Namely, under so great a certainty that some earth-shadow had passed across her whole life, and would not stir, he must needs seek the body which cast it,—which was, in his mind, Gaspard, whom she, as he imagined, still loved. He carried this presumption back very reasonably through all her earlier conversations and looks. It was so natural that they who were at an earlier period separated by a throne should now, in this lovely land of free connections, long for each other again. Beside all this, the Knight had, according to his inexorable irony, received her show of courting him with show on his part,—that is to say, with seriousness,—and therefore always served himself up as a side-dish to her enjoyment of his son, and carried over an after-winter into the spring. This double show Albano recalled to himself as double truth.
Then, too, fate stepped in suddenly among his new conclusions. His father was taken dangerously sick of an unnerving spring-fever, caught from the sirocco-wind. "Take no special interest," said Gaspard to him, "either in my sufferings or expressions. I have, in such situations, a weakness which I am afterwards ashamed of, and yet cannot avoid." Albano was moved, by many an unexpected outbreak of the sick man's heart, even to the warmest love. If the ruins of a temple inspire melancholy, thought he, why shall not the ruins of a great soul affect me so still more? There are men full of colossal relics, like the earth itself. In their deep heart, already grown cold, lie fossil flowers of a fairer period; they resemble northern rocks, on which are found the impress of Indian flowers.
The sickness undermined itself. Gaspard remained without sympathy for himself; only his affairs, not his end, troubled him. He held private interviews with his step-father Lauria, by way of impressing the finishing black seal of justice on his life. An express must stand in readiness to fly, the moment after his death, with a letter to Linda; his son must himself break one open, and deliver a sealed one to the Princess. Very harshly and imperiously did he demean himself toward the son, when he demanded of him an oath, immediately after his death, to travel off to Pestitz; for when Albano, who so longed to see Naples, and upon whom all these conditions, presupposing his father's death, fell hard, hesitatingly declined, Gaspard said, "That is so really human and common, to bewail the pains of others immoderately, and sympathize with them sincerely, and yet ungraciously to sharpen them so soon as the smallest thing must be done." Albano gave his word and oath, and never let himself be seen by his father again, when he wept out of a child's love.
Unexpectedly there presented himself before this sickbed Gaspard's nearest and earliest kinsman, his brother. Albano stood by when the strange being came up and spake to the mortally sick man, and turned two stiff, glassy eyes, which looked as if they had been set in, quite away from him with whom he spake,—so fantastic, and yet full of the cold world toward his dying brother,—with loosely hanging face-skin upon significant face-bones,—a gray were-wolf on his hind legs, just charmed out of the beastly hide into the human skin,—like the destroying angel, a destroying man, and yet without passion. It stretched out toward Albano its long hand, but he, repelled by something unnamable, could not grasp it. This brother said he had come from Pestitz,—handed over two letters from there, one to Gaspard, one for the Princess,—and began to say something about his travels, which seemed uncommonly acute, fantastical, learned, incredible, and oft really unintelligible. Once Albano said, "That is a downright impossibility." He began the narration again, made it still more incredible, and insisted it was actually so. Thereupon he went away, to Greece, as he said, and took the coolest leave imaginable of his dying brother.
Gaspard now said to Albano, "I should like to have you, after my death, rightly estimate this strangeling, if he ever comes near you, or rather avoid him altogether, as he never says a true word, and that from a pure and disinterested delight in pure lies; still more," he continued, "shun the deep, deadly scorpion-sting of Bouverot, as well as his cheating hand at play." Albano was surprised at the aspect of this speech (agreeably so at its moral sharpness), for he had hitherto imagined that he found in his father quite other sentiments regarding Bouverot.
The next day he found his father already with his foot on the steps to come up out of the tomb. The express had been discharged,—all letters remanded,—the Prince Lauria stood there with beaming face. "Simply another's sickness has cured me of mine," said the father. The letter which his brother had brought him from Pestitz had contained the intelligence that his old friend, the reigning Prince, was swiftly approaching his last hour, because they had held his dropsy to be embonpoint, and had delayed the treatment of it. "I hope," said Gaspard, "to have been so wholesomely agitated by my sympathies in this matter, that I shall still be able to make the journey in season for the last hour of friendship." He added, that then this journey would make way again for Albano's to Naples.
Then came the Princess in consternation about the letter, which announced her husband's danger and her own departure. Gaspard answered by giving his son a hint expressive of his desire for a private interview with her. They remained alone together for a long time. At last the Princess came back quite changed, and begged him, with almost stammering hesitation, to accompany her to the opera seria. She was moved and embarrassed, her eyes glistening, her features inspired; his father, too, he found excited, but apparently strengthened.
Here a long beam of noonday shot through his whole previous labyrinthine wood, namely, the confirmed presumption of his father's love, which now, through the approaching dissolution of the marriage chain of the Princess, and in the debility of sickness had broken out more strongly; hence Gaspard's letter to the Princess, hence their keeping together in Rome and on the way thither, &c.
Never did Albano love his energetic father more than after this discovery of a tender sentiment; and toward the Princess his heart now grew from a friend to be all at once a son. Besides, as among the five prizes of hereditary human love he had gained only one,—a father (no mother, no brother, no sister, and no child),—so was he filled with this new delight at the gain of a mother. All that respect could do, warmth express, and hope betray, he indulged.
It was a night when in Rome spring already threw flowers again through the clouds of winter. At the theatre they gave Mozart's Tito. How on a foreign soil is one carried away by a strain from one's native land, which has followed him hither! The lark that sings over Roman ruins exactly as over German fields is the dove which, with her well-known song, brings us the olive-branch from our native land. Up to this time, Albano, on the Alpine road over ruins, had sent his eye eagerly forward only along the future race-ground of war, and had seldom raised it toward the heaven where the glorified Liana was, and he had forcibly dashed away every rising tear. But now his sick father had lifted the curtain of the bed under the ground where her remains slept; now did the clear stream of tones which had passed through the lands of his youth and his paradises come all at once strongly over the mountains, and murmur down so near to him with its old waters. At first his spirit defended itself against the old, slumbering days, which spoke in their sleep; but when at length the tones which Liana herself had once played and sung before him came across over the bier of the mountains, and hung down as shining tapestries of golden days,—when he reflected what hours he and Liana might have found here, but had not found,—then his dark grief ran up the scale of tones as an evil, plundering genius, and Albano saw his dreadful loss stand clearly in heaven. Then he turned not his eye toward the Princess, but in the consecration of music pressed the hand by which the departed saint was once to have come into these fields. By and by he said, "I shall, in the rich Naples, long more and more after my only female friend, and envy the happy man who is permitted to accompany her." She fell into great emotion at this new intelligence of his intended separation, and into a still greater at his passionate transformation, which she knew how to deduce, with the richest dowry for her tenderest hopes, from her departure, and even the approaching departure of her spouse. But she concealed the greater emotion behind the lesser. They parted from each other with mutual joys and errors. Albano was made more and more happy by the improvement of his father's health; the Princess was made so by the increase of the son's warmth, and her life mounted out of the ship of war into an express-balloon, an air-vessel winged with tidings of peace. Thus did both approach closer and closer to the curtain, whose pictures they took for the scenery of the stage itself, only to be so much the more astonished when it rose.