Part 37

"Long enough! Thou art the old _I_,--only bring thy face along hither and put it to mine, and make this stupid existence cold," cried Schoppe, with a last effort of manly force. "I am Siebenkäs," said the Fac-simile, tenderly, and stepped quite near. "So am I; I resemble I," said he once more, in a low tone; but at that moment the overpowered man collapsed, and this cleansing storm became a sighing, still breath of air. With a face growing white, spasmodically shutting-to his stiff eyes, he fell; the playing fingers seemed still to be calling the dog, and the lips were just making themselves up for a joke which they did not utter. His friend Siebenkäs, who could not guess anything of the matter, raised, weeping, the cold, fast-closed hand to his heart, to his mouth, and cried: "Brother, look up, thy old friend from Baduz stands verily beside thee, and sees thee in the pangs of death; he bids thee a thousand times farewell,--farewell!"

This seemed to convey into the breaking heart, through the ears still open to life, sweet tones of the dear old times and pleasant dreams of eternal love;--the mouth began a faint smile, traced at once by pleasure and death,--the broad breast filled, and heaved once more for a sigh of pleasure: it was the last sigh of life, and the dead one sank back, smiling, on the earth.

Now hast thou ended thy course here below, stern, steadfast spirit! and into the last evening-tempest on thy bosom there still streamed a soft, playing sun, and filled it with roses and gold. The earth-ball, and all the earthly stuff out of which the fleeting worlds are formed, was indeed far too small and light for thee. For thou soughtest behind, beneath, and beyond life, something higher than life; not thy _self_, thy _I_,--no mortal, not an immortal, but the Eternal, the Original One, God! This present _seeming_ was so indifferent to thee, the evil as well as the good. Now thou art reposing in real _being_,--death has swept away from the dark heart the whole sultry cloud of life, and the eternal light stands uncovered which thou didst so long seek, and thou, its beam, dwellest again in the fire.

THIRTY-FIFTH JUBILEE.

Siebenkäs.--Confession of the Uncle.--Letter from Albano's Mother.--The Race for the Crown.--Echo and Swan-song of the Story.

140. CYCLE.

Long lay Albano in the solitary, dark abyss, till at length light illuminated the depths and the green height from which he had been precipitated. The once life-colored, manly face of his friend lay white before him; the red mantle only heightened the snow of the corpse. The dog lay with his head on his breast, as if he would warm and protect it. When Albano saw the naked blade, he looked round him on all sides, shuddered at the cold uncle, at the living brotherly image of the dead, and at the first shadow of a doubt whether it had been murder or suicide, and asked in a low tone, "How did he die?" "By me," said Siebenkäs; "our similarity killed him; he thought he saw himself, as this gentleman here will assure you." The uncle related several

## particulars. Albano turned eye and ear away from him, but he buried in

the warm reflection of the friend's face that look to which the daylight of friendship had sunk below the horizon of earth. Siebenkäs seemed to assert himself by a rare manly bearing. Even Albano, the younger friend, concealed his anguish that he had lost so much, and that his orphan-heart was now exposed, like a helpless child, in the wilderness of life.

Wehrfritz asked him whether he should still send him a horse to ride into the city. "Me! I ever go into the city again?" asked Albano. "No, good father; Schoppe and I go to-day into the Prince's garden." He was terrified at the mere black churchyard-landscape of the city, where once had bloomed for him a golden sunshine, and leafy avenues and heaven's-gates full of flowery festoons. O, the young honey of love, the old wine of friendship; both were indeed poured by fate into graves!

The dead man was carried into the new castle of the Prince's garden. Only Albano and Siebenkäs followed him. When they were alone, Albano saw for the first time that the friend of his friend trembled and wavered, and that until now only the spirit had sustained the body. "Now can we both," said Albano, "mourn before each other; but only in you do I believe. God, how then was his end?" Siebenkäs described to him the last looks and tones of the poor man. "O God!" said Albano, "he died not easily; when the madness of months became one minute,--rending must have been the hell-flood which snatched away so firm a life." Siebenkäs could with difficulty admit the belief of his madness, because the deceased had so often, in his best moments, been similarly misapprehended; but Albano at last convinced him. He related further, that on his journey home he had been startled, when the repeated mistaking of his person for the deceased led him to the presumption that his long separated Leibgeber must be sojourning here, although he could not but dread to think of the first appearing and comparison. "For, Sir Count," said he, "years and business, particularly juristical, ah! and life itself, always draw man farther down,--at first out of ether into air, then out of the air on to the earth. 'Will he know me?' said I. I am truly no more the man that I was, and the physiognomical likeness might well have still remained the only and strongest one. But this, too, had passed away; the blessed one there looks still as he did ten years ago. O, only a free soul never grows old! Sir Count, I was once a man, who played one and another joke with life, and with death too, and I would cry out, 'Heavens! if hell should get loose!' and more of the like. Ah, Leibgeber, Leibgeber! Time has delicate little waves, but the sharpest-cornered pebble, after all, becomes smooth and blunt therein at last."[145]

