conscience told him, and since she now alone was atoning for it, that
she was willing to sacrifice herself to him, even to him.
Inexpressibly did he hate the dead seducer, because by his act his
death had become only a cowardly flight. The poor deserter, whose
escape had been reported during the tragedy, he saw led along as a
prisoner before him; but his captain had escaped the hand of vengeance
forever. After some days papers of the dead were put into his hands;
but, full of abhorrence, he could not look on them. They contained
justifications, and at the same time additional sins. Roquairol had,
after the pleasure-night, spent the whole morning in the Prince's
garden writing, in order to color the remembrance, which alone (so he
wrote) had rewarded and satisfied him, that he had not that very night
played out the fifth act of the drama of life.
The Lector delivered in Albano's absence short letters from Julienne,
wherein she begged him to make his appearance, and appointed him place
and time at the castle, whither she had gone from Lilar. He went not.
Sometimes it seemed to him as if distant men tracking him stole round
him in wide circles.
Once at evening he was still standing at the foot of a woody hill, when
he espied overhead a wolf stalk out of the thicket; the wolf saw him,
sprang down upon him, and changed into Schoppe's wolf-dog. Soon his
friend himself, with an old man, stepped out from the trees above, saw
him, hurriedly gave the man money, and came down to him slower than he
went up to him. "Ah, a good evening, Albano," said Schoppe, with the
old coldness with which he spoke, when he did not write, and smiled at
the same time with so many lines and wrinkles that he appeared to
Albano altogether strange. Albano pressed him tightly to his heart, and
transformed the hot words which his friend did not love into hot tears.
It was an old star out of the spring morning when his Liana still lived
and loved; it had gone down before him on a grave in that night of his
journey; now it rose, and Albano was again unhappy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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