So both arrived. Hafenreffer, quite as fine and cold as he was honest, easily searched out all the real relations of the case. Gaspard imparted to Julienne—still fancying that she retained her old love for his daughter Linda—the wish of the rival Court; but he was astounded at her disclosures, which spoke as much for Idoine as her former secret influences upon Albano. In addition to this, she further provoked him, in the confused twilight of her situation, by the well-meant offer to make good to him in some measure his paternal outlays upon Albano. "The Spaniard reads no household accounts, he merely pays them," said he, and sensitively took leave forever, in order to travel over all the islands of the earth. Albano he wished not to see any more, from chagrin at the accident that he had been cheated out of the enjoyment, by Schoppe's church- and grave-robbery, of punishing and humbling Albano, by the disclosure that he was only Linda's father and not his, for cherishing bold doubts of his worth. Whither Linda had gone on that night of his discovery as father, he coldly concealed from all.
Thereupon he took also solemn leave of his former bride, the Prince's widow. "He held it as his bounden duty," he said to her, "to let her into the secret of the newest succession, since he had in some measure let himself be entangled in the progress of the business." Never was her look more proud and poisonous. "You seem," said she, composedly, "to have been led off into more than one error. If it so interests you, as you seem upon the whole to be interested for this land, then I take pleasure in telling you, that I dare no longer hesitate about making known the good fortune which I anticipate, of sparing the country, perhaps, by a son of their beloved, deceased Prince, the necessity of any change. At least, we cannot, before time has decided the thing, admit any foreign admixture." Gaspard, enraged at what he had expected, spoke in reply merely an infinitely impudent word—because he had a faculty of more easily forgetting and violating sex than rank,—and thereupon took his courteous leave of her, with the assurance that he was certain, wherever he might be, to receive confirmation of this already so agreeable intelligence, and that it would then pain him to be obliged, out of love for the truth, to make public against her some extraordinary—judicial papers, which he would not gladly put in circulation. "You are a real devil," said the Princess, beside herself. "Vis-à-vis d'un ange? Mais pourquoi non?" replied he, and departed with the old ceremonies.—
Albano, whose heart had in all these depths and abysses naked, wounded roots and fibres, could not say a word. But his friend Siebenkäs declared, without further ceremony, that "Gaspard, at every step, and with his everlasting, fine dallying and hesitating,—as, for example, about the marriage of his daughter, and other things,—had betrayed nothing but the incarnate Spaniard, as Gundling, in the first part of his Otia, so well portrays him." Augusti wondered at this openness, while it seemed to him more tolerable and decorous than Schoppe's roughness. "What would strike me most," added Siebenkäs, who, as it seemed, had taken the world's history as a subordinate department, "would be the long concealment of so weighty a pedigree among so many partakers of the secret, if I did not know too well from Hume, that the Gunpowder Plot, under Charles I., had been kept secret for a whole year and a half by more than twenty conspirators."
Much wounded, and yet thoroughly cleansed, Albano departed, in the afternoon after these narrations, into the discordant kingdom, but with cheerful, holy boldness. He was conscious to himself of higher aims and powers than any of the hard souls would dispute with him; from the serene, free, ethereal sphere of eternal good he would not let himself be drawn down into the dirty isthmus of common existence; a higher realm than what a metallic sceptre sways, one which man first creates, in order to govern it, opened itself before him; in every, even the smallest country, was something great,—not population, but prosperity; the highest justice was his determination, and the promotion of old foes, particularly of the sensible Froulay. Thus did he now, full of confidence, leap out of his former slender vessel, propelled only by strange hands, on to a free earth, where he can move himself alone without strange rudder, and instead of the empty, bare watery way, find a firm, blooming land and object. And with this consolation he parted from the dead Schoppe and the living friend.
145. CYCLE.
In the twilight he came upon the mountain, whence he could overlook, but with other eyes than once, the city, which was to be the circus and the theatre of his powers. He belongs now to a German house,—the people around him are his kinsmen,—the prefiguring ideals, which he had once sketched to himself at the coronation of his brother, of the warm rays wherewith a prince as a constellation can enlighten and enrich lands, were now put into his hands for fulfilment. His pious father, still blessed by the grandchildren of the country, pointed to him the pure sun-track of his princely duty: only actions give life strength, only moderation gives it a charm. He thought of the beings who lay sunk in graves around him, hard and barren indeed as rocks, but high as rocks, too,—of the beings whom fate had sacrificed, who would fain have used the milky-way of infinity and the rainbow of fancy as a bow in the hand, without ever being able to draw a string across it. "Why did not, then, I, too, go down like those whom I esteemed? Did not, in me also, that scum of excess boil up and overspread the clearness?"
Fate now carried on again games of repetition with him; a flaming carriage rolled away on a road leading off sidewise from the Prince's garden; slowly moved the hearse of the brother with dead lights up the Blumenbühl mountain. "The slow carriage I know; whose is the swift one?" asked Albano of the Lector. "Herr von Cesara has left us," replied he. Albano was silent, but he experienced the last pang which the Knight would give him. He begged the Lector earnestly to let him go alone on the way to Blumenbühl, because he should take altogether circuitous routes.
He wished to visit in Tartarus the grave of the paternal heart without a breast. As he passed through the noisy suburbs, an old man stared at him for a long time, suddenly fled away with terror, and cried to a woman, who met him, "The old man is walking round!" The man had been in his youth a servant of the Prince, had become blind and had recovered again a short time since; therefore he took the son for the father whom he so resembled. In the city the usual public joy at change was making itself heard. In one house was a children's ball, in another a group of players at proverbs; while the public mourning shut up every dancing-hall and every theatre. Strange, merry sons of the muses were looking out of Roquairol's chamber. In the hotel of the Spaniard a boy had the jay by a string. He heard some people say in passing, "Who would have dreamed of it?" "Quite natural," replied the other; "I was helping make, at the very time, a wall to the princely vault, and saw him as I see thee." In the upper city all the rows of windows in the palace of mourning were brightly illuminated, as if there were a happier festival. In the house of the Minister all were dark; overhead among the statues on the roof a single little light crept round.
"No," thought Albano, "I need not reflect, why I, too, sank not with them. O enough, enough has fallen from me into graves. I must surely yearn forever after all the beings who have flown from me; like divers, the dead swim along with me below, and hold my life-bark or bear the anchor." He saw the old corpse-seeress standing out there on the Blumenbühl road, who once met him in the company of the Baldhead; she stared up after the lighted hearse and fancied she was seeing dreams and the future, when she was looking at reality. Everywhere in his path lay the quivering spider-feet which had been torn out from the crushed Tarantula of the past. He saw life through a veil, though not a black but a green one.
Passing through Tartarus, he longingly, but with a shudder, because the past with its spirits glided after him, arrived at the Moravian churchyard, where, in a garden without flowers, surrounded by sunken, slumbering mourning-birches, the white altar with the paternal heart and the golden inscription glimmered: "Take my last offering, all-gracious one!" Before the heart shut up in a breast of stone, in which nothing stirred, not even a particle of dust, he made his childlike prayer to God, and felt that he would have loved his parents, and swore to himself to please them, if their lofty eyes still looked down into the low vale of life. He pressed the cold stone like a breast to himself; and went away with soft steps, as if the old man were walking along beside him in this his own form, so like his.