What he did find was precisely the reverse. In and about Nathalie there reigned such a noble cold, serene gladsomeness as you may find upon the loftiest mountain peaks; the cloud and the storm are beneath, while around there rests a purer, colder air, but a deeper blue, too, and a paler sunlight.
It cannot, of course, surprise me that you are on the tenter-hooks of anxiety to hear the account she is going to give of her rupture with Everard. But her account of it was so brief—it might have been written round a Prussian dollar—so that I must supplement it with mine, which I have taken from Rosa’s own written record of it. The fact is, the Venner, five years afterwards, wrote a very passable novel (if we may credit the praise bestowed upon it in the ‘Universal German Library’), into which he artfully built the whole of the rupture with Nathalie—(that severance between soul and body); at all events, this is the conclusion to which sundry hints of Nathalie’s would point us. The said novel, accordingly, is my fountain of Vaucluse. Emasculate intelligences, such as Rosa’s, can only reproduce experiences; their poetic fœtuses are nothing but adopted children of the actual.
To be brief, what took place was as follows. Scarce were Firmian and Heinrich gone out among the trees, when the Venner brought up his reserve of vengeance, and asked Nathalie, in a tetchy manner, how it was that she could tolerate visitors of such a poor and plebeian sort. The haste and the coldness of the departed pair had already set Nathalie on fire, and this address made her blaze forth in a flame upon her yellow-silken questioner. “A question such as that,” she answered, “is very little short of an insult;” and she immediately added one of her own—for she was too warm and too proud to dissemble in the slightest, or to hold other than the straightest course with him. “You call at Mr. Siebenkæs’s pretty often yourself, do you not?” “Oh!” said this empty braggart, “I call on his wife (to speak the simple truth); he is merely my pretext.” “Really,” said she, making her syllables last as long as her look of scorn. Meyern, amazed at this behaviour, so very unlike the tone of the antecedent epistolary correspondence (he gave the twin cronies the credit of it)—Meyern, whom her beauty, his own money, and her poverty and dependence upon Blaise (to say nothing of his position of betrothed bridegroom), had now inspired with the utmost audacity—Meyern, this brave and courageous lion, undertook, without a moment’s hesitation, a task which nobody else would have ventured upon, namely, that of humiliating and bringing to her proper senses this irate Aphrodite, by reading to her the catalogue of his Cicisbean appointments, and, in general terms, unfolding before her the long perspective of the hundreds of gynæcœa and jointure-houses open to him. “It is such an easy matter to worship false goddesses and open their temple doors, that I am charmed to be restored to the worship of the true feminine godhead, through my Babylonish captivity to you.”
All her crushed heart sighed forth, “Ah! then it is all true—he is a wicked wretch, and I am miserable indeed.” But she kept silence, outwardly, and went and looked out of the window, in anger. Her soul was one of those whose seats are the knight’s upper dais of womankind; it was ever eager to do rare, heroic acts of self-devotion and self-sacrifice; indeed, a fondness for remarkable and out-of-the-way greatness was the only littleness about it. And now, when the Venner tried to make amends for his braggadocio by a sudden jump into a light and sportive tone (a tone which, in minor warfares with the ordinary fair sex, heals breaches much quicker and better than a more serious one)—and proposed a walk in the pretty park to her, as being a spot better adapted for a reconciliation—this noble soul of hers spread wide its pure white pinions and soared away from out the foul heart of this crooked pike with his silver scales for ever! And she drew near to him and said (all a-glow, but dry-eyed wholly), “Mr. von Meyern, I have quite decided—we are parted for ever. We have never known each other, and our acquaintance is at an end. I will send you back your letters to-morrow, and you will have the goodness to return mine to me.” Had he employed a more serious tone, he might have kept hold of this strong soul for some days—perhaps weeks—longer. Without looking at him anymore, she opened a casket and began arranging letters. He tried, in a hundred speeches, to flatter and pacify her; she answered never a word. His heart boiled within him, for he gave the two advocates the blame for all this. At length he thought he would humble this deaf mute (as well as make her alter her determination), by saying, as he now did, “I don’t know what your uncle in Kuhschnappel will say to all this. He appears to me to set a much greater value upon my sentiments towards you than you do yourself; indeed, he seems to consider our marriage as essential to your happiness as I think it to mine.” This was a burden heavier than her back, so sore bent down by Fate, could bear. She shut up the casket hurriedly, sat down, and rested her bewildered head upon her trembling arms, shedding burning tears, which her hands strove in vain to hide. A reproach of our poverty uttered by lips we have loved, darts like red-hot iron into the heart, and scorches it dry with fire. Rosa, whose vengeance, now wreaked, gave place to the most eager love, (in hopes that her feelings were of the same selfish type as his own), threw himself on his knees before her, crying, “Oh! forget it all! What are we breaking with one another for, if we come really to think about it? Your precious tear-drops wash it all away. I mingle mine with them in rich abundance.”
