Part 28

The Minister, during this speech, had several times unnecessarily snapped-to the snuffers over the wax candles, and only beheaded the point of the flame; the fixed air of wrath now colored the roses of his lips (as the chemical does botanical ones) blue. "_Bon!_" he replied, "I travel; you can reflect on the subject,--but I give my word of honor, that I never consent to any other match; and though it were (whereupon he looked at the lady ironically) still more considerable[147] than the one just projected,--either the maiden obeys or she suffers, _decidéz_! _Mais je me fie à l'amour que vous portéz au pere et à la fille; vous nous rendréz tous assêz contens._" And then he went forth, not like a tempest, but like a rainbow, which he manufactured out of the eighth color only, namely, the black, and that with his eyebrows.

After some days of resentment with the mother and the daughter, he rode, as Luigi's business-agent, to Haarhaar to see the princely bride. The oppressed mother confided to her oldest and only friend, the Lector, the sad secret. The two had now a pure relation of friendship toward one another, which, in France, in consequence of the higher respect for women, is more common. In the first years of the ministerial forced marriage, which dawned not with morning dew, but with morning frost, perhaps the hawk-moth[148] Cupid fluttered after them; but by and by children drove away this sphinx. The wife is often forgotten when she becomes the mother. She, therefore, with her characteristic cool and clear strength, took all that was ambiguous in her relation to Augusti forever out of the way; and he made her firmness more easy by his own, because he, with more love of honor than of women, grew not more red at any kind of braided-work than at that of a basket,[149] and erroneously believed that a man who receives it, has as much to be ashamed of as a woman who does.

The Lector could foresee that she would also, after her divorce,--which she postponed only for Liana's sake,--remain single, if only for this reason, in order not to deprive her daughter of an allodial estate, Klosterdorf, for the reservation of which she had now for one and twenty years exposed herself to the battering-ram and scythe-chariot and blunderbuss of the old Minister. Whether she was not even silently intending her dear Liana for a man so firm and tender, who differed from her in nothing but in a worldly coolness toward positive religion, is another and more delicate question. Such a reciprocal gift were worthy such a mother and friend, who must know from her heart, that combined feelings of tenderness and honor prepare for a loved soul a surer bliss than the love which genius offers, that alternation of flying heat and flying cold,--that fire which, like the electric, always twice destroys,--in the stroke and in the rebound. The Lector himself started not that question; for he never made rash, unsafe plans; and what one would have been more so than that of such a connection, in his poverty, or with such a father-in-law, in a country where, as in the Electorate of Saxony, a statute, so beneficial (for parents), can countermand even a marriage of many years' standing, which has been concluded without parental consent?

With moist eyes the Minister's lady showed him the new storm-clouds, which had again descended upon her and her Liana. She could build upon his fine eye for the world, upon his dumb lip and upon his ready hand for business. He said, as ever, he had foreseen all this; but proved to her that Bouverot, if only from avarice, would never exchange his knightly cross for the wedding-ring, whatever designs he might cherish with regard to Liana. He gave her to surmise, so far as a tender regard to her sore relations would tolerate, to what degree of readiness for compliance with Bouverot's wishes the very frailty of Liana's life might allure the Minister, in order to harvest it before it had done blooming. For Froulay could much more nimbly swallow demands against honor than injuries done to his vanity, as the victim of hydrophobia can much more easily get down solid morsels than fluids. Yet all this did not sound so immorally hard to the Minister's lady as readers of the middling classes might imagine; I appeal to the more sensible among the higher.

Augusti and the Minister's lady saw that something must certainly be done for Liana during the Minister's absence; and both wonderfully coincided in their project. Liana must go into the country this pleasant season,--she must muster up health for the wars that were in prospect,--she must be put out of the way of the knight's visits, which now the birthday would multiply fourfold,--even the Minister must have nothing to object to the place. And where can this be? Simply under the roof of the Director Wehrfritz, who cannot endure the German gentleman, because he knows his poisonous relation to the Prince. But of course there are first still other mountains to be climbed than that which lies on the way to Blumenbühl.

