Liana's eyes healed, but only slowly: Nature would not lead her at once
out of her sombre prison into the sun; she could now, like the
philosophers, just recognize light rather than forms. Nevertheless, the
Minister issued cabinet orders that she should day after to-morrow play
on the harmonica, appear at the _souper_, and even make the salad, and
thereby mask her blindness. He sometimes commanded impossible things, in
order to meet with as much disobedience as his anger needed for the
purpose of venting itself in punishment. Certain people keep themselves
all day long full of vexation beforehand for some coming event or other,
like urinal phosphate, which always boils under the microscope, or
forges, wherein every day fire breaks out.
The Minister's lady pronounced her soft, firm, No. About the harmonica
she said she had asked the Doctor, in his name, who had strictly
forbidden it; and the rest was an impossibility. Here he could already,
he felt so like it, be angry at several things, especially at the asking
of the Doctor, which, however, had not yet taken place; he grew mad
enough, and swore he should act according to _his own_ principles, and
devil a bit did he care for _other_ people's.
This _principle_ was in the present case the German gentleman. That is
to say, the above-mentioned anecdote--Bouverot's guardianship of the
hereditary Prince on his travels, or the design of the thing--had at
both courts come to be the common talk in assemblies and at tables, and
was hidden only from the Prince Luigi; for on thrones, there are almost
no mysteries to any one excepting him (hardly his wife) who sits
thereupon, as in whispering-galleries the people in distant corners hear
everything aloud, only not he who stands in the middle. The German
gentleman was, therefore, in the Hohenfliess system, the important
port-vein and pulmonary artery wherewith even Froulay would water
himself. The latter is obliged throughout to serve the present and the
future, or two masters, of whom the one of Haarhaar might very soon be
his.
Bouverot was attached not merely to Froulay the minister, but to Froulay
the father; a man like him, who causes to be sent after him from Italy a
whole cabinet of Art, and whose acquaintance with the arts has so long
knit together even him and the Prince, must know how to prize a Madonna
of such carnation as Liana, and of the Romish school, and, what is more,
who, detached from the canvas, moved as a full, breathing rose. As to
marrying the rose, that he could not propose to himself, because he was
a German Herr.
He had not seen her since his Italian tour,--nor had the Count
either,--to both the Minister wished to show her as a round pearl of
special whiteness and figure. Froulay had--which after all happens
oftener than we imagine--quite as much vanity as pride; the latter to
repel blame, the former to court praise. But I should have now to write
a tournament-chronicle to tell posterity the half of all his raging and
racing and lance-thrusts, in a fight wherein he served under the banners
of enmity, vanity, and avarice. He was no more to be hunted to death
than a wolf. All weapons were alike to him, and he was ever taking
sharper and more poisonous ones. In the old _judicial_ duels between man
and wife, the man stood commonly up to his stomach in a pit, in order to
bring his strength down to a level with the woman's, and she struck at
him with a stone tied up in a veil; but in the _matrimonial_ duels the
man seems to stand in the free air and the woman in the earth, and she
often has only the _veil_ without the stone.
In this combat there stepped between the two a shining peace-angel who
caught the wounds, namely, Liana. The daughter, who had an enthusiastic
love for her mother, and the womanly reverence for the stronger sex
toward her father, and who suffered so endlessly under their strifes,
fell upon her mother's neck and begged her to allow her what her father
demanded; she would certainly do everything so as not to excite
observation; she would take the greatest pains and practise herself
specially beforehand,--ah, he would otherwise only be still more unkind
to her poor brother,--this discord, merely on her account, was so
painful to her, and perhaps more injurious than playing on the
harmonica.
"My child, thou knowest," said the mother, for now she _had_ asked,
"what the physician said yesterday against the harmonica; the rest is at
thine own risk!" Liana kissed her joyfully. She must needs be led to her
father, that she might make known to him aloud the gladness of her
obedience. "I thank you, and be hanged," said he, softly; "it is simply
your cursed duty." She left him with her joy dissipated to atoms, but
without any great pangs; she was already accustomed to this.