"The couch? Right," said the fiddler, nodding. "Yes, go to sleep, comrade, and dream.—Here with that heap, brother conspirer. And now, listen: the wise commit no unnecessary crimes. We have no business with the private correspondence of the good folks of Cassel. But here is a document with an official seal, addressed to the Commissary of Police, Goettingen."
He tossed the letter across the table. There was a shout of triumph from the Jurist.
The horsehair couch was hard enough, but Steven had flung himself on it with a whole-souled desire to shut out a sordid, unsatisfactory world. Sleep, however, the jade, is not to be had for the wooing. The whines of the Theologian, the stertorous breathing of Barbarossa, the Jurist's flow of rhetoric, the crackling of the papers, the fiddler's very mutism, were all so many goads to drive him into ever more feverish wakefulness. Against the rigid bolster his heart-beats resounded in his brain. "Sidonia, Sidonia!" they said, in maddening persistence. And then, as in a sort of vision, he would see the paltry Don Juan, King Jerome, with his flickering eyes, and start, with a spasm of anger, back to a glaring consciousness of the mean room, the guttering lights, the reek of wine and smoke, the insufferable company.
"Herr Jurist, halt, halt!" came the fiddler's voice suddenly. "Leave that alone, if you please. That is, beyond any doubt, private."
"'Tis addressed to the Arch-Enemy, and no correspondence with tyrants is private," retorted the lawyer. "Besides"—with a grin—"it's one of those new-fashioned French envelopes, and everything French is damned and doomed! See, the wafer has come unsealed in my very hand. The wise man—hic—neglects no hint of Providence. Hey da! what have we here? ... O thou little son of Venus, what a sweet slip of rosy paper! What a darling little claw of a hand! ... (The King has a fine taste in doves, I'll grant him that!) Bah, Sardanapalus! It is enough to turn any man republican. I am for the rights of man. Tyrants shall have no monopoly of dovecotes. Hum! neither date nor place: a cautious dove! Chirp, chirp!" The creature pressed the sheet to his tipsy lips with disgusting lushness. "Would I held the pretty flutterer here! Hark! what does she say? 'Sir' (A cold beginning: her feathers seem ruffled), 'I ought to be very angry with you; but, alas! anger is not to be commanded any more than love. How well it would be for us women were it otherwise!' (Pretty dear! Ambiguous as any lawyer's statement!) 'Yet I feel that you must be forgiven, if but for the sake of duty—for I should be indeed disloyal to persist in rebellion against one who is my lawful lord.—Betty! P.S.' (Aha! now we shall come to the true meaning, to the kernel, medulla, medululla esculenta, of the rosy note.) 'Understand: I promise nothing. But understand also: you may come and receive your pardon—if no more!'"
The reader's mouth was opened upon fresh dithyrambics when the fiddler's voice rose peremptorily: "Pass me that letter!"
There fell a silence between the two. Geiger-Hans, his lean jaws propped upon his hands, sat staring at the pink sheet. The lawyer fell upon a new pile of letters with monkey-like mischief and activity. The supposed director of the Cabinet Noir was now snoring lustily. Its religious guide and philosopher was still pondering over the perversity of his liquor.
"Ha!" cried the Jurist, with a sudden shout, "another missive from the pink dove—same hand, same paper and cover, and addressed to no less a person than the great Chancellor Wellenshausen! Also at Heiligenstadt. Never draw such angry brows upon me, Minnesinger mine. I tell you, this woman positively cannot seal a letter!"
Steven lifted his head from the pillow. He heard the rustle of the opening sheet in the student's hands; then came another crow:
"Excellent, upon my cerevies, excellent! Listen, man. Whatever your faults are, you can laugh: