Maliciously and joyfully did Bouverot, to whom she now seemed to betray a serviceable mistrust about the Count, which pointed out a freer play-room for his character mask, remind the perplexed maiden of her commands for Justa; she must now cause her to bring a light.
"Infidèle," he thereupon began, "I have overcome all obstacles, in order to throw myself at your feet and supplicate your forgiveness. Je m'en flatte à tort pent être, mais je l'ose," he went on, made more passionate through her. "O cruelle! de grace, pourquoi ces régards, ces mouvements? Je suis ton Alban et il t'aime encore,—Pense à Blumenbühl, cé sejour charmant,—Ingrate, j'esperais te trouver un peu plus reconnaisante. Souviens-toi de ce que tu m'a promis," said he, by way of sounding her, "quand tu me pressas contre ton sein divin." ...
A pure soul mirrors, without staining itself, the unclean one and feels darkly the distressing neighborhood, just as doves, they say, bathe themselves in limpid water, in order to see therein the images of the hovering birds of prey. The short breath, the wavering tone of speech, every word, and an indefinable something, drove the frightful spectre close before her soul, the suspicion that it was not Albano. She started up; "Who are you? God, you are not the Count. Justa, Justa!" "Who else could it be," replied he, coldly, "that would dare to assume my name? O, je voudrais que je ne le fusse pas. Vous m'avez écrit, que l'esperance est la lune de la vie. Ah, ma lune s'est couchée, mais j'adore encore le soleil, qui l'éclaire."
Here he grasped the hand of this eclipsed sun fighting with a dragon. Then his gnawed finger-nails and dry fingers, and a passing touch of his order-cross, discovered to her the real name. She tore herself loose with a shriek, and ran away without seeing whither, and fell into his hands again. He snatched her violently to his meagre hot lips: "Yes, it is I," said he, "and I love you more than does your Count with his étourderie."
"You are wicked and godless toward a blind maiden; what will you? Justa! is there no one then to help me? Ah, good God, give me my eyes," she cried, flying, without knowing whither, and again overtaken. "Bouverot! Thou evil spirit!" she cried, warding off in places where he was not. He, like gunpowder, cooling on the tongue, and singeing and shattering when greed kindled him, placed himself at a considerable darting-distance from her, threw a painter's eye at the charming waves and bendings of her tempest-struck flowerage, and said quietly, with that mildness which resembles the eating and devouring milk of spunges: "Only be calm, fairest; it is I still; and what would it all avail thee, child?"
Giddy with the snake-breath of distress, wandering nature began to sing, but only beginnings: "Joy, thou spark of Heaven-born fire!"—"I am a German maiden." She ran round and sang again: "Know'st thou the land?" "Thou evil spirit!"
At this moment the giant snake, thus charmed, reared himself aloft on his cold rings, with darting tongue, to spring and to coil; "Mon cœur," said the snake, who always in passion spoke French, "vole sur cette bouche qui enchante tous les sens." "Mother!" cried she, "Caroline! O God, let me see, O God—my eyes!" Then did the All-gracious give them back to her once more; the agony of nature, the noisy preparations for the burial, opened again the eye of the tranced victim.
How eagerly she flew out of the chamber of torture! The disappointed, mortified beast of prey was still reckoning on blindness and distraction. But when Bouverot saw that she ran lightly up the stairway to the Italian roof, then he merely sent the maid, who came running in, after her, to see that she received no injury; and now again he held her previous blindness for dissimulation. He himself took from the chamber the miniature sketch, and dragged himself like a hungry, wounded monster sullenly and slowly out of the house.
