"Heavens! why comest thou so late, and so pale?" asked Schoppe, who had been a long time in Albano's chamber, waiting for him. "O, ask me not to-day!" said Albano.
[TWENTY-THIRD JUBILEE.]
Liana.
95. CYCLE.
Ever did Schoppe let fly at himself more curses than on the morrow, during Albano's recital, and on this account, to be sure, that he had not stayed so as to arrest the Baldhead, the fly-wheel of so many ghostly movements, in the midst of the revolutions, by dashing right at the spokes. He earnestly besought the Count, at the next appearance, at least,—especially in Italy,—to tear off, without mercy, the Baldhead's mask, though life hung upon it. The youth had been moved too intensely by the events of the night. He therefore spoke of them reluctantly, and without dwelling upon them. As in him all sensations stirred more intensely and overpoweringly than in Roquairol, he had not, like him, pleasure in portraying them, but shrank from it. He looked up the little old likeness of his sister which his father had given him on the island. What a striking reflection of the nightly image in the mirror! This moss of age on a sister must have been artificially produced there, merely for the purpose of hiding the resemblance. The presumption of its being Julienne he gave up again, after the denial of the veiled one, and from the improbability of such a nocturnal performance, and postponed measuring the altitudes of all these incomprehensible airy apparitions till he should have the aid of his daily expected father.
Ah, over all his thoughts swept incessantly in vulture-circles a distant, dark form, the destroying angel, that would fain stoop greedily upon the helpless Liana! The staring stiffness of the corpse-seeress on the Blumenbühl road—especially since the sad billet of the Princess—now in the dark intersecting thicket paths, into which his life's course had entangled itself, danced on before him as a juggling phantom of terror.
A new and single resolve stood now in his soul like a rigid arm fast by the way-side, pointing ever in one direction, up the Blumenbühl road. "Thou must go to her," said the resolve; "she must not die in the delusive belief of thy anger and thy old severity; thou must see her again, to ask her pardon, and then shalt thou weep till her grave opens and takes her away." "O, how I then," he said to himself, "before the dying-throne of this angel, shall bruise with contrition my hard, haughty, wild heart, and take back everything, everything whereby I blinded and wounded the tender soul in Lilar, that she may not despise too much the short days of her love, and that her heart may at least part from me with one little farewell pleasure! And that, O God, grant us!"
In vain did Schoppe propose thereupon, that he should seek with him the business-office of the night-wonders, which so probably must be found in the Gothic-temple; this very day he would force his way into the presence of his pale loved one. Schoppe continued to insist vehemently on the visit to Lilar, and at last demanded it, and commanded compliance; but now it was a lost case, and Albano's refusal was panoplied. "Plague take it! why let myself, then, be boiled in these tear-pots?" said Schoppe, and marched out.
But after a short time he came back with a billet from—Gaspard, wherein the latter demanded for to-day relay-horses from the post-house, and with a proposition from himself that they should go to meet his father. How refreshingly did the nearness of his father breathe over Albano's sultry waste! Nevertheless, he said No the second time; his long willing and warring and every hour's lapse veiled Liana more and more darkly from him in her cloud, and he thought anxiously of his dream about her on Isola Bella;[[57]] and finally he had his suspicions aroused by Schoppe's holding him back so significantly.