The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

But this mistake is rendered quite improbable by her subsequent conduct. His embarrassment repeated itself in hers; she regretted her precipitancy in having praised a brother and sister as loving and happy who avoided each other and disliked to speak of their mutual relations. She concealed not with her looks her design, of diverting the conversation, but took pains to show it; but to her sorrow in having no brother, was joined the sorrowful reflection that Gustavus had indeed a sister, but did not love her, and she expressed her sympathy with the like misfortune more and more touchingly and tenderly on her lute. Over the soul of Gustavus, above which to-day's festival still hung with all its splendor, rolled the heaviest and most heterogeneous waves--mistrust never entered into his heart, although in his head he thought he had enough of it--at this moment he had the choice between the throne and the grave of to-day's joy.

For strong souls know no half way between heaven and hell--no purgatory, no limbus infantium.

The Resident Lady decided his wavering soul. She took his chaos of looks (or it seemed so, for I have not the heart to be the tribunal and last appeal of so many thousand readers) for the two-fold confusion and concern at the coldness with which his (alleged) sister treated him, and at his family history. She had hitherto found in his eyes a longing which sought finer charms than did other courtly eyes--she had retained in her sensitive heart the morning when he petitioned for the grave of Amandus, and the loving eyes, which he had dried in her presence--accordingly she shed the tenderest look upon his ardent face--drew from her lute-strings the tenderest voice of her sympathetic bosom--sought to cover her beating heart--and could not even hide its beatings--and while he made a movement expressive of the most intense affection, she fell, transported, lost, with quivering eye, with overwhelmed heart, with distracted soul and with the single, slow, deep-drawn sigh: "Brother!"--on his breast.

And he on hers!... For the first time in her court-life she felt such an embrace; he for the first time a reciprocated one; for on Beata's pure heart he had never felt her arms around him. O Bouse! couldst thou only have resembled her and remained a sister! but, thou gavest more than thou didst get, and thou didst charm thy victim to take what thou gavest--thou hurriedst him and thyself into a darkening hurricane of feeling--on thy bosom he lost sight of thy face--thy heart--his own--and as all the senses assailed with their first energies, he lost all, all....

Guardian angel of my Gustavus! Thou canst no longer save him; but heal him, if he is lost, if he has lost all, his virtue and his Beata! Draw with me the mourning curtain around his fall and say, even to the soul which is as good as his is: "Be better!"

Before we go to the soul to whom he says it, to Beata, we will hear at least a single advocate for poor Gustavus, that he may not be so severely condemned. The Vindicator suggests for our reflection simply this: if women are so easy to overcome, it is because in all military relations the assailant has the advantage over the party assailed; but let the case be once reversed, a temptress come upon the scene instead of a tempter, then will the same tempted man, who never would have assailed another's innocence, lose his own in the unwonted reversal of relations, and indeed the more easily, in proportion as female temptation is finer, more delicate and penetrating than that of man. Hence men, it is true, lead astray; but young men are generally in the beginning led astray--and one seductress creates ten seducers.

Pardon us all, pure Beata, the transition to thyself! Thou keepest at this late hour of the night a chamber of the princely palace, all alone, but with joy upon joy; for thou hadst Gustavus's letter to thee in thy hands and on thy bosom; and in the whole palace the sickest soul was the happiest; for the letter which she could at length read, kiss, and without inner and outer tempests enjoy thoroughly, beamed more mildly on her tender eye than the presence of the object, whose fiery glow only by distance sank to a fanning warmth; his presence oppressed her with too great a load of enjoyment, and she then embraced every moment the genius of her virtue, while she fancied she was merely embracing her friend. In this spring-time of rapture, when she held the letter in one hand and by the other the genius of virtue, she was disturbed by the--Prince of Scheerau. So crawls a toad on his belly into a bed of flowers.

In such a case a woman only then finds it difficult to decide her line of conduct, when she still wavers irresolutely between indifference and love; or else when, despite all coldness, she would fain from vanity allow just so much, that virtue may lose, and love gain, nothing;--on the contrary, in the case of a complete virtuous resolve, she can freely resign herself to the inner virtue which fights for her, and she needs hardly watch over lips and looks, because these fall under suspicion precisely when they desire a guard. Beata's way of putting up the letter was the only little semi-tone in this full harmony of an armed virtue. The incumbent of the Scheerau throne excused his appearance on the score of anxiety about her health. He made up his following conversation out of the French language--the best when one would talk with the women and witlings--and of those turns of phrase whereby one can say all one will without boring himself or the other party, and which communicate all only in half, and of this half again a quarter in jest, and all more politely than flatteringly and more boldly than sincerely.

"Thus have I"--he said with a polite admiration--"this whole evening, in my mind's eye seen you pictured; my fancy has taken nothing from you, except actual presence. If fate suffered herself to be reasoned with, I should have scolded at her all through the Ball for having denied to the person who has given us to-day so much pleasure, the enjoyment of her own."

"O!" said she, "a kind destiny has given me to deny more pleasure than I could impart." Although the Prince is one of those persons with whom one would rather not talk about anything, still she said this with a feeling which, however, was nothing but a thanking of destiny for the previous happy reading hour.