Part 35

"'Was that the painter's name?' she asked. 'Are you he? You loved her too?' 'Beauty is a cliff,' replied I, seriously, 'on which one and another man seeks to shipwreck himself, because it lies full of pearls and oysters.' She begged of me, in a friendly manner, the most distinct repetition of the repetition; she wished to attend better; hearing and thinking were as hard and heavy for her now as living. Albano, you should have despatched me to her with more preparatory information. As it was, I was half confused and cloudy, and when, during my picture of the Long Lake Isle,[140] something moist sprang from her eyes, I sank in the drops, and almost drowned therein, and not till after some time could I rub myself to life. At the end of my discourse, she stood up, folded her hands, and prayed, with weeping, as if she gave thanks: 'O God, O God! thou hast spared me!'--which I, after all, do not wholly understand."

Albano understood it well,--namely, that she thanked fate for the accidental delay of Schoppe's arrival, which had spared her the short but fearful transformation of Roquairol into a brother.

"Thereupon she broke out into too many thanks to the painter, robbers and purveyors of the painted birth-certificate. He whose heart has gone to sleep like an arm, and is feelingless and hard to move, finds a something very droll run through and over the awaking member when he stirs it. 'I could not do less,' said I, 'for your holy brother; the sunny side is, then, the moon-side.' She turned suddenly to the subject of thy father, and asked, as he was immediately coming, whether she or I should propose to him these riddles. 'Or rather both!' I had hardly replied, when he stepped wildly in.

"Now, Gaspard is, to be sure and decidedly, thy own and thy sister's natural father, and filial love toward him is never to be set down against _thee_ as a fault; but if I chose to tell thee he was no bear, no rhinoceros, no werewolf or other kind of wolf, I should do it more from singular politeness than from any other cause. He snorted to me a good evening; so did I to him. Many men resemble glass,--smooth and slippery and flat so long as one does not break them, but _then_ cursedly cutting, and every splinter stings. The matter was laid before him with the accompanying frontispiece of the portrait. Wert thou more distantly related to him, I would let myself out on this subject; for his face was overspread with the northern light of grim fury; out of his eyes yellow wasps flew at me; straight lines shot up on his tempestuous brow like electrical lances, particularly two perpendicular lines of discomfort. But, as was said, thou art, to my knowledge, his son. 'My friend,' he thundered away, 'with what _right_ do you steal pictures, then?' 'That ought to be a hard question for me to answer,' replied I, gently; 'but I have an _inability_ to look at an unrighteous deception; I march right in.' 'Countess,' said he, gasping, 'in three minutes you shall know this _gentleman_ well enough.' O no, no! he used another word than _gentleman_, but I will one day clasp him to my breast for it, and though we stood on the highest steps of God's throne, and wrestled in the glory." "Schoppe!" said Albano. "Don't excite me!" replied Schoppe, and went on.

"He rang; a servant flew in with a card; we all were silent. 'Indulgence, Countess,' said he, 'only for the space of one minute.' He thereupon gave her some miserable court-news, but she looked silently on the ground. Then came thy tall uncle, nodded sixteen times with his little head, for that he takes to be an obeisance, and stepped far off from me. 'Brother, simply say, what has this gentleman here done back of Valencia?' 'Murdered, murdered!' said he, rapidly. 'Under what circumstances?' asked thy father. Here he began to depose the minutest

## particulars of my shot of distress at the Baldhead with such an

incomprehensible sharpness that I said, 'That is true!' and went on myself, and kept asking, 'Is it not so?' and he hurriedly nodded, till I had come to the end. Then I asked, 'But, Spaniard, tell me, by Heaven! whence have _you_, then, derived this knowledge?' 'From me!' answered a strange, hollow voice, exactly like the Baldhead's.

"My heart grew cold as a dog's nose, and my tongue full of stone. 'As _convictus_ and _confessus_,' began thy father, 'you can now prophesy your fate.' 'To be sure,' murmured the uncle, pulling out and putting back his handkerchief, taking the picture up and laying it away,--'prophesy, prophesy!' 'Meanwhile,' thy father continued, 'it is freely left with you whether you will, until a nearer investigation, choose, instead of the prison, which belongs to you in consideration of the murder and theft, a milder place, the madhouse, which befits you in consideration of your journey; if you do not choose, then I choose for you.' 'To the madhouse, to the madhouse!' cried I, 'for the sake of true sociability, on my honor. But I make no questions about anything; on the washing-bill of my conscience stands no murder. Do you only burn yourselves white and clean. Your chariot of the sun and triumphal car goes up to the very hub in dung. Countess, let, I pray, everything be cleared up by you in the best manner, and think unceasingly of me, in order to get a father, like the students' father of his country, to be sure, who consists in a hole through the hat.'[141] 'Step farther back!' said thy father to thy uncle, 'the madness is broken out.' Upon that the hare made eighteen springs down over thresholds and steps. I executed my own orders of march and halt. Thy father still crawled after me with a licking, flamy look. I charged my eye with poison, and saw him, down below at the door, fall headlong at the stroke."

