She must needs disclose to him her full heart, and tell him all. He
heard with astonishment, how that whole Tartarus-night, on which the
unknown voice had promised Linda de Romeiro to his friend, had been made
known to her. By whom? She held an inexorable silence; he contented
himself, because, to be sure, it could only have been Augusti, who was
the only one that knew of it. "And now believest thou, thou heart from
heaven," said he, "that I and the brother of my soul could ever separate
by robbing each other? O, it is all otherwise, all otherwise! He curses
the mock-spirits and the object of the mimicry. O he loves me; and my
heart will rejoice in the day when it is his!" The touching ambiguity of
these last words dissolved him in a sacred melancholy.
But she, in the midst of the heartiest overflow of feeling, took part,
as if out of piety, with the spirits, and said: "Speak not thus of
spiritual apparitions! They exist, that I know,--only one needs not fear
them." Here, however, with firm hand she held fast the veil over her
experiences; he too had known long since, that, notwithstanding her most
tremblingly delicate feelings, which shrunk even from the sight of the
blue veins on the lily hand, as from a wound, she had appeared
unexpectedly courageous before the dead and in the ghostly hours of
fantasy.
Behind the waves of so different an emotion which now drove his heart up
and down, Rabette was eclipsed. He burned now only for the hour when he
could tell his Albano the singular treachery of the Lector.
61. CYCLE.
Even before the Captain disclosed to his friend Augusti's probable
treachery, Albano was almost entirely at variance with his two tutors.
In a circle full of young hearts which beat for one another, and still
more fondly fight for one another, two always take an indissoluble hold
of each other, and become one at others' expense.
Albano boldly broke with every one whom Charles displeased. Besides,
Schoppe had long been loved by few, because few can endure a perfectly
free man; the flower-chains hold better, they think, when galley-chains
run through them. He, therefore, could not bear it, when one "with too
close a love clambered up round him so tightly that he had the freedom
of his arms no more than if he wore them in bandages of eighty
heads."[164] The sarcastic liveliness of his pantomime chilled the
Captain, by having the appearance of a somewhat stricter observation,
more than did the composed face of the Lector, who from that very
circumstance took everything more sharply into his still eye.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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