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!"
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.