Now hast thou ended thy course here below, stern, steadfast spirit! and into the last evening-tempest on thy bosom there still streamed a soft, playing sun, and filled it with roses and gold. The earth-ball, and all the earthly stuff out of which the fleeting worlds are formed, was indeed far too small and light for thee. For thou soughtest behind, beneath, and beyond life, something higher than life; not thy self, thy I,—no mortal, not an immortal, but the Eternal, the Original One, God! This present seeming was so indifferent to thee, the evil as well as the good. Now thou art reposing in real being,—death has swept away from the dark heart the whole sultry cloud of life, and the eternal light stands uncovered which thou didst so long seek, and thou, its beam, dwellest again in the fire.
[THIRTY-FIFTH JUBILEE.]
Siebenkäs.—Confession of the Uncle.—Letter from Albano's Mother.—The Race for the Crown.—Echo and Swan-song of the Story.
140. CYCLE.
Long lay Albano in the solitary, dark abyss, till at length light illuminated the depths and the green height from which he had been precipitated. The once life-colored, manly face of his friend lay white before him; the red mantle only heightened the snow of the corpse. The dog lay with his head on his breast, as if he would warm and protect it. When Albano saw the naked blade, he looked round him on all sides, shuddered at the cold uncle, at the living brotherly image of the dead, and at the first shadow of a doubt whether it had been murder or suicide, and asked in a low tone, "How did he die?" "By me," said Siebenkäs; "our similarity killed him; he thought he saw himself, as this gentleman here will assure you." The uncle related several particulars. Albano turned eye and ear away from him, but he buried in the warm reflection of the friend's face that look to which the daylight of friendship had sunk below the horizon of earth. Siebenkäs seemed to assert himself by a rare manly bearing. Even Albano, the younger friend, concealed his anguish that he had lost so much, and that his orphan-heart was now exposed, like a helpless child, in the wilderness of life.
Wehrfritz asked him whether he should still send him a horse to ride into the city. "Me! I ever go into the city again?" asked Albano. "No, good father; Schoppe and I go to-day into the Prince's garden." He was terrified at the mere black churchyard-landscape of the city, where once had bloomed for him a golden sunshine, and leafy avenues and heaven's-gates full of flowery festoons. O, the young honey of love, the old wine of friendship; both were indeed poured by fate into graves!
The dead man was carried into the new castle of the Prince's garden. Only Albano and Siebenkäs followed him. When they were alone, Albano saw for the first time that the friend of his friend trembled and wavered, and that until now only the spirit had sustained the body. "Now can we both," said Albano, "mourn before each other; but only in you do I believe. God, how then was his end?" Siebenkäs described to him the last looks and tones of the poor man. "O God!" said Albano, "he died not easily; when the madness of months became one minute,—rending must have been the hell-flood which snatched away so firm a life." Siebenkäs could with difficulty admit the belief of his madness, because the deceased had so often, in his best moments, been similarly misapprehended; but Albano at last convinced him. He related further, that on his journey home he had been startled, when the repeated mistaking of his person for the deceased led him to the presumption that his long separated Leibgeber must be sojourning here, although he could not but dread to think of the first appearing and comparison. "For, Sir Count," said he, "years and business, particularly juristical, ah! and life itself, always draw man farther down,—at first out of ether into air, then out of the air on to the earth. 'Will he know me?' said I. I am truly no more the man that I was, and the physiognomical likeness might well have still remained the only and strongest one. But this, too, had passed away; the blessed one there looks still as he did ten years ago. O, only a free soul never grows old! Sir Count, I was once a man, who played one and another joke with life, and with death too, and I would cry out, 'Heavens! if hell should get loose!' and more of the like. Ah, Leibgeber, Leibgeber! Time has delicate little waves, but the sharpest-cornered pebble, after all, becomes smooth and blunt therein at last."[[145]]
"Enumerate to me every trifle of his former days," begged Albano,—"every dew-drop out of his morning redness: he was so chary of his dark history!" "And that to every one," said the stranger. "This much will I one day prove to you, from dates gathered on the spot, that he is a Dutchman, like Hemsterhuis, and properly named Kees, like Vaillant's ape, to which he prefixed Sieben, or seven; for Siebenkäs is his first name. He drew his income out of the Bank of Amsterdam. Every New Year's night he burnt up the papers of the preceding year; and how his Clavis Leibgeriana[[146]] has become known I do not yet comprehend." Thereupon he related his first change of name, when Schoppe took from him the name Leibgeber; then every hour and act of his true heart toward the (former) poor-man's-attorney; then their second exchange of names, when Siebenkäs let himself nominally be buried, and went on as Leibgeber, and their eternal farewell in a village of Voigtland.
As Siebenkäs here stopped in his narrative, he grasped the cold hand, with the words: "Schoppe, I thought I should not find thee till I found thee with God!" and bent weeping over the dead. Albano let his tears stream down, and took the other dead hand and said: "We grasp true, pure, valiant hands." "True, pure, valiant," repeated Siebenkäs, and said, with a Schoppeish smile, "His dog looks on and testifies as much." But he became pale with emotion, and looked now exactly like the dead. Then did he and Albano, sinking, touch the cold face to theirs, and Albano said, "Be thou, too, my friend, Leibgeber; we can love each other, because he loved us. Pale one, let thy form be the seal of my love toward thy old friend!"