The father had made this chamber-imprisonment a punitory mark of her refusal. With deep anguish she uttered this mute no, in the very fact that she voluntarily stayed in the chamber, and denied her mother the morning kiss. She had, in the course of the night, cast many an ardent look at the dead image of her counsellor Caroline, but no original, no fever-created form had appeared to her. Can I longer doubt, she inferred from this, that the divine apparition, which has spoken the assenting word to my love, was something higher than my own creation, since I must otherwise have been able to form it again over against her picture?
She had Albano's blooming letters in her desk, and opened it, in order to look over from her island into the remote orient land of warmer times; but she shut it to again; she was ashamed to be secretly happy, while her mother was sorrowful, who into these melancholy days had not even come, like her, out of pleasant ones.
Froulay did not long leave her alone, but soon sent for her; not, however, to sound her or pronounce her free, but for the purpose—which, as may well be conceived, required an unvarnished brow and cheek, whose fibrous network was as hard to be colored as his with the Turkish red of shame—of appointing her his mistress in artistic language, and taking her with him to the Prince's gallery, in order to learn from her the explanation of these frontispieces (for such they were to him) in this private deaf-and-dumb institution so well that he might be in a condition, so soon as the Princess should come to inspect it, to represent something better than a mute before the beauties of the pictures and the image-worshipping Regentess. Liana had to transfer an impression of every pictured limb, with the praise or blame appertaining thereunto, over into his serious brain, together with the name of the master. How delightedly and completely did she give this kallipædeia to her growling old cornute,[211] and would-be connoisseur in painting, who paid her not a single thankful look as instruction-money!
At noon, for the first time, did the daughter find her longed-for mother, among the kitchen-servants, very serious and sad. She ventured not to kiss her mouth, but only her hand, and opened upon her her love-streaming eyes only timidly and a little. Dinner seemed a funeral-feast. Only the old gentleman, who on a battle-field would have danced his marriage-minuet, and celebrated his birthday, was in good spirits and appetite, and full of salt. In case of a family jar, he usually ate en famille, and found in biting table-speeches, as common people do in winter and in famine, a sharper zest for food. Quarrelling, of itself, strengthens and animates, as physicians can electrify themselves merely by whipping something.[212]
Laughable, and yet lamentable, was it that poor Liana, who was all day long to keep a prison, was always called out of it just for to-day,—this time into the carriage again, which was to set down the sad heart and the smiling face before nothing but bright palaces. She had to go with her parents to the Princess, and look as happy as they, who, on the melancholy road, regarded her as if she were to be envied. So does the heart which has been born not far from the throne never bleed, except behind the curtain, and never laugh but when it rises; just as these same distinguished ones were formerly executed only in secret. The Prince, who was ridiculously loud on the subject of his marriage; Bouverot, just returned from card-tables or privateering planks, whom Liana now, since the latest intelligences, could only endure with a shudder; and the Princess herself; who excused her previous absence from her on account of the distraction of preparing for the festival, and who very strangely jested at once about love and men,—only to a Liana who guessed so little, suffered so much, and endured so willingly, could all these beings and incidents seem anything but the most intolerable.
Ah, what was intolerable, but the iron unchangeableness of these connections, the fixedness of such an eternal mountain-snow? Not the greatness, but the indefiniteness, of pain; not the minotaur of the labyrinth, its cellar-frost, sharp-cornered rocks, and vaults, make the breast contract and the blood curdle therein, but the long night and winding of its egress. Even under bodily maladies, therefore, unwonted new ones, whose last moment stretches away beyond our power of prediction, appear to us more ominous and oppressive than recurring ones, which, as neighboring frontier-enemies, are ever attacking us, and find us in arms.
