The Minister, when she came home from Lilar with murdered eyes, had set
in _his_ right eye a hell, and into his left a purgatory, for no
fatality had ever before so cheated him, namely, so completely upset
all his projects and prospects,--the office of court-dame for his
daughter, that ring guard on the finger of the Princess, and finally
every chance of a haul with his double-woven net.
Unspeakably did the man struggle against the spoon in which fate
offered him the powder wherein he was to let the swallowed diamonds of
his plans go down; he delivered the strongest sermons,--so did he, like
Horace, name his Satires against "his women"; he was a war-god, a
hell-god, a beast, a monster, a satan,--everything;--he was in a frame
now to undertake anything and everything,--but what availed it?--Much,
when the German gentleman surprised him just in this mood of moral
feeling. He made no scruple of refreshing the paternal memory on the
subject of the promised sitting of the daughter for a miniature, and
asserting his claim to it; for the rest he was all-knowing, and seemed
to know nothing. For the sitting-scene of a blind girl he had cut out
certain original, romantic situations, according to the notices which
he had drawn out of the Captain. His artistic love for Liana had
hitherto suffered little, and his slow, stealthy advances and
reconnoitrings were in accordance with his viper-coldness and his
worldsman-like energy. The old father--who in life, as in an imperial
advertiser, always sought a partner with 60-80,000 dollars for his
business--declared himself anything but averse to the match. These two
falcons on one pole, trained by one falcon-master, the Devil,
understood and agreed with each other excellently well. The German
gentleman gave to understand that her miniature-likeness would, through
her striking resemblance to Idoine, who, like her, had never been
willing to sit, be serviceable for many a piece of pleasantry with the
Princess, but still more indispensable to his "flame" for Liana, and
just now, in her blindness, one might, indeed, sketch her without her
knowledge,--and he would write under the picture, _La belle aveugle_,
or something of the kind. The old Minister, as was said, swallowed
the idea with perfect _goût_. As the Italian female singers carry a
so-called mother instead of a passport on their journeys, so did he
regard himself as in a similar sense a so-called father; he thought to
himself: at all events there is little more to be done with the girl;
she lies there as so much dead capital, and pays a miserable interest;
I can take the god-penny-medal which the German gentleman in his
godfatherly capacity offers to me as the father like a name for the
child, and just put it in my pocket.
This duplicate of rogues was held back in mid-current merely by a
drag-rake, which threatened to draw the prey out of their pike-like
teeth. An old, scolding, but true-souled chambermaid from Nuremberg was
the rake; she could not be drawn away from Liana, or reduced to
silence. Bouverot, to be sure, a Robespierre and destroying angel to
his servants, would, in Froulay's place, have caused the Nuremberg
dame, a couple of days beforehand, to be furnished by a servant with
some complex fractures, and then thrown upon the street; but the
Minister--his heart was soft--could not do that. All that was possible
for him was this: He sent for her to his chamber; represented to her
that she had stolen his Magdeburg ear; remained, in his present state
of hearing, deaf to every objection, but not to every incivility, and
at last found himself under the necessity (a word and a blow) of
driving the thievish wench out of service. With every successor to the
office, as being a new one, money would have weight, he knew.
He proposed thereupon to beg of the Princess an invitation for himself
and his lady to tea and supper, to bespeak the miniature-painter, to
instruct the new chambermaid, and put all things in a right train.
Two tigers, according to the legend, digged the Apostle Paul's grave;
so do our two men here scratch away at one for a saint. So much the
more confidently do I say this, as I do not otherwise see through--if
nothing is to be made but a picture--the meaning of so many
circumstances. But the father I could almost excuse. In the first
place, he said expressly to the German gentleman, the Abigail might, in
his opinion, as well stay in the chamber, or in the adjoining one, in
case the patient wanted anything; secondly, the otherwise soft man had
contracted, from his ministerial commerce with justice, a certain grit,
a certain barbarity, which is so much the more natural to Themis,
passing sentence behind the bandage, and, as an Areopagus, without the
sight of the pains, as even Diderot[23] asserts that blind people are
more cruel than others; and, thirdly, no one could well be more ready
than he to pity the more deeply, in case she should die, the very child
whom he, as it was once pretended Jews and witches did with Christian
children, crucified, in order, like them, to do something with the
blood (as parents generally, and particularly human parents, can indeed
get over easily the misfortunes of those who are near and dear to them,
but hardly their loss, just as we, in the case of the hair of the head,
which is still nearer to us, feel not the singeing or cutting of it,
but very painfully the tearing of it up by the root); and, fourthly,
Froulay had always the misfortune that thoughts which in his head had a
tolerable, innocent hue, became, like muriate of silver or good ink,
black on the spot, when they once came to light.
