I confess reluctantly that Albano, in the beginning,--because, with all his sharp-sightedness, his purity was quite as great,--comprehended the fact only confusedly; but when he did get the idea, it was to him _pharmaceutic_ manna, as it was to Schoppe _Israelitish_. "The Knight of the Cross," said the latter, "beareth not his cross in vain,--it does him quite as much service as one daubed on the houses in Italy does to them: not a soul may do on either of them what even in Rome may be done before every antechamber."
Not long after that our three friends were going out into the street just at the hour when the noisy carriages rolled along to tea and play, when a litter was carried by before them with the seat _backward_, whereupon, however, a man was sitting. "Holy Father!" cried Schoppe, "in there sits, bodily, Cephisio, from Rome, who must sometime or other give me a sound drubbing."--"Softly, softly!" said Augusti, "that is the German gentleman; Cephisio is his Arcadian name."[77]--"Well, I rejoice so much the more that I once in my life had a hearty, downright set-to with the red-nose," said he, turning round and accompanying the litter, with his arms thrust under it, for almost ten paces, in order to get a better view of the caged bird, before the latter s.n.a.t.c.hed-to the curtains. Albano caught a glimpse within the litter, as it pa.s.sed swiftly along, only of a sharp eye drawn like a dagger, and a red-glowing nose-bud.
Schoppe came back and related the transactions in Rome. He said, against all mortal sinners, blood-guilty men, and imps of iniquity he bore no such bitter and grim wrath as against professional bankers, _croupiers_,[78] and _Grecs_; if he had a canker-worm-iron wherewith he might sc.r.a.pe away this vermin from the earth, or a cochineal-mill wherewith he might grind them to powder, he would do it most cordially.
"O heavens!" he then broke out, "had I in fact my foot just stretched out over the curling, coiling worm-stalk (and though that foot had the gout in it), I would gladly dash it down upon them, and tread out the vile filth." But what he could, he did. Being his own travelling servant, and a decoy-spider, darting to and fro through all Europe, he had full often the pleasure of getting these faro-leaf-caterpillars and leaf-sappers under his thumb,--of becoming their pretended a.s.sociate,--learning their tactics,--and then rolling some fire-wheel or other into their hissing snakes"-hole. I am not intimately instructed whether it is known in Leipsic who the ringleader was that, a short time since, at the fair, played a mock-police with mimic-constables, and broke up a bank;--at least the bankers were altogether out on the subject, because they were expecting the real police the next day, and were begging for some indulgences and _il_legal-benefits; but I am in a condition here to name the thief-catcher: it was Schoppe. The spoils he applied mostly to the purpose of running new mines under the faro-tables.
With Cephisio he had played his cards otherwise. He stepped up before his bank, and looked on for some minutes, and at last presented a card with a shield-louis-d"or. It won, and he showed behind the card a long roll of louis. Bouverot would not pay this roll. "He had not seen anything," he said. "What is your _croupier_ sitting there for, then?"
said Schoppe, and p.r.o.nounced them swindlers, if they did not pay. To escape greater damage, they paid him his winnings. He took the money coldly, and departed, with these words to the Pointeurs: "Gentlemen, I a.s.sure you, you are playing here with finished cheats; but they have paid me only because I knew them." Amidst the increasing stiffness and paleness of the partners he turned, and slowly, with his broad-shouldered, compact figure, and his knotty cudgel, walked away unscathed.
Augusti wished from his heart--for the persecution"s sake--that Bouverot might not know the Librarian again. They found at home an invitation from the Minister to tea and supper. "The poor daughter!" said Augusti; "for the sake of this Bouverot, the half-blind one must go to-morrow to the table." Meanwhile, our youth will then surely see her again at last, and only a spring-day separates him from the dearest object! If Augusti is right, then my observation fits in here, that a good sound villain is always the motive-pike which sets the still, quaker-like carp-tribe in the pond to swimming; the hidden pock-matter, which brings cold children at once to life.
