"My Dear Friend!
"The time has expired, the three days have passed without my seeing you again, I had scarcely hoped that the disclosure I made to you through your brother--give my kindest regards to him; I envy you the happiness of possessing such a relative--that any word from me could produce any impression upon you since I can retract nothing, cannot deceive you and myself.
"I have ceased to desire to exist and have exhausted my means to do so. You know that with me both amount to very much the same thing. I cannot understand how people can remain attached to a life, whose conditions are limited to simple existence. And yet--I must suffer more than I yet suffer, physical and spiritual hunger must gnaw still more sharply, ere I can bring myself to try the last resource. Meantime the pain is dull, and sometimes blended with the hope that it may not last forever. So I wish to try whether I shall be better amid entirely new surroundings. The old countess has invited me to spend some time at her castle; she came for me in person, and little as I like her, I have still less reason to be over fastidious. When you read these lines I shall be on the way.
"I can scarcely ask you to write to me. But if you do not prefer to utterly forget me, pity me more than you condemn. I shall never cease to remember you.
"Toinette."
At noon, when kind Madame Feyertag went to the tun to interrupt his solitude, and ask if he wanted anything, he seemed perfectly calm, spoke of his speedy departure, thanked her for the love she had shown Balder, and made all sorts of arrangements, in case he should enter upon his duties as professor at once. He even ate a portion of the food brought up to him, but could not made up his mind to go, and the trunk he had brought down from the attic remained unpacked. Old Lore saw him wandering about his room late at night; his lamp was not extinguished until after midnight.
When Marquard called the following morning, he was not at all surprised to hear that the Herr Doctor had not yet gone. "He has a disease of the nerves called absence of will," he said to the shoe maker, "it's hard to reach, but I think if we can once get him on the way--"
At the door of the room he started violently. He heard Edwin's voice talking in a very strange tone on all sorts of matters. When he entered, he found his friend sitting on the bed with dilated eyes, holding the little bottle of violet perfume and Leah's plate, and striking them together like a tambourine and a drum stick. He did not recognize the new comer, and continued his discordant music, which he accompanied with confused, delirious words, and verses of Italian poetry--apparently from Dante. On the little table beside him lay a small copy of the Divina Comedia, and beside it Toinette's letter. The back of this was covered with writing in Edwin's small hand, which had probably been done just before the fever set in, and his friend in amazement read a singular improvisation in the style of the Inferno, whose echo must have excited the sick man. Although Balder had said that his brother was a poet, he had not been caught in such sins for years, and in his days of health, certainly would not have fallen into this fever for versifying. But as it sometimes happens in dreams or a state of somnambulism, that we suddenly practise with wonderful skill an art whose rudiments we have scarcely mastered, these lines had been written without an erasure, as if dictated by some other, and as even the worst verses were far superior to what Edwin usually acknowledged, and the cynical, over-excited tone of the whole was utterly foreign to his nature, Marquard looked upon them as a record of words uttered by a man possessed with a devil, and forced to repeat what the demon suggests. The verses ran as follows:
Methought that all my tasks were duly learned,
And I prepared to turn my back on school.
Must I examined be, to show what rank I've earned?
Then pray begin to ask your questions o'er,
For I am almost tempted to display
Before you all my wisdom's scanty store.