Part 30

Beata had not quite so dangerous a midnight or after-midnight; but I will despatch his first. He arrived with the Resident Lady at her apartment. He could not and would not tear himself away from to-day's scenes. This room represented to him all that had passed there, and in the strings of the harpsichord lurked a far-distant and beloved voice, and behind the foil of the mirror a far-distant and beloved form. Longing attached itself as a dark flower to the variegated festoon of joy: the Resident Lady gained a new charm by this dark flower also. She was not one of the coquettes who seek to move the senses before the heart; she fell upon this first with the whole array of her charms and from this afterward, as into an enemy's country, carried the war in to them. She herself was not to be conquered otherwise than according to her own tactics. If women of the upper class, like epigrams, are divisible into those that have wit and those that have sensibility, she resembled rather the Greek than the Gallic sententious poem, though the resemblance to the Greek grew daily less. The May air of her earlier life had once wafted a white blossom of noble love to her heart, as a blossom-leaf often comes fluttering down into the midst of the macerated feathers or flower-brilliants of a lady's hat--but her station soon metamorphosed her bosom into a _pot pourri_, on which are painted flowers of love and within a decaying heap of leaves. All her missteps kept, however, within those narrower and fairer limits to which the invisible hand of an _inextinguishable_ sentiment restricted them. This sentiment the Minister's Lady had never had, and the tablets of her heart grew more and more soiled the more she wrote upon them and rubbed out again. The latter could never possibly delude a noble man; the former lady could.

After this digression the reader can no longer be perplexed, if the Bouse's behavior toward Gustavus is neither sincere nor dissembled, but both. She showed him the night-piece which the Russian-Prince had left with her, and which for the sake of better light she had hung in her cabinet. It represented simply a night, a rising moon, an Indian woman worshipping it on a mountain, and a youth also directing his prayer and his arms toward the moon, but his eyes upon the beloved suppliant at his side; in the background a glow faintly lighted a moonless spot. They remained in the cabinet; the Resident Lady was absorbed in the pictured night, Gustavus talked about it; at last she suddenly woke out of her gaze and silence with the drowsy words: "My birthday festivals always made me sad." In justification she disclosed to him almost all the darker parts of her history; the mournful picture took its colors from her eye and lip and its soul from her tone, and she ended by saying: "_Here_ every one suffers _alone_." In the inspiration of sympathy he seized her hand and perhaps remonstrated by a slight pressure.

She left her hand in his with a look of entire indifference; but presently took up a lute lying near them, as an apparent pretext for drawing back the fair hand. "I was never unhappy," she continued with emotion, "while my brother still lived." She now drew forth, after a slight but unavoidable unveiling, the image of him which she wore on her sisterly bosom and allowed his eyes a partial view of it, but devoured it with her own. Although Gustavus at the unveiling of such different mysteries, looked merely at the painted bust--even this my Conrector and his fox-skin coat criticise in the most rational manner, for he conceives that there is no fairer _rounding_ than that of his periods, and no more modern Eve's _apple_ than that in the Old Testament. My skin-dressed Conrector may prescribe as he will; but Gustavus, sitting opposite to the mourning Resident Lady, who, formerly let only the _form_, never the _color_ of that embowered forbidden fruit be divined, will have hard work to learn the lesson.

Very few would have been able, like me and the Conrector, to have hung the picture in its place again with their own hands.

"I love this cabinet," said she, "when I am sad. Here my Alban (name of the brother) surprised me, when he came from London--here he wrote his letters--here he wanted to die, but the doctor would not let him leave his chamber." Unconsciously she let a chord escape from her lute and die away in the air. She looked dreamily on Gustavus, her eyes assumed a more and more moist glimmer. "Your sister is still happy," said she in that sorrowful tone, which is omnipotent when one hears it _for the first time_ from fair and usually laughing lips. "Ah!" said he with sympathetic sadness, "would that I had a sister!" She looked at him with a slightly searching glance of wonder, and said: "On the stage to-day you played the precisely reverse part toward the same person." She meant _there_ he had falsely given himself out as a brother to Beata; here, falsely, as not her brother, or rather here he revealed to her his love. His inquiring look of astonishment hung on her lips and hovered anxiously between his tongue and his ear. She went on indifferently: "To be sure, they say, own brother and sister seldom love each other; but I am the first exception; you will be the second." His astonishment became amazement....

It would be just so with the public, did I not make a sudden break and inform them, that the Resident Lady may well have actually believed (in fact must have) the lie which she told him. People of her station, into whose ears the _furioso_ of the concert of gaieties is ever sounding, hear un-contemporary news with only a deaf, if indeed with more than half an ear--she may therefore, even more easily than the reader (and who will answer for him?) have confounded the lost son of Madam Roeper and Falkenberg with the present son of Falkenberg and the Captain's lady. Her behavior hitherto is no more against my supposition than that of the alleged brother and sister was against hers; however I may be mistaken.