38. CYCLE.
Liana"s eyes healed, but only slowly: Nature would not lead her at once out of her sombre prison into the sun; she could now, like the philosophers, just recognize light rather than forms. Nevertheless, the Minister issued cabinet orders that she should day after to-morrow play on the harmonica, appear at the _souper_, and even make the salad, and thereby mask her blindness. He sometimes commanded impossible things, in order to meet with as much disobedience as his anger needed for the purpose of venting itself in punishment. Certain people keep themselves all day long full of vexation beforehand for some coming event or other, like urinal phosphate, which always boils under the microscope, or forges, wherein every day fire breaks out.
The Minister"s lady p.r.o.nounced her soft, firm, No. About the harmonica she said she had asked the Doctor, in his name, who had strictly forbidden it; and the rest was an impossibility. Here he could already, he felt so like it, be angry at several things, especially at the asking of the Doctor, which, however, had not yet taken place; he grew mad enough, and swore he should act according to _his own_ principles, and devil a bit did he care for _other_ people"s.
This _principle_ was in the present case the German gentleman. That is to say, the above-mentioned anecdote--Bouverot"s guardianship of the hereditary Prince on his travels, or the design of the thing--had at both courts come to be the common talk in a.s.semblies and at tables, and was hidden only from the Prince Luigi; for on thrones, there are almost no mysteries to any one excepting him (hardly his wife) who sits thereupon, as in whispering-galleries the people in distant corners hear everything aloud, only not he who stands in the middle. The German gentleman was, therefore, in the Hohenfliess system, the important port-vein and pulmonary artery wherewith even Froulay would water himself. The latter is obliged throughout to serve the present and the future, or two masters, of whom the one of Haarhaar might very soon be his.
Bouverot was attached not merely to Froulay the minister, but to Froulay the father; a man like him, who causes to be sent after him from Italy a whole cabinet of Art, and whose acquaintance with the arts has so long knit together even him and the Prince, must know how to prize a Madonna of such carnation as Liana, and of the Romish school, and, what is more, who, detached from the canvas, moved as a full, breathing rose. As to marrying the rose, that he could not propose to himself, because he was a German Herr.
He had not seen her since his Italian tour,--nor had the Count either,--to both the Minister wished to show her as a round pearl of special whiteness and figure. Froulay had--which after all happens oftener than we imagine--quite as much vanity as pride; the latter to repel blame, the former to court praise. But I should have now to write a tournament-chronicle to tell posterity the half of all his raging and racing and lance-thrusts, in a fight wherein he served under the banners of enmity, vanity, and avarice. He was no more to be hunted to death than a wolf. All weapons were alike to him, and he was ever taking sharper and more poisonous ones. In the old _judicial_ duels between man and wife, the man stood commonly up to his stomach in a pit, in order to bring his strength down to a level with the woman"s, and she struck at him with a stone tied up in a veil; but in the _matrimonial_ duels the man seems to stand in the free air and the woman in the earth, and she often has only the _veil_ without the stone.
In this combat there stepped between the two a shining peace-angel who caught the wounds, namely, Liana. The daughter, who had an enthusiastic love for her mother, and the womanly reverence for the stronger s.e.x toward her father, and who suffered so endlessly under their strifes, fell upon her mother"s neck and begged her to allow her what her father demanded; she would certainly do everything so as not to excite observation; she would take the greatest pains and practise herself specially beforehand,--ah, he would otherwise only be still more unkind to her poor brother,--this discord, merely on her account, was so painful to her, and perhaps more injurious than playing on the harmonica.
"My child, thou knowest," said the mother, for now she _had_ asked, "what the physician said yesterday against the harmonica; the rest is at thine own risk!" Liana kissed her joyfully. She must needs be led to her father, that she might make known to him aloud the gladness of her obedience. "I thank you, and be hanged," said he, softly; "it is simply your cursed duty." She left him with her joy dissipated to atoms, but without any great pangs; she was already accustomed to this.
39. CYCLE.
The Lector, while they were yet on their way to the Minister"s, begged Albano to moderate the fire of his a.s.sertions and his pantomimes. He made known to him only so much of the family-jar as was necessary, in order that he might not, by a mistaken idea of her restoration, throw Liana into embarra.s.sment. As they entered the card-room, everything was already in full blaze.
