Ah, on the morning following this, the evening redness of a whole heaven
had grown, to be sure, into a sad cloudiness. For Liana walked before
the youth in such long, thick veils. Any mystery of trouble throws up
cold cloister-walls between hearts drawn near together; that is
manifest. Hitherto accidents of various kinds had bent aside some
flowers which Liana had drawn as a veil over her heart (as the ground
stories in cities prevent looking in at the windows by flowers and
grape-vines), and had disclosed the darkest corner of the background, in
which something like the reverse side of a bust hung, which, turned
round, would perhaps resemble the Count. But as yet the image hangs with
its face toward the wall. However, a female heart is often like marble;
the cunning stone-cutter strikes a thousand blows, without the Parian
block showing the line of a crack; but all at once it breaks asunder
into the very form which the cunning stone-cutter has so long been
hammering after.
On Saturday, when the Minister's lady and the pair of friends were about
to start for Blumenbühl, in order to behold the burial and the
consecration, the Captain came to the Count, not only full of joy,--for
he had gladly, out of love to Rabette, helped make for Liana, not
_wings_ indeed, but still _wing-shells_, and out of a threefold interest
for his friend, helped tighten the fly-work,--but also full of anxiety.
But, ye muses! why in the poetical world are there rarely any
occurrences which have such manifold motives as often in the actual?
His anxiety was simply this, lest his father should arrive earlier than
his mother went off,--for he knew the Minister. The latter intended,
according to his letters, to arrive on Monday or Tuesday (Saturday at
the latest); but this might--as Froulay loved to let his friends swim in
the broad play-room of expectation--still more certainly threaten that
he--because, like the Basle clocks,[171] he always struck an hour too
early, and came in the hope of catching his people at some right odious
thing--might at any minute come driving in at the court-yard gate. If he
came driving furiously up this forenoon, or at the moment when the
servant was lifting the daughter into the carriage, and the mother
already sat therein, then was this much certain, by a thousand
conclusions from observance, that both would have to go up into the
house again; that he would order all trunks and boxes unpacked, and, as
to the daughter of the Provincial Director, after her ten thousand
entreaties,--although her very second would freeze upon her lips,--he
would, in a friendly manner, with quite jocose equanimity, let her be
carried home, as a solitary member of a conclave, in a close carriage.
Certain men--and he is their generalissimo--know no sweeter cordial for
themselves, than to put under lock and key, before the very nose of
their friends, the garden-gates of some Arcadia or other, for which they
have not drawn up for them a map of the route and region, and judicially
to seal them up. Besides, just before a pleasure party, most parents
secrete gall; if Froulay, in fact, could absolutely prevent one, that
was as much for him as if he were himself returning home from one red
and gay.
At three o'clock in the afternoon, our friends went to walk beneath the
loveliest sky. Everything had been already arranged; Charles proposed to
follow to-morrow; Albano not till Monday, after the general return (his
tender motives, and the hard ones of others, decided it); and there
floated through the whole vaulted blue no cloud but Charles's concern
lest the second depositing of the princely corpse might draw his father
along as early as to-day,... when he suddenly cried out, with a curse:
"There he comes!" He knew him by the tiger-spotted post-team, and still
more by the long line of horses tackled on tandem. A purgatorial moment
of life! The carriage rattled swiftly down the street; the head horses
streamed forth in a longer and quite disorderly train; the people
stared. At last the pulling distance became an acre long,--that seemed
quite impossible,--when Albano's eagle eye discovered that there was no
leather connection between the post-train, and at last, that in fact
there was merely a strange churl, with two horses, accidentally riding
along before the carriage, and at this moment they saw the open
triumphal car, with the female trinity slowly moving up the Blumenbühl
heights, and the blended tulip-bed of the three parasols glimmered long
after them.