Otherwise, and without taking these alleviating circumstances into
view, there remains, indeed, much in his conduct which I do not
vindicate.
The evening appeared. The Minister's lady went on her husband's arm to
the court. The new chambermaid had, as Bouverot's bridesmaid, already,
three days beforehand, made the most necessary arrangements or
manœuvres. She had, with great ease, borrowed for him Liana's
letters to Albano, as the mother, from habit, forgot that a present eye
was not necessarily a seeing one; and he could extract from them the
historical touches or watercolors, wherewith he could assume, before
the blind one, in case of a recognition on the stage, the semblance of
her hero,--namely, Albano's. With Roquairol he had played often enough
to have his voice, consequently Albano's, in his power. Methinks his
preparation-days for the festal evening were suitably spent.
He could, as little residences drink tea earlier than others, make his
appearance quite as early as a miniature-painter in September
absolutely must. When he beheld the silent form in the easy-chair, with
the discolored flower-cups of the cheeks, but more firmly rooted in
every purpose, a more coldly commanding saint, then did the
exasperation and inflammation which he had imbibed at once from her
letters kindle each other into a higher flame. Only in such chests,
strung at once with metal and catgut, with cruelty and sensuality, is
such an alliance of lust and gall conceivable. Bouverot's whole past,
the books of his life's history, ought, as those of Herodotus are to
the nine Muses, to have been dedicated to the three Fates, one to each.
He stole to the window, seated himself, set down his paint-box, and
began hastily to dot. Meanwhile Liana heard her very cultivated,
well-read chambermaid read to her out of the second volume of Fénelon's
_Œuvres Spirituelles_. Zefisio was not affected by the Archbishop in
the least,--what he caught about pure love (_sur le pur amour de Dieu_)
he perverted into an impure by applications, and let himself be
devilishly inflamed by the divine,--for the rest what there was
touching in Liana's relations he left as it was, as he had now to
paint. Odiously did his motley-colored panther-eyes lick like red,
sharp tiger-tongues over the sweet, soft countenance!--"Dear Justa,
stop, the reading is disagreeable to thee, thou breathest so short!"
said she at last, because she heard the portrait-painter breathe. It
was no sacrifice to him, but a foretaste, a sweet early-bit, to put off
the kiss of this tender little hand and lip and the whole exhibition
of his burning heart, until he saw her outline dotted off with the
poison-tints on the white ivory by the rapid dotting machine of his
hand. At length he had her, many-colored[24] on white. "Very well, dear
Justa," said she, "the prayer bell tolls; thou canst not see any
longer. Rather lead me to the instrument,"--namely the harmonica. She
did so. Bouverot gave Justa a sign to retire. She did that too. The
yellow garden-spider now ran up to the tender, white flower. The spider
heard her evening choral not without enjoyment, and the devout
upcasting of her ruined eyes seemed to him a right picturesque idea,
which the true _painter_[25] resolved to transfer to the ivory leaf, if
it could be done.
"Lovely goddess!" cried he, suddenly, with Albano's stolen voice, into
the midst of those holy tones, which Albano had once, in a happier
hour, but more nobly, interrupted. She listened with alarm, but hardly
believing her own ear in this night. The astonishment did not displease
the prospect painter--for her face was his prospect--by any means
whatever; "remember this harmonica in the thunder-house." He confounded
it with the water-house. "You here, Count?--Justa! where art thou?"
cried she distressfully. "Justa, come here!" he added, calling after
her. The maiden followed his voice and his--eye. "Gracious damsel?"
asked she. But now Liana had not the heart to ask about the door and
the admission-ticket of the Count. To speak French with her lover
would not do, as the maid understood it; hence it was that in Vienna in
the years of the Revolution they forbade this language very
judiciously, because it so surely and pestilentially spreads a certain
_equality_,--_freedom_ follows,--between the nobility and the servile
orders.
