Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 31

Liana listened now, for the first time, after the word which had escaped her; then, in order to justify the past and her mother, she conceived the pleasant and ridiculous purpose, of moving and converting the old gentleman by her ghost-visions or dream-seeings. She begged of him a solitary interview, and afterward--when it was reluctantly granted--intreated him therein for his sacred promise to be silent towards her mother, because she feared to show to that loving one the clock-wheels of her death-bell rattling so near to the fatal stroke. The old gentleman could only, with a comic expression,--which made him look like one who with a bad cold wants to laugh,--vow that he would keep his word so far as was necessary, because never, so far as he could recollect, had his word been kept by him, only he had been often kept by his word. In such men, word and deed are like theatrical thunder and lightning, which, though generally occurring in close connection, and simultaneously in heaven, on the stage break forth out of separate corners, and by means of different operators. But Liana would not rest till he had put on a word-keeping, sincere face,--a painted window.

Thereupon she began, after a kissing of the hand,[209] her ghostly history.

With unbroken seriousness, and firmly contracted muscles, he heard the extraordinary narration through; then, without saying a word, he took her by the hand and led her back into the presence of her mother, to whom he handed her over with a long psalm of praise and thanksgiving about her successful daughter's-school. "His boy's-school with Charles had not been blessed to him, at least in this degree," he added. As a proof, he frankly communicated to her--cold-bloodedly working up all Liana's pangs, as the coopers do cypress-branches into cask-hoops--the little which he had promised to bury in silence, because he always prost.i.tuted either himself or the other party, generally both. Liana sat there, deeply red, and growing hotter and hotter, with downcast eyes, and begged G.o.d to preserve her filial love towards her father.

No sympathizing eye shall be further pained with the opening of a new scene, when the ice of his irony broke, and became a raging stream, into which flowed tears of maternal indignation, also, at the thought of a precious being, and her feverish, fatal, dreaming of herself away into the last sleep. The object and the danger almost united the married couple for the second time; when there is a glazed frost, people go very much arm in arm. "Thou hast sent nothing to Lilar?" asked the father.

"Without your permission I certainly should not do it," said she; but she meant her letters, not Albano's. He took advantage of the misunderstanding, and said, "Thou hast, however, surely." "I will gladly do, and let be done everything," said she, "but only on condition the Count consents, in order that I may not appear to him disingenuous; he has my sacred word for my truth!" At this mild firmness, at this Peter's rock overgrown with tender flowers, the father stumbled the hardest. In addition to this, the transition of a haughty lover from his own wishes to those of his enemies, supposing they had allowed Liana the question to the Count, was so impossible on the one hand, and the solicitation of this change, whether it were granted or refused, absolutely so degrading on the other, that the astounded Minister's lady felt her pride rise, and asked again, "Is this thy last word to us, Liana?" And when Liana, weeping, answered, "I cannot help it; G.o.d be gracious to me!" she turned away indignantly toward the Minister, and said: "Do now what you take to be _convenable_; I wash my hands in innocence!" "Not so entirely, _ma chere_; but very well!" said he, "thou wilt stay after to-morrow in thy chamber, till thou hast corrected thyself, and art more worthy of our presence!" he announced, as he went out, to Liana; firing at her meanwhile two eye-volleys, wherein, according to my estimate, far more reverberating fires, tormenting ghosts, eating, devouring medicaments, brain and heart-borers, were promised, than a man can generally hold to give or bear to receive.

Poor maiden! Thy last August is very hard, and no harvest-month day!

Thou lookest out into the time, where thy little coffin stands, on which a cruel angel wipes away the still fresh flower-pieces of love running round it, in order that it may, all white, as rosy-white as thy soul or thy last form, be consigned to the grave!

This banishment by her mother into the desert of her cloister-chamber was quite as frightful to her, only not more frightful than her anger, which she had to-day, only for the third time, experienced, though not deserved. It was to her as if now, after the warm sun had gone down, the bright evening glow had also sunk below the horizon, and it grew dark and cold in the world. She remained this whole day, which was yet allowed her, with her mother; gave, however, only answers, looked friendly, did everything cheerfully and readily, and--as she quickly dashed away, with her tiny finger, every gathering dew-drop out of the corner of her eyes, as if it were dust, because she thought, at night I can weep enough,--she had very dry eyes; and all that, in order not to be an additional burden to her oppressed mother. But she, as mothers so easily do, confounded a timid, loving stillness with the dawning of obduracy; and when Liana, with the innocent design of consolation, wished to have Caroline's picture brought for her from Lilar, this innocence also pa.s.sed for hardness, and was punished and reciprocated with a corresponding on the part of the parent, namely, with the permission to send. Only the Minister's lady demanded the French prayers of her again, as if she were not worthy to lay them under her present heart. Never are human beings smaller than when they want to plague and punish without knowing _how_.

