Schoppe's history was, according to Wehrfritz's and the uncle's telling, this: He had started up glowing out of the constrained slumber; the snorting war-steed of vindictive fury against the Spaniard had hurried him away. In the hotel-yard of the latter the servant had directed him with a lie to the castle. Here, amidst the confused tumult about the suffering Prince, he had reached, unasked, unseen, the mirror-room where he had once begged of the Countess Linda Idoine's word of peace for his distracted friend. When the cylindrical mirror which graves the long years of age on the young face, and shakes thereon the moss and rubbish of time, threw out at him his image wasted with madness, said he, "Ho, ho! the old _I_ lurks somewhere in the neighborhood," and looked grimly round. Out of the mirrors of the mirrors he saw a whole people of _I_'s looking at him. He sprang upon a chair, to unhang a long mirror. While he was starting the nail of the same, a clock in the wall struck twelve times. Here the prediction of Gaspard came into his head, which his friend had confided to him, and all the rules which the latter had prescribed to him for the solution of the riddles. The prediction mentioned, indeed, a picture-gallery, but a mirror-room is itself one, only more vacillating, and deeper in behind the wall. He took down the mirror, according to the rules given by Gaspard, found and opened the arras-door corresponding to the size of the mirror; the wooden female form, with the open souvenir in her left hand and the crayon in her right, sat behind there. He pressed, according to the prescription, the ring on the left middle finger; the form stood up, with the rolling of an inward machinery, stepped out into the apartment, stopped at the opposite wall, drew a line down thereon with the crayon in its hand. He drew up the border of the wall-hanging; the perspective-gla.s.s and the waxen impression of the coffin-key lay in a compartment behind there. Now he pressed the ring-finger; the figure set the crayon upon the souvenir, and wrote, "Son, go into the princely vault in the Blumenbuhl church, and open the coffin of the Princess Eleonore, and thou wilt find the black slab."

When that was done (the Knight had told Albano), if the marble slab, nevertheless, was not found in the coffin, then he must press the third ring on the little finger, whereupon something would appear which he himself did not foreknow. Schoppe tried the pressure of this finger before going into the Blumenbuhl Church,--the figure remained standing,--but something began to roll inside,--the arms stretched themselves out and fell down,--wheels rolled out,--at last the whole form dismembered itself by a mechanical suicide, and there appeared an old head of wax.

Here Schoppe went off, to run to Blumenbuhl and fetch out of the vault the light required for this night-piece. Though it was noonday, church and vault were left open,--perhaps because they were making room for the new cavern-guest who was just dying. Without stopping to transform the waxen key into an iron one, he violently broke open the coffin with an iron tool, and quickly s.n.a.t.c.hed out the marble slab and Albano's portrait. He broke the slab behind a bush. When he read the superscription, he examined no farther; he hastened to Albano's house to deliver all. But the two were simultaneously seeking each other in vain. Meanwhile he lighted upon the honest Wehrfritz, through whom alone he could despatch such important booty; he himself was now on the scent after his deadly foe, the Spaniard, and no power could drive him off the hunting-ground of his wrath.

At sundown Schoppe espied the Spaniard, who, flying out of the Prince's Garden to escape the fac-simile, Siebenkas, came running into his hands. He stiffened at the sight of the madman, cried, "Lord and G.o.d, are you behind me and before me, are you red and green?" and rushed sidewards into the old Chapel of the Cross, to fall on his knees and invoke the Holy Virgin. Schoppe stretched out his condor wings, shot off and dropped them together before the chapel. "Turn thyself round, Spaniard, I'll devour thee from top to toe," said he. "Holy mother of G.o.d, help me,--good, bad spirit, stand by me, O gloomy one!" prayed the Baldhead. "Step round, knave, without further trick," said Schoppe, describing from behind with his sword a horse-shoe in the air. He turned round piteously on his knees, and his head hung slackly down from his neck. Schoppe began: "Now I've got thee, villain! thou prayest to me to no purpose on thy knees; I hold the sword of judgment,--mad am I, too,--in a few minutes, when we have said our say, I stick this present cane-sword into thee,--for I am a madman, full of fixed ideas."

