15. CYCLE.
The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,—yes, as a sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the cabinet of the dining-room,—and for Albano Albina had already contrived an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the vocation of the Province. Ah, but what did the lady get from it all but flames, which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the sprinkling of the magister?
Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness, because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,—then step by step she took back the right,—but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their mouths,—and at last said he should just give the child up to her.
But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own, and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him—though he himself dared and did too much—to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback, or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner, and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?
Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his defiant way to the father's study, and therefore to the court-martial punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning, tied on the vena cava of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"
He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated, into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant. Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation with wine.
In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of the dulcimer let his musical hammer fall on the stringed floor. Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs, ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their leather aprons and culs de Paris, to take themselves off instantly.
Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle, who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing, convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones. After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon himself by his rides and his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely, herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.
Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained cold and hard,—for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point, the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue, which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Würzburg appendage off over his head. Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment, with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him, "and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him, but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair as an act of obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children in high life.
Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off, the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then will the old man read the Decretum over again still more slowly, so as almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it, make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry cheeks,—then will he look a pretty long time after his departing darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over the address of the diploma at his will.