Never in all his career did this young gentleman arrive otherwise than too soon or too late; just as he was never serious, but either lachrymose or jocular. The three faces were now each a long duodecimo edition of themselves; Leibgeber’s was the only one which was not stretched on the wire-drawing press, but it was dyed a fine red by his inborn detestation of fops and maiden-hawks of every kind. Everard had come primed with one idea (taken from Stolberg’s ‘Homer’), which was, to ask Nathalie, on his entrance, whether she were a goddess or a mortal (in the manner of Homer’s heroes), since he could only pretend to contend with the latter race. But at sight of the masculine pair whom the Devil levelled at his head like a double-barrelled gun, everything inside it turned to cheese and curd, immobile; twenty kisses wouldn’t have enabled him to get his great idea a-flow again. It was five days before he got what little there was inside the bones of his head into such a fair way of recovery as to make shift to deliver himself of this idea to a distant relation of my own (how else should I have known anything about it?) in a tolerable degree of preservation. At all times nothing so paralysed him in female society as the presence of a man; he would have stormed an entire convent of women sooner than have laid siege to a single couple of novices (to say nothing of a canoness), had but a single wretched man been alongside them.
A standing troupe of players, such as I now see before my pencil, never performed in Fantaisie. Nathalie was lost in amazement (little polite), and in a quiet comparison of this original edition with her epistolary ideal. The Venner, who took for granted that the result of her observations was just the opposite of what it really was, would have been delighted had he had it in his power to be a manifest contradiction, an antipodes to himself. I mean, he would fain have shown himself both cold and angry at finding her in the society of this couple, and also confidential and tender, so that this beggarly pair might be filled with envy and vexation at the sight of his harvest and vintage. And inasmuch as he was quite as greatly (only much more agreeably) struck with, and surprised at her appearance, as she with his, and as he had time enough before him for revenge and punishment, he chose rather to adopt the line of bragging and vaunting with the view of seasoning and blessing the visit of these two lawyer fellows with a good spice of envy. Moreover, he had the advantage of them in possessing a light horse-artillery body, and he could mobilise his army of physical charms quicker than they could. Siebenkæs was thinking of nothing nearer at hand than—his wife. Before Rosa’s arrival he had been browsing on the idea of her as on a meadow of bitter herbs, for the rough, chapped bark of the conjugal hand was by no means capable of touching his self-love with the delicate, etherial, gentle, snail-antennæ touch of this unmated beauty’s eiderdown fingers. But now the idea of Lenette became a pasture of sweet and succulent verdure; for his jealousy of Rosa (domiciled in two different quarters) was less awakened by Lenette’s behaviour to him than by Nathalie’s relations with him. The grimness of Heinrich’s glances increased amain; they wandered up and down over Rosa’s summer hare-skin of yellow silk with a jaundiced glare. In an irritable impulse to be doing something or other, he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and got hold of the profile of Herr von Blaise which he had clipped out (as we may remember) on the occasion when he stamped the glass wig to pieces (and with respect to which profile the only thing which had been distressing him for a twelvemonth past was that it was in his pocket, and not affixed to the gallows, where he could have stuck it with a hairpin the evening he went away). He pulled it out, and tousling it between his fingers, he glided nimbly backwards and forwards between Nathalie and Rosa, murmuring to Siebenkæs (with his eyes fixed on the Venner), “À la silhouette.”[[64]]
Everard’s self-love divined these flattering (and involuntary) sacrifices of the self-love of the other two, and he went on firing off at the embarrassed girl (with ever-growing superciliousness, directed to Siebenkæs’s address) fragments from the story of his travels, messages from his friends, and questions concerning the arrival of his letters. The brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, sounded a retreat, but did so like true males; for they were the least bit annoyed with poor, innocent Nathalie, just as though she could have marched up to this sponsus and letter bridegroom of hers the moment he came into the room, with a salutation such as, “Sir, you can never be lord of mine, even were you nothing worse than a scoundrel, idiot, fright, prig, man-milliner,” &c. But must we not, all of us (for I don’t consider myself an exception), smite upon our bony, sinful breasts, and confess that we spit fire the moment modest girls refrain from spitting it instantly at those whom we may have nigrified or excommunicated in their presence; that further we insist upon their discarding wicked squires instantaneously, although they may not be in such a hurry to receive them that they should care as little what forced marches and honourable retreats their cottiers and dependents may have to make, as we fief-holders do ourselves; and that we are offended with them when they have an innocent opportunity of being false; even when they do not avail themselves of it? May Heaven improve the class of persons of whom I have just been treating.
Firmian and Heinrich roamed for an hour or two about the enchanted valley; it was full of magic flutes, magic zithers, and magic mirrors. But they had neither ears nor eyes. What they found to say concerning events heated their heads to the temperature of balloon furnaces, and Leibgeber blew a fanfare of mere satiric insults out of the reverse end of Fame’s trumpet at every female Bayreuthian he met taking her evening walk. He announced it as his opinion that women were the unsafest ships in winch a man could embark on the great open ocean of life—slaveships in fact, or bucentaurs (or shuttles[[65]] which the Devil weaves his nets and gins with)—and the more so that, like other ships of war, they are so often and so scrupulously washed, sheathed on the outside with poisonous copper, and have about the same amount of bunting and tarry tackle (ribbons) flying about them. Heinrich had gone to Nathalie’s, indulging the (highly improbable) anticipation that she would at once unhesitatingly accept and act upon his friend’s deposition of evidence in his capacity of an eye- and ear-witness concerning Rosa’s canonical impedimenta (or ecclesiastical marriage disabilities), and it was his disappointment on this score which was so gnawing upon his mind.
But just as Firmian was discussing and expatiating upon the Venner’s lisping and indistinct mode of speaking (his words seemed to curl about the top of his tongue with no power of expression in them), Heinrich cried out, “Hallo! there the dirt-fly goes!” It was the Venner, floundering as a pike does in the net he has been brought to market in. As the woodpecker (naturalists call most gaudy-plumaged birds woodpeckers) winged his flight closer by them, they saw, as he passed them, that his face was a-glow with anger. Doubtless the cement which had attached him to Nathalie was broken and dissolved.
The two friends waited a little while longer in the shady walk, hoping that they might meet her; but at length they made their way back to town, meeting, as they went, a maid of hers, who was taking the following letter to Leibgeber:—
“You and your friend were, alas! quite right, and all is now at an end. Please to let me rest, and reflect for a time in solitude over the ruins of my little future. When people’s lips are wounded and stitched, they are not allowed to talk, although it is not my lips but my heart that bleeds, and that for your sex. Ah! I blush when I think of all the letters I have written, which it has been such happiness to me to write—and, alas! under such a delusion!—yet I have no real reason to do so after all. You have yourself said that innocent pleasures should give us as little cause to be ashamed as blackberries, although, when the enjoyment is past, there may be a black stain on the lips. But, at all events, I thank you from my heart. As I must have been disenchanted one day, it was kind that it was not done by the wicked sorcerer himself, but by you and your most honest and truthful friend, to whom please to offer my very kind regards and remembrances.
“Yours,
“A. Nathalie.”
Heinrich had expected the letter to be one of invitation, “for” (said he) “her empty heart must feel a cold void, like a finger with its nail cut too short.” Firmian, whom matrimony had taught, and furnished with barometer scales and meteorological tables for observance of women, knew enough to be of opinion that a woman must, in the very hour when she had dismissed one lover (on purely moral grounds) be a little over-cool towards the person who has persuaded her thereto, even were he her second lover. And (I take leave here to add, myself) for the very same reasons she will exceed in warmth towards this second immediately afterwards.