But this mistake is rendered quite improbable by her subsequent conduct. His embarrassment repeated itself in hers; she regretted her precipitancy in having praised a brother and sister as loving and happy who avoided each other and disliked to speak of their mutual relations. She concealed not with her looks her design, of diverting the conversation, but took pains to show it; but to her sorrow in having no brother, was joined the sorrowful reflection that Gustavus had indeed a sister, but did not love her, and she expressed her sympathy with the like misfortune more and more touchingly and tenderly on her lute. Over the soul of Gustavus, above which to-day's festival still hung with all its splendor, rolled the heaviest and most heterogeneous waves--mistrust never entered into his heart, although in his head he thought he had enough of it--at this moment he had the choice between the throne and the grave of to-day's joy.

For strong souls know no half way between heaven and hell--no purgatory, no _limbus infantium_.

The Resident Lady decided his wavering soul. She took his chaos of looks (or it seemed so, for I have not the heart to be the tribunal and last appeal of so many thousand readers) for the two-fold confusion and concern at the coldness with which his (alleged) sister treated him, and at his family history. She had hitherto found in his eyes a longing which sought finer charms than did other courtly eyes--she had retained in her sensitive heart the morning when he petitioned for the grave of Amandus, and the loving eyes, which he had dried in her presence--accordingly she shed the tenderest look upon his ardent face--drew from her lute-strings the tenderest voice of her sympathetic bosom--sought to cover her beating heart--and could not even hide its beatings--and while he made a movement expressive of the most intense affection, she fell, transported, lost, with quivering eye, with overwhelmed heart, with distracted soul and with the single, slow, deep-drawn sigh: "Brother!"--on his breast.

And he on hers!... For the first time in her court-life she felt such an embrace; he for the first time a _reciprocated_ one; for on Beata's pure heart he had never felt her arms around him. O Bouse! couldst thou only have resembled her and remained a sister! but, thou _gavest_ more than thou didst get, and thou didst charm thy victim to take what thou gavest--thou hurriedst him and thyself into a darkening hurricane of feeling--on thy bosom he lost sight of thy face--thy heart--his own--and as all the senses assailed with their first energies, he lost all, all....

Guardian angel of my Gustavus! Thou canst no longer save him; but heal him, if he is lost, if he has lost all, his virtue and his Beata! Draw with me the mourning curtain around his fall and say, even to the soul which is as good as his is: "Be better!"

Before we go to the soul to whom he says it, to Beata, we will hear at least a single advocate for poor Gustavus, that he may not be so severely condemned. The Vindicator suggests for our reflection simply this: if women are so easy to overcome, it is because in all military relations the assailant has the advantage over the party assailed; but let the case be once reversed, a temptress come upon the scene instead of a tempter, then will the same tempted man, who never would have assailed another's innocence, lose his own in the unwonted reversal of relations, and indeed the more easily, in proportion as female temptation is finer, more delicate and penetrating than that of man. Hence men, it is true, lead astray; but young men are generally in the beginning led astray--and one seductress creates ten seducers.

Pardon us all, pure Beata, the transition to thyself! Thou keepest at this late hour of the night a chamber of the princely palace, all alone, but with joy upon joy; for thou hadst Gustavus's letter to thee in thy hands and on thy bosom; and in the whole palace the sickest soul was the happiest; for the letter which she could at length read, kiss, and without inner and outer tempests enjoy thoroughly, beamed more mildly on her tender eye than the presence of the object, whose fiery glow only by distance sank to a fanning warmth; his presence oppressed her with too great a load of enjoyment, and she then embraced every moment the genius of her virtue, while she fancied she was merely embracing her friend. In this spring-time of rapture, when she held the letter in one hand and by the other the genius of virtue, she was disturbed by the--Prince of Scheerau. So crawls a toad on his belly into a bed of flowers.

In such a case a woman only _then_ finds it difficult to decide her line of conduct, when she still wavers irresolutely between indifference and love; or else when, despite all coldness, she would fain from vanity allow just so much, that virtue may lose, and love gain, nothing;--on the contrary, in the case of a complete virtuous resolve, she can freely resign herself to the inner virtue which fights for her, and she needs hardly watch over lips and looks, because these fall under suspicion precisely when they desire a guard. Beata's way of putting up the letter was the only little semi-tone in this full harmony of an armed virtue. The incumbent of the Scheerau throne excused his appearance on the score of anxiety about her health. He made up his following conversation out of the French language--the best when one would talk with the women and witlings--and of those turns of phrase whereby one can say all one will without boring himself or the other party, and which communicate all only in half, and of this half again a quarter in jest, and all more politely than flatteringly and more boldly than sincerely.

