"By all means, as thy regiment chaplaincy. Not for want of the spirit of art, as thou writest from Rome, but from a superfluity of it, thou goest among soldiers. I should see it with pleasure, if thou wert to consider that even Dante, Cæsar, Cervantes, Horace, served before they wrote so preciously,—only students invert it, and compose something short and sweet, and take up service afterward. To come to my travels,—it costs me much, namely, time, merely to tell thee that I caught thy absurd uncle with a carriage full of baggage in the little nest of Ondres, a post and a half from Bayonne. I owned to him I was going to Valencia to dissect the silk-stocking-weavers' looms in that place, to enjoy, at the same time, my drop of ice and a waistcoat-pocket full of Valencia almonds, and to visit the few professors who had produced the best compends for three thousand reals.[[134]] He should certainly arrive before me, he said. We arranged to put up at the same inn in Valencia. I found my account in him, as he could most easily introduce me to Romeiro's house. But I waited and watched there for him fourteen days in vain. With the steward of the house I found no hearing, although I cut out his stupid profile five times, with the request that he would unlock to a travelling painter the picture cabinet, where I wished to find the maternal picture of the Countess.
"Now was I half and half resolved to become pregnant, and in this guise to demand everything for my satisfaction, which even the Spanish King refuses to no pregnant woman.[[135]] In Italy they carry the child on the arm, in order to beg; in Spain it needs not so much as this visibleness. But fortunately thy uncle came. The picture-gallery door was thrown open. I set myself to copying a stupid kitchen-piece, and looked everywhere after my island portrait. But nothing was to be seen." (Here he drew a wooden case out of his hunting-bag, and laid it before him and went on.) "Until at last I saw it,—a picture leaned on the floor against the wall, turning toward me its back- and wintry-side,—it was the child of my pencil, and I was touched by the neglect it had suffered,—inwardly vexed, but outwardly calm, I put it by,—and snapped off short in the kitchen-piece in the middle of a half-finished pole-cat. Look at the likeness!"
He took off the box-cover, and Linda beamed upon his friend with a stream of mind and charms, only dressed in older fashion. Albano could scarcely stammer for emotion. "That were my father's spouse and my dear mother? And thou knowest assuredly that this picture here is the one you made of her on Isola Bella?"
"I'll just make it manifest," said he, and scoured away at a rose in the picture about the region of the heart. "My then Paphos-name Loewenskiould lies sub rosa and will be immediately forthcoming. Had I already scraped it open on the road, then you would have believed I had on the road for the first written myself in." As from a ghostly writing hand Albano started back shuddering, when actually an L and an Ö came forth from under the rose: "I shall clear away no further now," said Schoppe, "the rest I keep for her." Albano now poured out his heart before his honest heart's-friend; to him he could say and object that Julienne was his sister,—"against which I have nothing at all to say," said Schoppe,—and that Gaspard had approved an intended marriage between him and Linda. "There is no getting away from it," he added; "if she is his daughter, then I am not his son,—I cannot possibly make his sacred word of honor a lie—and, God! into what a monstrous pit and pool of crime must one then look down!" "Touching the word and the pool," said Schoppe, quite coldly, "there are specious proofs to be adduced (although, to be sure, I have before this spoken superfluously on the subject with thy father, and with the Countess), that the Baldhead, who, as he confessed to me, has been thy father's mass-assistant, groomsman, and bear-leader, was not a man of the freshest morals, but that he—although otherwise upright in many saddles except the moral—had his hours and centuries when he acted as such a dog and highwayman, that my hound there is a calendar-saint and father of the Church to him. Only I ought not to have blown out the lamp of his life, which of course stank more than it shone."
Albano could not disguise from him his horror at the deed. "I cannot repent it; listen," said Schoppe, and gave this account: "Even in Valencia thy uncle told me that he had met in Madrid such and such a fellow,—exactly like the Baldhead,—who carried round for show a wax-figure-cabinet of nothing but crazy creatures; often the whole cabinet would speak, and he himself would sit therein too, and help discourse; thy superstitious uncle procured and lent him spirits, too, and made evil and frightful things out of it all.
"Once in a Posada[[136]] I heard in a sleeping chamber near mine all sorts of voices murmuring through each other and saying, 'Schoppe also is coming to us.' I rose; the strange chamber was shut. I listen and hear it again, the devilish cry, 'Schoppe comes in also.' My room had a balcony out of which I could, through the neighboring window, see by the moonlight into the noisy chamber. In horrible, frizzled shapes sat a mass of wax therein and spake, the waxen baldhead in the midst; but I sought the living one. The wax beasts exchange with one another their fixed ideas and slip me in among them: 'There is our honorary fellow-member peeping in,' said the wax baldhead. By Heaven! I must be short, my blood boils and burns again through my heart. I grow furious, take my weapon, and petition God for a peaceable, forbearing disposition. Unfortunately I observe, in a back corner not lighted by the moon, near a father of death and a pregnant woman of wax, a black cloak which stirs, and out of which peeps the living tone-leader, the Baldhead. 'Black master of ventriloquism,' cried I, 'hold thy tongue for God's sake; I see thee behind there and fire in.' I took it for ventriloquism.
"Now for the first time the crazy-house properly began; I heard it laugh,—call me in and dub me a comrade and member of the club. 'Presses,' said I, 'I am notoriously a man, and see thee quite distinctly.' It availed nothing; the waxen baldhead so much the more replied, 'Yes, there sits brother Schoppe already,' and I actually saw myself also embossed and modelled on the spot. 'He is to be had here also,' cried I, grimly, and fired away at the master of the lodge, who tumbled bleeding to the floor.
"I made off with myself in the same hour. As to the uncle, I came across his track afterward for a short time. He dreads madmen, and would not have me long with him, for fear I myself should strike up a bargain with the aforesaid set. He asked me whether the director of the wax-figure travelling madhouse had encountered me. I could not place much confidence in him; I have the secret alone."
"Thou art a wild, true man," said Albano, with such an intense desire to embrace him; "thou dost much for others, and art, after all, much for thyself. I can now leave thee no more. My former life-island, with all its flowers, lies deep under water, and I must cast myself into the infinite sea of the world. Give me thy hand, and swim with me. We travel to-morrow to France."
"To-morrow?" said Schoppe. "Well, yes! then I go this evening to the Countess, and then to Don Cesara." "Tell her," begged Albano, "that I would not visit her even as a brother, if I were such, not from coldness, but because I revere her great spirit; say that to her, and God help thee!" Albano was about to go, and leave him to wander alone into the neighboring Lilar. "No, accompany me, my master," said Schoppe, vehemently; "I have discharged the old churl over there in the woods by fair payment of escort-money, and should now be alone vis-à-vis de moi." "I do not understand thee," said Albano; "what art thou afraid of?" "Albano," said he, in a low and important tone, and his generally direct looks glanced shyly sidewise, and innumerable great wrinkles encircled his smiling mouth, "the 'I' might come; yes, yes!"