Joyfully did Roquairol, on the first evening when he knew his father had
gone a journey, bear to his friend the invitation to go with him to his
mother. Albano blushed charmingly for the first time, at the thought of
that fiery night which had wrung from him the oldest mystery; for
hitherto neither of them, in the common hours of life, had retouched the
sacred subject. Only the Captain could easily and willingly speak of
Linda as well as of every other loss.
Liana always beheld her brother--the creator and ruling spirit of her
softest hours--with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to
get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book
in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She
and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately
relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the
Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the
visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern
chamber, from which he had seen, for the first time, the dear maiden,
only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns!
The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her,
after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling
of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire,
of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent
consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of
Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical,
strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the
flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten
years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden;
afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually
at once thirteen and seventeen years old.
Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting
because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be
avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious
spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground
to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and
warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and
brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet _proudly_,
but so _affectionately_, that true pair of eyes!
And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,--whose continuance
is often, on _men's_ faces, but not on _maidens'_, the title-vignette of
falsehood,--she received our noble youth, but not him alone.
She seated herself at the embroidery-frame; and the mother soon launched
the Count out into the cool, high sea of general conversation, into
which only occasionally the son threw up a green, warm island. Alban
looked on to see how Liana made her mosaic flower-pieces grow; how the
little white hand lay on the black satin ground (Froulay's _thorax_ is
to wear the flowers on his birthday), and how her pure brow, over which
the curly hair transparently waved, bent forward, and how her face, when
she spoke, or when she looked after new colors of silk, lifted itself
up, animated with the higher glow of industry in the eye and on the
cheek. Charles sometimes hastily stretched out his hand towards her. She
willingly reached hers across; he laid it between his two, and turned it
over, looked into the palm, pressed it with both hands, and the brother
and sister smiled upon each other affectionately. And each time Albano
turned from his conversation with the mother, and true-heartedly smiled
with them. But poor hero! It is of itself a Herculean labor to sit idly
by where fine work is going on, such as embroidery, miniature painting,
&c.; but above all, with a spirit like thine, which has so many sails,
together with a couple of storms in behind, to lie inactively at anchor
beside the embroidery-frame, and not to be, say, a spinning Hercules
(that were easy), but only one that sees spinning,--and that, too, in
the presence of a great spring and sunset out of doors,--and, in
addition to all this, in the company of a mother, so chary of her words
(in fact, before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to
introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter),--these are sore
things.
He looked down sharply at the embroidered Flora. "Nothing pains me so
much," said he,--for he always philosophized, and everything useless on
the earth troubled him grievously,--"as that so many thousand artificial
ornaments should be created in vain in the world, without a single eye
ever meeting and enjoying them. It will touch me very nearly if this
green leaflet here is not especially observed." With the same sorrow
over fruitless, unenjoyed plantings of labor, he often shut his eyes
upon wall-paper foliage, upon worked flowers, upon architectural
decorations. Liana might have taken it as a painter's censure of the
overladen stitch-garden, which, merely out of love for her father, she
was sowing so full,--for Froulay, born in the days when they still
trimmed the gold-lace with clothes, rather than the reverse, was fond of
buttoning a little silk herbary round his body,--but she only smiled,
and said, "Well, the little leaf has surely escaped that evil destiny:
it _is_ observed."
"What matters a thing's being forgotten and useless?" said Roquairol,
taking up the word, full of indifference to the Lector, who was just
entering, and full of indifference to the opinion of his mother, to
whom, as well as to his father, only the entreaties of his sister
sometimes made him submissive. "Enough that a thing _is_. The birds sing
and the stars move in majesty over the wildernesses, and no man sees the
splendor. In fact, everywhere, in and out of man, more passes unseen
than seen. Nature draws out of endless seas, and without exhausting
them; we, too, are a nature, and should draw and pour out, and not be
always anxiously reckoning upon the profit, for watering purposes, of
every transient shower and rainbow. Just keep on embroidering, sister!"
he concluded, ironically.
"The Princess comes to-day!" said the Lector, and, delighted with the
prospect, Liana kissed her mother's hand. She looked up often and
confidentially from her embroidery at the courtier, who seemed to be
very intimate, but who, as a refined man, was full as much respected
and as respectful as if he were there for the first time.
