Part 5
Two tigers, according to the legend, digged the Apostle Paul's grave; so do our two men here scratch away at one for a saint. So much the more confidently do I say this, as I do not otherwise see through--if nothing is to be made but a picture--the meaning of so many circumstances. But the father I could almost excuse. In the first place, he said expressly to the German gentleman, the Abigail might, in his opinion, as well stay in the chamber, or in the adjoining one, in case the patient wanted anything; secondly, the otherwise soft man had contracted, from his ministerial commerce with justice, a certain grit, a certain barbarity, which is so much the more natural to Themis, passing sentence behind the bandage, and, as an Areopagus, without the sight of the pains, as even Diderot[23] asserts that blind people are more cruel than others; and, thirdly, no one could well be more ready than he to pity the more deeply, in case she should die, the very child whom he, as it was once pretended Jews and witches did with Christian children, crucified, in order, like them, to do something with the blood (as parents generally, and particularly human parents, can indeed get over easily the misfortunes of those who are near and dear to them, but hardly their loss, just as we, in the case of the hair of the head, which is still nearer to us, feel not the singeing or cutting of it, but very painfully the tearing of it up by the root); and, fourthly, Froulay had always the misfortune that thoughts which in his head had a tolerable, innocent hue, became, like muriate of silver or good ink, black on the spot, when they once came to light.
Otherwise, and without taking these alleviating circumstances into view, there remains, indeed, much in his conduct which I do not vindicate.
The evening appeared. The Minister's lady went on her husband's arm to the court. The new chambermaid had, as Bouverot's bridesmaid, already, three days beforehand, made the most necessary arrangements or manœuvres. She had, with great ease, borrowed for him Liana's letters to Albano, as the mother, from habit, forgot that a present eye was not necessarily a seeing one; and he could extract from them the historical touches or watercolors, wherewith he could assume, before the blind one, in case of a recognition on the stage, the semblance of her hero,--namely, Albano's. With Roquairol he had played often enough to have his voice, consequently Albano's, in his power. Methinks his preparation-days for the festal evening were suitably spent.
He could, as little residences drink tea earlier than others, make his appearance quite as early as a miniature-painter in September absolutely must. When he beheld the silent form in the easy-chair, with the discolored flower-cups of the cheeks, but more firmly rooted in every purpose, a more coldly commanding saint, then did the exasperation and inflammation which he had imbibed at once from her letters kindle each other into a higher flame. Only in such chests, strung at once with metal and catgut, with cruelty and sensuality, is such an alliance of lust and gall conceivable. Bouverot's whole past, the books of his life's history, ought, as those of Herodotus are to the nine Muses, to have been dedicated to the three Fates, one to each.
He stole to the window, seated himself, set down his paint-box, and began hastily to dot. Meanwhile Liana heard her very cultivated, well-read chambermaid read to her out of the second volume of Fénelon's _Œuvres Spirituelles_. Zefisio was not affected by the Archbishop in the least,--what he caught about pure love (_sur le pur amour de Dieu_) he perverted into an impure by applications, and let himself be devilishly inflamed by the divine,--for the rest what there was touching in Liana's relations he left as it was, as he had now to paint. Odiously did his motley-colored panther-eyes lick like red, sharp tiger-tongues over the sweet, soft countenance!--"Dear Justa, stop, the reading is disagreeable to thee, thou breathest so short!" said she at last, because she heard the portrait-painter breathe. It was no sacrifice to him, but a foretaste, a sweet early-bit, to put off the kiss of this tender little hand and lip and the whole exhibition of his burning heart, until he saw her outline dotted off with the poison-tints on the white ivory by the rapid dotting machine of his hand. At length he had her, many-colored[24] on white. "Very well, dear Justa," said she, "the prayer bell tolls; thou canst not see any longer. Rather lead me to the instrument,"--namely the harmonica. She did so. Bouverot gave Justa a sign to retire. She did that too. The yellow garden-spider now ran up to the tender, white flower. The spider heard her evening choral not without enjoyment, and the devout upcasting of her ruined eyes seemed to him a right picturesque idea, which the true _painter_[25] resolved to transfer to the ivory leaf, if it could be done.
