75. CYCLE.
A hard, black morning; only the outward atmospheric morning was dark-blue; there was nothing loud and stormy, except perchance the swarms of bees in the linden-thicket; the heaven's ether seemed to flutter away high over the stony streets, so as to settle down low in the bright open Lilar upon all hill-tops and tree-tops, and, blue as peacock's plumage, to play its hues over the twigs.
Liana found on her writing-table a billet, folded in large quarto, wherein the Minister, ever-working, like a heart, sought even at this early hour of the morning, before raising out of the public documents for the several administration and exchequer counsellors the transient tempests which were necessary to fruitfulness, to descend upon his shuddering daughter with a cold morning rain-gust. In the decretal letter referred to, he developed more in detail, upon a sheet and a half what he had meant yesterday,—separation on the spot; and offered six grounds of separation,—first, his uncongenial relation with the Knight of the Fleece; secondly, her own and the Count's youth; thirdly, the approaching place of court-dame; fourthly, that she was his daughter, and this the first sacrifice to which he, her father, for all his previous ones, had ever laid claim; fifthly, she might perceive, by his indulgent "Yes," to the love of her brother, whose apparent improvement he held out to her as a model, that he lived and cared only for the welfare of his children; sixthly, he would send her to Fort * * * to his brother, the commandant, in case she were refractory, by way of exiling, punishing, and bringing her round; and neither weeping, nor falling at feet, nor mother, nor hell should bend him; and he gave her three days' time for reflection.
Mutely, and with wet eyes, she handed to her who had been hitherto her comforter the heavy sheet. But the comforter had become a judge: "What wilt thou do?" said the Minister's lady. "I will suffer," said Liana, "in order that he may not suffer; how could I so sorely sin against him?" The mother, whether actually under the old notion of her easy conversion, or from dissimulation, took that "He" for the father, and asked: "Say'st thou nothing of me?" Liana blushed at the substitution, and said: "Ah! poor me, I will not indeed be happy,—only true!" How had she during this night prayingly lived and wept amidst the fearful wars of all her inner angels! A love so guiltless, consecrated by her holy friend in heaven,—a fidelity so exceedingly abridged by early death; so sound-hearted a youth, shooting up with high, fruit-bearing summit heavenward, whom not even ghostly voices could scare or allure out of his faithful childhood's love toward her, insignificant one; the everlasting discomfort and grief which he would experience at the first, greatest lie against his heart; her short, straight path through life, and the nearness of that cross-way, at which she should wish to throw back,—not stones, but flowers upon the other pilgrims;—all these forms took her by one hand to draw her away from her mother, who called after her with the words: "See how ungratefully thou art going from me, and I have so long suffered and toiled for thee!" Then came Liana back again out of the dusky, warm rose-vale of love into the dry, flat earth-surface of a life, wherein nothing breaks the monotony save her last mound. O how imploringly did she look up to the stars, to see whether they did not move as the eyes of her Caroline, and tell her how she must sacrifice herself, whether for her lover or for her parents; but the stars stood friendly, cold, and still in the steadfast heavens.
But, when the morning sun again beamed upon her heart, it beat hopefully, newly strengthened with the resolution to endure this day for Albano full many sorrows,—ah yes, even the first. Could Caroline, thought she, approve a love to which I must be untrue?
Hardly had she left the lips of her mother with the morning greeting, when the latter sought, but more earnestly than yesterday, to draw up the roots of this steadfast heart out of its strange soil by a longer use of yesterday's flower-extractor. In her comparative anatomy of Albano and Roquairol, from the similarity of voice even to that of stature, she grew more and more cutting, till Liana, with a maiden's wit, at once asked, "But why may my brother, then, love Rabette?" "Quelle comparaison!" said the mother. "Art thou nothing better than she?" "She does, strictly speaking, much more than I," said she, quite candidly. "Didst thou never quarrel with the wild Zesara?" asked the mother. "Never, except when I was in the wrong," said she, innocently.
The mother was alarmed to perceive more and more clearly that she had to pull up deeper and stronger roots than light flowers strike into the soil. She concentrated all her maternal powers of attraction and lifting-machines upon one point, for the upturning of the still green myrtle. She disclosed to her the Minister's dark plan of an alliance with the German gentleman, her hitherto concealed strifes and sighs on the subject, her thus far effectual resistance, and the latest paternal stratagem, to make her a garrison-prisoner with his brother, and thereby probably Herr von Bouverot a besieger of the citadel.
For some readers and relicts of the heavy, old-fashioned, golden age of morality, the remark is here introduced and printed, that a peculiar, cold, unsparing, often shocking and provoking, candor of remark upon the nearest relatives and the tenderest relations is so very much at home in the higher ranks, that even the fairer souls, among whom, surely, this mother belongs, cannot, absolutely, understand or do otherwise.