"Enumerate to me every trifle of his former days," begged Albano,--"every dew-drop out of his morning redness: he was so chary of his dark history!" "And that to every one," said the stranger. "This much will I one day prove to you, from dates gathered on the spot, that he is a Dutchman, like Hemsterhuis, and properly named _Kees_, like Vaillant's ape, to which he prefixed _Sieben_, or seven; for Siebenkäs is his first name. He drew his income out of the Bank of Amsterdam. Every New Year's night he burnt up the papers of the preceding year; and how his _Clavis Leibgeriana_[146] has become known I do not yet comprehend." Thereupon he related his first change of name, when Schoppe took from him the name Leibgeber; then every hour and act of his true heart toward the (former) poor-man's-attorney; then their second exchange of names, when Siebenkäs let himself nominally be buried, and went on as Leibgeber, and their eternal farewell in a village of Voigtland.

As Siebenkäs here stopped in his narrative, he grasped the cold hand, with the words: "Schoppe, I thought I should not find thee till I found thee with God!" and bent weeping over the dead. Albano let his tears stream down, and took the other dead hand and said: "We grasp true, pure, valiant hands." "True, pure, valiant," repeated Siebenkäs, and said, with a Schoppeish smile, "His dog looks on and testifies as much." But he became pale with emotion, and looked now exactly like the dead. Then did he and Albano, sinking, touch the cold face to theirs, and Albano said, "Be thou, too, my friend, Leibgeber; we can love each other, because he loved us. Pale one, let thy form be the seal of my love toward thy old friend!"

Albano now pushed up the window, and showed him a grave in the east, and one in the south, near the third open one, out there in the night, and said, "Thus have I thrice wept over life." Siebenkäs pressed his hand, and only said, "The Fates, and Furies, too, glide with linked hands over life, as well as the Graces and Sirens." He looked upon the singular, beautiful, fiery youth with the most hearty love; but Albano, who always imagined himself to be loved but little, and whom the fiery meteors of a Dian and a Roquairol had accustomed to bad habits of thinking, knew not how very much he had won this more tranquil heart.

141. CYCLE.

On the morrow more sunshine and strength returned to Albano's breast. He had now himself to heave up the mountain in the flat-pressed plain of his life. Only to _see_ Pestitz again, where all the tournament-pleasures of his shining days had vanished, except the single Dian,--he abhorred the thought. "When this friend has once his grave-mound over his breast, then I go, and take leave of no one," said he.

Just then the hated uncle arrived, with the carriages full of magic wands, and said, weepingly, he was going to the Carthusian cloister, to atone for many sins, and he would first willingly explain to his nephew, as well with words as by the carriages, all that he desired. "I believe nothing you say," said Albano. "I can now tell the whole truth, for the gloomy one has nothing more to do with me, I think, _cousin_," replied the Spaniard. "Is not that," he added, in a low tone, with a shy look at Siebenkäs, "the gloomy one, _cousin?_" Albano would not know nor hear anything. Siebenkäs asked him who the gloomy one was. It was the infinite man, he began, very black and gloomy, and had for the first time stalked over toward him across the sea, when he stood on the coast before a fog. At night he had often heard him call, and sometimes had repeated his ventriloquial speeches. He had immediately appeared to him, with a handful of threatenings, whenever he had told many truths after sundown. Therefore had he feared exceedingly before the present gentleman in the Chapel of the Cross; but now, since he had been converted without suffering any harm in the chapel, he would tell truths all day long, and in the Carthusian convent he intended to do so still more.

"Cloisters are the very places where they do not generally dwell; for this reason, I suppose, the vow of silence is required, the observance of which is always more favorable to truth than its breach is," replied Siebenkäs. "O heretic, heretic!" cried the Spaniard, with such an unexpected anger that Albano at once received, through this sign of human feeling, pledges of his present sincerity, as well as of his narrower spiritual circumference. Now, for the first time, he asked him outright about the soil and the seed which he had hitherto used, in order to force the swift flowers of his miracles.