Maliciously and joyfully did Bouverot, to whom she now seemed to betray
a serviceable mistrust about the Count, which pointed out a freer
play-room for his character mask, remind the perplexed maiden of her
commands for Justa; she must now cause her to bring a light.
"_Infidèle_," he thereupon began, "I have overcome all obstacles, in
order to throw myself at your feet and supplicate your forgiveness. _Je
m'en flatte à tort pent être, mais je l'ose_," he went on, made more
passionate through her. "_O cruelle! de grace, pourquoi ces régards,
ces mouvements? Je suis ton Alban et il t'aime encore,--Pense à
Blumenbühl, cé sejour charmant,--Ingrate, j'esperais te trouver un peu
plus reconnaisante. Souviens-toi de ce que tu m'a promis_," said he, by
way of sounding her, "_quand tu me pressas contre ton sein divin_." ...
A pure soul mirrors, without staining itself, the unclean one and feels
darkly the distressing neighborhood, just as doves, they say, bathe
themselves in limpid water, in order to see therein the images of the
hovering birds of prey. The short breath, the wavering tone of speech,
every word, and an indefinable something, drove the frightful spectre
close before her soul, the suspicion that it was not Albano. She
started up; "Who are you? God, you are not the Count. Justa, Justa!"
"Who else could it be," replied he, coldly, "that would dare to assume
my name? _O, je voudrais que je ne le fusse pas. Vous m'avez écrit, que
l'esperance est la lune de la vie. Ah, ma lune s'est couchée, mais
j'adore encore le soleil, qui l'éclaire_."
Here he grasped the hand of this eclipsed sun fighting with a dragon.
Then his gnawed finger-nails and dry fingers, and a passing touch of
his order-cross, discovered to her the real name. She tore herself
loose with a shriek, and ran away without seeing whither, and fell into
his hands again. He snatched her violently to his meagre hot lips:
"Yes, it is I," said he, "and I love you more than does your Count with
his _étourderie_."
"You are wicked and godless toward a blind maiden; what will you?
Justa! is there no one then to help me? Ah, good God, give me my eyes,"
she cried, flying, without knowing whither, and again overtaken.
"Bouverot! Thou evil spirit!" she cried, warding off in places where he
was not. He, like gunpowder, cooling on the tongue, and singeing and
shattering when greed kindled him, placed himself at a considerable
darting-distance from her, threw a painter's eye at the charming waves
and bendings of her tempest-struck flowerage, and said quietly, with
that mildness which resembles the eating and devouring milk of spunges:
"Only be calm, fairest; it is I still; and what would it all avail
thee, child?"
Giddy with the snake-breath of distress, wandering nature began
to sing, but only beginnings: "Joy, thou spark of Heaven-born
fire!"--"I am a German maiden." She ran round and sang again: "Know'st
thou the land?" "Thou evil spirit!"
At this moment the giant snake, thus charmed, reared himself aloft on
his cold rings, with darting tongue, to spring and to coil; "_Mon
cœur_," said the snake, who always in passion spoke French, "_vole
sur cette bouche qui enchante tous les sens_." "Mother!" cried
she, "Caroline! O God, let me see, O God--my eyes!" Then did the
All-gracious give them back to her once more; the agony of nature, the
noisy preparations for the burial, opened again the eye of the tranced
victim.
How eagerly she flew out of the chamber of torture! The disappointed,
mortified beast of prey was still reckoning on blindness and
distraction. But when Bouverot saw that she ran lightly up the stairway
to the Italian roof, then he merely sent the maid, who came running in,
after her, to see that she received no injury; and now again he held
her previous blindness for dissimulation. He himself took from the
chamber the miniature sketch, and dragged himself like a hungry,
wounded monster sullenly and slowly out of the house.