As every one who rules, whether he sits on a chair of instruction or a princely one, or, like parents, on both, when the occupant of its footstool once leaves off his former obedience, imputes that obedience to him, not as a mitigation, but as an aggravation of his offence, so did the Minister's lady also toward her hitherto so uniformly docile child. She hated her pure love, which burned like ether, without ashes, smoke, or coal, so much the more, and held it to be either the author or the victim of an incendiary fire, particularly as her own married love hitherto had seldom been anything more than a showy chimney-piece.

Liana at last, too heavily constrained, since on the other side of the wall-tapestry the serene day, the loveliest sky was blooming, ascended to the Italian roof. She saw how people were travelling and riding back contentedly from their little places of pleasure, because the earth was one; on Lilar's bushy path the walkers were sauntering with a blissful slowness home,--in the streets there was a loud carpentering at the festive scaffoldings and Charles's-wains for the princely bride, and the finished wheels were rolled along for trial,--and everywhere were heard the drillings of the young music, which when grown up was to go before her. But when Liana looked upon herself, and saw her life alone standing here in dark raiment,--over yonder the empty house of her loved one, here her own, which to her had also become empty,--this very spot, which still reminded her of a lovelier, rarer blossoming than that of the _Cereus serpens_,--and oh! this cold solitude, in which her heart to-day, for the first time, lived without a heart; for her brother, the chorister of her short song of gladness, had been sent off, and Julienne had for some time been incomprehensibly invisible to her,--no, she could not see the fair sun go down, who, so serene and white, was sinking to slumber with his high evening star,--or listen to the happy evening chorus of the long day, but left the shining eminence. O how does joy die a stranger in the untenanted, dark bosom, when she finds no sister and becomes a spectre there! Thus does the beautiful green, that spring color, when a cloud paints it, betoken nothing but long moisture.

When she entered, soon, the asylum of day, the bedchamber, the heavens without flashed heat-lightning; O why just now, cruel fate?--But here, before the still-life of night, when life, covered with her veil, sounds more faintly,--here may all her tears, which a heavy day has been pressing,[210] gush forth freely. On the pillow, as if it bore the last, long sleep, rests this exhausted head more softly than on the bosom which reproachfully reckons up against it its tears; and it weeps softly, not _upon_, only _for_ loved ones.

According to her custom, she was on the point of opening her mother's prayers, when she recollected, with a startled feeling, that they had been taken from her. Then she looked up with burning tears to G.o.d, and prepared alone out of her broken heart a prayer to him, and only angels counted the words and the tears.

76. CYCLE.

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 a.s.senting 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 inst.i.tution 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 kallipaedeia 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 appet.i.te, 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 amba.s.sadress of the Count as an electress of her son. The cunning girl sought to s.n.a.t.c.h some solitary moments with Liana by boldly begging for her company to Blumenbuhl. The company was granted, and even that of the mother freely offered, into the bargain. Liana led the way to Blumenbuhl 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 amus.e.m.e.nts," 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sumes 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 a.s.sailed, 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 _Venus 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 s.e.x, 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-gla.s.ses, the frizzling-gla.s.s 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-gla.s.s, 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.

She asked, trembling, how long the answer would tarry? "Six, eight, eleven days after the nuptials at most!" said he, reckoning. Yes, good Augusti! "Ah! we are all suffering, indeed," said she, and added, confidentially, and out of a weeping breast: "But is he well?" "He is diligent," was the reply.

So he brought her, burdened with two secrets, and for the present consenting to an interim-separation, back to her mother; but she bestowed only upon the Lector the reward of a friendly look. He desired, meantime,--after his Carthusian manner,--no other reward than the most good-natured silence toward the Minister on the subject of his interference, since the latter might hold his deserts in this connection much greater than they were.

The eight days' improvement and abstinence was announced to the Minister. He believed, however,--keeping in reserve a mistrust towards his lady,--that he could carry the war farther into the enemy's country with his own weapons; nevertheless, he contented himself, at the same time, with the new respite and Liana's disincarceration, for the sake of driving his daughter before him to his beloved at the nuptial festival, blooming and healthy as a sparkling pea-hen.