"Ah, sir," replied the Baldhead, "you are certainly entirely rational and in your head and yourself; I beg to live; killing is so great a deadly sin." Schoppe replied: "As to my understanding, of that another time! I have already shot thee in effigy, now will I not carry round in vain the deadly sin and the sting of conscience, but set myself about it _in natura_, thou hangman of souls, thou trepan of hearts!"

"Schoppe, Schoppe!" cried at this moment, several times over, at great distances, a something with Albano's voice. He looked swiftly round; nothing was to be seen. "Good Schoppe," it continued, "let my uncle go!" Now Schoppe blazed up, and raised his dagger for a thrust. "Thou absolutely too abominably petrified ventriloquist! Should not one immediately stick the trumpery here as they do a wounded horse? Seest thou not, then, the h.e.l.lish, cursed murder- and death-stroke before thy nose, thy pest-cart already tackled up, the stuffed-out skeleton of death cased in this flesh of mine, and just lifting the scythe?

Confess, Spaniard, for Jesus' sake, confess! Fly, ere I stick, spit thee! Thou wilt thereby have some plea with the devils in h.e.l.l; otherwise thou art, even down below there, an utterly ruined man."

"Where sits the Pater? I will confess, indeed," said the Spaniard.

"Here stands thy gallows-Pater; behold the shorn poll," said Schoppe, shaking off the hat from his bending, close-shaven head.

"Hear my confession! But by night the gloomy one suffers me not to tell the truth,--he comes certainly, he comes to take me, Pater! fumigate me, baptize me against the devil!"

"Step-penitent and thief, am I not father-confessor and Pater enough for thee, who will soon baptize thee? Just say all, hound, I absolve thee, and then strike thee dead for penitence. Say on, thou coronation-mint of the Devil, art thou not the Baldhead, and the Father of Death, and the monk at the same time, whose figure full of gas went up toward heaven in Mola, and hadst ventriloquism and wax-moulding and considerable knavery at hand?"

"Yes, father, ventriloquism and wax-images and the knave. But the evil spirit was always by; often I said nothing, and yet it was said, and the figures ran."

"Mordian," said Schoppe, waxing furious upon this subject, "seize the hound! Dost thou still lie,--thou cloaca dug in Paradise!--into the ear of the great Fatal Sister, thou mimic mummery? Does thy death's head without lip and tongue still bestir itself to lie? O G.o.d, what are thy human creatures!"

"O Pater, they are no lies! but the gloomy one wills them by night; I have made a league with him,--I have seen him this evening; he looked like you, and was in green. Holy Mary, O Pater, I have spoken the truth; there he comes in green,--O Pater, O Mary, and has your form and a fiery eye in his hand--"

"No one has my form," said Schoppe, agitated, "but the 'I.'"

"O glance round! The evil spirit comes to me--absolve--stab--I will die off!"

Schoppe at last looked behind him. The striding cast of his form came moving along towards him,--the fiery eye in the hand ascended into the face,--the mask of the _I_ was clad in green. "Evil spirit, I am just in the act of auricular confession; thou canst not come hither; I am holy," cried the Spaniard, and grasped Schoppe. The dog seized _him_.

Schoppe stared at the green form,--the sword fell from his hand. "My Schoppe," it cried, "I seek thee, dost thou not know me?"

"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 Siebenkas," 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 Siebenkas, 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, G.o.d! 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.

Siebenkas.--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 Siebenkas; "our similarity killed him; he thought he saw himself, as this gentleman here will a.s.sure 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. Siebenkas seemed to a.s.sert 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 Siebenkas 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. G.o.d, how then was his end?" Siebenkas described to him the last looks and tones of the poor man. "O G.o.d!" said Albano, "he died not easily; when the madness of months became one minute,--rending must have been the h.e.l.l-flood which s.n.a.t.c.hed away so firm a life."

Siebenkas 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l 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 Siebenkas 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 Siebenkas let himself nominally be buried, and went on as Leibgeber, and their eternal farewell in a village of Voigtland.

As Siebenkas 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 G.o.d!" 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 Siebenkas, 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." Siebenkas 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_ Pest.i.tz 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 Siebenkas, "the gloomy one, _cousin?_" Albano would not know nor hear anything. Siebenkas 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 Siebenkas. "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 circ.u.mference. 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 gla.s.s, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 Siebenkas. 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 Siebenkas, 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 Siebenkas. "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 gla.s.s.

Before he began to read, he held the image under the gla.s.s 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.