The reader himself must now get over a low one; and that is a short comico-tragic Extra-leaf upon

THE GREEN-MARKET OF DAUGHTERS.

The following is certain: every owner of a very beautiful or very rich daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt under his roof, which to himself is of no service, and which he must put to its first use after it has long lain idle, by selling it to a _Regent_.[150] Strictly and commercially speaking, daughters are not an article of trade; for the parental grand adventurers no one can confound with those female dealers in second-hand frippery, and stall-women, whose transit-business one does not love to name; but a stock, with which one gains in a South Sea, or a clod, wherewith one transfers symbolically (_scortatione_) real estate. "_Je ne vends que mes paysages et donne les figures par dessus le marche_,"[151] said Claude Lorraine, like a father,--and could easily say it, because he had the figures painted in his landscapes by _others_;--even so in the purchase or marriage-contract only the knightly seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them is thrown into the bargain. Even so, higher up, is a princess merely a blooming twig, which a princely sponsor plucks off and carries home, not for the sake of the _fruits_, but because a _bee-swarm_ of lands and people has attached itself thereto.

If a father, like our Minister, has not much, then he can pawn his children, as the Egyptians did their parents (namely, the mummies of them), as mortgages and hand-pledges or imperial pawns, which are not redeemed.

At present the mercantile order, which formerly dealt only in foreign products, has got possession of this branch of commerce also; methinks, however, they might find room enough in their lower vaults to be selfish and damned, without going up stairs to the daughter. In Guinea only the nobility can trade; with us they are cut off and debarred from almost all trade, except the small trade in daughters, and the few other things which grow on their own estates; hence is it that they hold so fast to this liberty of trade, and that the noblesse seem here to be a Hanse alliance for this delicate branch of business; so that one may, in some manner, compare the high standing[152] of this class with the _higher_ one (in a literal sense) which marketable people in Rome were obliged to mount[153] in order to be seen.

It is a common objection of young and (so-called) sensitive hearts, that this sort of transaction very much constrains, or in fact crushes love; whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation for it as this very thing. For when the bargain is once concluded and entered by the bookkeeper (the parson) in the ledger, then does the time truly come on when the daughter can consider and provide for her heart, namely, the fair season after marriage, which is universally assumed in France and Italy, and is gradually coming to be in Germany also, as the more suitable time for a female heart to choose freely among the host of men; her state then, like the Venetian, grows out of a commercial into a conquering one. The husband himself, too, is quite as little interrupted afterward as beforehand in his love by this short business transaction; all is, that now--as in Nuremberg every Jew is followed by an old woman--close upon the heels of our bridegroom a young one is seen. Nay, often, the nuptial tradesman conceives an inclination even for the article which he has carried home with him,--which is an uncommon piece of good fortune; and as Moses Mendelssohn, with his bundle of silken wares under his arm, thought out his _letters_ upon the _affections_, so do better men, amidst their business, meditate love-letters on this branch of trade, and deal with the virgin--as merchants in Messina[154] do with the holy virgin--in Co.; but of course such profitable connections of love with business must always be rare birds, and are little to be counted upon.

The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your daughters _friendship_ for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage, exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself? You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to _them_; and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being?

If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly _your own_; _your_ glory and aggrandizement, _your_ feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage; for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them sinners,[155] in order not to be yourselves robbers?

Tell me not that marriages of inclination often turn out ill, and forced marriages often well enough, as may be seen in the instance of the Moravians, the old Germans, and Orientals. Name me rather all barbaric times and nations, in which--for both indeed only reckon the man, never the wife--a happy marriage means nothing more than a happy husband. No one stands by near enough to hear and to count a woman's sighs; the unheard pang becomes at last speechless; new wounds weaken the bleeding of the oldest. Further: the ill-luck of fancy-marriages is chargeable upon your very opposition to them, and your war against the married couple. Still further: every forced marriage is, in fact, for the most part, half a marriage of fancy. Finally: the best marriages are in the middling class, where the bond is more apt to be love; and the worst in the higher, where it is more a mercenary motive; and as often as in these classes a prince should choose merely with his heart, he would get a heart, and never lose nor betray it.