"Thus have I"--he said with a polite admiration--"this whole evening, in my mind's eye seen you pictured; my fancy has taken nothing from you, except actual presence. If fate suffered herself to be reasoned with, I should have scolded at her all through the Ball for having denied to the person who has given us to-day so much pleasure, the enjoyment of her own."

"O!" said she, "a kind destiny has given me to deny more pleasure than I could impart." Although the Prince is one of those persons with whom one would rather not talk about anything, still she said this with a feeling which, however, was nothing but a thanking of destiny for the previous happy reading hour.

"You are," said he with a fine look, which was meant to put another meaning upon Beata's words, "a little of an egotist--that is not your talent.--Yours must be not to be alone. You have hitherto concealed your face as well as your heart; think you that at my court no one is worthy to admire and to see both?" For Beata, who fancied she had no need to be modest, but only humble, such a praise was too great for her not to think of refusing it. His look seemed to require an answer, but she gave one, on the whole, as seldom as possible, because every step carries the old noose along with it into a new one. He had at first sought her hand with the air with which one takes that of a patient; she had carelessly let him have it, but she had let it lie bedded in his like a dead glove--all his feelers could not detect in it the least sensitiveness; she withdrew it at the next opportunity, neither slowly nor hurriedly, out of the rusty sheath.

The dance, the events of the day, the night, the stillness gave his words to-day more fire than usual. "The lots," said he, playing, as one piqued, with a coin in his waist-coat pocket, by way of supplying the place of the escaped hand, "have fallen unluckily. Persons who have the talent of inspiring sensations, have unhappily often the disagreeable one of reciprocating none, themselves." Suddenly he fixed his glance upon her breast-pin, on which gleamed a pearl with the word, "Amitie;" from that he turned his eyes to his Bolognese coin, on which, as on all coins of Bologna, was inscribed the word "Libertas." "You deal with friendship as Bologna with Freedom--both of you wear that as a legend which you have not in fact." The nobler class of persons cannot hear the words _Friendship_, _Feeling_, _Virtue_, even from the most ignoble, without being reminded by the words of the greatness of which their hearts are capable. Beata covered with her heaving breast a sigh which would fain say, only too plainly, what joys and sorrows, feeling and friendship gave her, but it touched not the Prince.

His searching glance, which was owing not to his sex, but to his _station_, overtook the sigh which he had not heard. He made at once, contrary to the nature of an appeal and of nature itself, a leap in the dialogue: "Do you not understand me?" he said, in a tone full of expectant homage. She said with more coldness than the sigh promised, that she could not to-day do anything with her sick head than rest it on--her arm, and that alone made it difficult for her to express with equal strength the reverence of a subject, and the difference between her opinions and his. Like beasts of prey, where creeping effected nothing, he resorted to leaps. "Oh, believe me," said he, adopting as his own Henri's declaration of love; "Marie, indeed I am not thy brother!" A woman gains nothing by long refusing to understand certain declarations, except--the most unmistakable ones. Besides, he still lay before her in Henri's attitude. "Permit me," she answered, "the alternative of regarding it either as earnest or as jest--off the stage I am less capable of deserving the rose-prize or of neglecting it; but it is you who in all cases have merely to give it."--"But to whom?" said he (and this shows that against such persons no reasons are of any avail)--"I forget in the presence of the beautiful all ugly ones, and all beauties in the presence of the most beautiful--I give you the prize of virtue, give me that of sensibility--or may I take it myself?" and his lips hastily darted toward her cheeks, on which hitherto were more tears than kisses; but with a cold astonishment, which he had found warmer in all other women, she drew herself away from him neither an inch too much nor too little, and in a tone in which were contained at once the respect of a subject, the repose of a virtuous and the coldness of an inexorable soul; in short, a tone as if her request had no connection with what had gone before--She presented to him her submissive petition that he would most graciously be pleased (inasmuch as the Doctor had assured her she could not do anything worse than keep awake) to retire--or as I should have expressed it--go to the devil. Before going so far he indulged in a little more badinage, in which he almost got back to his old tone, filed his inhesive pro-counter-protests and withdrew.

Nothing but the peace which she derived from the hands of virtue and love and Gustavus's letter ensured her the happy result that this Jacob, or Jack, sprained his hip in wrestling with this angel--which, of course, vexed the mortified Jacques so much the more in proportion as the angel grew more beautiful during the wrestling, as every excitement in a woman is notoriously a momentary cosmetic.

In your whole life, Gustavus and Beata, never have you opened your eyes upon a morning with such different feelings as on this, when Beata had nothing to reproach herself with and Gustavus everything. Over the whole sunken spring-time of his life there settled down a long winter; out of himself he had no pleasure, within himself no consolation, and before him, instead of hope, remorse.

