"Thy Friend, Or Thy Foe."
89. CYCLE.
"My foe!" cried Albano. The second hot pain darted from Heaven into his life, and the lightning-flash blazed up fiercely again. As a heartless carcass of the former friendship, Roquairol had been thrown at his feet; and he felt the first hatred. That poison-mixing of sensual and spiritual debauchery, that fermenting-vat of the dregs of the senses and the scum and froth of the heart,—that conspiracy of lust and bloodthirstiness, and against the same guiltless heart,—that spiritual suicide of the affections, which left behind only an airy, roaming spectre, ever changing its forms of incarnation, upon which there no longer remains any dependence, and which a brave man already begins to hate for the very reason that he cannot lay hold of this yielding poison-cloud and give it battle,—all this seemed to the Count, who, without the transitions and mezzotintos of habit and fancy, had been ushered over out of the former light of friendship into this evening-twilight, still blacker than it was. Beside the superficial wound which his family pride received in the maltreatment of his sister, came the deep, poisonous one that Roquairol should compare him with himself, and Liana's ruin with Rabette's. "Villain!" said he, gnashing his teeth; even the least shadow of resemblance seemed to him a calumny.
Most assuredly Roquairol had miscalculated upon him, and set out his poetic self-condemnation too much on the reckoned strength of a poetic sentence from the judge. As in an uproar one unconsciously speaks louder, so he, when fancy with her cataracts thundered around him, did not justly know what he cried and how strongly. As he often, to be sure, found less that was black in himself than he depicted, so he presumed that another must find even still less than he himself. He had, too, in his poetic and sinful intoxication, made for himself at last the moral dial-plate itself movable, so that it went with the index; in this confusion it was never indicated to him where innocence was.
Had he foreseen that his epistolary confessions would bound and rebound in more hostile corners than his oral ones did aforetime, he would have prepared them otherwise.
For agitation Albano could not directly write the short parting-letter—not a challenge—to the abandoned one, but delayed, in the certainty that the Captain would not come himself,—when all at once he came. For procrastination he could not bear; bodily and spiritual wounds he received as theatrical ones; too much accustomed to win men, he too easily brought himself to lose men. A terrible apparition for Albano; it was but the long coffin of his murdered favorite set upright!—that now over that powerfully-angular face, once the stronghold of their souls, furrows of weeds should wind, that this mouth, which friendship had so often laid upon his, should have become a plague-cancer, a concealing rose to the tongue-scorpion for the good Rabette when she approached so trustingly,—to see and think of that was clear anguish.
Hardly audible were greeting and thanks; silently they walked up and down, not beside but against each other. Albano sought to get the mastery over his wrath, so as to say nothing but the words: "Begone from me, and let me forget thee!" He meant to spare Liana in her brother, who had reproached him with being sacrificial-knife to her; unjust suspicions keep us better in the time immediately following, because we are not willing to let them grow into just ones. "I am candid, thou seest," Roquairol began, with moderation, because his ebullitions had been half distilled and dropped away from the point of his pen; "be thou so, too, and answer the letter." "I was thy friend,—now, no more," said Albano, choking. "I have not surely done anything to thee," was the reply.
"Heavens! Let me not say much," said Albano. "My miserable sister,—my innocence of the coming of the Countess,-my wretched, abandoned sister! O God! drive me not to frenzy,—I respect thee no more, and so go!"
"Then fight!" said the Captain, half drunk with emotion and half with wine. "No," said Albano, drawing in a long breath, as if for a sigh of indignation; "to thee nothing is sacred, not so much as a life!" This pupil of death so easily threw after his own life-days and joys and plans all those of another into the tomb with them; that was what Albano meant, and thought of the sick Liana, so easily dying of others' wounds; love (instead of friendship) had passed along like a soothing woman before his provoked soul; but the foe misunderstood him.
"Thou must," said the Captain, wildly mocking; "thine shall be precious to me!"