56. CYCLE.
Joyfully did Roquairol, on the first evening when he knew his father had gone a journey, bear to his friend the invitation to go with him to his mother. Albano blushed charmingly for the first time, at the thought of that fiery night which had wrung from him the oldest mystery; for hitherto neither of them, in the common hours of life, had retouched the sacred subject. Only the Captain could easily and willingly speak of Linda as well as of every other loss.
Liana always beheld her brother—the creator and ruling spirit of her softest hours—with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern chamber, from which he had seen, for the first time, the dear maiden, only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns! The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her, after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire, of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical, strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden; afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually at once thirteen and seventeen years old.
Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet proudly, but so affectionately, that true pair of eyes!
And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,—whose continuance is often, on men's faces, but not on maidens', the title-vignette of falsehood,—she received our noble youth, but not him alone.
She seated herself at the embroidery-frame; and the mother soon launched the Count out into the cool, high sea of general conversation, into which only occasionally the son threw up a green, warm island. Alban looked on to see how Liana made her mosaic flower-pieces grow; how the little white hand lay on the black satin ground (Froulay's thorax is to wear the flowers on his birthday), and how her pure brow, over which the curly hair transparently waved, bent forward, and how her face, when she spoke, or when she looked after new colors of silk, lifted itself up, animated with the higher glow of industry in the eye and on the cheek. Charles sometimes hastily stretched out his hand towards her. She willingly reached hers across; he laid it between his two, and turned it over, looked into the palm, pressed it with both hands, and the brother and sister smiled upon each other affectionately. And each time Albano turned from his conversation with the mother, and true-heartedly smiled with them. But poor hero! It is of itself a Herculean labor to sit idly by where fine work is going on, such as embroidery, miniature painting, &c.; but above all, with a spirit like thine, which has so many sails, together with a couple of storms in behind, to lie inactively at anchor beside the embroidery-frame, and not to be, say, a spinning Hercules (that were easy), but only one that sees spinning,—and that, too, in the presence of a great spring and sunset out of doors,—and, in addition to all this, in the company of a mother, so chary of her words (in fact, before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter),—these are sore things.
He looked down sharply at the embroidered Flora. "Nothing pains me so much," said he,—for he always philosophized, and everything useless on the earth troubled him grievously,—"as that so many thousand artificial ornaments should be created in vain in the world, without a single eye ever meeting and enjoying them. It will touch me very nearly if this green leaflet here is not especially observed." With the same sorrow over fruitless, unenjoyed plantings of labor, he often shut his eyes upon wall-paper foliage, upon worked flowers, upon architectural decorations. Liana might have taken it as a painter's censure of the overladen stitch-garden, which, merely out of love for her father, she was sowing so full,—for Froulay, born in the days when they still trimmed the gold-lace with clothes, rather than the reverse, was fond of buttoning a little silk herbary round his body,—but she only smiled, and said, "Well, the little leaf has surely escaped that evil destiny: it is observed."
"What matters a thing's being forgotten and useless?" said Roquairol, taking up the word, full of indifference to the Lector, who was just entering, and full of indifference to the opinion of his mother, to whom, as well as to his father, only the entreaties of his sister sometimes made him submissive. "Enough that a thing is. The birds sing and the stars move in majesty over the wildernesses, and no man sees the splendor. In fact, everywhere, in and out of man, more passes unseen than seen. Nature draws out of endless seas, and without exhausting them; we, too, are a nature, and should draw and pour out, and not be always anxiously reckoning upon the profit, for watering purposes, of every transient shower and rainbow. Just keep on embroidering, sister!" he concluded, ironically.
"The Princess comes to-day!" said the Lector, and, delighted with the prospect, Liana kissed her mother's hand. She looked up often and confidentially from her embroidery at the courtier, who seemed to be very intimate, but who, as a refined man, was full as much respected and as respectful as if he were there for the first time.
