Notwithstanding all entreaties, he took no medicines from Dr. Sphex; for he had already, he said, committed his case to an old, well-known practitioner and circuit-physician, Time. He readily allowed Sphex to draw up a recipe, to bring it; willingly looked it through, disputed about the contents, remarked it was easier to be sanitary-counsel than to give it, and he saw, indeed, that he hit his case, because he pursued a weakening treatment, which was the first thing with crazy people; he added, however, that reason was not just the thing he desired, but only a couple of valiant shanks to walk with and stand upon, and a couple of arms well filled out to strike home withal; and for the rest, he told him he did not like him, because he cut up dogs. Albano, too, at last, took the position, that, if Schoppe could only get muscular strength again for a social journey with him, then the frenzy-dream into which the unsocial one had thrown him would readily fly away of itself.
Schoppe was always flying out at the Doctor particularly. Once the latter said: "Follow, if not me, at least your second self," and pointed to Albano. "To the Devil," he replied, "with my second self,—that may be you: I feel shy enough of you to make it probable,—but he, there, is certainly, I have every reason to hope, hardly my sixth, twentieth self, or the like."
Meanwhile Sphex stuck to his opinion, that his sthenic sleeplessness, which was alternately the daughter and the mother of his fever-visions, especially of the Baldhead, barred up the way to relief, and must be conquered by weakening processes. When one day Dian, who often visited his friend Albano, heard this, he asked, why one would not deceive and cure him directly with the tidings of the Spaniard having travelled off for fear of him, say to France. Albano replied: "Truly I should be glad to say it, but I cannot; I could as soon will to tell a lie to God or myself." "Whims!" said Dian; "I'll tell him myself." "Just what I had expected of that Spaniard," replied Schoppe to the official recipe-falsehood. When Dian had gone out, he asked Albano: "Do I not sit now much cooler and more icy here? And, truly, since hearing that the Baldhead is in France, I have become almost a new man. Of course I am lying, but Dian lied first."
At last the physician resolved to mix at once a sleeping potion in his drink. Albano allowed it. Schoppe got it; glowed and phantasied for a space of some minutes; at last the mist of sleep came up and soon covered the patient over.
Albano, then, after so long a time, visited again the green of the earth and the blue of heaven, and his Dian in Lilar. What a transformation had taken place in the interval; how had things been confounded, and changed places, with each other! How many leaves had become budgeons again! And many a foam of life which had once gladdened him with its whiteness and delicacy and lightsomeness, now chilled his bosom like gray, heavy water, and he had retained almost nothing except his courage to meet life. At Dian's he heard of new changes, of the Prince's approaching death, of Idoine's approaching visit to her sister in anticipation of the bereavement. In what a strange bewilderment did his soul open its eyes out of its winter-sleep into the warm sunshine which this image of Liana diffused over his life! In many a still night by Schoppe's ghostly tent had he already, since Julienne for the first time let him see the apparition of this peace-angel without the veil, beheld the olden time and former love come up again like a heaven of distant stars, and in the clear-obscure of dreams disrobed of sleep he saw on the sea of time a far, far-off island,—whether behind him or before him, he knew not,—where a white, averted form, resembling or suggesting Liana's, hovered and sang as an echo of the olden strain. Now close upon the death-month of the brother followed the death-month of the sister Liana. Were it possible that the celestial one would step out again from the still mirror of the second world and out of its immeasurable distances, into this earthly atmosphere, and after her transfiguration again walk embodied here below?
But friendship demanded room for its sorrows, and these cloud-images were soon covered over or destroyed by it. He could not find courage in his heart, however much he wished it, to demand of Schoppe, or even to receive from him, a description of that healing-night, in which Idoine had been Liana; and yet this form was the only live-playing jewel in the death-ring on the skeleton of stern time, which stood before him. What days! What the graves had not stolen from him and swallowed up, the earth had snatched away, and Gaspard, once his exalted father on a serene throne of the heavens, had now appeared to his fancy with frightful hell-powers and weapons down below, sitting on a throne of the abyss.
So much the more mildly did he feel, flowing around him, when he was in Dian's house, the stiller presence, the thought of the reposing friend, the sight of the neighboring Dream-temple, where Liana had once been Idoine, and the annunciation that the living image of the loved one was drawing near. He portrayed to himself the sweet and bitter terror of her apparition before him; for as in the stream the bending flower sketches not only its form, but its shadow also, so is she Liana's beautiful form and shadow at once, and in the living one would a lost and a glorified appear to him at the same time.
In this dreamy chiaroscuro and evening twilight, made up of past and future flowing together, he came back to his house. A sharp lightning-flash darted white across the dreamy redness. His Schoppe had, after a few minutes of forced sleep, wildly started up and madly sprung out, nobody knew whither. The doctor came, and said decisively, either he had thrown himself overboard or everybody else; he had run wildly away, and had taken his sword-cane with him, too.
