The janitor opened his eyes wide when he was knocked up to open the back-door for Herr Rosenbusch. The white mice, too, quickly sprang up from their pleasant dreams of biscuit and Swiss cheese, and rubbed their snouts against the wire-netting in nervous excitement; for they recognized their master. There he stood in the moonlight, paying no attention to them, firmly planted before the battle of Lützen. He gazed at it for a while in silence; then he felt for the place where his beard was usually to be found.
"You are no fool, after all!" he muttered to himself. "If you had never painted anything but that black charger there, rearing because he has received a bullet in his neck--Basta! Anch' io sono pittore!"
Then he took his flute out of its case, and marched up and down for a while blowing an adagio, in order to dissipate the fumes of the red Würtemberger. At length, when he felt tired enough, he rigged up a bed on the floor out of a Swedish saddle, that he took for a pillow, a saddle-blanket, said to have been used by Count Piccolomini, and a tiger-skin which the moths had eaten until it looked like a variegated geographical chart, but which was popularly supposed to have belonged to Froben, the Master of the Horse. However this might be, it served to make a softer bed for the tired body of the last of the romantic battle-painters; and he stretched himself upon it with a sigh, looked out once more on the moonlight night, and then fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, such as is rarely granted to a disappointed lover.
CHAPTER IV.
Elfinger had been sitting up late into the night awaiting the return of his friend, until at last he was forced to admit that there could be no doubt but what the adventure had not ended very gloriously. He fell asleep with a heavy heart, for his last hopes were now defeated.
The next morning he crept mournfully down to the bank, and left it earlier than usual under some pretext or other. He hoped to find Rosenbusch at home at last. But the little, scantily furnished, untidy chamber of the battle-painter was still vacant.
Could he have done something desperate, left the city or even--?
In great excitement, for he loved his good comrade heartily, he mounted the dark stairs for the second time, after the close of his evening duties at his desk. He found on his little table an unmistakable symbolical sign that his friend was still in the land of the living. A large market-basket stood in the middle, provided with a long paper label such as they put on medicine-bottles; and on it were written these words:
"A REMEDY FOR BEARDLESS ARTISTS.
TO BE TAKEN ACCORDING TO THE NECESSITIES
OF THE CASE.
FROM THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
THE LEATHER GLOVE."[[3]]
There was nothing in the basket but the sketch-book, in which the solitary outcast had written his lamentations the night before.