The World's Greatest Books - Volume 7 Part 25

Gaspard, Count Cesara, Knight of the Fleece, had met his son, for the first time in Albano's memory, at Lake Maggiore, and Albano had come away from the meeting with a feeling of chill that poisoned his heart, eager as it was to love and be loved, and a vague, discomposing sense that in his birth there was a mystery. But the thought of his father's coldness, all thoughts that troubled and confused, were forgotten on his entry into Pest.i.tz, in the eager hope of seeing Liana, his beloved, and his friend, her brother, Charles Roquairol; for neither his beloved nor her brother had he ever yet in his life beheld.

The love and the friends.h.i.+p were of the imagination, and the imagination was begotten of the accounts given by Von Falterle, the accomplishments-master of Albano in the village of Blumenbuhl, and of his former pupil Liana, daughter of the Minister von Froulay. It was his wont to paste up long altar-pieces of Liana's charms, charms which her father had sought to enhance by means of delicate and almost meagre fare, by shutting up his orangery, whose window he seldom lifted off from this flower of a milder clime--until she had become a tender creature of pastil-dust, which the gusts of fate and monsoons of climate could almost blow to pieces. In Albano's silent heart, therefore, there was to be seen a saintly image of Liana, the ascending Raphael's Mary, but, like the pictures of the saints in Pa.s.sion-week, hanging behind a veil.

And as for her brother, the madcap Roquairol, who in his thirteenth year had shot at himself with suicidal intent because the little Countess Linda de Romeiro, Albano's father's ward, had turned her back upon him, could our hero's admiration be withheld from a youth of his own age who already possessed all the accomplishments and had tasted all the pa.s.sions?

When Albano entered Pest.i.tz, eager that his dreams of love and friends.h.i.+p should be realised, the aged Prince of Hohenfliess had just departed this life, and Liana, intimate friend of the Princess Julienne, daughter of the dead prince, was smitten with temporary blindness, due to emotion and consequent headache. Albano first beheld her in the garden of her father, the minister, standing in the glimmer of the moon.

The blest youth saw irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, and the delicate proportions, which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form. Thou too fortunate man!--to whom the only visible G.o.ddess, Beauty, appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence!

Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty heaven?

The inauguration of the new prince was held--of the enfeebled Prince Luigi--upon whose expected speedy decease the neighbouring princely house of Haarkaar founded its hopes of acquiring the dominions of Hohenfliess. It was on the night of an inauguration ball that Albano, having poured out his heart to Roquairol in a letter, met his long-hoped-for friend, and sealed their affections by declaring that he would never wed Linda de Romeiro, whom it was thought Count Gaspard had designed for his son's bride, and for whom Roquairol's youthful pa.s.sion had not been extinguished.

When Liana recovered her sight, she was sent to Blumenbuhl for restoration of health--to the home of Albano's foster-father, the provincial-director Wehrfritz. Thither often came Albano; thither also came Roquairol, to bask in the wondering admiration that Rabette, Albano's foster-sister, bestowed on him with all the fervour of her innocent rural mind. Albano's dream was fulfilled; he loved Liana in realty as he had loved her in imagination. Roquairol thought he loved Rabette; in truth, her simplicity was to this experienced conqueror of feminine hearts but a new and, for the moment, overmastering sensation.

On a glorious evening Albano and Liana stood on a sloping mountain-ridge; overhead was a heaven filled with a life-intoxicated, tumultuous creation, as the sun-G.o.d stalked away over his evening-world.

He seized Liana's hands and pressed them wildly to his breast; flames and tears suffused his eyes and his cheeks, and he stammered, "Liana, I love thee!"

She stepped back, and drew her white veil over her face.

"Wouldst thou love the dead?" she said.

He knew her meaning. Her friend Caroline, whom she had loved and who had died, had appeared in a vision, and announced that she would die in the next year.

"The vision was not true!" cried Albano.

"Caroline, answer him!" Liana folded her hands as if in prayer; then she raised the veil, looked at him tenderly, and said, in a low tone, "I will love thee, good Albano, if I do not make thee miserable."

"I will die with thee!" said he.

Charles appeared with Rabette; he, also, had spoken frantic words of love, and Rabette clung around him compa.s.sionately, as a mother around her child.

A few more days of joyous life at Blumenbuhl, and Liana returned to her home at Pest.i.tz. Then for weeks Albano saw nothing of her, heard nothing of her. Liana was in sore trouble. Her father had disapproved of the match; what mattered much more to her, her mother also. The mother's opposition was on the quite decisive ground that she could not endure Albano.

The Minister von Froulay had more specific reasons for his hostility-- the most specific of all being that he had designed his daughter for one Bouverot, a disreputable court intriguer, his leaning towards Bouverot being based on financial liabilities, and stimulated by financial expectations. The minister's lady detested Bouverot, but in desiring separation between Liana and Albano, she was her husband's ally. Behold, then, Liana torn between duty towards her mother and love for Albano.

