He asked what she was reading; she hesitated, covering it up. A thought, suddenly darting upon her, seemed to open her heart; she gave him the book, and said it was a French manuscript,—namely, written prayers, drawn up by her mother several years before, which touched her more than her own thoughts; but still there was ever-more looking through her tenderly woven face a cloistral thought, which sought to leave her heart. What could Albano object to this Psalmist of the heart? Who can answer a songstress? A praying female stands, as does also an unhappy one, on a high, holy place, which our arms cannot reach. But how miserable must most prayers be, since, although in earlier life possessing the attraction of charms, like the rosary, which is made out of sweet-smelling woods, yet afterward in advanced age they act only as blemishes, and like the relic or the death's-head with which the rosary itself ends!
Without waiting for his question, she told him at once what had disturbed her during her prayer; namely, this passage in it: O mon Dieu, fais que je sois toujours vraie et sincere, &c., whereas she had hitherto concealed her love from her dear mother. She added, she would come now very soon, and then the closed heart should be opened to her. "No," said he, almost angrily, "thou mayest not; thy secret is also mine!" Men are often hardened by that in prose which in poetry softens them; for example, woman's piety and open-heartedness.
Now no one hated more than he the clutching of the parental writing-finger, forefinger, and little finger into a pair of clasped hands; not that he feared, on the part of the Minister, wars or rivals,—he rather presupposed open arms and feasts of joy,—but because, to his magnanimous spirit, at once claiming and granting liberty, nothing was more revolting than the reflection, what smutty turf now for the kindling of the fire the parents might lay on the altar of love, or what pots they might set on to boil; how easily, then, even poetic parents often transform themselves with the children into prosaic or juristical ones, the father into an administrative, the mother into a financial board; how, then, to say the least, the court atmosphere makes one a bondsman, just as only the poetic heaven's ether makes free; and what perturbations his Hesperus might expect from the attracting world, the old Minister, who found nothing more unprofitable about love than love itself, and to whom the holiest sensibilities seemed about as useful for marriages of rank as the Hebrew is for preachers, namely, more in examination than in actual service. So ill did he think of his father-in-law, for he knew not something still worse.
But the good daughter thought far higher of her mother than did a stranger, and her heart struggled painfully against concealing from her her love. She appealed to her brother, who was just entering. But he was wholly of Albano's mind. "Women," he added, not in the best humor, "are more fond of speaking about love than in love; men, the reverse." "No," said Liana, decidedly; "if my mother ask me, I cannot be untrue." "God!" cried Albano, with a shudder, "and who could wish that?" For to him, also, free truth was the open helmet of the soul's nobility; only he spoke it merely from self-respect, and Liana out of human affection.
Rabette came with the tea-things and a flask, wherein was tea-juice and elementary fire, or nerve-ether for the Captain,—arrack. He never liked to visit people in the morning, with whom he could not drink it till evening; Rabette had yesterday guessed this naughtiness, and to-day gratified it. "How can the soul," said the sound Albano to him often, "make itself a slave to the belly and the senses? Are we not already bound closely enough by the fetters of the body, and thou wilt still draw chains through the chains?" To this Roquairol had always the same answer: "Just the reverse! Through the corporeal itself, I free myself from the corporeal; for instance, by wine from blood. As long as thou canst never escape servitude to the bodily senses, and all thy consciousness and thy thinking can only, through a bodily servitude, attaching itself to the glebe of the earth, abide in their nobility; I cannot perceive why thou dost not properly use these rebels and despots as thy servants? Why must I let the body only work ill upon me, and not advantageously as well?" Albano stood to it, that the still light of health was more dignified than the poppy-oil flame of a slave of opium; and the fate of being prisoner of war to the body, which one spirit has to bear in common with the whole human army, more honorable than the cramping confinement of a personal arrest.
To-day, however, not even the spirituous brimstone-smoked tea-water could wash away a certain discontent from Roquairol, whom night-watching had colored more pale, as it had the Count more red. He could not be reconciled to it, that the manor-garden was all shut in with a board-fence as high as a man, which was less intended as a billiard-table border, not to let the eye-ball go out, than as a mountebank's booth, to let nothing in, and which of course insured no other prospect than the prospect proper; quite as little did the pleasure-garden commend itself to his favor by the fact that the turf-benches on which they sat in the arbor had not yet been mowed, that in all the beds only vegetables for the trimming of cooked meat flapped about, that nothing ripe yet hung there but one or two moles in their hanging death-beds, that on a bowling-green, whereupon one rolls into a tinkling middle-hole, the crooked return-alley let the balls run home again, much more easily than they could—unless one threw them—be made to pass over the earth-bottom of the main alley, and that no orangery was anywhere to be seen, excepting once, when fortunately the garden-gate stood open, just as a blooming orangery box passed by in a wheelbarrow on its way to Lilar.
The Captain needed only to bring forward these particulars satirically, and thereby inwardly to wound the outwardly laughing Rabette,—because no woman can bear to hear fault found with her bodily property, whether it be children, clothes, cakes, or furniture;[187] and then his mountain-heights could gradually disencumber themselves of their clouds again, and Rabette become still more uncommonly gay.
Albano, in this morning hour of the day, and, as it were, of childhood, and in this little paradise-garden of his childish years, was inwardly glad,—for in the first love, as in Shakespeare's pieces, nothing depends on the wooden stage of the performance; but to-day's afterwinter of yesterday's chill would nevertheless not melt. The morning-blue began to be filled with brighter and brighter golden fleeces; as the garden, like small cities, had only two gates, the upper and the lower, he opened like an aurora that of the morning sun; the splendor gushed in over the smoking green; the Rosana gliding below caught lightnings, and flung them over hitherward; Albano departed finally full of love and bliss.
But the love was greater than the bliss.