Albano shuddered, and inquired about the how. Then Schoppe was silent, buried in thought, for a long time, and said, in a troubled tone, "That, to be sure, was only a dream of mine; but so do I now confound dream with reality, and the reverse. I ought to be more moved about Schoppe; he is, after all, an old man, and old men weep like the jester, when it goes down hill." "I will comfort thee now, my friend," said Albano, with distracted breast; "I will remove an error from thy faithful heart, and then thou wilt certainly go with me. This Baldhead, our mocker and juggler, is, according to the holy word of my sister, one and the same person with my uncle, and is a ventriloquist."

Schoppe stood for a long time like one dead, as if he had not heard a word. Suddenly, with radiant face and sparkling eye, he threw himself on his knee, and stammered, "Heaven, Heaven! make me mad! The rest I will do." Here he made a wicked neck-wringing motion with his hands, and said, in a tone of restored strength, "I can follow thee." He really could now, but before he had hardly been able to stand. And so Albano led the unhappy, excited friend with heavy heart to his own lodgings.

136. CYCLE.

Albano now left no stone unturned which friendship could lift, for the sake of setting the noble patient to rights again, and renewing his youth, inwardly and outwardly. Especially did he seek to set up again the bridge over which all his strings were drawn, and which the Knight and his brother had overturned in the presence of Linda, namely, his pride of character, which had been brought so very low by this barbarous humiliation. As only pure brotherly respect and holy worship of a divine relic can softly warm and reanimate a wounded pride, the faithful Albano took this course. But without satisfaction from the Spaniard, the contriver of the mischief and the misleader of the Knight, his backbone, Schoppe said, would never run perpendicular again, and his spinal marrow would remain bent. Only Albano's duel with the uncle was a fresh draught of cool water to him; he had to have it told over to him several times. His thirsty wish was to be as well as he needed to be in order to fight with the Spaniard, and then, as a madman, to extort from him on a death-bed, whereupon he thought to lay him, the confession of all his tricks and juggleries. "Then," he added, all the time smiling, "it can well be _égal_ to me whether the world is round or angular, and to France is my first step."

Albano had to let this Greek fire of wrath, which in the end worked as a strengthening cure to a body frozen by humiliation, burn deeper and deeper under itself, since every attempt to extinguish merely fed it; only he had to watch, that he did not get a free, solitary moment, to fly off in a blaze and seek out the Spaniard. Albano stirred not day nor night from his sofa-bed, and that for other reasons also. For if Schoppe should be left alone, and his Mordian fall asleep (whom he never woke, because the dog, he said, evidently dreamed, and then went flying and nosing about in ideal worlds, snuffing things whereof in the streets of the actual hardly a trace of a shadow was to be scented), if, then, he should be alone with the quiet animal (for when it was awake he had society enough), and his eye should accidentally fall upon his legs or hands, then would his cold fear creep over him that he might appear to himself as his own apparition, and see his own "I." The looking-glass had to be overhung, that he might not come across himself.

His nights were sleepless, but dreams moved nakedly and boldly round him. Albano readily devoted to him his own well nights, yet could not drive away any of his friend's dreams, those spectres which generally flee or sink before the living. They crept and peeped about in the shadows of the corners of the room. Once toward midnight Albano had gone out, and on returning found him just in the act of grasping one hand with the other, and exclaiming, "Whom have I here, man?" "O good, best Schoppe," cried Albano, half in anger, "such irrational plays! Quite as well might one finger catch the other!" "Yes, to be sure," replied he. "But listen," said he softly, and squatted, ducked his head, and pointed with the right index-finger up over his nose into the air, "thou calledst me Schoppe; that is not my name: but I may not utter my real name; the 'I' who has been so long seeking me would hear it, and come stalking along,--a long gravestone lies on the name. Schoppe or _Scioppius_ I could very well call myself, because my many-named namesake and name-father (it is all found in Bayle) called himself, now so, now so, now Junipere d'Amone, now Denig Bargas, or Grosippe, or Krigsöder, Sotelo, and now Hay. I must appear to have wholly forgotten that the man was, after all, veritable Titular Prince of Athens and Duke of Thebes by Ottoman chancery and grace, if I should choose to remain Maltese Librarian. In fact, I used to go from one hotel to another with many a name, which magnificently played with and played upon the 'I,' that forever hunted and haunted me; for example, Löwenskiould, Leibgeber, Graul, Schoppe, too, Mordian (which I afterward gave my dog), Sacramentierer, and once _huleu_,--many I may have entirely forgotten. The true one," said he, shyly whispering, "is a ss or S--s,[142]--give me a _third_ hand here. The name is cut out of grave-clothes, and I lie therein already buried in the ground. 'I am I.' Such were the last words of the fine old Swift, who otherwise said little in his long madness. I might not venture, however, to be so much myself as that. Well, courage! Infinite Wisdom has created all,--madness, too,--in the lump. Only God grant, that God may never say to himself, 'I!' The universe would tremble to pieces, I believe; for God finds no third hand."