Once Albano saw her, but heard no explanation. The prince was wedded to the Princess of Haarbaar, and it was at a wedding festivity in the grounds of the pleasure palace of Lilar that Albano looked upon his beloved. But she was pledged for the time to tell him nothing, and she told him nothing. The princess looked curiously at her, for Liana exactly resembled the princess's younger sister, the philanthropic Idoine, who devoted herself to the idyllic happiness of her peasantry in the Arcadian village that it was her whim to rule.

To the aged and saintly court chaplain, Spener, Liana at last brought her perplexities. Here the history moves in veils. How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano for ever is a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the oath she swore to him.

On the next day Albano was summoned, and stood with quivering lips before the beloved.

"I am true to you--even unto death," she said; "but all is over."

He looked upon her, wild, wondering.

"I have resigned you," she said; "and my parents are not to blame. There is a mystery that has constrained me--"

"Oh, G.o.d!" he cried. "Is it thus with external fidelity and love?" In whirling, cruel pa.s.sion he pictured his love, her coldness, his pain, her violated oath.

"I did not think thou wert so hard," she said. "Oh, it grows dark to me; let me to my mother!"

Albano gazed into the groping, timid face, and guessed all--her blindness had returned!

The mother rushed up. "May G.o.d bring you retribution for this!" cried Albano to her. "Farewell, unhappy Liana!"

For many days Albano lived without love or hope, in bitter self-reproach; every recollection darted into him a scorpion-sting. And to him in his agony came the tormenting news that the fickle Roquairol had deserted Rabette. He drove the false one from his presence; sister and brother, beloved and friend, were now utterly lost to him.

At length he learned that Liana had recovered her sight, and that she was dying. Once more, for the last time, he was admitted to her presence. She reclined in an easy-chair, white-clad, with white, sunken cheeks.

"Welcome, Albano!" she said feebly, but with the old smile. "Some day thou wilt know why I parted from thee. On this, my dying day, I tell thee my heart has been true to thee." She handed him a sheet with a sketch she had made with trembling hand of the n.o.ble head of Linda de Romeiro. "It is my last wish that them shouldst love her," she said.

"She is more worthy of thee."

"Ah, forgive, forgive!" sobbed Albano.

"Farewell, beloved!" she said calmly, while her feeble hand pressed his.

For a while she was silent. Suddenly she said, with a low tone of gladness, "Caroline! Here, here, Caroline! How beautiful thou art!"

Liana's fingers ceased to play; she lay peaceful and smiling, but dead.

_II.--Linda De Romeiro_

Albano's state for a long time was one of fever. He lay dressed in bed, unable to walk, in a burning heat, talking wildly, and as each hour struck on the clock, springing up to kneel down and utter the prayer, "Liana, appear, and give me peace!" to the high, shut-up heavens.

"Poor brother!" said Schoppe the librarian, his old preceptor and dear friend. "I swear to thee thou shalt get thy peace to-day."

He went to Linda de Romeiro, now in Pest.i.tz after long wandering, and placed his design before her. Would the Princess Idoine, Liana's likeness, appear before Albano as a vision and give him peace? Linda consented to plead with Idoine. But Idoine made a difficulty. It was not the unusualness and impropriety of the thing that she dreaded, but the untruthfulness and unworthiness of playing false with the holy name of a departed soul, and cheating a sick man with a superficial similarity.

At length Idoine gave her decision. "If a human life hangs upon this, I must conquer my feeling."

As eight o'clock struck, Albano knelt in the dusk, crying, "Peace, peace!"

Idoine trembled as she heard him; but she entered, clothed in white, the image of the dead Liana.

"Albano, have peace!" she said, in a low and faltering tone.

"Liana!" he groaned, weeping.

"Peace!" cried she more strongly, and vanished.

"I have my peace now, good Schoppe," said Albano softly, "and now I will sleep."

Time gradually unfolded Albano's grief instead of weakening it. His life had become a night, in which the moon is under the earth, and he could not believe that Luna would gradually return with an increasing bow of light. Not joys, but only actions--those remote stars of night--were now his aim. As he travelled with his father in Italy after his recovery, the news of the French Revolution gave an object to his eagerness.

"Take here my word," he wrote to Schoppe, "that as soon as the probable war of Gallic freedom breaks out I take my part decidedly in it, for it."

But at Ischia, Albano was dazzled by a wonder; he saw Linda de Romeiro.

When she raised her veil, beauty and brightness streamed out of a rising sun; delicate, maidenly colours, lovely lines and sweet fullness of youth played like a flower garland about the brow of a G.o.ddess, with soft blossoms around the holy seriousness and mighty will on brow and lip, and around the dark glow of the large eye.