Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend and schoolmate Giulia had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her.
Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the heart of the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her friend.
Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at least, not cold; for painters, in the æsthetic and in the calligraphic sense, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:—
"When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself therein;—then, when the lofty beauty[[41]] that forever beams within me lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,—a form whose unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular bodies,[[42]] encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,—then every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when, for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again; when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,—which, like two souls, hover over without touching each other—as bees steal out of roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;—then, when at length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love'; and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish, hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the happy one who has divined and deserves it;—then the happy one is mute, the happy one and the artist."
Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon him with moist eyes, and said, "Of that thou wast worthy!" But now twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;—the pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and Infanta of his friend; the desire which not every one has, but he had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him indifferently, because the contest against love differs in nothing from the contest for it, except in order of precedence. But let not the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, "Be the heroine!" and go about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former pastor fido out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the æsthetic, self-seeking, sensitive—scamp. If I should wish this last, I could excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every æsthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into the oubliette or family-vault of the inkstand.
Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so little regard to days of grace and double usance,[[43]] on the spot, before supper,—cito citissime,—what hast thou, what canst thou?—to fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a new face, like new music, made a stronger and shorter impression. He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against a friend?
Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King Charles's spaniel.
Seebass brought a billet to Flamin:—
I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship cannot.
"Your Matthieu."