At this question he caused a casket to be brought up. "Ask," said he. "How did Romeiro's form rise out of _Lago Maggiore?_" said Albano. The uncle unlocked the casket, showed a wax figure, and said, "It was only her mother." Albano shuddered before this near mock-sun of his sunken one, and at the presumption of relationship with which Schoppe had inspired him. "Am I related to her?" he quickly asked. The uncle replied, with confusion, "It may haply be otherwise." Albano asked about the monk who made the heavenly ascension in Mola. "He stood overhead filled with gas;[147] I down below on the wall," said the uncle. Albano would hear no further. The casket contained, besides, ear-trumpets and speaking-trumpets, a face-skin, blue glass, through which landscapes appeared snowed over, silk flowers, with powder of an _endormeur_, &c. Albano would not see anything more.

"Evil being! who set thee on to this?" asked Albano. "My strong brother," said the uncle, for so he usually called the Knight. "He gave me my living, and he would fain shoot me dead; for he laughs very much when men are very finely cheated." "O, not a syllable of that!" cried Albano, painfully, whose anger against the Knight made all his veins spirt out fiery tears and poison. "Wretch! how didst thou become what thou art?" "So! a wretch am I?" he asked, with icy coldness. He then stated--but in an abrupt and confused manner, which attended him in every language in his own part, whereas in a strange name (for instance, the Baldhead's) he could speak long and well--that he had a dark-gray and a blue eye, a hidden bald head, and a remarkable memory since coming to manhood, and had therefore wished to become an actor, because he had nothing to do, for he had never been in love; but, so long as he did not improvisate, it had not gone well with him. He had always had in his mind Joseph Clark, who could counterfeit any grown person, and the deceiver Price, who went round in a threefold character. Then the gloomy one had again come over to him one evening in a shore fog across the water, and had murmured, as out of a belly, "_Peppo_, _Peppo_,[148] swallow back the true word; I will directly utter another"; and from that hour forth he had had the faculty of ventriloquizing. He had thereby caused dead and dumb persons, and speaking-machines, and parrots, and sleepers, and strange people in the theatre, to speak well, but never any one in church, and that was indeed a satisfaction to him. He had often given an unceasing echo to rocks, so that men did not know at all when to go away. He had also once caused a whole battle-field full of dead men to talk with itself, in all languages, to the astonishment of the old general.

"Where was that?" asked Siebenkäs. The Spaniard came to himself, and replied, "I don't know; is it true, then? '_Omnes homines sunt mendaces_,' says the Holy Scripture." "As little true," said Albano, "as your gloomy ghost!" "O Mary, no!" said he, decidedly; "when I predicted anything, he caused it indeed, after all, to turn out true. Then he appeared to me, and said, 'Dost thou see, Peppo, mind and only never speak a truth!' And in the night, when I went by your side to Lilar, he went down in the valley as a man through the air." "I saw that too," said Albano; "he floated onward without stirring." "That was one," said Siebenkäs, smiling, "who stood, with his legs hidden, in a boat that glided onward, and nothing more." Then the Spaniard looked at this fac-simile of the corpse with the old horror with which he had hitherto secretly taken it for the gloomy spirit himself, murmured in Albano's ear, "See, this being knows it," and said, in justification of his truths, "The sun is not yet gone down," and, without listening to human entreaties, whose power had never been known to him, without sorrow or joy, hurried off to enter before sundown into the neighboring Carthusian monastery. All the implements of deception he had left where they were.

"A frightful man!" said Siebenkäs. "Some time ago, when he would fain rejoice at something, he looked as if a pang seized upon his face. And that he should stand there so thin and haggard, and look down sidewise, and swallow his syllables! I am certain he could kill without changing his look, even to anger." "O, he is the gloomy spirit that he sees; don't call him up!" said Albano, hurrying away into a wholly new world, which had now suddenly risen before his spirit.

142. CYCLE.

He thought, namely, of the paper, hitherto hidden by the cloud of sorrow, which Schoppe had brought out of the princely vault, and of the maternal image which he was to have found under the ocular glass. Before he began to read, he held the image under the glass before the stranger, to see if by any accident he might know it. "Very well! It is the deceased Princess Eleonore, so far as a frontispiece engraving to the provincial hymn-book allows one to presume upon resemblances; for the Princess herself I never saw."