Albano shuddered at the sense of this nonsense. Schoppe seemed ice; then he threw himself suddenly on the brotherly bosom; neither said aught upon the subject, and Albano began sunny descriptions of the happy Hesperia.

Thus patiently and solitarily did he spend with his sick friend, in nursing, indulging, caressing, the days which he would gladly have made use of for his flight out of Germany; and loved him more and more passionately, the more he did and endured in his behalf. He absolutely would not suffer it at the hand of fate, that such a world full of ideas should approach its conflagration, and so free a heart, full of honesty, its last beating. Schoppe had in the youth's heart even a greater realm than Dian; for he took life more freely, deeply, greatly, bravely; and if the law of Dian's life was beauty, his was freedom, and he tended, like our solar system, to the constellation Hercules.

Notwithstanding all entreaties, he took no medicines from Dr. Sphex; for he had already, he said, committed his case to an old, well-known practitioner and circuit-physician, Time. He readily allowed Sphex to draw up a recipe, to bring it; willingly looked it through, disputed about the contents, remarked it was easier to _be_ sanitary-counsel than to give it, and he saw, indeed, that he hit his case, because he pursued a weakening treatment, which was the first thing with crazy people; he added, however, that reason was not just the thing he desired, but only a couple of valiant shanks to walk with and stand upon, and a couple of arms well filled out to strike home withal; and for the rest, he told him he did not like him, because he cut up dogs. Albano, too, at last, took the position, that, if Schoppe could only get muscular strength again for a social journey with him, then the frenzy-dream into which the unsocial one had thrown him would readily fly away of itself.

Schoppe was always flying out at the Doctor particularly. Once the latter said: "Follow, if not me, at least your second self," and pointed to Albano. "To the Devil," he replied, "with my second self,--that may be you: I feel shy enough of you to make it probable,--but he, there, is certainly, I have every reason to hope, hardly my sixth, twentieth self, or the like."

Meanwhile Sphex stuck to his opinion, that his sthenic sleeplessness, which was alternately the daughter and the mother of his fever-visions, especially of the Baldhead, barred up the way to relief, and must be conquered by weakening processes. When one day Dian, who often visited his friend Albano, heard this, he asked, why one would not deceive and cure him directly with the tidings of the Spaniard having travelled off for fear of him, say to France. Albano replied: "Truly I should be glad to say it, but I cannot; I could as soon will to tell a lie to God or myself." "Whims!" said Dian; "I'll tell him myself." "Just what I had expected of that Spaniard," replied Schoppe to the official recipe-falsehood. When Dian had gone out, he asked Albano: "Do I not sit now much cooler and more icy here? And, truly, since hearing that the Baldhead is in France, I have become almost a new man. Of course I am lying, but Dian lied first."

At last the physician resolved to mix at once a sleeping potion in his drink. Albano allowed it. Schoppe got it; glowed and phantasied for a space of some minutes; at last the mist of sleep came up and soon covered the patient over.

Albano, then, after so long a time, visited again the green of the earth and the blue of heaven, and his Dian in Lilar. What a transformation had taken place in the interval; how had things been confounded, and changed places, with each other! How many leaves had become budgeons again! And many a foam of life which had once gladdened him with its whiteness and delicacy and lightsomeness, now chilled his bosom like gray, heavy water, and he had retained almost nothing except his courage to meet life. At Dian's he heard of new changes, of the Prince's approaching death, of Idoine's approaching visit to her sister in anticipation of the bereavement. In what a strange bewilderment did his soul open its eyes out of its winter-sleep into the warm sunshine which this image of Liana diffused over his life! In many a still night by Schoppe's ghostly tent had he already, since Julienne for the first time let him see the apparition of this peace-angel without the veil, beheld the olden time and former love come up again like a heaven of distant stars, and in the clear-obscure of dreams disrobed of sleep he saw on the sea of time a far, far-off island,--whether behind him or before him, he knew not,--where a white, averted form, resembling or suggesting Liana's, hovered and sang as an echo of the olden strain. Now close upon the death-month of the brother followed the death-month of the sister Liana. Were it possible that the celestial one would step out again from the still mirror of the second world and out of its immeasurable distances, into this earthly atmosphere, and after her transfiguration again walk embodied here below?