Thus stood the dumb Liana in a cloud, when the exulting Rabette, with a bosom full of old joys and new hope, came running into the house,—that sister of the holy youth who had been torn away from her, that confederate of such glorious days. She was honorably received, and constantly attended by a guard of honor,—the Minister's lady,—because she might, indeed, as likely be an ambassadress of the Count as an electress of her son. The cunning girl sought to snatch some solitary moments with Liana by boldly begging for her company to Blumenbühl. The company was granted, and even that of the mother freely offered, into the bargain. Liana led the way to Blumenbühl over the still-blooming churchyard of buried days. What a torrent of tears struggled upward in her breast when she parted from the still happy Rabette! She had innocently left to the house one of the greatest apples of discord for the evening meal which the Minister had ever plucked for his fruit-dish with his apple-gatherer. Therefore he supped again en famille. That is to say, a silly word had escaped Rabette about the Sunday's meeting at Lilar. "Of that," said Froulay, in a very friendly manner, "thou hast not made one word of remark, daughter." "I did to my mother immediately," she replied, too fast. "I should be glad, too, to take an interest in thy amusements," said he, saving up his fury. In the pleasantest mood imaginable did this raftsman of so many tears and hewn-down blossoming branches, which he let float down thereupon, take his seat at the supper-table. He first asked servants and family for his auxiliary ear. Thereupon he passed over to the French, although the plate-exchangers found a rough translation thereof for themselves, a versio interlinearis, on his face, by way of giving notice that the distinguished Count had been there, and had inquired after mother and daughter. "With good right he asked for you both," continued the moral glacier, who loved to cool his warm food. "You are conspired, as I heard again to-day, to keep silence towards me; but why, then, shall I still trust you?" He hated from his heart every lie which he did not utter himself; so he seriously regarded himself as moral, disinterested, and gentle, merely for this reason, that he inexorably insisted upon all this in the case of others. With an abundant supply of the stinging nettles of persiflage,—the botanical ones also come forward best in cold and stony soil,—he covered over all his opening and closing lobster-claws, as we keep brook-crabs in nettles, and took first his tender child between the claws. Her soft, submissive smile he took for contempt and wickedness. How comes this soft one intelligibly by his paternal name, unless one assumes the old hypothesis, that children are usually most like that for which the pregnant mother vainly longed, which in this case was a soft spouse? Then he assailed, but more vehemently, the mother, in order by his mistrust to set her at variance with his daughter; yes, in order, perhaps, to torment the latter, by means of her mother's sufferings, into childlike sacrifices and resolutions. He very freely declared himself—for the egotist finds the most egotists, as love and Liana find only love, and no self-love—against the egotism around and beside him, and concealed not how very cordially he cursed them both for female egotists (as the old heathen did the Christians for atheists). The Minister's lady, accustomed to live with the Minister in no wedlock so little as in that of souls,—as Voltaire defines friendship,—said merely to Liana, "For whom do I suffer so?" "Ah, I know," she answered, meekly. And so he dismissed both full of the deepest sorrows, and thought afterward of his business matters.
This general distress was increased by something which should have lessened it. The Minister was vexed that he had daily, in the midst of his wrath, to consult the taste of the women upon his—exterior. He wanted, at the marriage festival,—for the sake of his beloved,—to be a true bird of paradise, a Paradeur, a Vénus a belles fesses.[213] Of old he had loved to act the double part of statesman and courtier, and would fain, by way of monopolizing pride and vanity, grow into a Diogenes-Aristippus. Something of this, however, was not vanity; but that tormenting spirit of the male sex, the spirit of order and orthodoxy, would not go out of him. He was a man who would flourish against his very livery the clothes-switch wherewith the servant had let a few particles of dust settle on the state coat; still more dangerous was it—because he sat between two looking-glasses, the frizzling-glass and the large mirror in the stove-screen—to lay the dust rightly on his own wool; and hardest of all was it for him to be satisfied with the fixing of his children. Liana, as artist, had now to suggest the proper color of a new surtout. Sachets, or smelling-bags, he directed to be filled, and with them his pockets; and a musk-plant pot placed in his window, not because he wished to use the leaves for perfume (that he expected of his fingers), but because he wished to anoint his fingers by rubbing the leaves together. Patent pomatum for the hands, and English pressed ornamental paper also for the same (when they wished to use a billet-doux pen), and other knickknacks, excited less attention than the snuff which he procured for himself; not, however, for his nose, but for his lips, in order to rub them red. In fact, he would have rendered himself quite ridiculous in the eyes of many a merry blade, if such a one had seen him draw privately out of his souvenir the hair-tweezers, and with them the hair out of his eyebrows, just where the saddle of life, as upon a horse's back, had worn it white; and only the Minister himself could look serious during the process, when he sat before the looking-glass, smiling through all the finest ways of smiling,—the best one he caught and kept,—or when he tried the most graceful modes of throwing one's self on the sofa,—how often he had to practise this!—and finally, in short, through all his operations upon himself.
Fortunately for the mother, the good Lector came; from the hand of this old friend she had so often taken, if not a Jacob's ladder, yet a mining-ladder, upon which to climb out of the abyss; hopefully she now laid before him all her trouble. He promised some help, upon the condition of speaking with Liana alone in her chamber. He went to her and declared tenderly his knowledge and her situation.
How did the childlike maiden blush at the sharp day-beams which smote the scented night-violet of her love! But the friend of her childhood spoke softly to this smitten heart, and of his equal love for her and her friend; of the temperament of her father, and of the necessity of considerate measures; and said the best was to make him a sacred vow that she would yield to her parent's wish of her strictly avoiding the Count, only until he had received from his father, to whom he himself, as attendant of the son, had long been obliged to communicate intelligence and inquiries about the new connection, the yes or no in respect to it; if it were "no,"—which he would not answer for,—then Albano must solve the riddle; if it were "yes," he himself would stand security for a second on the part of her parents; at the same time, however, he must lay claim to her profoundest silence toward them in relation to his inquiries, whereby they might perhaps find themselves compromitted. Thereby he rooted himself only the more deeply in her confidence.