Albano now pushed up the window, and showed him a grave in the east, and one in the south, near the third open one, out there in the night, and said, "Thus have I thrice wept over life." Siebenkäs pressed his hand, and only said, "The Fates, and Furies, too, glide with linked hands over life, as well as the Graces and Sirens." He looked upon the singular, beautiful, fiery youth with the most hearty love; but Albano, who always imagined himself to be loved but little, and whom the fiery meteors of a Dian and a Roquairol had accustomed to bad habits of thinking, knew not how very much he had won this more tranquil heart.
141. CYCLE.
On the morrow more sunshine and strength returned to Albano's breast. He had now himself to heave up the mountain in the flat-pressed plain of his life. Only to see Pestitz again, where all the tournament-pleasures of his shining days had vanished, except the single Dian,—he abhorred the thought. "When this friend has once his grave-mound over his breast, then I go, and take leave of no one," said he.
Just then the hated uncle arrived, with the carriages full of magic wands, and said, weepingly, he was going to the Carthusian cloister, to atone for many sins, and he would first willingly explain to his nephew, as well with words as by the carriages, all that he desired. "I believe nothing you say," said Albano. "I can now tell the whole truth, for the gloomy one has nothing more to do with me, I think, cousin," replied the Spaniard. "Is not that," he added, in a low tone, with a shy look at Siebenkäs, "the gloomy one, cousin?" Albano would not know nor hear anything. Siebenkäs asked him who the gloomy one was. It was the infinite man, he began, very black and gloomy, and had for the first time stalked over toward him across the sea, when he stood on the coast before a fog. At night he had often heard him call, and sometimes had repeated his ventriloquial speeches. He had immediately appeared to him, with a handful of threatenings, whenever he had told many truths after sundown. Therefore had he feared exceedingly before the present gentleman in the Chapel of the Cross; but now, since he had been converted without suffering any harm in the chapel, he would tell truths all day long, and in the Carthusian convent he intended to do so still more.
"Cloisters are the very places where they do not generally dwell; for this reason, I suppose, the vow of silence is required, the observance of which is always more favorable to truth than its breach is," replied Siebenkäs. "O heretic, heretic!" cried the Spaniard, with such an unexpected anger that Albano at once received, through this sign of human feeling, pledges of his present sincerity, as well as of his narrower spiritual circumference. Now, for the first time, he asked him outright about the soil and the seed which he had hitherto used, in order to force the swift flowers of his miracles.
At this question he caused a casket to be brought up. "Ask," said he. "How did Romeiro's form rise out of Lago Maggiore?" said Albano. The uncle unlocked the casket, showed a wax figure, and said, "It was only her mother." Albano shuddered before this near mock-sun of his sunken one, and at the presumption of relationship with which Schoppe had inspired him. "Am I related to her?" he quickly asked. The uncle replied, with confusion, "It may haply be otherwise." Albano asked about the monk who made the heavenly ascension in Mola. "He stood overhead filled with gas;[[147]] I down below on the wall," said the uncle. Albano would hear no further. The casket contained, besides, ear-trumpets and speaking-trumpets, a face-skin, blue glass, through which landscapes appeared snowed over, silk flowers, with powder of an endormeur, &c. Albano would not see anything more.
"Evil being! who set thee on to this?" asked Albano. "My strong brother," said the uncle, for so he usually called the Knight. "He gave me my living, and he would fain shoot me dead; for he laughs very much when men are very finely cheated." "O, not a syllable of that!" cried Albano, painfully, whose anger against the Knight made all his veins spirt out fiery tears and poison. "Wretch! how didst thou become what thou art?" "So! a wretch am I?" he asked, with icy coldness. He then stated—but in an abrupt and confused manner, which attended him in every language in his own part, whereas in a strange name (for instance, the Baldhead's) he could speak long and well—that he had a dark-gray and a blue eye, a hidden bald head, and a remarkable memory since coming to manhood, and had therefore wished to become an actor, because he had nothing to do, for he had never been in love; but, so long as he did not improvisate, it had not gone well with him. He had always had in his mind Joseph Clark, who could counterfeit any grown person, and the deceiver Price, who went round in a threefold character. Then the gloomy one had again come over to him one evening in a shore fog across the water, and had murmured, as out of a belly, "Peppo, Peppo,[[148]] swallow back the true word; I will directly utter another"; and from that hour forth he had had the faculty of ventriloquizing. He had thereby caused dead and dumb persons, and speaking-machines, and parrots, and sleepers, and strange people in the theatre, to speak well, but never any one in church, and that was indeed a satisfaction to him. He had often given an unceasing echo to rocks, so that men did not know at all when to go away. He had also once caused a whole battle-field full of dead men to talk with itself, in all languages, to the astonishment of the old general.
"Where was that?" asked Siebenkäs. The Spaniard came to himself, and replied, "I don't know; is it true, then? 'Omnes homines sunt mendaces,' says the Holy Scripture." "As little true," said Albano, "as your gloomy ghost!" "O Mary, no!" said he, decidedly; "when I predicted anything, he caused it indeed, after all, to turn out true. Then he appeared to me, and said, 'Dost thou see, Peppo, mind and only never speak a truth!' And in the night, when I went by your side to Lilar, he went down in the valley as a man through the air." "I saw that too," said Albano; "he floated onward without stirring." "That was one," said Siebenkäs, smiling, "who stood, with his legs hidden, in a boat that glided onward, and nothing more." Then the Spaniard looked at this fac-simile of the corpse with the old horror with which he had hitherto secretly taken it for the gloomy spirit himself, murmured in Albano's ear, "See, this being knows it," and said, in justification of his truths, "The sun is not yet gone down," and, without listening to human entreaties, whose power had never been known to him, without sorrow or joy, hurried off to enter before sundown into the neighboring Carthusian monastery. All the implements of deception he had left where they were.
"A frightful man!" said Siebenkäs. "Some time ago, when he would fain rejoice at something, he looked as if a pang seized upon his face. And that he should stand there so thin and haggard, and look down sidewise, and swallow his syllables! I am certain he could kill without changing his look, even to anger." "O, he is the gloomy spirit that he sees; don't call him up!" said Albano, hurrying away into a wholly new world, which had now suddenly risen before his spirit.