"You are free, madame, in the area reserved for your habitation."
"I understand. I am in a large and comfortable prison," said Consuelo, looking around her broad bright room, hung with white lustre, with gold rays, supported by magnificently carved and sculptured wood-work. "Can I see Karl?"
"I do not know, madame, for this house is not mine. I go: you need my services no longer. I am forbidden to indulge in the luxury of conversing with you."
He left, and Consuelo, yet feeble and listless, attempted to get up. The only dress she found was a long white woollen robe, of a wonderfully soft texture, not unlike the tunic of a Roman lady. She took it up, and observed fall from it the following note, in letters of gold: "This is the neophyte's spotless robe. If your mind be sullied, this robe of noble innocence will be the devouring tunic of Dejanera."
Consuelo, accustomed to a quiet conscience, (perhaps too quiet,) smiled, and put on the robe with innocent pleasure. She picked up the letter to read it again, and found it puerilely emphatic. She then went to a rich toilette—a table of white marble sustaining a mirror, in a golden frame, of excellent taste. Her attention was attracted by an inscription on the upper ornament of the mirror. It was: "If your soul be as pure as yon crystal, you will see yourself in it always—young and beautiful. But if vice has withered your heart, be fearful of reading in me the stern reflection of moral deformity."
"I have never been either beautiful or vicious," thought Consuelo. "Therefore the mirror in either case must be false."
She looked in it without fear, and did not think herself ugly. The flowing white robe, and her long, floating dark hair, made her look like a priestess of antiquity. Her pallor was extreme, and her eyes were less pure and brilliant than usual. "Can I be growing ugly?" said she, "or does the mirror censure me?"
She opened a drawer of the toilette, and found, amid various articles of luxury, many of them accompanied with devices and sentences, which were at once simple and pedantic. There was a pot of rouge with the following words on the cover: "Fashion and falsehood. Paint does not restore the freshness of innocence to the cheek, and does not efface the ravages of disorder." There were exquisite perfumes with this device: "A soul without faith and an indiscreet lip are like open flacons, the precious contents of which are exhaled and corrupted." There were also white ribands with these words woven in the silk: "To a pure brow, the sacred fillets; to a head charged with infamy, the servile punishment of the cord."
Consuelo did up her hair, tying it complacently in the ancient manner, with the fillets. Then she examined with curiosity the strange abode to which her romantic fate had brought her. She passed through the various rooms of the suite intended for her,—a library, a music-room, filled with admirable instruments, and many and precious musical compositions. She had a delicious boudoir, and a gallery filled with superb and charming pictures and statues. In magnificence her rooms were worthy of a queen, in taste of an artist, and in chastity of a nun. Consuelo, surprised at this sumptuous and delicate hospitality, reserved the detailed examination of the symbols expressed by the books and works of art, until she should be more composed. A desire to know in what part of the world her miraculous home was, made her desert the interior for the exterior. She approached a window, but before she lifted up the silken curtain before it, read: "If the thought of evil be in your heart, you are unworthy of contemplating the divine spectacle of nature; if your heart be the home of virtue, look up and bless God, who opens to you the door of a terrestrial paradise." She opened the window, anxious to see if the landscape corresponded with the proud promises of the inscription. It was an earthly paradise, and Consuelo fancied that she dreamed. The garden, planted in the English manner—a rare thing at that time—but with all the minutiæ of German taste, offered pleasant vistas, magnificent shades, fresh lawns, and the expanses of natural scenery; at the same time that exquisite neatness, sweet and fresh flowers, white sand, and crystal waters, betokened that it was carefully attended to. Above the fine trees, the lofty barriers of a vale covered, or rather draped, with flowers, and divided by clear and limpid brooks, arose a sublime horizon of blue mountains, with broken sides and towering brows. In the whole area of her view, Consuelo saw nothing to tell her in what part of Germany was this imposing spectacle. She did not know where she was. The season, however, seemed advanced, and the herbage older than in Prussia, which satisfied her that she had made some progress to the south.
"Dear canon, where are you?" thought Consuelo, as she looked at the thickets of white lilac and hedges of roses, and the ground, strewn with narcissi, hyacinths, and violets. "Oh! Frederick of Prussia, I thank you for having taught me, by long privations and cruel ennui, to enjoy, as I should do, the pleasures of such a refuge. And you, all-powerful Invisibles, keep me ever in this captivity. I consent to it with all my heart, especially if the Chevalier—"