The Minister, when she came home from Lilar with murdered eyes, had set in his right eye a hell, and into his left a purgatory, for no fatality had ever before so cheated him, namely, so completely upset all his projects and prospects,—the office of court-dame for his daughter, that ring guard on the finger of the Princess, and finally every chance of a haul with his double-woven net.
Unspeakably did the man struggle against the spoon in which fate offered him the powder wherein he was to let the swallowed diamonds of his plans go down; he delivered the strongest sermons,—so did he, like Horace, name his Satires against "his women"; he was a war-god, a hell-god, a beast, a monster, a satan,—everything;—he was in a frame now to undertake anything and everything,—but what availed it?—Much, when the German gentleman surprised him just in this mood of moral feeling. He made no scruple of refreshing the paternal memory on the subject of the promised sitting of the daughter for a miniature, and asserting his claim to it; for the rest he was all-knowing, and seemed to know nothing. For the sitting-scene of a blind girl he had cut out certain original, romantic situations, according to the notices which he had drawn out of the Captain. His artistic love for Liana had hitherto suffered little, and his slow, stealthy advances and reconnoitrings were in accordance with his viper-coldness and his worldsman-like energy. The old father—who in life, as in an imperial advertiser, always sought a partner with 60-80,000 dollars for his business—declared himself anything but averse to the match. These two falcons on one pole, trained by one falcon-master, the Devil, understood and agreed with each other excellently well. The German gentleman gave to understand that her miniature-likeness would, through her striking resemblance to Idoine, who, like her, had never been willing to sit, be serviceable for many a piece of pleasantry with the Princess, but still more indispensable to his "flame" for Liana, and just now, in her blindness, one might, indeed, sketch her without her knowledge,—and he would write under the picture, La belle aveugle, or something of the kind. The old Minister, as was said, swallowed the idea with perfect goût. As the Italian female singers carry a so-called mother instead of a passport on their journeys, so did he regard himself as in a similar sense a so-called father; he thought to himself: at all events there is little more to be done with the girl; she lies there as so much dead capital, and pays a miserable interest; I can take the god-penny-medal which the German gentleman in his godfatherly capacity offers to me as the father like a name for the child, and just put it in my pocket.
This duplicate of rogues was held back in mid-current merely by a drag-rake, which threatened to draw the prey out of their pike-like teeth. An old, scolding, but true-souled chambermaid from Nuremberg was the rake; she could not be drawn away from Liana, or reduced to silence. Bouverot, to be sure, a Robespierre and destroying angel to his servants, would, in Froulay's place, have caused the Nuremberg dame, a couple of days beforehand, to be furnished by a servant with some complex fractures, and then thrown upon the street; but the Minister—his heart was soft—could not do that. All that was possible for him was this: He sent for her to his chamber; represented to her that she had stolen his Magdeburg ear; remained, in his present state of hearing, deaf to every objection, but not to every incivility, and at last found himself under the necessity (a word and a blow) of driving the thievish wench out of service. With every successor to the office, as being a new one, money would have weight, he knew.
He proposed thereupon to beg of the Princess an invitation for himself and his lady to tea and supper, to bespeak the miniature-painter, to instruct the new chambermaid, and put all things in a right train.
Two tigers, according to the legend, digged the Apostle Paul's grave; so do our two men here scratch away at one for a saint. So much the more confidently do I say this, as I do not otherwise see through—if nothing is to be made but a picture—the meaning of so many circumstances. But the father I could almost excuse. In the first place, he said expressly to the German gentleman, the Abigail might, in his opinion, as well stay in the chamber, or in the adjoining one, in case the patient wanted anything; secondly, the otherwise soft man had contracted, from his ministerial commerce with justice, a certain grit, a certain barbarity, which is so much the more natural to Themis, passing sentence behind the bandage, and, as an Areopagus, without the sight of the pains, as even Diderot[[23]] asserts that blind people are more cruel than others; and, thirdly, no one could well be more ready than he to pity the more deeply, in case she should die, the very child whom he, as it was once pretended Jews and witches did with Christian children, crucified, in order, like them, to do something with the blood (as parents generally, and particularly human parents, can indeed get over easily the misfortunes of those who are near and dear to them, but hardly their loss, just as we, in the case of the hair of the head, which is still nearer to us, feel not the singeing or cutting of it, but very painfully the tearing of it up by the root); and, fourthly, Froulay had always the misfortune that thoughts which in his head had a tolerable, innocent hue, became, like muriate of silver or good ink, black on the spot, when they once came to light.
