The Serapion Brethren Volume Ii Part 6

"Oh, thou, my Creator," cried Tussmann, in the fulness of his heart.

"You ask, dearest Miss Albertine, who is an engaged young lady, and of whom I am talking? To whom else can I be alluding but to yourself? Are you not my future bride, whom I have so long adored in secret? Did not your dear papa ever so long ago promise me your beautiful, white, _so_ kissable little hand?"

"Mr. Tussmann," said Albertine; "either you have been to a wineshop, early as it is in the day--(my father says you go to them a great deal more than you ought),--or you've gone out of your mind in some extraordinary way. My father can never have had the slightest idea of _your_ marrying _me_."

"Dearest Miss Albertine," cried Tussmann; "consider for a moment. You have known me for many long years. Have I not always been a man of the strictest moderation and temperance? Have I ever been given to dissipation? Can you suppose that I have taken to drinking and improper conduct all at once? Dearest Miss Albertine, I shall be only too happy to close my eyes to what I have seen going on here; not a syllable concerning it shall ever pa.s.s my lips--we'll forget and forgive. But remember, adored one, that you promised to marry me out of the tower window of the Town-hall at twelve o'clock at night; and, although you were waltzing in such a style with this young gentleman (whose acquaintance, as I said, I have not the honour of), still I----"

"Don't you see?" interrupted Albertine; "don't you know, that you're talking all sorts of incoherent nonsense, like some lunatic out of the asylum? Please go away. I feel quite unwell; do go away, for goodness'

sake."

Tears started in Tussmann's eyes.

"Oh, heavens!" he cried. "Treatment like this from the beloved Miss Albertine! No; I shall not go. I shall remain here till you have arrived at a truer opinion concerning my unworthy person, dearest Miss Albertine."

"Go; go!" reiterated Albertine, running into a corner of the room, and covering her face with her handkerchief.

"No, dearest Miss Albertine," answered Tussmann; "I shall not go until, in compliance with the sapient advice of Thomasius, I endeavour to----" and he made as if he would follow her into the corner.

While this was going on, Edmund had been sc.u.mbling angrily at the background of his picture. But at this point he could contain himself no longer.

"d.a.m.ned, infernal scoundrel!" he cried, and flew at Tussmann, making four dashes over his face with the brush, full of a greyish green tint, which he had been working at his background with. Then he grasped him, opened the door, and sent him out of it with a kick so forcible that he went flying down stairs like an arrow out of a bow.

Bosswinkel, who was just coming up, started back in much alarm as this school-chum of his came b.u.mping into his arms.

"What in the name of all that's----" he cried; "what's going on? what ails your face?" Tussmann, almost out of his mind, related all that had happened, in broken phrases; how Albertine had behaved to him--how Edmund had treated him. The Commissionsrath, brimful of rage and fury, took Tussmann by the hand and led him back to the room.

"What's all this?" he cried to Albertine. "This is very pretty behaviour; is this the way you treat your husband that is to be?"

"My husband that is to be?" echoed Albertine, in wild amazement.

"Most undoubtedly!" the Commissionsrath answered. "I don't know why you should pretend to be in a state of mind about a matter which has been understood and arranged for such a long time. My dear old friend Tussmann is your affianced husband, and the wedding will come off in a week or two."

"_Never!_" said Albertine. "Never will I marry him. Good heavens! how could anybody have _that_ old creature; n.o.body could ever bear him."

"I don't know about 'bearing' him, or whether he's an 'old creature' or not," said her father. "What you have got to do is to marry him.

Certainly my friend Tussmann is not one of your giddy young fools. Like myself, he has reached those years of discretion when a man is, very properly, considered to be at his best; and into the bargain, he is a fine, upright, straightforward, honourable fellow, most profoundly learned, perfectly eligible, in every way, and my old schoolfellow."

"No!" cried Albertine, in the utmost agitation, with the tears starting to her eyes. "I can't endure him. He's insupportable to me. I hate him!

I abhor him! Oh, Edmund!"

She sank, almost fainting, into Edmund's arms; and he pressed her to his heart with the warmest affection.

The Commissionsrath, utterly amazed, opened his eyes as wide as if he were seeing spectres, and then cried--"What's all this? what do I see?"

"Ah, yes! yes, indeed!" Tussmann said, in a lamentable tone. "It appears, unfortunately, to be the fact that Miss Albertine doesn't care to have anything to do with me, and seems to cherish a remarkable partiality for this young gentleman--this painter (whose acquaintance I have not the honour of, by the way)--inasmuch as she kisses him without the slightest hesitation or shyness, though she will scarcely give wretched _me_ her hand. And yet I hope to place the ring on her lovely finger very shortly indeed."

"Come away from one another, you two," the Commissionsrath cried out, and forced Albertine out of Edmund's arms. But Edmund shouted that he would never give her up, if it cost him his life.

