Paganina had not yet acquired that marvellous beauty that afterward became so celebrated, but something there was about her very strange and very attractive.
She was reticent and retiring, nonchalant in gesture and careless in behavior. Her face was always sad, an indescribable, almost ferocious ennui seeming completely to overpower her. But if some recital, some sudden expression touched her imagination, or music entranced her, her deep black eyes threw out a violet flame, and even sparkled. But that was all. The calm of an affected, scornful carelessness returned immediately.
Restlessness is the common host of the domestic hearth.
Master Swibert trembled to see the worldly and theatrical genius of the mother develop in the child; he knew well that, in a nature strong and deep as hers, such tastes would make terrible ravages. And the development of each successive year was not calculated to dispel his fears.
Everything in the child alarmed him, from her habitual concentration to her fits of passionate tenderness—the outburst of the moment, volcano-like, a jet of brilliant flame which sparkles and goes out.
IX.
Master Swibert could boast in his dying hours of never having deserted the child for an hour even. After having devoted the early hours of the day to her and her cousin's education, he superintended and guided their recreations—an important part, in good hands, of the training of a child.
He had the habit of taking every day a long walk. The route they loved best he called the German road. It was that by which the organist had come to Italy. The sight of it revived his memories, and flattered the melancholy love he gave his country.
On the way, the children listened to the stories of the good musician, who so willingly related them. They spoke of Germany; for on this chapter Master Swibert never tired. He led his little auditors into the world of ballads and legends, and we can readily imagine the pretty curiosity and happy astonishment which, at their age, he awakened. Their favorite legend was that of the great emperor Barbarossa, who slept so many centuries in an obscure grotto, leaning on a table of stone into which his beard had grown. These stories were better than our nurses tell; for the organist related them, not to impose on the credulity of his youthful auditory, but to extract the poetry they contained; and this he did wonderfully. Poetry never did harm to any one.
But the children loved, even better than the legends, the recitals suitable for them from the German poets. The story of Mignon delighted them. What could be told them sufficed; and they loved the little girl who had no other language than song, who took the face of an angel and aspired to heaven, where she went without scarcely having lived on earth.