"Lovely goddess!" cried he, suddenly, with Albano's stolen voice, into the midst of those holy tones, which Albano had once, in a happier hour, but more nobly, interrupted. She listened with alarm, but hardly believing her own ear in this night. The astonishment did not displease the prospect painter--for her face was his prospect--by any means whatever; "remember this harmonica in the thunder-house." He confounded it with the water-house. "You here, Count?--Justa! where art thou?" cried she distressfully. "Justa, come here!" he added, calling after her. The maiden followed his voice and his--eye. "Gracious damsel?" asked she. But now Liana had not the heart to ask about the door and the admission-ticket of the Count. To speak French with her lover would not do, as the maid understood it; hence it was that in Vienna in the years of the Revolution they forbade this language very judiciously, because it so surely and pestilentially spreads a certain _equality_,--_freedom_ follows,--between the nobility and the servile orders.
Maliciously and joyfully did Bouverot, to whom she now seemed to betray a serviceable mistrust about the Count, which pointed out a freer play-room for his character mask, remind the perplexed maiden of her commands for Justa; she must now cause her to bring a light.
"_Infidèle_," he thereupon began, "I have overcome all obstacles, in order to throw myself at your feet and supplicate your forgiveness. _Je m'en flatte à tort pent être, mais je l'ose_," he went on, made more passionate through her. "_O cruelle! de grace, pourquoi ces régards, ces mouvements? Je suis ton Alban et il t'aime encore,--Pense à Blumenbühl, cé sejour charmant,--Ingrate, j'esperais te trouver un peu plus reconnaisante. Souviens-toi de ce que tu m'a promis_," said he, by way of sounding her, "_quand tu me pressas contre ton sein divin_." ...
A pure soul mirrors, without staining itself, the unclean one and feels darkly the distressing neighborhood, just as doves, they say, bathe themselves in limpid water, in order to see therein the images of the hovering birds of prey. The short breath, the wavering tone of speech, every word, and an indefinable something, drove the frightful spectre close before her soul, the suspicion that it was not Albano. She started up; "Who are you? God, you are not the Count. Justa, Justa!" "Who else could it be," replied he, coldly, "that would dare to assume my name? _O, je voudrais que je ne le fusse pas. Vous m'avez écrit, que l'esperance est la lune de la vie. Ah, ma lune s'est couchée, mais j'adore encore le soleil, qui l'éclaire_."
Here he grasped the hand of this eclipsed sun fighting with a dragon. Then his gnawed finger-nails and dry fingers, and a passing touch of his order-cross, discovered to her the real name. She tore herself loose with a shriek, and ran away without seeing whither, and fell into his hands again. He snatched her violently to his meagre hot lips: "Yes, it is I," said he, "and I love you more than does your Count with his _étourderie_."
"You are wicked and godless toward a blind maiden; what will you? Justa! is there no one then to help me? Ah, good God, give me my eyes," she cried, flying, without knowing whither, and again overtaken. "Bouverot! Thou evil spirit!" she cried, warding off in places where he was not. He, like gunpowder, cooling on the tongue, and singeing and shattering when greed kindled him, placed himself at a considerable darting-distance from her, threw a painter's eye at the charming waves and bendings of her tempest-struck flowerage, and said quietly, with that mildness which resembles the eating and devouring milk of spunges: "Only be calm, fairest; it is I still; and what would it all avail thee, child?"
Giddy with the snake-breath of distress, wandering nature began to sing, but only beginnings: "Joy, thou spark of Heaven-born fire!"--"I am a German maiden." She ran round and sang again: "Know'st thou the land?" "Thou evil spirit!"
