And so saying, I fled maniac-like from the accursed spot, and vowed in my excitement and indignation to return no more. I kept my word.
MORE ROGUES IN OUTLINE.
The Sick Antiquary.
"Aspettar e non venire,
Star in letto e non dormire.
Son' due cose da morire."
Italian Proverb.
Three years are passed since we last visited Herr Ascherson, and we once more find ourselves, with considerably improved tact and knowledge, both as to virtuosi and virtu, ringing at the well-known bell! On the door being unbarred to us, we are sorry to hear that he is now a great invalid, and confined to bed. "I hope we don't disturb you, Mr Ascherson," said we, as a half-witted slattern of fifty opened the door of the sick man's room, and discovered to us something alarmingly like Cheops redivivus, reclining on a Codrus-looking couch, which was too short to receive his whole body save diagonally, in which position he accordingly lay. Upon hearing these words, the much-swathed object suddenly draws itself up in bed; and after looking keenly to make us out in the dusk, (as if he suspected a visit of cajoling rather than condolence.) his eye lost its anxious look, and his features gradually expanded, when he saw at a glance that we were come, not to cheat, but to cheer him. The first words he uttered were—"Ja, ja; dat is mein nobil freund the Doctor;" and then, falling back, he resigned himself to his pains, like a man who has been long trained to suffer. We ask after his health. The poor invalid shakes his head, and tells us, groaning, that he was "sehr krank, very ill indeed; had much dolors but no slipp;" apologising also for having sent for some 10 pi. which we owed him, and which "it was need," so he told us, "to pay his medicine mit." Really concerned to see one whom we had so recently known under worldly circumstances so unlike the present, so suffering, so poor, and so solitary, we told him that we had been intending to call on him that very day for that very purpose—observing, by way of consoling his feelings, that it was not to be expected "that a man who had laid out so much money of the present currency to procure fine specimens of one that was out of date, could be quite so well off in ready cash as those whose money was all in hard coin at their bankers. "Ja, ja," it was even so; and then, his pains remitting for a moment, he proceeded to explain, for our satisfaction, how he had become so short of the needful supplies. "Tis three monate seyne mein freund Vinhler went to Paris—(an honest and heart-good man, Mr Vinhler)—to whom this commission I consign:—'See you give a careful eye-blink to this 9000 ducats, which you must take mit you to Paris. There in the house of Furet you shall become some moneys, which you shall send to me directly; and mit these ducats you shall also pay their consignment.' Well, it was a simple direct, als any childer might do. So Vinhler takes my money, gets to Paris, calls and pays Mr Furet, and writes that he will be back in Neapoli in a week. So I stay! Drei monate I stay, and no Mr Vinhler come! Then lastly, when I hav begin to scold myself, two days seyne, comes eine briefe, and says, 'I hav been stopt here for three weeks by what I then foresaw not when I did write you lastly. I am promised to marry Herr Furet's daughter, and we mak the marriage in eine monate. I am sorry for the delay about your monete, but shall bring them mit Mrs Vinhler and myself to Neapoli, when we arrive!" So, while he is happy mit his Julia in Paris, I cannot become my Julias that I hav bought; and I hav lost much by this man's delay. Ah! (continued he,) whenever he had felt mein dolors," (the poor man had now wrought himself up into a painful excitement,) "my no slipp, this unendlich irritation, this torment to pay the Doctor, for no gute—my loss of practice, my loss of friends, my physique so bad, mein eine samkeit so dull—he should surely have sent me that cassetta of coins to make me a little more gay." Being obliged to quit Naples suddenly, we left him in the midst of his pains, which had been wholly unrelieved by our medication; fretting more and more daily at the non-arrival of his friend; with nobody to visit him but the needy Leech, who, having asked himself—
"And will my patient pay?
And can he swallow draughts until his dying day?"
thinks no further self-interrogatory needful; with none to inquire after him, save only the peasants, whose findings he is too ill to look at, and too poor to purchase; and Death's grim auctioneer, who undertakes for the district; and who, when he has made the daily inquiry at his door, not to lose further time, begins to ply his small hammer, and is tap-tap-tapping away for somebody else, till wanted. Oh! who would change places with a sick antiquary, whose conscience, though he sleeps, is awake to torment him, and whose dreams, if he dream, are of rifled tombs, profaned temples, Charon and his boat!
"Nocte, brevem si forte indulsit cura soporem,
Et toto versato toro, jam membra quiescunt,
Continuo templum et violati numinis aras,
Et quod præcipuis mentem sudoribus urget,
Se vidit in somnis!"