Otherwise, and without taking these alleviating circumstances into view, there remains, indeed, much in his conduct which I do not vindicate.
The evening appeared. The Minister's lady went on her husband's arm to the court. The new chambermaid had, as Bouverot's bridesmaid, already, three days beforehand, made the most necessary arrangements or manœuvres. She had, with great ease, borrowed for him Liana's letters to Albano, as the mother, from habit, forgot that a present eye was not necessarily a seeing one; and he could extract from them the historical touches or watercolors, wherewith he could assume, before the blind one, in case of a recognition on the stage, the semblance of her hero,—namely, Albano's. With Roquairol he had played often enough to have his voice, consequently Albano's, in his power. Methinks his preparation-days for the festal evening were suitably spent.
He could, as little residences drink tea earlier than others, make his appearance quite as early as a miniature-painter in September absolutely must. When he beheld the silent form in the easy-chair, with the discolored flower-cups of the cheeks, but more firmly rooted in every purpose, a more coldly commanding saint, then did the exasperation and inflammation which he had imbibed at once from her letters kindle each other into a higher flame. Only in such chests, strung at once with metal and catgut, with cruelty and sensuality, is such an alliance of lust and gall conceivable. Bouverot's whole past, the books of his life's history, ought, as those of Herodotus are to the nine Muses, to have been dedicated to the three Fates, one to each.
He stole to the window, seated himself, set down his paint-box, and began hastily to dot. Meanwhile Liana heard her very cultivated, well-read chambermaid read to her out of the second volume of Fénelon's Œuvres Spirituelles. Zefisio was not affected by the Archbishop in the least,—what he caught about pure love (sur le pur amour de Dieu) he perverted into an impure by applications, and let himself be devilishly inflamed by the divine,—for the rest what there was touching in Liana's relations he left as it was, as he had now to paint. Odiously did his motley-colored panther-eyes lick like red, sharp tiger-tongues over the sweet, soft countenance!—"Dear Justa, stop, the reading is disagreeable to thee, thou breathest so short!" said she at last, because she heard the portrait-painter breathe. It was no sacrifice to him, but a foretaste, a sweet early-bit, to put off the kiss of this tender little hand and lip and the whole exhibition of his burning heart, until he saw her outline dotted off with the poison-tints on the white ivory by the rapid dotting machine of his hand. At length he had her, many-colored[[24]] on white. "Very well, dear Justa," said she, "the prayer bell tolls; thou canst not see any longer. Rather lead me to the instrument,"—namely the harmonica. She did so. Bouverot gave Justa a sign to retire. She did that too. The yellow garden-spider now ran up to the tender, white flower. The spider heard her evening choral not without enjoyment, and the devout upcasting of her ruined eyes seemed to him a right picturesque idea, which the true painter[[25]] resolved to transfer to the ivory leaf, if it could be done.
"Lovely goddess!" cried he, suddenly, with Albano's stolen voice, into the midst of those holy tones, which Albano had once, in a happier hour, but more nobly, interrupted. She listened with alarm, but hardly believing her own ear in this night. The astonishment did not displease the prospect painter—for her face was his prospect—by any means whatever; "remember this harmonica in the thunder-house." He confounded it with the water-house. "You here, Count?—Justa! where art thou?" cried she distressfully. "Justa, come here!" he added, calling after her. The maiden followed his voice and his—eye. "Gracious damsel?" asked she. But now Liana had not the heart to ask about the door and the admission-ticket of the Count. To speak French with her lover would not do, as the maid understood it; hence it was that in Vienna in the years of the Revolution they forbade this language very judiciously, because it so surely and pestilentially spreads a certain equality,—freedom follows,—between the nobility and the servile orders.