As, at this time, no one is presented to him, I must do it; they are disciples (at least _twelfth_ disciples) of the Minister.
And first, I introduce to thee the holy President of Justice, Von Landrok, a good apothecary"s-balance of Themis, which weighs out scruples, and wherein no false weights lie; but what is quite as bad, much s.m.u.t, rubbish, and rust. Those at the ombre-table near by are the lords and ladies of Vey, Flol, and Kob, sleek, fine souls, like minerals in cabinets, polished off on the show-side, but on the concealed base still jagged and scratching.
Go with me to the entrance of the next apartment; here I have to present to thee the young but fat canon Von Meiler, who, in order to line and stuff out and pad his inner man with a thick, warm, outer one, needs to fleece no more peasants yearly than the number of linden-trees the Russian peels for his bark-shoes, namely, one hundred and fifty.
The apartment into which thou art looking I present to thee as a fly-gla.s.s full of courtiers, who, in order to enter into the _kingdom of heaven_, have become not merely _children_, but in fact _embryons_ of four weeks, who, as is well known, look like flies; if Swift desires of his servants nothing more than the _shutting-to_ of the doors, these wish nothing of their employer and bread-provider but the _leaving-open_ of the same.
I have the honor to set before thee yonder--it is he who is not playing--the holy Church-Counsellor, Schape, who would fain be chief chaplain to the court; a soft scoundrel, who soaks and softens the seed-corns of the divine and human word, like melon-seed (they are thereby to spring up sooner in the heart), so long in sugared wine, that they rot in it; a spiritual lord who never in his life _offered_ any other prayers than the two which he always refuses, the _fourth_ and _fifth_.[79]
But the Lector will soon name to thee, at the window, every one of the lords and dames, coldly, gently, and without pantomime. At present the Minister himself conducts thee to a gentleman, one of the players, with a cross on, who drinks water with saltpetre, and is continually licking his dry mouth; it is _Bouverot_,--he is just rising in thy presence; examine the cold, but impudent and cutting, sharply-ground eye, whose corners resemble a pair of open tinman"s-shears, or a trap set,--the red nose, and the hard, lipless mouth, whose reddish crab"s-claw, worn off by whetting, pinches together,--the c.o.c.ked-up chin, and the whole stocky, firm figure. Albano does not surprise him; he has already seen all men, and he inquires about no one.
The Minister refreshed the youth, whose inner being was one snarl, with the promise that at supper he would present to him his daughter. He offered him a game; but Alban replied, with a too youthful accent, he never played.
He could now roam round through the lanes of the card-tables, and survey whatever he wished. In such a case one posts himself, if there is no one of the company whom he can endure, exactly before or beside the face he detests the most, in order inwardly to lash himself into vexation at every word and every feature of the countenance. Albano might have had many visages in his eye which were, at least in a small degree, intolerable, and by which he might have stationed himself;--nay, no sufficient reasons could have been a.s.signed why he should not have given his whole attention to a certain chaffy, dried up paste-eel, a weakling full of impertinence, who was observing through an eye-gla.s.s the card constellations as they came up, while Albano could extend the feelers of his optic nerves even to the spots on the cards in the second apartment;--there would, indeed, have been no reasons, had not the German gentleman been there; before him he must place himself; of him he knew the most and the worst; he stood in distant connection with Schoppe, even with Liana. Furies! in the neighborhood of certain faces the pinions of the soul crumple up and mew themselves as swans" and pigeons" feathers are crushed before eagles" quills; it was as uncomfortable and close for all the innocent feelings in such a roomy breast as Albano"s, as it is to a flock of pigeons into whose cote some one has thrown the tail of a polecat.
I cannot disguise the fact, he muttered and growled inwardly at all the man did and had,--whether it was his having fingers whose points were finely shaved for the faro-game, and whose nails had been somewhat peeled off by an altogether worse game of _hazard_ yet,--or his looking occasionally through the hair of his eyebrows,--or (only once) squashing a fly by a sudden snapping to of his lips like a fly-trap,--or his uttering now a line of German and now of French, which I expect of good circles, whereas only low people never bring out a German word, except a few, such as _Lansquenet_,[80] _canif_ (kneif), _birambrot_ (bier am brod), excepted. Suffice it, he thought always of Schoppe"s fine expression: "There are men and times at which and with whom nothing could be more refreshing to an honest man than--to give them a sound drubbing." Duelling is quite as good, thought the Count.