But friendship demanded room for its sorrows, and these cloud-images were soon covered over or destroyed by it. He could not find courage in his heart, however much he wished it, to demand of Schoppe, or even to receive from him, a description of that healing-night, in which Idoine had been Liana; and yet this form was the only live-playing jewel in the death-ring on the skeleton of stern time, which stood before him. What days! What the graves had not stolen from him and swallowed up, the earth had snatched away, and Gaspard, once his exalted father on a serene throne of the heavens, had now appeared to his fancy with frightful hell-powers and weapons down below, sitting on a throne of the abyss.

So much the more mildly did he feel, flowing around him, when he was in Dian's house, the stiller presence, the thought of the reposing friend, the sight of the neighboring Dream-temple, where Liana had once been Idoine, and the annunciation that the living image of the loved one was drawing near. He portrayed to himself the sweet and bitter terror of her apparition before him; for as in the stream the bending flower sketches not only its _form_, but its _shadow_ also, so is she Liana's beautiful form and shadow at once, and in the living one would a lost and a glorified appear to him at the same time.

In this dreamy chiaroscuro and evening twilight, made up of past and future flowing together, he came back to his house. A sharp lightning-flash darted white across the dreamy redness. His Schoppe had, after a few minutes of forced sleep, wildly started up and madly sprung out, nobody knew whither. The doctor came, and said decisively, either he had thrown himself overboard or everybody else; he had run wildly away, and had taken his sword-cane with him, too.

THIRTY-FOURTH JUBILEE.

Schoppe's Discoveries.--Liana.--The Chapel of the Cross.--Schoppe and the "I" and the Uncle.

137. CYCLE.

As Schoppe had taken with him his great sword-cane, Albano presumed he had gone after the Spaniard, as destroying-angel. He hurried to his uncle's hotel. A servant told him a red cloak with a thick cane had been there, and desired to be admitted to the gentleman, but that they had despatched him, according to the directions of the latter, to the palace, and meanwhile the gentleman had posted off to the Prince's garden to meet his strong brother. Albano asked, "Who is the strong brother?" "His Excellency your father," replied the servant. Albano hastened to the palace. Here all was haste and confusion about the sickbed of the Prince, who threatened soon to exchange it for the bed of state. Hurrying servants met him. One could tell him he had seen a red mantle go into the great mirror-room. Albano stepped in; it was empty, but full of strange traces. A great mirror lay on the floor, an arras door behind stood open, an open souvenir, wheels, and articles of female apparel, were scattered about an old waxen head. It seemed to him he saw something he had seen before, and yet could not name to himself. Suddenly he beheld in a corner-mirror a second reflection of himself far in behind the image of his youthful face, but covered with age, and similar to the waxen head. He looked round him, a relieved cylindrical mirror unlocked to him, as it were, time itself, and he saw in its depths his gray old age.

Shuddering, he left the singular apartment. A gentlewoman of Julienne came across his way. She could tell him that she had seen the "Profile-cutter," in a red mantle, with a pocket spy-glass in his hand, go out across the castle yard. He hastened after, when Augusti came to meet him below the gate, with the request of the Prince, that he would visit him once more. "Cannot possibly now; I must first have my crazy Schoppe again," replied he. In his bosom no one lived but his friend; moreover, he took the Prince, in this case, to be only the mask of his talkative sister. "I saw him on the way to Blumenbühl," said the Lector. He darted off. At the gate, Augusti's intelligence was confirmed by the guard.

On the road to Blumenbühl he was met by the carriage of the court chaplain, Spener, who was on his way to the Prince. Albano asked after Schoppe. Spener informed him he had talked with him for some time before a solitary house, where he had stopped an hour for the sake of a sick old penitent daughter; had found him well, uncommonly sensible, only older and more reserved than usual. To the question as to his route, the court chaplain replied he had gone toward the city. This appeared to him impossible, but Spener's people confirmed the story, and spoke of the man as wearing a green coat. Albano spoke of a red cloak; Spener and all the rest stuck to the green coat.

He turned back to his own house, where, perhaps, he thought, Schoppe might be seeking and awaiting him. The bondman of the Doctor, the lank Malt, ran to meet him with the intelligence that Herr von Augusti had just been looking for him, and that the sick gentleman had gone out at the old gate in a new green coat. It was the street to the Prince's garden, which, according to Albano's presumption, he had certainly taken, so soon as he had been informed of the Spaniard's having taken the same. Out of doors it was confirmed by Falterle, who related how he had, in his way out, overtaken him, and immediately inquired: "Whither so fast, Mr. Librarian?" whereupon he had stood still, looked at him seriously, and given the answer, "Who are you? You are mad," and then hastened on. Albano inquired about the dress. "In green," replied Falterle. Now his way was decided. The loitering rider could even avouch that the uncle had previously taken the same.