With emotion, Albano drew the paper out of the cracked marble capsule; but he was still more moved when he read the signature, "Eleonore," and then the following in French:--

"My Son: To-day have I seen thee again,[149] after long times in thy B. (Blumenbühl); my heart is full of joy and anxiety, and thy beautiful image floats before my weeping eyes. Why can I not have thee about me and in my daily sight? How am I bound and distressed! But always did I forge for myself fetters, and beg others to fasten them upon me. Hear thine own history from the mouth of thy mother; from no other will it come to thee more acceptably and truly.

"The Prince and I lived long in an unfruitful marriage, which flattered our cousin Hh. (Haarhaar) with more and more lively hopes of the succession. At a late period thy brother L. (Luigi) annihilated them. One could hardly forgive us that. The Count C. (Cesara) retains the proofs of some dark actions (_de quelques noirceurs_) which were to cost thy poor brother, otherwise weakly, his life. Thy father was with me in Rome just as we learned it. 'They will surely get the better of us at last,' said thy father. In Rome we made the acquaintance of the Prince di Lauria, who would not give his beautiful daughter to the Count C. (Cesara) till he should have become Knight of the Golden Fleece. The Prince procured this order for him at the Imperial Court.

"For this Madam Cesara thought she ought to be very grateful to me, _une femme fort décidée, se repliant sur elle-même, son individualité exagératrice perca à travers ses vertus et ses vices et son sexe_. We learned to love each other. Her romantic spirit communicated with mine,

## particularly in the Land of Romance. This result was helped by the fact

that she and I found ourselves at the same time in the right condition of female enthusiasm, namely, the hope of being mothers. She was confined with an exquisitely beautiful girl, exactly like her, Severina, or as she was called afterward, Linda. Here we made the singular contract, that, if I bore a son, we would exchange; I could educate a daughter without hazard, and with her my son could grow up without incurring that danger which had always threatened thy brother in my house. She said, too, I could better guide a daughter, she a son, as she had little respect for her sex. The Count was well satisfied with the plan; the Hh. Court had just before refused him the oldest princess, for whom he had been a suitor, under the ironical and insulting pretext of her yet childish youth, and he for the sake of avenging offended honor and injured vanity,--for he was a very handsome man, and used only to victory,--was ready for any measures and contests against the haughty court. Only the Prince did not approve of it; he considered an education abroad, &c., quite ambiguous and critical. But we women interwove ourselves so much the more deeply into our romantic idea.

"Two days after I brought forth thee and--Julienne at a birth. On this rich emergency no one had reckoned. Here much turned up quite otherwise and more easily than had been expected. 'I keep,' said I to the Countess, 'my daughter, thou keepest thine; as to Albano (so shall he be called), let the Prince decide.' Thy father allowed that thou shouldst be brought up as son of the Count, indeed, but under his eye, with the honest W. (Wehrfritz). Meanwhile he made provisions whose solid value I then, in the fanciful enthusiasm of friendship, was not in a condition wholly to weigh. At present I only wonder that I was then so full of spirit. The documents of thy genealogy were not only thrice made out,--I, the Count, and the Court Chaplain Spener, were put in possession of them,--but subsequently thou wast presented even to the Emperor Joseph II. as our princely son, and his gracious letter, which I shall one day commit to thy brothers and sisters, is of itself sufficiently decisive.

"The Count himself now took an active part in the mystery,--whether out of love for his daughter or from spite against the H. court,--by demanding, as a reward for his participation, that one day thou and Linda should make a match. Here the Countess stepped in again with her wonders and fancies. 'Linda will certainly resemble me in soul as she now does in form,--force can then never move her,--but magic of the heart, of the fairy-world, the charm of wonder, may draw and melt and bind her.' I know her very words. A singular plan of enchantment was then sketched, whose limits the Count, through the submissiveness with which his brother, adept in a thousand arts, let himself be hired for everything, extended still further, beside making the plan thereby more agreeable. Linda will, long before thou hast read this, have appeared to thee; her name will have been named; thy birth mysteriously announced. May thy spirit, O may it be happily reconciled to it all, and may the difficult play pour winnings into thy lap when the cards are turned up. I am anxious; how can I be otherwise? O what tidings have I not received even from Italy through the Count, before which now all the hopes I have set upon my Lewis (Luigi) are at once extinguished! Now would Hh. (Haarhaar) have conquered through the wicked B. (Bouverot), had it not been that thou livest. And I cannot but be so happy, that thou livest clear of his poisonous influences. Yes, it seems as if the Count had intentionally and gladly let the destruction of thy brother take place in order to strike so much the stronger terror with thy resurrection. Yet I will not do him injustice. But whom shall a mother trust, whom mistrust, at court? And which danger is the greater?