Roquairol at this moment came back, and ushered into the house a cloud or two full of beautiful, bright morning redness. He delivered to his father tidings and greetings from the Princess. To Liana he brought the echo of that beloved voice, which had once said to her heaven: "Let it be!"--ah! the last melody among the discords of the unharmonious time!

He guessed easily--for he learned little from his mother, who neglected him, and nothing from her daughter--how all stood. When he was actually on the point of slipping Albano's letter to her, in the twilight of evening, into her work-bag, and she said, with an ah! of love, "No, it is against my word,--but at some future time, Charles!"--then he saw, as he expressed it, "with crying indignation, his sister, in Charon's open boat, sailing into the Tartarus of all sorrows." About his friend he thought less than of his sister. The friendly, flattering Minister--he presented, as a proof of it, a valuable saddle to the Captain--informed him of Rabette's visit, and gave hints about betrothment and the like.

Charles said, boldly: "He postponed every thought of his own happiness, so long as his dear sister saw none before her." By way of drawing the old gentleman again into more interest for Liana, he suggested to him a romantic invention for the marriage festival, which Froulay did not dream of, when he already stood quite close to it; namely, Idoine (the sister of the bride) was strikingly like Liana. The Princess loved her inexpressibly, but saw her only seldom, because on account of her strong character, which once refused a royal marriage, she lived in a village built and governed by herself, in a courtly exile from court. He now proposed to his father the poetic question, whether, on the illumination night, Liana might not for a few minutes, in the dream-temple, which was entirely suited to this beautiful illusion, delight the Princess with the image of her beloved sister.

Whether it was that love toward the Princess made the Minister bolder, or he was intoxicated by the desire of brilliantly introducing Liana to her office of court-lady; suffice it, he found in the idea good sense.

If anything supplied tobacco for the calumet of the _ex parte_ peace which he had made with his son, it was this theatrical part. He hastened immediately to the Prince and the Princess with the prayer for his permission and her sympathy; and then, when he had secured both, he hastened on to his Orestes, Bouverot, and said: "_Il m'est venu une idee tres singuliere qui peut-etre l'est trop; cependant le prince l'a approuvee_," etc.,--and finally--for he must not forget her either--to Liana.

The Captain had already sought to persuade her beforehand. The mother opposed the dramatic imitation from self-respect, and Liana from humility; such a representation seemed to her a piece of presumption.

But at last she gave in, simply because the sisterly love of the Princess had seemed to her so great and unattainable, just as if she did not cherish a similar sentiment in her own heart; thus she always regarded only the image in the mirror, not herself, as beautiful; just as the astronomer thinks the same evening, with its red splendors and night shadows, more sublime and enchanting, when he finds it in the moon, than when he stands in the midst of it on the earth. Perhaps, too, there entered another element of secret sweetness into Liana's love for the Prince's bride, namely, a step-daughter's affection; because she should once have been the bride of the Knight Gaspard. Women regard relationship more than we; hence, too, their ancestral pride is always several ancestors older than ours.

Thus, then, did she make ready her oppressed heart for the light plays of the shining festival, which the coming Cycles are to present on the New-Year's holiday, as it were, of a new Jubilee.

END OF VOL. I.

Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.

FOOTNOTES:

[192] This is Jean Paul's own image.--TR.

[193] That is, of course, some lights of hope.--TR.

[194] A German or Suabian dance.--TR.

[195] His Moral Treatises, Vol. II. p. 96.

[196] The Germans call the dash the _stroke of thought_. Here it implies an emphatic pause, as much as to say, "What do you think is coming?"--TR.

[197] At the Prince's marriage.

[198] With the Egyptians the enchanters were only learned men; with him the learned women were enchantresses.

[199] _Memoires secrets sur les Regnes de Louis XIV._, etc. Par Duclos. Tom. I.

[200] It is well known that a cut is made in a fowl left whole as a sign that it has been upon the Prince's table, so that it may not be set on again, but otherwise enjoyed.

[201] In German, _Schutz- und Stich-blatt_,--literally, a plate to defend the hand in parrying and thrusting,--_Blatt_, meaning _leaf_ (of paper) also, conveys a _pun_ not easily translated.--TR.

[202] The blind-pa.s.senger in the German stage-coach corresponds to our _dead-head_ in stage or steamboat.--TR.

[203] See Klockenbring's collected Essays.

[204] (In German, _Spring-wurzel_.) The juice of some plant (perhaps Devil's-milk) highly and quickly corrosive.--TR.

[205] News by hand.--TR.

[206] The King had to _damer_, or make a dame of an unmarried maiden of rank, before she could go to Versailles to court.