The announcement of the Princess set the Captain into a charming state
of easy good-humor; a female part was to him as necessary for society as
to the French for an opera, and the presence of a lady helped him as
much in teaching, as the absence of a button did Kant.[135] By way of
drawing his sister off from the flowers, he removed the red veil from a
statue on the card-table, and threw it, like a little red dawn, over the
lilies on the face of the embroideress; just then the door opened and
Julienne entered. Liana, trying to remove the veil, in her haste to
welcome her, entangled herself in the little red dawn. Albano
mechanically reached out to her his hand to relieve her of the veil, and
she gave it to him, and a dear, full look besides. O how his enraptured
eye shone!
Julienne brought with her a train of _jeux d'esprit_. The Captain, who,
like a pyrotechnist, could give his fire all forms and colors,
reinforced her with his; and his sister sowed, as it were, the flowers
with which the zephyrettes of raillery could play. Julienne almost said
no to yes, and yes to no; only toward the Minister's lady was she
serious and submissive,--a sign that, on her arena of disputation, among
the grains of sand particles of golden sand still lay, whereas for
philosophers the arena is the prize and the ground,--at once the
battle-field, the _Champ de Mars_, and the _Champs Elysées_. Upon the
Count she fixed her passionate gaze as boldly as only princesses may
venture to and love to; and when he returned the glance of her brown
eye, she cast it down; but she remembered him, from her old visit in
Blumenbühl, and inquired after his friends. He now entered with pleasure
upon something that was as ardent as his own soul,--encomiums. It is
against the finest politeness to praise or blame persons with
warmth,--things one may. While he portrayed with grateful remembrance
his sister Rabette, Julienne became so earnestly and deeply absorbed in
his eye, that she started, and asked the Lector about the steps of the
_Anglaise_ which he had led at the masquerade. When he had done his best
to give an idea of it, she said she had not understood a word of what he
had been saying; one must, after all, execute it.
And herewith I suddenly introduce my fair readers in a body to a
domestic ball of two couples. See the two sisters-in-soul, side by side,
like two wings on _one_ dove, harmoniously flutter up and down. Albano
had expected Julienne would form a contrast, by nimble and sprightly
fluttering, to the still, hovering movement of her friend; but both
undulated lightly, like waves, by and through each other, and there was
not a motion too much nor too swift.
Hence I have so often wished that maidens might always dance exactly
like the Graces and the Hours,--that is to say, only with one another,
not with us gentlemen. The present union of the female wave-line with
the masculine swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does
not remarkably beautify the dance.
Liana assumed a new ethereal form, somewhat as an angel while flying
back into heaven lays aside his graceful earthly one. The dancing-floor
is to woman's beauty what the horse's back is to ours; on both the
mutual enchantment unfolds itself, and only a rider can match a dancing
maiden. Fortunate Albano! thou who hardly dar'st take the finger-points
of Liana's offered hand in thine! thou gettest enough. And only look at
this friendly maiden, whose eyes and lips Charis so smilingly brightens
for the dance, and who yet, on the other hand, appears so touchingly,
because she is a little pale! How different from those capricious or
inflexible step-sisters, who, with half a Cato of Utica on the wrinkled
or tightly stretched face, hop, fall back, and slip round. Julienne
flies joyfully to and fro; and it is hard to say before whose eyes she
loves to flutter best, Liana's or Albano's.
When it was done, Julienne wanted to begin over again. Liana looked at
her mother, and immediately begged her friend rather for a cooling off.
A mere pretext! A female friend loves to be alone with a female friend;
the two loved each other before people only with a veil upon their
hearts, and longed for the dark arbor where it might fall off. Liana had
a real loving impatience, till she could, with her duplicate-soul, her
twin-heart, snatch moments free from witnesses in the garden of evening
and May. They came back changed and full of tender seriousness. The
lovely beings were perhaps as like each other in their innermost souls
and in stillness as in the dance, and more so than they seemed.
And thus passed with our youth a fair-starred evening! Pardon him,
however, that he grasped and pressed this nosegay so close as to feel
some of the thorns. His heart, whose love grew painfully near another,
could not help finding this other, where there was no sign of response,
at once _higher_ and _farther_ off. Her love was love of man,--her smile
was meant for every kind eye,--she was so cheerful. In Lilar she easily
passed into emotion and general contemplations; not so here,--of course
she would look right sympathetically upon her wildly loving brother,
who, since that confession-night, had twined himself as if with
oak-roots around the darling; but her half-blind love for the brother
might indeed be only, in the deceiving light of reflection, shining upon
_his_ friend. All this the modest one said to himself. But what he had
enjoyed in full measure of ecstasy was the increasing, clear, tender,
steadfast love of his soul's-brother.