"O thou best mother!" cried Liana, agitated, but not by the thought of the rattle and the snaky breath of Bouverot, or of his murderous spring at her heart,—she thought with as much indifference of being betrothed to him as any innocent one does of his dying on a scaffold,—but by the thought of the long building over and crowding out of sight of the motherly tears, the streams of motherly love, which had hitherto flowed nourishingly deep down under her flowers. She threw herself gratefully between those helpful arms. They closed not around her, because the Minister's lady was not to be made weak and soft by any washing wave and surge of sudden emotion.
Into this embrace the Minister struck or stepped in. "So!" said he, hastily. "My ear, madam," he continued, "cannot be found again at all among the domestics; I have that to tell you." For he had to-day posted himself upon a law-giving Sinai, and thundered into the ears of the service assembled at its foot the inquiry after his own ear, "because I must believe," he had said to them, "that you, for very good reasons, have stolen it from me." Then he had swept like a hail-storm, or a kitchen-smoke in windy weather, through the servants' apartments and corners, one by one, in quest of his ear. "And thou?" said he, in a half-friendly tone to Liana. She kissed his hand, which he, as the Pope does his foot, always despatched for kisses, as proxy and lip-bearer, agent, and de latere nuncio of his mouth.
"She continues disobedient," said the severe lady. "Then she is a little like you," said he, because the mistrustful one looked upon the embrace as a conspiracy against him and his Bouverot. Upon this, his ice-Hecla burst out, and flamed and flowed, now upon daughter, now upon wife. The former was absolutely a miserable creature, he said; and only the Captain was worth anything, whom he luckily had educated by himself alone. He saw through all, heard all, though they had hid away his ear-trumpet. There was, accordingly, as he saw, (he pointed to his unsealed morning-psalm,[208]) a communication between the two colleges; but he invoked God to punish him if he did not—"my dear daughter, pray answer at last!" he begged.
"My father," said Liana, who, since the fraternization of Bouverot and the ill treatment from her mother, had begun to feel her heart wake up, which, however, could only despise and never hate, "my mother has to-day and yesterday told me all; but I have surely duties towards the Count!" A bolder liveliness than her parents had ever missed or found in her beamed under her upraised eye. "Ah, I will truly remain faithful to him just as long as I live," said she. "C'est bien peu," replied the Minister, astounded at such pertness.
Liana listened now, for the first time, after the word which had escaped her; then, in order to justify the past and her mother, she conceived the pleasant and ridiculous purpose, of moving and converting the old gentleman by her ghost-visions or dream-seeings. She begged of him a solitary interview, and afterward—when it was reluctantly granted—intreated him therein for his sacred promise to be silent towards her mother, because she feared to show to that loving one the clock-wheels of her death-bell rattling so near to the fatal stroke. The old gentleman could only, with a comic expression,—which made him look like one who with a bad cold wants to laugh,—vow that he would keep his word so far as was necessary, because never, so far as he could recollect, had his word been kept by him, only he had been often kept by his word. In such men, word and deed are like theatrical thunder and lightning, which, though generally occurring in close connection, and simultaneously in heaven, on the stage break forth out of separate corners, and by means of different operators. But Liana would not rest till he had put on a word-keeping, sincere face,—a painted window. Thereupon she began, after a kissing of the hand,[209] her ghostly history.
With unbroken seriousness, and firmly contracted muscles, he heard the extraordinary narration through; then, without saying a word, he took her by the hand and led her back into the presence of her mother, to whom he handed her over with a long psalm of praise and thanksgiving about her successful daughter's-school. "His boy's-school with Charles had not been blessed to him, at least in this degree," he added. As a proof, he frankly communicated to her—cold-bloodedly working up all Liana's pangs, as the coopers do cypress-branches into cask-hoops—the little which he had promised to bury in silence, because he always prostituted either himself or the other party, generally both. Liana sat there, deeply red, and growing hotter and hotter, with downcast eyes, and begged God to preserve her filial love towards her father.
