"Certainly I will speak softly," said the Princess, who, much more sensitive and resonant than Linda, had some trouble in tuning her tone of speech to her promise; "nothing further is needed than the consideration that our quarrel is premature; I make merely the request to adjourn it till October, and the promise that then the issue will be quite different." "O let it be!" said Albano. Linda nodded softly and slowly, and, contrary to expectation, laid his hand with both hers on her heart, and looked upon him weeping, with her large eyes, to which fire was more usual than water. He was melted at beholding that this powerful nature had only intensity without hate or wrath, and infinitely was he refreshed by his former secret suppression of his passionate flames.
The sister was softened by both, and a minute of the tenderest love soon entwined the three beings in one embrace. The hyperboles of anger are never so serious with man as those of love; the former only the other party must believe, the latter he believes himself. All had been brightened and cleared up by this free expression.
If generally a cold past moment shuts up to lovers, as a cold night does to bees, the flowers out of which they take the honey, here, however, after the storm, the clear blue air of heaven had become purer and stiller, and the tranquillity became bliss, as the bliss tranquillity. Through Albano, although rapidly, the Fury of fear had passed, who holds an inverted telescope, and through it shows man a very distant, empty heaven, without stars. But not so through Linda; she had throughout spoken in love and hope, and for her glowing heart there were no icy places. Therefore was he now so happy and so blessed by the contemplation of that vigorous nature! A long, deep chain of valleys, wherein wine and oil flowed in the fragrance of blossoms, led them all towards the great Rome. For a space the youth could accompany them; at last, for a long separation, he must tear heart and eye away from the loved ones, when over the green, glistening vales the mighty dome of St. Peter's already sparkled, and the cypresses, proudly encircled only with cypresses, bore the gold of evening on their twigs without stirring them. All had their eyes on the fair Rome, but their hearts were only on Isola Bella, where they promised to find each other again.
117. CYCLE.
On the way to Isola Bella, he thought of his hour of contention with the vehement Linda, and the character of this war-goddess. He shuddered at the very recollection of the steep precipice upon which, within a few days, he had leaned so far over; for Linda is so decided, knows no alternative between passion and annihilation. And yet, in this time of cool reflection, he felt her imperious demand upon his liberty more severely than ever, and said to himself, firmly, "Woman must not be allowed to circumscribe or rule the holy domain of man's development." On the other hand, it was, to be sure, all love, and an excess of it; and the longer he journeyed and compared, so much the darker and lonelier was it on that spot of his life upon which she alone cast the great flame. She moved before him much more clearly and nearly in spirit by his still contemplation of her spirit, than in bodily presence, because the former presented her at once in harmony, the latter with the individual dissonances without the solution. Her power of all-sided impartiality towards all characters had appeared to him, for a woman, quite as rare as it was great, especially as he himself let this power work more in the shape of respect for her and in a glad, free appreciation of great, eccentric, poetical manifestations, but not of all, even the flat and the worthless.
Alike mighty and full-grown stood Love and Liberty within him, side by side. They were bound together and reconciled only by a new resolution to be gentle, not merely strong, to lay before her with all frankness his right of freedom and his loving soul, and to be to her the noble character which belonged to her. "Am I not such, if I really will it?" said he.
In the highest joy of life, in perfect oneness with himself and destiny, he made his journey to Isola Bella as rapidly as if he were going to find there a beloved, instead of merely awaiting one. How many a thing seemed now smaller along his road, to which he applied the Roman measure, and not the German, and before which he now, as his father had foretold him, passed along flying!
At last he saw the artificial Alp of Isola Bella standing in the waves, and disembarked joyfully with his teacher, Dian, in the garden of childhood, where he was to expect so much, and, with fresh Italian life-blossoms on his heart, bid farewell to the land of promise.
He waited several long days, yearning and anxious for his two friends, although his sunny companion was always reminding him to make allowance for the rapidity of his own journey. His determination to be gentle grew continually more and more unnecessary and involuntary. The very island itself, with its springs born of perfumes and with the distant garland of Alps, melted his soul. In the former year he had seen it more in leaves than in blossoms. It was, indeed, his land of childhood. From many places on the lake stars glimmered up to him out of a deep, early, after-midnight hour of life. Here had he for the first time found his father, and for the first time seen Linda's form across the waters; here he finds and loses them again, after the longest separation, for a still longer one; and here he stands in the gateway between north and south. The free, fragrant land, full of islands, the Jacob's-ladder of his life mounts back into the ether, and he goes down into a cold region full of constraint and eyewitnesses; his love is judged by his father, it is assailed by the downfallen friend. "Ye days in Ischia," he sighed, "ye hours in Vesuvius and in Tivoli, can you reverse your course? can you ever come back again and overflow anew the insatiable heart, that it may drink, and say, 'It is enough'?"
To his Dian, as if by way of justifying himself and his illimitable longing, he spoke frequently of Chariton and their children, and asked him how it was with his heart when he thought of them. "Don't talk to me so much of them," said he, after his manner, feeling more than he suspected or betrayed, "we are still so cruelly far off from them; one only spoils one's journey without cause. But when I have them all.... Well, ah God!" Then he paused, snatched the youth to his arms, and did not kiss him.