The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

I.--Liana

For many years Albano, the young Spanish Count Cesara, had lived within sight of the capital city of the state of Hohenfliess; yet he had never entered it--his mother, so his father told him, had shut it against him, desiring that he should be reared in the Carthusian monastery of rural life, not sullied in his youth by mingling with courtiers and men of the world.

And now the gates of Pestitz were open to him. Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where who knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, his beloved Liana may be standing?

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 Pestitz, 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 friendship 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 Blümenbuhl, 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 Passion-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 passions?

When Albano entered Pestitz, eager that his dreams of love and friendship 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 goddess, 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 passion had not been extinguished.

When Liana recovered her sight, she was sent to Blümenbuhl 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.