Albert trembled in every limb. He was again alone, with nothing but the open grave before him. The darkness around him seemed impenetrable. He could not see an inch away. Only strange voices of invisible men reached his ears, with the sound of autumn leaves in his ears. Then flashes of lightning came and revealed to him a line of men, in single file, coming through a gap in a ruined wall. He could not see the men’s faces but they wore little crucifixes over their breasts and swayed ornamental containers of frankincense such as he had seen in the Franciscan cloister. The next moment a strange light appeared and he saw himself surrounded by black robed priests, with mitres on their heads, and one of them gave him a sharp cut with a fishing rod and jeered. “Your inheritance!—your inheritance!”
“What’s the matter, Albert?—You gave such a shriek.”
He opened his eyes and beheld his mother at the foot of his bed.
“I had a dreadful dream—” he muttered.
“Always your dreams,” the mother said, smiling affectionately, as she walked out of the room.
III.
Weeks of tantalizing suspense followed. The letters that arrived from his father stirred Albert’s imagination. They seemed to come from distant lands, far, far away. And the letters were full of adventurous episodes: of nights spent in forests because of a broken axle, of weary tramps because of the horse’s bleeding leg, of halts at the frontier, and of numerous other perilous mishaps. “But,” as the optimistic David Zorn put it, “the road to success is always paved with rough stones.” His letter from Amsterdam was encouraging. No, he could not tell the extent of the estate, but it was huge. The tone of his succeeding letters, however, soon grew less and less reassuring, hinting at intervening difficulties, and he finally announced that he would return home without the millions as the matter was necessarily complicated and he could carry on the rest of the negotiations through correspondence.
His father’s return without riches was a stunning blow to the youth. It meant renewed drudgery and further contact with Father Scher and Kunz and Fritz. True, his father had not yet abandoned hope—he never did abandon hope—but Albert realized there were no prospects for a castle—at least not for the present and no immediate relief from the Franciscan school! Everything was the same as of old; no change, no excitement, nothing but the same monotonous business of irregular verbs, meaningless characters that stood for figures, the same blackboard and alongside of it another yellow stick in place of the broken one with whose every projecting knot and gnarl Albert was so familiar. It was a disheartening scene to see his father alight from the post chaise without a single bag of gold!
A few moments later came the great disappointment, the final blow. Like the glad tidings, it came in the form of a letter from Holland one rainy day in August. The humble shop in Schmallgasse was deserted save for David who, as usual, was thoughtfully turning the leaves of his ledger and jotting down some figures on the margin of a page. Zorn was everlastingly balancing the book, and the more he balanced them the less they balanced in his favor.
One of the saddest scenes of Albert’s early life took place on the afternoon following his father’s departure for Hamburg, to get financial assistance from his brother, Leopold Zorn, a banker.