At this moment the giant snake, thus charmed, reared himself aloft on his cold rings, with darting tongue, to spring and to coil; "_Mon cœur_," said the snake, who always in passion spoke French, "_vole sur cette bouche qui enchante tous les sens_." "Mother!" cried she, "Caroline! O God, let me see, O God--my eyes!" Then did the All-gracious give them back to her once more; the agony of nature, the noisy preparations for the burial, opened again the eye of the tranced victim.
How eagerly she flew out of the chamber of torture! The disappointed, mortified beast of prey was still reckoning on blindness and distraction. But when Bouverot saw that she ran lightly up the stairway to the Italian roof, then he merely sent the maid, who came running in, after her, to see that she received no injury; and now again he held her previous blindness for dissimulation. He himself took from the chamber the miniature sketch, and dragged himself like a hungry, wounded monster sullenly and slowly out of the house.
TWENTIETH JUBILEE.
Gaspard's Letter.--Partings.
86. CYCLE.
"She can see again," cried Charles to the Count the morning after, in the intoxication of joy, without concerning himself at all about the cold relations of the recent period; and was entirely his old self. His enmity was more frail and fleeting than his love, for the former dwelt, in his case, on the ice, which soon melted and ran away, the latter upon the fluid element, on which he always sailed. Coloring, Albano asked who had been the ophthalmist. "A well-meant fright," said he; "the German gentleman made as if he would paint her, when my parents, according to appointment, were not there,--or he really painted her,--at this moment I have but a confused idea of the whole,--all at once she heard a strange man's voice, and terror and fright worked naturally like electric shocks!" Although the Captain heard, down on the bottom of his billowy sea, all voices only confusedly, nevertheless he had this time heard correctly; for Liana had extorted from her mother the concealment of the martyrology, in order to take away from her brother the occasion of proving his love to her by a duel with her adversary.
Albano laid up many questions about the dark history in his breast; and broke off the conversation by a description of his journey.
After some days he heard that Liana with her mother had left the city, and gone to visit the mountain-castle of a solitary old noble widow, which lay above Blumenbühl. Out in the clean country, it was hoped light would fall again upon her life, and the maternal hand was to paint over anew its fading colors. The Minister, who, like other old men and like old hair, was hard to frizzle and to shape, was, in this last and deepest pitfall of fate, struck quite spiritless, so that he did not devour Liana, who was also caught therein, but let her go. The whole story was to the public eye very much covered over and beflowered like the wall of a park. Only the Lector knew it in full, but he could hold his tongue. He demanded back the miniature from the German gentleman, in the name of the mother; that personage gave in its stead cold, hollow lies; nevertheless Augusti, at the entreaty of mother and daughter, knew how to control himself, and sacrifice to them the challenge wherewith he was going to take satisfaction for all.
Our friend was now, since his conscience had been appeased with respect to accidental consequences, smitten with new and unmingled sorrow over the emptiness of his present condition; the most precious soul was nothing to him any longer; his hours were no more harmoniously sounded out by the chime of love and poesy, but monotonously by the steeple-clock of every-day routine. Therefore he took refuge with men and friendship, as under trees still blooming in greenness near the smouldering ruins of a conflagration; women he shunned, because they--as strange children do a mother who has lost hers--too painfully reminded him of his loss. How gayly, on the contrary, does a general lover, who celebrates only all-souls' and all-saints' days, go about like one new-born, when he has happily slipped the noose of a heart which had caught him, and now can reckon up all female forms again with the prospect of a redeemed estate! The very feeling of this freedom may animate him to surrender himself the oftener, by way of tasting it again, as prisoner to a female heart.
Albano let himself be drawn by the hands of Roquairol and Schoppe to wild festivals of men,--which would fain render the sphere-music of joy on the kettle-drum;--they were only the thorn-festivals after the feasts of roses. So there is a despair which relieves itself by revelry; as, for example, during the plague at Athens,--or in the expectation of the last day,--or in the anticipation of a Robespierre's butcher-knife. The Captain went back deeper into his old labyrinth and wilderness, and drew, so far as he could, the innocent youth into his popular festivals with so-called sons of the muses, into his recruiting places of pleasure, just as if he had need on his own account to bring his friend down to himself a little.
Albano fancied, with these Dithyrambics, his weeping soul would be quite sung to sleep, and he only gave it in addition a gentle rocking. Meanwhile, although he would not have confessed it, his young rosy cheeks grew as pale as a forehead, and his face fell in like a piano-forte key upon the snapping of a string. It was touching and hard at once, when he sat laughing among his friends and their friends with a colorless face,--with higher, sharper bones of eyes and nose,--with a wilder eye, which blazed out of a darker socket. From music, especially Roquairol's, wherein under the hackneyed, artistical alternation of damper and thunder, the passionate rolling and plunging of our ship were too vividly represented, his ear and heart fled as from a destroying siren. The broken-off lance-splinter of the wound rankled and festered in his whole being. O, as, in the years of childhood, when the rosy cloud in heaven seemed to him to lie directly on the mountain where it was so easy to be reached, the magnificent pile retired far into the sky so soon as he had climbed the mountain, so now did the aurora of life and the spirit, which he would fain seize and hold near to him, stand so high and far overhead beyond his reach in the blue! Painfully does man attain the alp of ideal love; still more painful and dangerous--as in the case of other alps--is the descent from it.
One day Chariton came into town, merely to hand him at last a letter of her husband's,--for Dian, like all artists, much more easily and agreeably executed a work of art than a letter,--wherein he expressed his joy that he should see Albano so soon. "Is he coming back, then?" asked the Count. She exclaimed, with a sad tone: "Body o' me!--that indeed!--according to his former letter he has still to stay his year longer." "I do not understand him so," said Albano.
The same evening he was invited by the Princess to see the engravings of Herculaneum, which had come by the same post with Chariton's letter. She welcomed him with that animated look of love which we put on before one who will immediately, as we hope, pour out before us the unmeasured thanks of his heart. But he had nothing to pour out from his. She asked at length, somewhat surprised, whether he had received no letters to-day from Spain. She forgot that the post is courteous and expeditious toward no house except the princely house. As, however, his letter must certainly be already lying in his chamber, she allowed herself to take upon herself the part of Time, who brings all things to daylight, and told what was in the letter, namely, "that she should in autumn undertake a little artistic journey to Rome, upon which his father would accompany her, and he him if he liked; that was the whole secret." It was only the half; for she soon added, that she should be most glad to extend the pleasure of this tour to the best draughtsman in the city, as soon as she recovered,--Liana.
As the whole heart is suddenly illuminated with joy, when, after a long, dark rainy day, at last in the evening the sun arches for himself under the heavy water a golden, open western gate, stands therein pure and brilliant as in a rose-bower before the mirroring earth, announces to her a fairer day, and then, with warm looks, disappears from the open rose-bower, so was it with our Albano.
The fair day had not yet come, but the fair evening had. He left the Herculanean pictures under their rubbish, and hastened, as quickly as gratitude allowed, back to the letter of his father, who so seldom sent such a favor.
Here it is:--
"Dearest Albano: My affairs and my health are at length in such order, that I can conveniently carry out my plan, which I have proposed, in conjunction with the Princess, of making a short artistical tour to Rome this very autumn, to which I invite thee, and will come myself to take thee in October. The rest of the travelling party will not displease thee, as it consists entirely of clever connoisseurs, Herr von Bouverot, Mr. Counseller of Arts Fraischdörfer, Mr. Librarian Schoppe (if he will). Unfortunately Herr von Augusti must stay behind as Lector. Thy teacher in Rome (Dian) is expecting thee with much eagerness. They have written to me that thou art particularly partial to the new court-dame of the good Princess, Madlle. von Fr., whom I recollect as a very capital draughtsman. It will interest thee, therefore, to know, that the Princess takes her, too, with her, especially since, as I hear, a journey for health is as needful to her as to me. In spring, which, besides, is not the pleasantest season of the year in Italy, thou wilt return to Germany to thy studies. One thing more, in confidence, my best one! They have unreservedly communicated to my ward, the Countess of Romeiro, thy ghost-visions in Pestitz. Now, as she is to spend the autumn and winter during my absence with her friend, the Princess Julienne, and besides will arrive earlier than I, let it not strike thee as strange that she shuns thy acquaintance, because her female and personal pride has been mortified by the juggling use of her name, and feels itself challenged to a direct refutation of the juggler. In fact, if the game has really a serious object, one could not well choose worse means to effect it.--Thou wilt do what honor bids, and, although she is my ward, not insist upon seeking her company. All this between ourselves. Adio!