However, Schoppe must here be justified by an authority. Namely, the author himself, otherwise such a soft, warm swan-skin, could never stand behind card-table-chairs without becoming a complete game-c.o.c.k, and spreading out his scratching, bristly wing the wider the longer he idly looked on; the reason is this, that in general one finds only those people more and more tolerable and better upon acquaintance, with whom one pursues and purposes the same kind of objects.
Albano wished heartily he had his brother-in-arms Schoppe with him now; he went often, it is true, to Augusti to vent himself; but _he_ always sought to pacify him; yes, by keeping himself constantly engaged with the church-counsellor, he cut off from him the opportunity of betraying his youthful, inexperienced soul to listeners. Moreover, the Lector chose afterward for half an hour--what familiar friends often do in the absence of familiar female friends--the latter (namely, absence).
The Count stood some time behind Bouverot"s seat, and looked into a Chinese mirror, j.a.panned on the inside with grotesque figures, and changed his position constantly, till he brought Cephisio"s face to appear therein right beside a painted dragon, just by way of comparison;--all this went on, interrupted, however, by constantly increasing heart-beatings for Liana, when the servants opened the doors to the supper-hall; and now his heart thumped even to pain, and his form, already so blooming with youth, hung all full of the roses of happy and modest confusion.
40. CYCLE.
With beating heart and burning cheek he made his way into the midst of the motley promenading throng with some old lady or other, who, in her vanity, misunderstood him, and at once hung on his arm like a spring-bracelet, and who got nothing from him but--answers. With flying and piercing glances he stepped into the bright hall, which seemed as if it were made of crystallized light, and into the sea of heads. He was just making some answer when he caught, in the tumult behind him, the low words, "I certainly hear my brother,"--and immediately the still lower refutation, "It is my Count." He turned round; between the Lector and her mother stood the dear Liana, a modest, timid, pale-red angel, in a black silk dress, over which ran only the glittering spring-frost of a silver chain, and with a light ribbon in her blond hair. The mother presented her to him, and the tender cheek bloomed more redly,--for she had, indeed, confounded the similar voices of the guest and the brother,--and she cast down those beautiful eyes which could see nothing. Ah, Albano, how violently thy heart trembles now that the past has become present, the moonlit night a spring morning; and this still form, now so near thee, works far more mightily than in any dream! She was too holy in his sight for him to have been able to utter a lie before her about the apparent recovery; he preferred silence;--and thus the warmest friend of her life came to her the first time only veiled and dumb.
The Lector soon led her away to her seat under the second l.u.s.tre; opposite her sat her mother (probably, for this reason, that the good, unconscious daughter, who surely could not always be letting her eyelids fall, might raise them with friendliness and propriety towards a beloved being); the German gentleman, as an acquaintance, seated himself, without further ceremony, on her right, Augusti on her left,--Zesara, as Count, came far up above beside the highest lady.
Deuse take it! that is, unfortunately, so often my own case! I a.s.sert the upper seat of honor,--and observe, a mile below me, the daughter, but, like a myops, only half of her, and can bring about nothing the whole evening. Do pray transpose me without any scruples down beside her,--you have to deal with nothing more than a puffed-up man,--why, on earth, as in the heavens, must, then, the largest planets be placed exactly the farthest from their sun?
I now draw my readers to the Minister"s table, not to show them the ministerial pomp ingrafted upon avarice, or his dance of honor hemmed in between the parallel lines of etiquette, or even his family arms, which were carried round on every chafing-dish and salt-cellar, and with the ice and mustard,--enough for us to know the ubiquity of the insignia upon his flower-pots, shirts, bed-clothes, dog"s cravats, and all his thoughts; but the reader shall just now look only at my hero.
He is very prominent. Upon such a new-comer, people, in a residence-city, have already, before he has fairly given the driver his drinking-money, got all possible light of nature and revelation; nineteen of the company were fastened upon him as his moral odometers.
