We love to dwell upon it as a matter of great praise in the family of the Quintii,[144] that they never possessed gold: I adduce—without arraying a thousand other families of whom the same is to be sworn—only Froulay's. Certain families, like antimony, have no chemical affinity whatever with that metal, however much they might wish it; certainly Froulay wished it: he looked very much to his interest (to nothing else), he willingly (although only in cases of collision) set conscience and honor aside; but he got no further than to great outlays and great projects, simply because he sought money, not as the end and aim of his ambition, but only as the means of ambition and enterprise. Even for some pictures which Bouverot had purchased for the Prince in Italy he still owed that individual the purchase-shilling which he had taken out of the treasury. By his bonds as if by circulars, he stood in widely-extended connections. He would gladly have transposed his marriage contract into a bond, and had, with his lady, at least that most intimate community—of goods; for, under present circumstances, divorce and bankruptcy stood in neighborly relations to each other; but, as was said, many men, with the best talons,—like the eagle of the Romish king,[145]—have nothing in them.
He continued: "Now, perhaps, this géne will cease. Have you hitherto made any observations upon him?" She shook her head. "I have," he replied, "for a long time, and such as were really consoling to me,—j'avais le nez bon quant à cela,—he has a real liking for my Liana."
The Minister's lady here could draw no inference, and begged him, with disguised astonishment, to come to the agreeable matter. Comically on his face did the show of friendship wrestle with the expectation that he should be under the necessity immediately of being exasperated. He replied: "Is not this an agreeable matter? The knight means it in earnest. He wished now to be privately espoused to her; after three years he retires from the order, and her fortune is made. Vous êtes, je l'espere, pour cette fois, un peu sur mes interêts, ils sont les vôtres."
Her maternal heart, so suddenly and deeply wounded, wept, and could hardly be concealed. "Herr von Froulay!" said she, when she had composed herself a little; "I do not disguise my astonishment. Such a disparity in years, in tastes, in religion."[146]
"That is the knight's affair, not ours," he replied, refreshed by her angry confusedness, and, like the weather, in his coldness threw only fine, sharp snow, no hail. "As to Liana's heart, I beg you just to sound that." "O, that innocent heart? You are mocking!" "Posito! so much the more gladly will the innocent heart reconcile itself to make her father's fortune, if she is not the greatest egotist. I should never love to constrain an obedient daughter." "N'epuiséz pas ce chapitre; mon cœur est en presse. It will cost her her life, which already hangs by such frail threads." This allusion always struck the fire of wrath from his flint. "Tant mieux," said he; "then it will never go further than an engagement! I had almost said—Sacre! and who is to blame for that? So it fares with me at the hands of the Captain too,—in the beginning my children promise everything, then they turn out nothing. But, madam," he said, swiftly and venomously collecting himself; and, instead of compressing his lips and teeth, merely pinching moderately the auditory organs of a sleeping lap-dog; "you alone indeed know, by your influence upon Liana, how to dress and redress everything. Perhaps she belongs to you by a still prior claim than to me. I am not then compromitted with the knight. The advantages I detail no further." His breast was here already warmed under the vulture-skin of rage.
But the noble lady now indignantly rose, and said: "Herr von Froulay! hitherto I have not spoken of myself. Never will I counsel or countenance or consent to it,—I will do the opposite. Herr von Bouverot is not worthy of my Liana."
The Minister, during this speech, had several times unnecessarily snapped-to the snuffers over the wax candles, and only beheaded the point of the flame; the fixed air of wrath now colored the roses of his lips (as the chemical does botanical ones) blue. "Bon!" he replied, "I travel; you can reflect on the subject,—but I give my word of honor, that I never consent to any other match; and though it were (whereupon he looked at the lady ironically) still more considerable[147] than the one just projected,—either the maiden obeys or she suffers, decidéz! Mais je me fie à l'amour que vous portéz au pere et à la fille; vous nous rendréz tous assêz contens." And then he went forth, not like a tempest, but like a rainbow, which he manufactured out of the eighth color only, namely, the black, and that with his eyebrows.
After some days of resentment with the mother and the daughter, he rode, as Luigi's business-agent, to Haarhaar to see the princely bride. The oppressed mother confided to her oldest and only friend, the Lector, the sad secret. The two had now a pure relation of friendship toward one another, which, in France, in consequence of the higher respect for women, is more common. In the first years of the ministerial forced marriage, which dawned not with morning dew, but with morning frost, perhaps the hawk-moth[148] Cupid fluttered after them; but by and by children drove away this sphinx. The wife is often forgotten when she becomes the mother. She, therefore, with her characteristic cool and clear strength, took all that was ambiguous in her relation to Augusti forever out of the way; and he made her firmness more easy by his own, because he, with more love of honor than of women, grew not more red at any kind of braided-work than at that of a basket,[149] and erroneously believed that a man who receives it, has as much to be ashamed of as a woman who does.
The Lector could foresee that she would also, after her divorce,—which she postponed only for Liana's sake,—remain single, if only for this reason, in order not to deprive her daughter of an allodial estate, Klosterdorf, for the reservation of which she had now for one and twenty years exposed herself to the battering-ram and scythe-chariot and blunderbuss of the old Minister. Whether she was not even silently intending her dear Liana for a man so firm and tender, who differed from her in nothing but in a worldly coolness toward positive religion, is another and more delicate question. Such a reciprocal gift were worthy such a mother and friend, who must know from her heart, that combined feelings of tenderness and honor prepare for a loved soul a surer bliss than the love which genius offers, that alternation of flying heat and flying cold,—that fire which, like the electric, always twice destroys,—in the stroke and in the rebound. The Lector himself started not that question; for he never made rash, unsafe plans; and what one would have been more so than that of such a connection, in his poverty, or with such a father-in-law, in a country where, as in the Electorate of Saxony, a statute, so beneficial (for parents), can countermand even a marriage of many years' standing, which has been concluded without parental consent?
With moist eyes the Minister's lady showed him the new storm-clouds, which had again descended upon her and her Liana. She could build upon his fine eye for the world, upon his dumb lip and upon his ready hand for business. He said, as ever, he had foreseen all this; but proved to her that Bouverot, if only from avarice, would never exchange his knightly cross for the wedding-ring, whatever designs he might cherish with regard to Liana. He gave her to surmise, so far as a tender regard to her sore relations would tolerate, to what degree of readiness for compliance with Bouverot's wishes the very frailty of Liana's life might allure the Minister, in order to harvest it before it had done blooming. For Froulay could much more nimbly swallow demands against honor than injuries done to his vanity, as the victim of hydrophobia can much more easily get down solid morsels than fluids. Yet all this did not sound so immorally hard to the Minister's lady as readers of the middling classes might imagine; I appeal to the more sensible among the higher.