"G. v. C."
These prospects,--the elevating one of being so long with his father; the healing one of wading out from this deep ashes into a freer, lighter land; the flattering one that the sick, tormented heart in the mountain-castle might perhaps, in citron and laurel groves, find, yes, and haply give back, too, joy and health again,--these prospects were, what the joys of human beings are, very pleasant walks in a prison-yard.
On this happy walk he was soon disturbed by the image of the coming Linda, not, however, on his own account, but on that of his poor sister and his friend. How malignantly must this strange _ignis fatuus_, thought he, dance into the nightly conflict of all these clashing relations! Roquairol seemed, besides, to leave the too intensely loving Rabette alone with her solitary wishes. She sent him weekly, under cover to Albano,--once it was the reverse,--her epistolary sighs and tears, all which he coldly pocketed, without speaking of them or of the forlorn one.
Albano, weighing in silence Liana and Rabette, compassionated, himself, the unequal lot of his over-hasty friend, over whose sun-steeds only an Amazon and Titaness, but not a good country-girl, could fling the bridle, and whose Psyche's-chariot and thunder-car seemed to him too good for a mere connubial post-chaise or child's carriage. What a strangling struggle of all feelings will there be, thought he, when he, kneeling at the nuptial altar with Rabette, accidentally looks up, and discovers among the spectators the never-to-be-forgotten lofty bride of his whole youth, and must stammer out the renouncing "Yes!"
He was therefore in doubt whether he might venture to disclose to him the contents of the letter, but not long indeed. "Shall I," said he, "dissemble and juggle before a friend? May I dare to presuppose him weak, and shun the acceleration of connections, which, after all, must come with her?"
So soon as Charles came to him, he spoke to him first of the intended journey, and even added the request for his company, moved by the thought of the first parting with his youthful friend. The Captain, whose heart always needed the sounding-board of fancy for musical utterance, was not able, on the spot, to have or to picture any considerable emotions about the farewell. Then Albano, who could not get it over his lips, gave him the whole letter.
During the reading, Roquairol's whole face became hateful, even in his friend's eye. He darted then such a flaming look of indignation at Albano, that the latter involuntarily and unconsciously returned it. "O, verily, I understand it all," said Charles; "so was the thing to be solved. Only wait till to-morrow!" All muscles in him were alive, all features distorted, everything in commotion, just as, in a violent tempest, little cloudlets whirl around each other. Albano would fain question and detain him. "To-morrow, to-morrow!" he cried, and went off like a storm.
87. CYCLE.
On the morrow, Albano received a singular letter from Roquairol, for the understanding of which some notices of his connection with Rabette must be prefixed.
Nothing is harder, when one really loves one's friend, than scarcely to look at that friend's sister. Nothing is easier (except only the converse) than, after being disenchanted by city hearts, to be enchanted by country hearts. Nothing is more natural for a general lover, who loves all, than to love one among them. It needs not be proved that the Captain had been in all three cases at once, when he, for the first time, told Rabette she had his heart, as he was pleased to call it. She, of course, should not have worshipped, at such a nearness, the Hamadryad in such a Upas-tree, with whose sap so many of Cupid's arrows are poisoned; but she and most of her sisters are so dazzled by men's advantages as not to see men's misuse of them.