The boldness of his nature and his rank made up with him for worldly tact, which was missed nowhere except in this, that he never took sides except in the very strongest manner, and always ran off into general and cosmopolitan observations. But see, I pray you!--O, I wish Liana could see it,--how the rosy glow and the fresh green of his healthiness shines among the yellow sicklings of the age, out of whom, as from ships on the African coast of youth, all the pitch that held them together had run out,--and how the cheek-redness of spiritual health, a tender, ever-returning suffusion (from anxiety about Liana) graces him, whereas most of the world"s people at the table seem, like cotton wool, to take all colors more easily than _red_!
He looked and listened, against the salvation-laws of visiting, too much to Liana. She ate, under the heightened redness of a fear of mistaking, only sparingly, but without embarra.s.sment; the Lector, with easy hand, barred up against her the smallest road to error. What astonished him was, that she covered such a sensitive and easily weeping heart with such an unembarra.s.sed cheerfulness of countenance and conversation.
Young man! _that_ is, with the most delicate maidens, free from pangs of love, no covering and disguise, but an enjoying of the moment and habitual courtesy! She retained so considerately (what she had probably learned beforehand) the relative rank of the familiar voices, that she never directed her answer to the wrong place. She, however, looked often to her mother with full eyes, and smiled then still more serenely, not, however, for the purpose of deceiving, but from real, hearty love.
Touching her salad, the best and most fit to be a prince"s table-guest among my female readers, who had seen her mix it, would have taken several fork-loads thereof. Uncommonly charming was it, when, growing more earnest and red, she drew off her glove before the blue, celestial hemisphere of gla.s.s; with white hands and supple arms, without a silken fold, worked away in the green, between the blue of the gla.s.s and the black of the silk; considerately felt for the vinegar-and oil-castors, and poured out as much as her practice (and the deciphered advice of the Lector,--at least so it seems to me) directed. By heavens! the dressing is, in this case, the salad; and the vain Minister, who had no understanding of pictures, had a great eye for things that would make good pictures.
The mother seemed scarcely to look at the leaf-mixing. To the Count, the Minister"s lady seemed to-day to have only good-breeding and no pious strictness; but he did not yet sufficiently know those polished women, who have refinement without wit, sensibility without fire, clearness without coldness; who borrow of the snail his feelers, his softness, his coolness, and his dumb gait, and who demand and deserve more confidence than they obtain.
At this moment came in Cephisio, like an angel among three men in the fiery furnace, but a dark angel. To the Count, his contiguity of seat, and every word he addressed to Liana, was already a crucifixion,--only to pa.s.s with a look from her to him was an agony, little different from that which I should have, if I had spent a day at Dresden in the antique Olympus of ancient G.o.ds, and then, on going out, should fall into a refectory full of swollen monks, or into a naturalist"s cabinet full of stuffed malefactors" skins and bottled embryo-spiders. However he was pacified--in my opinion, only deceived--by one thing, that the German gentleman did not blaze away in lyrics beside her, was neither in heaven nor out of his head, but in his head, and quite composed and very polite. There are no pigeons, Count,--ask the farmers,--which the hawks oftener pounce upon than the _glossy white_ ones!
The German gentleman now produced a snuff-box, with a neat picture of Lilar, and asked Liana how it pleased her; he liked the sentimentality of it particularly.
The Lector was terrified, leaned forward toward the box-piece, and threw out a few opinions beforehand which should guide the half-blind one in forming her own; but after she had pa.s.sed it two or three times obliquely against the lights and near before her eyes, she was able to express an original opinion herself, that the child illuminated by the half-sunken sun, who is drawn aloft by a flower-chain under the triumphal arch, was, to her feelings, "so very lovely." Here--and I have observed the same case in a half-blind lady of powerful fancy and receptive sense of art--the effort and the artistic sense, or the spiritual eye, came to meet the bodily half-way. The box, as well as its snuff, was presented farther on, and came down along to the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdorfer, upon whom the new Prince"s love of the arts and the favorite"s knowledge in them now placed new crowns; he found fault with nothing but the white of the blossoms. "Spring," said he, "is, by reason of its wearisome whiteness, a mere monochrome; I have visited Lilar only in autumn." "There is the nightingale"s song, too, which we of course cannot paint, but yet we can hear it," said Liana, cheerfully; he was her teacher, and now, in the technology of painting, even her father"s. Over all her acquisitions and inner fruits and blossoms the rose of silence had been painted; to that her tyrannical father had entirely accustomed her, and especially before men, in whom she always revered copied fathers.