Now, then, what sort of a hand is that into which you so often force the fairest, finest, richest, but rebellious one? Commonly, a black, old, withered, greedy fist. For decrepit, rich, or aspiring libertines have too much of the connoisseur, too much satiety and freedom, to steal any other than the most splendid creatures; the less perfect fall into the hands and homes of mere lovers and amateurs. But how base is a man, who, abandoned of his own character, backed merely by the despotic edict of a stranger, paying for his fortune with a stolen one, can now drag away the unprotected soul from the yearning eyes of a weeping love into a long, cold life, and clasp her to his arms as against the edges of frosty swords, and therein so near to his eye see her bleed and grow pale and quiver! The man of honor even gives with a blush, but he takes not with a blush; and the better lion, the beast, spares woman;[156] but these soul-buyers extort from constrained beings at last even the testimony of free-will.

Mother of the poor heart, which thou wilt bless by misfortune, hear me! Suppose thy daughter should harden herself against the misery which is forced upon her, hast thou not reduced her rich dream of life to empty sleep, and taken out of it love's islands of the blest, and all that bloomed thereon; the fair days when one roamed over them, and the perpetual happy retrospect of them when they already lie with their blooming peaks low in the horizon? Mother, if this happy time was ever in thy breast, then snatch it not from thy daughter; and if it was barbarously torn from thee, then think of thy bitter pang, and bequeath it not!

Suppose, further, she makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now what she might have been to its darling; and whether she does not then deserve anything better than to gratify a jailer, locked in with her forever by one shutting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well as this; thou wilt heap a double disaster upon thy soul,--the long agony of thy daughter, and the growing coldness of her husband, who by and by comes to feel and resent refusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time when man first needs the morning-sun,--namely, youth. O, sooner make all other seasons of the day of life cloudy; they are all alike, the third and the fourth and fifth decades; only at sunrise let it not rain into life; only this one never returning, irredeemable time darken not!

But how, if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely joys, relations, a happy marriage, hopes, a whole posterity, to thy plans and commands, but the very being herself[157] whom thou constrainest? Who can justify thee, or dry thy tears, when thy best daughter,--for she is the very one who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, as the monks of La Trappe see their cloister burn down, without one of them breaking the vow of silence,[158]--when she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and half in the shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and pale; when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last can no longer conceal anything from thee, but for years bears round the paleness and the pangs of decline in the very orient of life; and when thou canst not console her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience cannot suppress the name of infanticide; and when at last the worn-out victim lies there under thy tears, and the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young, so faint, and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complaining, with languishing and longing looks, with painfully confused and conflicting emotions, sinks with her blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of death,--O guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed her in, who will comfort thee? But I would call every guiltless one, and show her the bitter dying, and ask her, Shall thy child also perish thus?

59. CYCLE.

It was a romantic day for Zesara, even outwardly; sun-sparks and rain-drops played dazzlingly through the heavens. He had received a letter from his father, dated at Madrid, which stamped at last the black seal of certainty on the threatened death of his sister, and in which there was nothing agreeable but the intelligence that Don Gaspard, with the Countess of Romeiro, whose guardianship he was now concluding, would travel in autumn (the Italian spring) to Italy. Two tones had been, in his life, stolen away from the musical scale of love; he had never known by experience what it was to love a brother or a sister. The coincidence of her death-night with that night in Tartarus, this whole clawing into the holy images and wishes of his heart, stirred up his spirit, and he felt with indignation how impotently a whole assailing world might seek to remove Liana's image from his soul; and again he painfully felt, that this very Liana herself believed in her near decline.

In this situation was he found by an unexpected invitation from the Minister's lady herself,--sun-sparks and rain-drops played in his heaven also. He flew; in the antechamber stood the angel who broke the six apocalyptic seals,--Rabette. She had run to meet him from a bashfulness before company, and had embraced him sooner than he her. How gladly did he look into the familiar, honest face! with tears he heard the name of brother, when he had lost a sister to-day!

