Schoppe's Office of Comforter.—Arcadia.—Bouverot's Portrait-painting.
82. CYCLE.
Now that Albano lived without love or hope; now that he had seen the polar-star of his life fall like a shooting-star into a wilderness still as death; now that every one of his actions and every recollection darted out a scorpion-sting, and he sent back Liana's letters, forsook Lilar, the house of the Doctor, the Lector, Liana's relatives, and the pious father; now that he directed his face, gradually growing pale, only to books and stars; men who know no higher sorrow than selfish sorrow must needs imagine that nothing weighs upon his bosom but the ruins and rubbish of the shattered air-castles of his hope and youthful love. But he was more nobly unhappy and disconsolate: he was so, because he had for the first time made a human creature and the best of beings miserable,—his beloved blind! Into this abyss of his heart all neighboring fountains of sorrow flowed together. The smallest gayly-painted shards of his urn of fortune were as if shattered afresh, when he heard from day to day that the poor girl, although daily stationed in the bath-house before the healing fountains, was nevertheless brought back each time without a ray of light or hope, and that she now feared nothing more, lamented nothing more on this robbers' earth, than that death might perhaps close her eyes before they had seen her mother again.
O, the wound of conscience is no sear, and time cools it not with his wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe! Albano called back to remembrance Liana's bitter entreaty for indulgence; and then it was no consolation to him, that, during that eclipse of the sun, he had not wished to sacrifice her eyes, but only her heart. In the burning-glass and magnifying-mirror of consequences fate shows us the light, playing worms of our inner man as grown-up and armed furies and serpents. How many sins pass through us unseen and with soft looks, like nightly robbers, because, like their sisters in dreams, they steal not out from the circle of the breast, and get no outward object to fall upon and strangle. The fair soul readily detects in an accident a sin. Only those hard stormers of heaven and earth before whose triumphal chariots there starts up beforehand a wagon-rampart full of wounds and corpses,—that is, the fathers of war, which, in the long course of history, ministers have oftener been than princes,—only these can calmly kindle all the volcanoes of earth, and let all their lava-torrents stream down, merely that they may have—fair prospects. They manure Elysian fields into a battle-field, in order to raise therein a redder rose-bush for a mistress.
The first thing Albano did, when he arrived at the Doctor's house, was to trudge out of it down into the remote valley town, in order neither to see the suspected Lector, still less to hear daily the malicious Doctor Sphex upon the relapse of the blindness. Only the faithful Schoppe jogged off with him, especially as he, by a well-adapted course of behavior, had contrived to get up an opposition party against himself in the Sphex family, which could no longer suffer him in the house. The Librarian's warmth toward the Count had grown very much with the Lector's coldness, and on similar grounds. The bold march out to Lilar and the passionate wildness of the youth had fastened him more closely to Albano's side. "I thought at first," said Schoppe, "the young man was coming to be nothing but an elderly one, when I saw him stalking along so to school. I often held the man in the moon—where notoriously, from an absence of thirst and atmosphere, there is nothing to drink—to be a greater tippler than he. But at last he strikes out. A youth must not, like old Spener, represent everything in bird's-eye perspective, from the apex downward. He must, in the beginning, like incipients in authors' studies and painters' studios, make all lines a little too large, because the little ones come of themselves. There are thunder-steeds, but no thunder-asses and thunder-sheep; as, however, the tutors and lectors would be glad if there were, and would be glad to have such to drive along before them,—they who, like the billiard-markers, suffer no open fire in the pipe, but only one under cover."
Albano lived alone now among books. Liana's brother came to him seldom, and then ice-cold, and said nothing of the patient, although he always stayed for her sake. As he himself had once woven the first web of her blindness, he must, of course, especially with his unpainted fire of love for his sister, have a real hatred for him who had drawn it over her again; so Albano thought, and gladly bore it as a punishment. So much the oftener did the Captain let himself be drawn to the German gentleman's, upon whose good graces he now, contrary to what was to be expected, always won. It is a question—that is to say, there can be no question—whether his talent and inclination for winding himself around the most unlike men was not mere coldness toward all hearts, all of which he only travels over, because he does not mean to dwell in any one.
Rabette, also, wrote the Count several bills of impeachment about the Captain's growing coolness. In one she even says, "Could I only see thee, in order for once to have some one who would let me weep, for laughter I have not for a considerable time any longer known." The good Albano entered this desertion also upon his sin-register, as if it were grandchild to his devil's children.
The Princess prevailed occasionally to allure him out of solitude, when she put the gentle bird-whistle to her fair lips. She seemed, for the father's sake, to take a veritable interest in the melancholy son, who showed no grief, to be sure, but also no joy. Besides, the masculine woman, more helmeted than hooded, loves to place the pillow of rest under the sick head, and under the faint head her arm as a chair-back; and such a one consoles fondly and tenderly, often more tenderly than the too feminine woman. Almost every day she visited her future court-dame and visionary sister[[19]] at the Minister's, and could therefore tell the lover all about her. Meanwhile, she acted as if she knew nothing of Albano's relations to the blind one;—the very dissembling betrays tender forbearance toward two beings at once, Albano said;—so she could freely give him all the medical reports of the fair sufferer's case, as well as the opinions entertained about her in general. After the manner of the strong women, she bestowed upon her all just praise, without any petty womanish deduction, and wished nothing so much as her restoration and future company.
"I am capable of doing everything for an uncommon woman, as well as everything against a common one," said she, and asked whether his father had already written him about her plan with Liana. He said no, and begged her for it. She referred him, however, to the paternal letter, which must soon come. She found fault only with Liana's propensity to be always embroidering fantasy-flowers into the groundwork of her life, and called her a rich Baroque pearl.
But from all these conversations Albano returned only more confused to Schoppe; he heard only lip-solace, and the death-sentence, that the long-suffering soul from whom he had stolen creation was becoming more and more immured in the deepest cavern of life, near which only the deeper one of the grave lies bright and open. Every soft, soothing, warm gale wafted to him by the sciences or by human beings passed over that cold cavern, and became to him a sharp norther. O, had he been called to release her from his sinking arms amidst lovely days, into a long, eternal Paradise, and had she forgotten him in the intoxication of rapture, he too could have forgotten that; but that he should have thrust her away into a cold realm of shadows, and that she must needs remember him for sorrow,—this must he forever remember.