"Now I am once more bored with the old complaint! No, Franz, I will not bring disgrace upon your mental cure and try to find the world as beautiful and reasonable as you do. That was only a recollection of the past. Is it not natural, is it not quite intelligible, that it should turn up just now, when we approach the end of our pilgrimage, and I am about once more to meet face to face the noble, unfortunate man to whom I owe so much, and that after an interval during which so much, so very much, has changed for him and for myself! I have followed your advice faithfully, as well as I could. I have let the past bury the past; I have practised industriously the art of forgetting, and I have sent the very shadows of the departed back to Hades, when they became troublesome. But here comes the form of a living man who is dead, of a dead man who still lives, and I find neither in my mind nor in my heart the magic words which will lay this spirit, whom I reverence, whom I mourn with tears, like the others."
"Then let us turn back," said Doctor Braun, with great vivacity. "If you do not feel the strength in you to maintain the position which you have yourself chosen, against every objection and every authority, it would be madness to expose yourself to such danger. Let us turn back; it is time yet."
"No," said Oswald, "that would be both cowardly and foolish. We do not overcome danger by avoiding it. I must see Berger and speak to him. This interview must be the test of the problem that has occupied us these four weeks. Either I recover myself from my own insanity by seeing this madman, or----"
"There is no or," cried Franz. "Really, when I hear you talk so, Oswald, I have a great mind to let you starve and thirst till you come again to your senses, or consent to do honor to reason. You are an enigmatical man, a thoroughly problematic character. There are incongruities in your character which I have not yet learnt to explain, in spite of our long intimacy. Natural disposition and education, which jointly make the man, must in your case have been most strangely intermingled. I have so far always avoided speaking of your early youth, because I felt a natural reluctance to inquire after what you evidently did not care to reveal. But my friendship for you is greater than such considerations, which are after all of little account between such intimate friends as we are. What do you say, Oswald, while the sun is gloriously setting behind those mountains, and our poor horses are painfully dragging themselves up the hill, you might tell me something about your early years--much or little, as you are disposed. Will you do it?"
"Willingly," replied Oswald. "I also have been thinking much of my youth in these last days. If one is engaged in settling his affairs, as I am now doing, at a certain epoch of one's life, it is almost indispensable to trace that life back to the beginning. It is true you are the first man, and perhaps the only one, whom I could permit to look into those dark portions of my existence; but I will do it."
"I shall be all the more attentive," replied Doctor Braun.
CHAPTER II.
"To begin at the beginning," said Oswald, after a pause, during which he seemed to have collected his thoughts, "I was born in the capital. My father was a teacher of languages, my mother the daughter of a mechanic. You see, therefore, that I have no claims to nobility, and that my hatred against the nobles is the very natural and legitimate hatred of the plebeian against the patrician, of the Pariah against the Brahmin.
"I have never learnt why my father left the capital, and shortly after my birth--I was, and remained, the only child of my parents--he went to live in the little Pomeranian port W----. It is true I never knew much of the history of my parents and of all that happened before my birth. I do not even know whether I have any relations on the father's or the mother's side. If there are any, I have never made their acquaintance.
"My mother also I only recollect dimly, after the manner of a person whom we have seen in a dream. But even now I sometimes dream of a fair young lady, with great, sweet blue eyes. She says in a soft tone some words which I do not understand, but which sound like the music of heaven, and always move me to tears even in my sleep. I know that this lovely creature of my dreams is my mother, for she never changes. She died before I had ended my fourth year.