"What were all beside?" said he. "The flat regions of life in general pass by without a memorial; from many a long past no echo reverberates, because no mountain breaks the broad surface! But Rome and this hour with you will live within us forever."
"Albano," said she, "why must we find each other so late and part so early? Yonder goes your way along by the Tiber,—God grant into no devouring sea!"
"And yonder goes yours over the bright mountains," said he. She took his hand, for his tone expressed and excited so much emotion. Divinely gleamed the world from the dark spring flowers even up to the lofty Capitol, and the bells sounded down the hours; the festal fires of day blazed on all heights; life was broad and high as the prospect; his eye stood under a tear,—no sad one, however, but such a tear as when the world's eye glances sunnily under the water, and has higher hues, which the dry world destroys. He pressed her hand, she his. "Princess, friend," said he, "how I esteem you! After this holy hour we separate. I would fain give you a sign that shall not pass away, and say a bold word to my father, which should express myself and my respect, and which, perhaps, might solve many a riddle."
Her eye fell, and she merely said, "May you venture?" "O forbid it not!" said he; "so many a divine bliss has been lost by one hour's hesitation. When shall man act extraordinarily, then, except in extraordinary situations?" She was silent, awaiting the morning-sound of love, and in a continued pressure of hands they went down from the lofty place. Alban's being was a trembling flame. The Princess comprehended not why he still deferred this spring-tone; no more did he see through her, unskilled in reading women and their broken words, those picture-poems, half form and only half speech. Just as if an eagle had flown down from his morning splendor, and, as a predatory genius, flapped his wings over his eyes; so had the flashing morn dazzled him so exceedingly that he meant to venture, now in the parting hour, to be mediator between his father and the Princess, by a word which should take away the partition-wall between their loves. His delicacy made many an objection against this proceeding, but when a weighty object was in sight, there was nothing he so abhorred as quailing caution; and daring he held to be worth as much to a man as winning.
The Princess, misunderstanding, but not mistrusting, followed him into his father's house with an expectation—bolder than his—that he would perhaps actually confess to the Knight his love for her. They found the father alone and very serious. Albano, although aware of his aversion to bodily signs of the heart, fell on his neck with the half-choked words of the wish: "Father! a mother!" To this childlike relation had his previous feelings raised and refined themselves. "Heavens, Count!" cried the Princess, astounded and enraged at Albano's assumed insinuation. The Knight, sparkling with wrath, and full of horror, seized a pistol, saying, "Unlucky—" but before one knew at which of the three he would shoot it off, his numbness seized and held him like a coiling snake imprisoned in a murderous embrace. "Count, did I understand you?" said the Princess, flinging the word at him, indifferent toward the petrified foe. "O God," said Albano, moved by the sight of the paternal form, "I meant no one!" "None were capable of that," said she, "but a base creature. Farewell. May I never meet you again!" So saying, she went off.
Albano stayed, unconcerned as to whether he himself was not meant by the pistol at the side of the sick man, who had stiffened exactly opposite to a man's corpse across the way which they were just busied in painting. Gradually life wrestled again out of winter, and the Knight, as cataleptics must, finished the address which he had begun with the word "Unlucky—" "woman, of whom art thou mother?" He came to himself and looked wakefully around; but soon the lava of wrath ran again through his snow: "Unlucky boy, what was the talk about?" Albano disclosed to him, with innocent soul, that he had cherished the hope, in the probable event of the Prince's death, of a union between his father and the Princess, and for himself, of the good fortune of having a mother.
"You young people always imagine one cannot have any genuine love without carrying it out and directing it to some one," replied Gaspard, and began to laugh hard and to find something very comic in the "sentimental misunderstanding"; but Albano asked him now very seriously about the origin of his misunderstanding. Gaspard gave him the following account: Lately, in his sickness, he had, upon the first news of the Prince's approaching death, a desperate battle with the Princess, who in the event of this death desired a regency,—or guardianship,—even on the bare ground of the possibility of an heir to the princely hat. The Knight said to her decidedly this possibility was an impossibility, and he would, without further preamble, attack her with new proofs yet unknown to her. He gave her directly to understand that he was even armed against the case of an ocular demonstration of the contrary (a Hereditary Prince) being presented to him. The Princess replied with bitterness, she could not conceive why he need in the least concern himself any more about the Haarhaar line and succession, or take any more care for it than for that of Hohenfliess. He brought her even to tears, for he could unsparingly hurl the most barbarous words, like harpoons, deep into her heart; he had the perfect resolution of a statesman, who, like a great bird of prey, drives the victim, which he can neither conquer nor draw away, to a precipice, and beats it over the brink with his wings, in order that he may find it subdued for him down below. A life which even as it passes away, like the sinking glaciers, discovers old corpses! Just as the happy one spreads out his love of an individual warmingly over humanity, so does the misanthrope hold the stinging focus (or freezing-point) of his broad and general coldness toward humanity at one great foe alone, whereas previously every smaller offence was forgiven the individual, and imputed only to mankind in a mass.
This, then, was that secret interview whose traces Albano had taken for fairer emotions than of hatred. "And now," said the Knight openly, in order to punish his high feeling with cutting impudence, "when thou madest to me the concise and obscure speech: 'A mother!' I could not but take thee for the father, and from this thou mayst easily explain the rest." "Father," said he, "that was a crying injustice to each"; and departed with three hot wounds, torn in him by the trident of fate. At his departure Gaspard reminded him to keep his word of returning in a month, and added jokingly, that the old man whom they were painting over yonder was a German gentleman, with whom he once carried on the joke of a sudden conversion.[[87]]
Before an hour Albano was travelling with his Dian out of the illuminated Rome. The blue heavens, floating down, undulated on the heights and on the dome of St. Peter's, and long shadows, begemmed with pearls of dew, still slept on the flowers; but the blessed morn had flown far back out of the hard day. They met before the gate a circular crowd, who stood around the beautiful form of one murdered, and who repeated, with a pleased expression, over the prostrate body, instead of casting the word with indignation in the teeth of the murderer, "Quanto e' bello!"[[88]] And Albano thought how often they had exclaimed behind his back, "Quanto e' bello!"
