewhere in the neighborhood with a strange gentleman." Albano inquired after his dress; this, to his astonishment, had grown out of a green into a red again. Hardly had Wehrfritz begun giving the wonderful history how Schoppe came by those wonderful things, when Albano, who gathered therefrom the solution of the paternal prophecy, in the eagerness of his expectation interrupted the intelligence with the request that he would accompany him to the neighboring Chapel of the Cross, around which several lanterns stood. He had both medallions always with him, and was now so curious to see the face of his mother through the object-glass, as well as to read the paper.