The reason of her appearance was this: when the Director was at the Minister's lady's the last time, the latter had, with easy, disguised hand, opened her house to his daughter, "for the sake of a knowledge of empty city life, and for change,"--in order that she might hereafter venture to knock at _his_ door on her own daughter's behalf. He said he would "forward the female wild deer to her with pleasure, and all possible despatch." And as in Blumenbühl Rabette had answered him No, then Yes, then No, then Yes, and had held with her mother, even before midnight, an imperial-exchequer-revision, a mint-probation-day about everything which a human being from the country can wear in the city, she packed up there and unpacked here.

"Ah, I am afraid in there," said she to Albano; "they are all too clever, and I am now so stupid!" He found beside the domestic trio the Princess also, and the little Helena from Lilar, that lovely medallion of a fine day to his stirred heart. Indescribably was he smitten with Liana's womanly advances to Rabette, as if he shared her with her. With courtesy and tenderness, a mildness also, which was without falsehood or pride, came to the help of the embarrassed playmate, on whose face the inborn gayety and eloquence of nature now singularly contrasted with her artificial dumb gravity. Charles, with his ready familiarity, was more in a condition to entangle than to extricate her; only Liana gave to her soul and tongue, if only by the embroidery-frame, a free field; Rabette could write with the embroidering needle, no illuminated and initial letters, indeed, but still a good running-hand.

She gave--turning her face toward her brother's, in order to pluck courage therefrom--a clear report of the dangerous road and upsets, laughing all the while, after the manner of the people when they are telling their mishaps. Her brother was to her, at the company's expense, both company and world; upon him alone streamed forth her warmth and speech. She said she could from her chamber see him "play on the harpsichord." Liana immediately led both thither. How richly and sublimely, beyond Rabette's demands upon city-life, was the maidenly _hospitium_ set out, from the tulip (not a blooming one, but a work-basket of Liana's,--although every tulip is such a basket for the finger of spring) even to the piano-forte, of which she, of course, for the present can use no more than seven treble-keys for half a waltz? Five moderate trunks of clothes--for therewith she thought to come out, and show the city that the country too could wear clothes--represented to him in their well-known flower-pieces and tin bands the old impressions (_incunabula_) of his earliest days of life; and to-day every trace of the old season of love refreshed him. She made him look for his windows, from one of which the Librarian was fixing a hard gaze on a paving-stone in the street to see how often he could hit it by spitting.

Here alone, in the presence only of the brother, Liana spoke more loudly to the sister the word of friendship, and assured her how happy she meant to make her, and how sincere she was in all that she promised. O look not into the flame of the pure, religious, sisterly love with any yellow eye of jealousy! Can you not comprehend that this fair soul even now distributes its rich flames among all sisterly hearts, until love concentrates them into _one_ sun; as, according to the ancients, the scattered lightnings of night gather themselves in the morning into one solid solar orb? She was, everywhere, an eye for every heart; like a mother, she never once forgot the little in the great; and she poured out (let no one deny me the privilege of printing this minute example) for little Helena the cup of coffee, which the Doctor forbade, half full of cream, in order that it might be without strength or harm.

The impatient Princess had already looked ten times toward the heavens, through which now beams of light, now rain-columns flew, till at length out of the consumed cloud-snow the broad fields of blue grew up, and Julienne could lead out the delighted young people into the garden, to the annoyance of the Minister's lady, who did not like to expose Liana to the _Serein_,--five or six blasts of the evening-wind, and the wading through rain-water that stood a nineteenth of a line[159] deep. She herself stayed behind. How new-born, glistening, and inviting was all down below! The larks soared out of the distant fields like tones, and warbled near over the garden,--in all the leaves hung stars, and the evening air threw the liquid jewelry, the trembling earrings, from the blossoms down upon the flowers, and bore sweet incense to meet the bees. The Idyl of the year, Spring, parcelled its sweet pastoral land among the young souls. Albano took his sister's hand, but he listened vacantly to her intelligence from home. Liana went far in advance with the Princess, and bathed herself in the open heavens of confidential communion.