29. CYCLE.
When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress, and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well, and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti: "The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which live on fruits, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on leaves,—for instance, the leaf-lice,—cleave together nest-wise." Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation and season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it. Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common, but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance of bodies.
The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly, simple, flabby man, named Malt, he had a year since, when certain symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead. Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.
As to the drum, the corpse is obliged—since he is full as hard of hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the very reason that he never hears one—to carry that round, strapped to him, because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his employer and prosector has to censure in him.[49] The Doctor now began to scold at him down below—Schoppe stood listening at the window—in the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can, and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret of thy trouble with me,—there is no real blessing upon our grease,—and one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father, verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."
30. CYCLE.
The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs, when translated, thus:—
"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence of thy sister's asphyxias; it was written on Good Friday, and looked forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain. I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful, armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the jongleur fast; but bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!
"G. de C."
"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion, and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals. "Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not, however, in this case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the most beloved.
In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their household arrangements,—which, however, had never yet been able to efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of the Linden-city,—the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the world a bill of fare raisonné of all the show-dishes in the gallery; but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban, in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of his mother's,[50] and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had no one been there.