Albano felt, at the expression of this new female love, that woman was the human heart in the fairest form. Within him rang a glad melody,—"What a day lies before thee, and what years!" Sweetly entwined and overspun with a canopy of double love-blossoms, he saw life and earth full of fragrance and light; over the morning dew of youth a sun had now been ushered up, and the dark drops glistened up and down through all gardens.
He cast, at length, a glance at the place which surrounded him. Niobe's group, the Genius of Turin, Cupid, and Psyche, stood there in casts, borrowed from the cabinet of an artist in Naples. The walls were decorated with rare pictures, among which was—Schoppe sneezing. This alone rushed with the northern past mightily into his softened heart, and he expressed his feeling to his beloved. "You," said she, "prefer friendship to art, for that portrait is the worst in my collection; but the original deserves, indeed, all regard."
She went into the cabinet, and brought out a miniature likeness of herself, which represented her, after the Turkish fashion, veiled, and with only one eye uncovered. How livingly beside the twilight of the veil did the open, soul-speaking eye look and strike! How did the flame of its might burn through the covering of mildness! Linda named the master of the magnificent picture, that very Schoppe, and added, he had said in this case the master must, out of reciprocal complaisance, himself praise a work which praised him more partially and powerfully than any other work of his ever had. She explained this difference of his pencil by another cause, which he had stated to her almost in these words: he had, he said, in his earliest youth, loved her mother as long as he had seen her, and afterwards never any one again; and therefore he had, as she resembled her mother, painted her con amore, and really striven to bring out something.
"O, honest old man!" said Albano, and could hardly keep tears out of the eyes which so often were happy. But it was only the holy pang of friendship; for there darted through him at last, like a beam of lightning through the clearest sky, a presumption made certain by everything,—by Schoppe's diary and Linda's words and Rabette's letter,—that Linda was the soul whom the singular being secretly loved. A sharp pain cut hastily but deeply through his brow; and he conquered himself only by his present younger freshness of spirit, by newly gathered power and force, and by the free thought that a friend may well and easily give up and sacrifice to his friend a loved one, but cannot or dares not so easily surrender one who loves him.
Julienne said, "The only wonder is that my brother, between two such fantastical beings as this Schoppe and Roquairol, has not himself become one of the same feather." A running fire broke out. Linda said, "Schoppe is only a southern nature in conflict with a northern climate." "Properly with life itself," said Albano. Julienne simply remarked, "I love always rules in life; with neither of them is one ever tranquil and à son aise, but only à leur aise." She asked him at once about Roquairol. "He was once my friend, and I speak of him no more," said Albano, whose tongue was tied by the ruined favorite's torturing love for Linda, and even his relationship to Liana. Linda glided over the subject with the mere verdict that he was an overstrained weakling, and without special mention of his love for her or of her abhorrence of him. She quite as coldly forgot at a distance every one who was repulsive to her inner being as she did vehemently thrust him off when he was near.
Julienne withdrew to make arrangements for the little day's journey over the island. Albano despatched a note to Dian, containing the marche-route to Naples. Linda said, in respect to Julienne, "A deeply and firmly grounded character!" "The stem and twigs all buried in little fragrant blossoms!" he added. "And exactly what she hates in books and conversations,—poesy,—that she pursues right earnestly in action. Individuality is everywhere to be spared and respected, as the root of everything good. You, too, are very good," she added, with soft voice. "Truly, I am so at present," said he; "for I love right heartily; and only a complete being can one really love, and with entire disinterestedness."
"So must the sun's image strike full and round, in order to burn." "Or an image which one takes for it," said she; "I am what I am, and cannot easily become anything else. If man has only a will once for all, which goes through life, not alternating from minute to minute, from being to being, that is the main thing." "Linda," cried Albano, "I hear my own soul. There are words which are actions; yours are." When she thus spoke out her soul, her beautiful form vanished from before his enchanted spirit, as the golden string vanishes when it begins to sound. Wounded and punished by the past for his often hard energy, he breathed only with a gentle breath—although now life, the world, and the very region made him bolder, brighter, firmer, and more ardent—upon the unisonant Æolian strings of this many-toned soul. But how must she have been charmed with a man at once so mighty and so tender,—a soft constellation of near suns,—a beautiful war-god with the lyre,—a storm-cloud full of Aurora,—a spirited, ardent youth, whose thought was so honest! She said it not, however, but simply loved, like him.
He threw an accidental glance at her little table-library. "Nothing but French!" said she. He found Montaigne, the life of Guyon, the Contrat Social, and, last of all, Madame de Staël sur l'Influence des Passions. He had read this, and said how infinitely pleased he had been with the articles upon love, parties, and vanity, and, in short, with her German or Spanish heart of fire, but not with her bald French philosophy, least of all with her immoral suicide-mania. "Good Heaven!" cried Linda; "is not life itself a long suicide? Albano, all men are still somewhere or other pedants, the good in morality so called, and you especially. Maxims of Kant, great, broad classifications, principles, must they all have. You are all born Germans, real Germans of the Germans, even you, friend. Am I right?" she added, softly, as if she desired a "yes."
"No," said Albano, "so soon as a man once pursues and desires anything right earnestly and exclusively, then he is called a coxcomb or a pedant." "O you everlasting readers and readeresses!" cried Julienne, stepping in and seeing him with a book in his hand. "Never has the Princess read preface or note," said Linda, "as I have never yet let any one go." Women who read prefaces and notes are of some significance; with men, at most the opposite were true. "We can set out; all is ready," said Julienne.