The announcement of the Princess set the Captain into a charming state of easy good-humor; a female part was to him as necessary for society as to the French for an opera, and the presence of a lady helped him as much in teaching, as the absence of a button did Kant.[135] By way of drawing his sister off from the flowers, he removed the red veil from a statue on the card-table, and threw it, like a little red dawn, over the lilies on the face of the embroideress; just then the door opened and Julienne entered. Liana, trying to remove the veil, in her haste to welcome her, entangled herself in the little red dawn. Albano mechanically reached out to her his hand to relieve her of the veil, and she gave it to him, and a dear, full look besides. O how his enraptured eye shone!
Julienne brought with her a train of jeux d'esprit. The Captain, who, like a pyrotechnist, could give his fire all forms and colors, reinforced her with his; and his sister sowed, as it were, the flowers with which the zephyrettes of raillery could play. Julienne almost said no to yes, and yes to no; only toward the Minister's lady was she serious and submissive,—a sign that, on her arena of disputation, among the grains of sand particles of golden sand still lay, whereas for philosophers the arena is the prize and the ground,—at once the battle-field, the Champ de Mars, and the Champs Elysées. Upon the Count she fixed her passionate gaze as boldly as only princesses may venture to and love to; and when he returned the glance of her brown eye, she cast it down; but she remembered him, from her old visit in Blumenbühl, and inquired after his friends. He now entered with pleasure upon something that was as ardent as his own soul,—encomiums. It is against the finest politeness to praise or blame persons with warmth,—things one may. While he portrayed with grateful remembrance his sister Rabette, Julienne became so earnestly and deeply absorbed in his eye, that she started, and asked the Lector about the steps of the Anglaise which he had led at the masquerade. When he had done his best to give an idea of it, she said she had not understood a word of what he had been saying; one must, after all, execute it.
And herewith I suddenly introduce my fair readers in a body to a domestic ball of two couples. See the two sisters-in-soul, side by side, like two wings on one dove, harmoniously flutter up and down. Albano had expected Julienne would form a contrast, by nimble and sprightly fluttering, to the still, hovering movement of her friend; but both undulated lightly, like waves, by and through each other, and there was not a motion too much nor too swift.
Hence I have so often wished that maidens might always dance exactly like the Graces and the Hours,—that is to say, only with one another, not with us gentlemen. The present union of the female wave-line with the masculine swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does not remarkably beautify the dance.
Liana assumed a new ethereal form, somewhat as an angel while flying back into heaven lays aside his graceful earthly one. The dancing-floor is to woman's beauty what the horse's back is to ours; on both the mutual enchantment unfolds itself, and only a rider can match a dancing maiden. Fortunate Albano! thou who hardly dar'st take the finger-points of Liana's offered hand in thine! thou gettest enough. And only look at this friendly maiden, whose eyes and lips Charis so smilingly brightens for the dance, and who yet, on the other hand, appears so touchingly, because she is a little pale! How different from those capricious or inflexible step-sisters, who, with half a Cato of Utica on the wrinkled or tightly stretched face, hop, fall back, and slip round. Julienne flies joyfully to and fro; and it is hard to say before whose eyes she loves to flutter best, Liana's or Albano's.
When it was done, Julienne wanted to begin over again. Liana looked at her mother, and immediately begged her friend rather for a cooling off. A mere pretext! A female friend loves to be alone with a female friend; the two loved each other before people only with a veil upon their hearts, and longed for the dark arbor where it might fall off. Liana had a real loving impatience, till she could, with her duplicate-soul, her twin-heart, snatch moments free from witnesses in the garden of evening and May. They came back changed and full of tender seriousness. The lovely beings were perhaps as like each other in their innermost souls and in stillness as in the dance, and more so than they seemed.
And thus passed with our youth a fair-starred evening! Pardon him, however, that he grasped and pressed this nosegay so close as to feel some of the thorns. His heart, whose love grew painfully near another, could not help finding this other, where there was no sign of response, at once higher and farther off. Her love was love of man,—her smile was meant for every kind eye,—she was so cheerful. In Lilar she easily passed into emotion and general contemplations; not so here,—of course she would look right sympathetically upon her wildly loving brother, who, since that confession-night, had twined himself as if with oak-roots around the darling; but her half-blind love for the brother might indeed be only, in the deceiving light of reflection, shining upon his friend. All this the modest one said to himself. But what he had enjoyed in full measure of ecstasy was the increasing, clear, tender, steadfast love of his soul's-brother.