She arose with haughty port, leaving him on his knees. “My tears,” she said, “have not the smallest reference to anything connected with you. I am poor, and I would not be rich. After the base, ignoble insult you have put upon me, you shall not stay and see me weep. Have the goodness to leave the room.” So that he retired; and—when one considers the weight of the sacks he had to carry—sacks of every kind (including one full of muzzles)—he really did it in a surprisingly brisk and lively manner, holding his head pretty high. His command of his temper and his apparent good humour strike one the more (for I may give him what praise he deserves), that he retained them and took them home with him, and this on an afternoon when, with the two finest and longest levers in all his collection he had utterly failed in touching the smallest point in Nathalie’s heart, or the auricles thereof. One of these levers was his old one, which he had tried upon Lenette—that of gradually twisting himself in, corkscrew fashion, in spiral serpentine lines of petty advances, approaches, attentions and illusions; but Nathalie was neither weak nor light enough to be penetrated thus. The other lever was one from which something might really have been expected in the way of effect—though it actually had less than even the first. It consisted in showing his old scars (like an old warrior), and rejuvenating them into wounds; in this manner he bared his suffering heart, pierced by so many a false love, and which (like a dollar with a hole in it), had hung as a votive offering upon so many a shrine. His soul put on Court mourning (of sorrow) of all degrees, whole and half, in hopes of being, like a widow, more enchanting in black. The friend of a Leibgeber, however, could be softened by manly sorrows only—the womanly sort could but harden her.
Meanwhile (as we have said), he left, his fiancée without any pity for her self-sacrifice indeed, and equally without the slightest indignation at her refusal of him. He merely thought, “She may go to the devil;” and he could scarce sufficiently congratulate himself that he had so easily escaped the incalculable annoyance of having to endure life with a creature of the kind from one year’s end to another, and to pay her the necessary respect throughout an infernal, long matrimonial life. On the other hand, his bile was mightily stirred against Leibgeber, but more particularly against Siebenkæs (whom he suspected of being the real judge of his Divorce Court), and he laid the foundation of several gall-stones in his gall-bladder, and of a slight bilious yellow tint in his eyes, with hating the advocate, which he could not do enough.
We return to the Saturday. Nathalie derived her calmness and serenity partly from her own strength of mind, but also in good measure from the pair of horses (and of rose maidens) with whom Rosa had been seen driving to the Hermitage. A woman’s jealousy is always a day or two older than her love. Moreover, I know of no excellence, no weakness, shortcoming, virtue, womanliness, manliness, in a woman which does not tend rather to enkindle than to appease jealousy.
Not only Siebenkæs, but even Leibgeber (anxious to breathe some warmth upon her freezing soul, all stripped of its warm plumage), was this afternoon serious and cordial, not (as he usually did) dressing his rewards and punishments up in irony. Perhaps, too, her gratifying (and flattering) readiness to obey him tamed him down to some extent. Firmian had, in addition to the reasons above set forth, the more powerful ones—that the English lady was expected home the next day but one, and her coming would put a stop to all this garden pleasure, or interfere with it at all events—that he who knew well, from his own experience, what the wounds of a lost love were, had a boundless compassion for hers, and would gladly have given his own heart’s blood to make up for the loss of hers—moreover, accustomed all his life to bare, mean and empty rooms, he felt a keen enjoyment in being in the richly-furnished, bright and tasteful chamber he was now in, and naturally carried over a portion of this to the account of their inhabitant and hermit.
The maid-servant, whom we have seen this week already, came in just then, with tears in her eyes, faltering out that she was going to confession, and hoped she had done nothing to displease her, &c., &c. “Anything to displease me?” cried Nathalie; “most certainly not—and I know I can say the same in your mistress’s name;” and went out of the room with her and kissed her, unseen, like some good genius. How beautiful are pity and kindness to distress, in a soul which has just risen up in might to resist oppression.
Leibgeber took a volume of ‘Tristram Shandy’ from the English lady’s library, and lay down with it on the lawn under the nearest tree, with the view of making over to his friend the undivided fruition of this anise, marchpane and honeycomb of an afternoon of talk, which to him was merely so much every-day household fare. Moreover, all that day when he made any sign of jesting, Nathalie’s eyes would implore him, “Please do not, for just this one day. Do not take pains to point out every pock-pit which Fate has left upon my inner soul to him—spare me for this once.” And lastly (which was his principal reason), it would be much easier for Firmian to tell this sensitive Nathalie (now upon one-eighth pay) all his project of making her his appanaged widow, his heiress in jest—to tell it to her wrapped in a triple shroud, written in distorted characters.