No sympathizing eye shall be further pained with the opening of a new scene, when the ice of his irony broke, and became a raging stream, into which flowed tears of maternal indignation, also, at the thought of a precious being, and her feverish, fatal, dreaming of herself away into the last sleep. The object and the danger almost united the married couple for the second time; when there is a glazed frost, people go very much arm in arm. "Thou hast sent nothing to Lilar?" asked the father. "Without your permission I certainly should not do it," said she; but she meant her letters, not Albano's. He took advantage of the misunderstanding, and said, "Thou hast, however, surely." "I will gladly do, and let be done everything," said she, "but only on condition the Count consents, in order that I may not appear to him disingenuous; he has my sacred word for my truth!" At this mild firmness, at this Peter's rock overgrown with tender flowers, the father stumbled the hardest. In addition to this, the transition of a haughty lover from his own wishes to those of his enemies, supposing they had allowed Liana the question to the Count, was so impossible on the one hand, and the solicitation of this change, whether it were granted or refused, absolutely so degrading on the other, that the astounded Minister's lady felt her pride rise, and asked again, "Is this thy last word to us, Liana?" And when Liana, weeping, answered, "I cannot help it; God be gracious to me!" she turned away indignantly toward the Minister, and said: "Do now what you take to be convenable; I wash my hands in innocence!" "Not so entirely, ma chère; but very well!" said he, "thou wilt stay after to-morrow in thy chamber, till thou hast corrected thyself, and art more worthy of our presence!" he announced, as he went out, to Liana; firing at her meanwhile two eye-volleys, wherein, according to my estimate, far more reverberating fires, tormenting ghosts, eating, devouring medicaments, brain and heart-borers, were promised, than a man can generally hold to give or bear to receive.
Poor maiden! Thy last August is very hard, and no harvest-month day! Thou lookest out into the time, where thy little coffin stands, on which a cruel angel wipes away the still fresh flower-pieces of love running round it, in order that it may, all white, as rosy-white as thy soul or thy last form, be consigned to the grave!
This banishment by her mother into the desert of her cloister-chamber was quite as frightful to her, only not more frightful than her anger, which she had to-day, only for the third time, experienced, though not deserved. It was to her as if now, after the warm sun had gone down, the bright evening glow had also sunk below the horizon, and it grew dark and cold in the world. She remained this whole day, which was yet allowed her, with her mother; gave, however, only answers, looked friendly, did everything cheerfully and readily, and—as she quickly dashed away, with her tiny finger, every gathering dew-drop out of the corner of her eyes, as if it were dust, because she thought, at night I can weep enough,—she had very dry eyes; and all that, in order not to be an additional burden to her oppressed mother. But she, as mothers so easily do, confounded a timid, loving stillness with the dawning of obduracy; and when Liana, with the innocent design of consolation, wished to have Caroline's picture brought for her from Lilar, this innocence also passed for hardness, and was punished and reciprocated with a corresponding on the part of the parent, namely, with the permission to send. Only the Minister's lady demanded the French prayers of her again, as if she were not worthy to lay them under her present heart. Never are human beings smaller than when they want to plague and punish without knowing how.
As every one who rules, whether he sits on a chair of instruction or a princely one, or, like parents, on both, when the occupant of its footstool once leaves off his former obedience, imputes that obedience to him, not as a mitigation, but as an aggravation of his offence, so did the Minister's lady also toward her hitherto so uniformly docile child. She hated her pure love, which burned like ether, without ashes, smoke, or coal, so much the more, and held it to be either the author or the victim of an incendiary fire, particularly as her own married love hitherto had seldom been anything more than a showy chimney-piece.
Liana at last, too heavily constrained, since on the other side of the wall-tapestry the serene day, the loveliest sky was blooming, ascended to the Italian roof. She saw how people were travelling and riding back contentedly from their little places of pleasure, because the earth was one; on Lilar's bushy path the walkers were sauntering with a blissful slowness home,—in the streets there was a loud carpentering at the festive scaffoldings and Charles's-wains for the princely bride, and the finished wheels were rolled along for trial,—and everywhere were heard the drillings of the young music, which when grown up was to go before her. But when Liana looked upon herself, and saw her life alone standing here in dark raiment,—over yonder the empty house of her loved one, here her own, which to her had also become empty,—this very spot, which still reminded her of a lovelier, rarer blossoming than that of the Cereus serpens,—and oh! this cold solitude, in which her heart to-day, for the first time, lived without a heart; for her brother, the chorister of her short song of gladness, had been sent off, and Julienne had for some time been incomprehensibly invisible to her,—no, she could not see the fair sun go down, who, so serene and white, was sinking to slumber with his high evening star,—or listen to the happy evening chorus of the long day, but left the shining eminence. O how does joy die a stranger in the untenanted, dark bosom, when she finds no sister and becomes a spectre there! Thus does the beautiful green, that spring color, when a cloud paints it, betoken nothing but long moisture.
When she entered, soon, the asylum of day, the bedchamber, the heavens without flashed heat-lightning; O why just now, cruel fate?—But here, before the still-life of night, when life, covered with her veil, sounds more faintly,—here may all her tears, which a heavy day has been pressing,[210] gush forth freely. On the pillow, as if it bore the last, long sleep, rests this exhausted head more softly than on the bosom which reproachfully reckons up against it its tears; and it weeps softly, not upon, only for loved ones.
According to her custom, she was on the point of opening her mother's prayers, when she recollected, with a startled feeling, that they had been taken from her. Then she looked up with burning tears to God, and prepared alone out of her broken heart a prayer to him, and only angels counted the words and the tears.