He tore himself away, with as much forbearance as his despair allowed him, from the objects of his anguish and hurried with his boiling blood towards Auenthal, to Wutz--into my lodgings. I saw no remaining sign of life about him, save the rain-storm from his eyes. He made a vain attempt to begin:--what with blood, ideas and tears, his words were drowned--at last, in a flame of emotion, he turned away from me toward the window, and with his eye fixed on one spot related to me how low he had fallen from himself. Thereupon, in order to avenge himself upon himself by his mortification, he made himself visible, but only held out till he came to the name of Beata; here, when for the first time he brought before me the vanished flower-garden of his first love, he was compelled to cover his face, and said: "Oh, I was altogether too happy and am quite too miserable."

The delusion of the Resident Lady in taking him for the brother of Beata I could easily explain to him by the resemblance between the likenesses of himself and of the first son. First of all I endeavored to restore to him the weightiest credit--that which he must find in himself: whoever ascribes to himself no moral strength, at last forfeits it in reality. His fall was owing merely to his _new situation_; nothing is so dangerous about a temptation as its _novelty_; men and clocks go most correctly in a uniform _temperature_. For the rest, I beg the romancers, who find it far easier than feeling and experience attest, for two quite pure, enthusiastic souls to change their love into a fall, not to take my hero as proof of their position; for here the _second_ pure soul was wanting; on the contrary, the union of all the colors of two fair souls (Gustavus's and Beata's) will never produce any other than the _white_ of innocence.

His determination was this, to tear himself away from Beata forever by a letter--to leave the palace with all objects that reminded him of his fair days or his unhappy ones--to live through or sigh through the winter with his parents, who always spent it in the city, and then in summer to shuffle the cards anew with Oefel for the game of life, in order to see what there might still be, when repose of soul is lost, to gain or to forfeit.... Unhappy darling! why does thy present history, just at the very moment when I might bring my written one into coincidence with it, put on a mourning veil? Why must thy short, sad days fall precisely upon the short, sad days of the almanac? O in this winter of sorrow no Jacob's ladder of enthusiasm will lift me to the heights whence I may survey and sketch the blooming landscape of thy life, and I shall write about thee little, in order to take thee the of oftener in my arms!

And you, ye frightful souls, who count a misstep of which Gustavus feels as if he must die, as among your distinctions and delights, you who, not like him, lose you own innocence, but murder that of others, dare I defile him by your neighborhood on my paper? What will you yet make out of our century? You crowned, starred, knighted, mitred eunuchs! Of you I speak not, and have never complained that you burn out and precipitate, with as much furnace fire as you can get together, out of your own ranks the so-called virtue (_i. e_., the semblance of it), which is so brittle an alloy in your female metals--for in your rank temptation has no longer a name, no significance, no evil consequences, and you do little or no harm there--but swoop not down upon our _middle_ class, upon our lambs, with your vulture claws! With us you are yet an epidemic (I fall, like you, into a confusion, but only of metaphors), which sweeps away the more victims by reason of its newness. Rob and kill there anything else rather than female virtue! Only in a century like ours, in which all fine feelings are strengthened _except the sense of honor_, can one trample under foot that of woman, which consists merely in chastity, and, like the savage hack down a tree forever in order to get its first and last fruits. The robbery of a woman's honor is as much as that of a man's, _i. e_., thou destroyest the escutcheon of a higher nobility, breakest the sword, takest off the spurs, tearest to shreds the diploma of nobility and the ancestral register; that which the executioner does to a man thou executest upon a poor creature who loves this hangman, and only cannot control her disproportionate imagination. Abominable! And of such victims, whom men's hands had fastened with an everlasting iron collar to disgrace, there are in the streets of Vienna two thousand, in those of Paris thirty thousand, in those of London fifty thousand--Horrible! Death-angel of vengeance! count not the tears which our sex wrings from woman's eyes and causes to fall burning on the frail female heart! Measure not the sighs and the agonies under which the _filles de joie_ expire, and which awaken no regrets in the iron _fils de joie_, except because he must betake himself to another bed which is not a death-bed!

Tender, true, but weak sex! Why are all the faculties of thy soul so great and brilliant, that thy considerateness is so small and pale in the comparison? Why does there stir in thy heart an inborn respect for a sex which spares not thine own? The more ye adorn your souls, the more graces you make of your limbs, the more love you have heaving in your bosoms and beaming from your eyes, the more you transform yourselves by enchantment into angels; so much the more do we seek to hurl these angels down out of their heaven, and in the very century of your highest transfiguration, authors, artists and nobles all conspire to form a forest of upas-trees under which you are doomed to die, and we exalt each other in proportion to the number of well-poisonings and beaker-poisonings we have prepared for your lips!

THIRTY-EIGHTH, OR NEW YEAR'S, SECTION.

Night Music.--Farewell Letter.--My Groans and Grievances.