When the landscape came to Albano, and he held before him in miniature that spring night when Lilar and the n.o.ble old man appeared to him so enchantingly,--and as he touched what the dear soul had handled,--and now in his own soul all accordant strings trembled,--just then the Devil struck again a dissonant chord of the seventh:--
"The Prince, gracious sir," said the Minister to the German gentleman, "was yesterday buried in private; only eight days hence we have the public interment. We are obliged to hasten, because the suspension of the court-mourning lasts until the inauguration, on _ascension-day_, is gone by." I am too much excited to express myself upon the eternal master of ceremonies, Froulay, who would have raised a lantern-tax in the sun, and bridge-toll before park-bridges and a.s.ses"-bridges; but Albano, dazzled by so many side-lights and glancing rays,--reminded of Liana"s sorrow over the old man, of his birthday, of the heart without a breast, and of the madness of the world,--was not in a condition, however much he had intended appearing in gentleness and lambs" clothes before Froulay, to keep the latter on; but he must needs (and louder than he meant), in opposition to his next neighbor, the Church Counsellor, Schape, with too great youthful exasperation (not lessened by the eager listening of Liana for the brotherly voice) declare himself against many things,--against the everlasting dead sham-life of men,--against the ceremonial haughtiness of a soulless form,--against this starving on love merely from making false shows of it;--ah, his whole heart burned on his lip!
The honest Schape, whom I just now called a scoundrel, took, with several expressions of countenance, Albano"s part. But I do not by any means, friend Albano!--thou hast yet to learn for the first time that men, in respect to ceremonies, modes, and laws, like a flock of sheep, will, in a body, provided the bell-wether can only be got to leap over a pole, continue to leap carefully over the same place when the pole has been taken away;--and the most and highest leaps, in the state, are those we make without the pole. But a youth would be an ordinary one who should love civil life very early, however certain it is that he and we all judge too bitterly the faults of every office which we do not ourselves hold.
The company listened in silence, and, out of politeness, only inwardly admired; on Liana fell a tender seriousness.
They rose,--the closeness vanished,--so did his zeal;--but, whether it came from the speaking, or the contemplation of the loved object, or from a youthful over-leaping of the hedges of visiting-propriety,--(it arose not, however, from want of manners),--the fact is not to be denied (and I do my best, too, to give it exactly) that the Count left the poor old lady who had been escorted in by him,--Hafenreffer himself knows not her name,--left her standing, and, I believe unconsciously, took Liana under his escort. Ah, her! What shall I say of the magic nearness of the dreamed-of soul,--of the light resting of her hand, felt only by the arm of the inner man, not of the outer,--of the shortness of the heavenly way, which should have been at least as long as Frederick Street?
Verily, he himself said nothing,--he thought merely of the abominable Inhibitorial-room, where their separation must take place,--he trembled at every effort to speak. "You have, perhaps," said Liana, lightly and openly, who loved to hear the friendly voice, especially after the warm discourse, "already visited our Lilar?"--"Truly not; but have you?" he said, too much confused. "My mother and I have made it our favorite home every spring."
Now were they in the parting-chamber. Alas! there and thus he stood with her, who saw nothing, for some seconds immovable, and looked straight before him, wanting to say something, till he was aroused by her mother, who was eagerly seeking, for her affection, which the whole evening had been nourishing, a sequestered hour on her daughter"s heart,--and so all was over, for both vanished like apparitions.
But Alban was as a man who is deserted by a glorious dream, and who all the morning is so inwardly blest, but remembers the dream no more. And yet, stands not Lilar open to him, and will he not surely see it, so soon as ever Liana can see it too?