"Indeed, sir!" said the Commissionsrath, with scathing irony. "Nice business, upon my word! A fine little love-affair going on behind my back here! Excessively pretty! Very nice indeed, my young Mr. Lehsen!

This is the meaning of your liberality--your cigars and your pictures.

He comes sliding into my house--leads my daughter into all this sort of thing. A charming idea, that I should go and hang her round the neck of a miserable beggar of a dauber, without a rap to bless himself with!"

Beyond himself with anger, Edmund had his mahlstick raised in the act to strike, when the voice of Leonhard was heard crying, in tones of thunder, as he burst in at the door--

"Stop, Edmund! don't be in a hurry. Bosswinkel is a terrible a.s.s; he'll think better of it presently."

The Commissionsrath had run into a corner, frightened by the unexpected arrival of Leonhard; and, from that corner, he cried--"I really do not know, Mr. Leonhard, what business you have to----"

But Tussmann had hidden himself behind the sofa as soon as he saw Leonhard come in. He was crouching down there, and chirping out, in a voice of terror--"Gracious powers! take care, Commissionsrath! Hold your tongue; don't say a word, dearest schoolfellow. Good G.o.d! here's the Herr Professor come, the Ball-Entrepreneur of Spandau Street."

"Come along out, Tussmann," said the Goldsmith, laughing; "Don't be frightened, nothing's going to happen to you. You've been punished enough already for that foolish idea you had of wanting to marry. That poor face of yours is going to be green all the rest of the days of your life."

"Oh Lord!" cried the Clerk of the Privy Chancery, almost out of his mind, "my face green for ever and ever! What will people say? What will His Excellency, the minister, say? His Excellency will think I have had my face painted green from motives of mere worldly vanity! Ah! it's all over with me. I shall be suspended from my official functions. The Government will never hear of such a thing as a Clerk of the Privy Chancery with a green face. Wretched man that I am; what's to become of me?"

"Come, come, Tussmann!" the Goldsmith said; "don't make such a fuss. I have no doubt there's hope for you yet, if you pull yourself together, and get rid of this idiotic notion of marrying Miss Bosswinkel."

In answer to this, Tussmann and Bosswinkel cried out together, in what is termed on the lyric stage "_ensemble_"--

"I can't."

"He shan't."

The Goldsmith fixed his sparkling, penetrating eyes on the two of them; but just as he was going to burst out at them, the door opened, and in came Mana.s.seh, with his nephew, Baron Benjamin Dummerl, from Vienna.

"Benjie" went straight up to Albertine--who had never seen him in her life before--and said, in a disagreeable, drawling tone, as he took her hand--

"I have come here in person, dear Miss Bosswinkel, to lay myself at your feet. Of course you know that is a mere _facon de parler_. Baron Dummerl doesn't really lay himself at anybody's feet, not even at the Emperor's. What I mean is--let me have a kiss."

So saying, he went nearer to Albertine, and bent down towards her.

But, at that moment, a something happened which neither he nor anybody else--except the Goldsmith--antic.i.p.ated, and which caused them all much alarm. Benjie's rather sizeable nose suddenly shot forward to such a length that, pa.s.sing beyond Albertine's face, it struck the opposite wall of the room with a tremendous, resounding bang. He started back a step or two, and his nose at once drew in to its ordinary dimensions.

He approached Albertine again, with exactly the same result. To make a long tale short, his nose kept on shooting in and out like a trombone.

"Cursed necromancer!" Mana.s.seh roared; and took a thin cord, fastened in a sort of knot, out of his pocket, which he threw to the Commissionsrath, crying--"Throw that about the brute's neck--the Goldsmith, I mean--and then drag him out of the room. Never mind about ceremony. Do as I tell you. All will be right then."

The Commissionsrath took hold of the noose, but instead of throwing it about the Goldsmith's neck, he threw it over the Jew's; and immediately he and the Jew began flying up to the ceiling and then down again. And so they went on, shooting up and down, while Benjie carried on his nose-concerto, and Tussmann laughed like a mad creature, till the Commissionsrath fell down nearly fainting in an arm-chair.

"Now's the time! now's the time!" Mana.s.seh cried. He slapped his pocket, and out sprung an enormous, horrible-looking mouse, which made a spring right at the Goldsmith. But as it was jumping at him, the Goldsmith transfixed it with a sharp needle of gold, upon which it gave a yell, and disappeared, none knew whither.

Then Mana.s.seh clenched his fists at the fainting Commissionsrath, and cried, with rage and hatred blazing in his face--

"Ha! Melchior Bosswinkel! thou hast conspired against me. Thou art in league with this accursed sorcerer, whom thou hast brought into thine house. But cursed, cursed shalt thou be. Thou and all thy race shall be swept away like the helpless brood of a bird. The gra.s.s shall grow on thy doorstep, and all that thou settest thy hand to shall be as the dream of the famishing, who sates himself, in dreams, with savoury food. And the D[=a]-l[ve]s shall take up his dwelling in thine house, and consume thy substance. And thou shalt beg thy bread, in rags, before the doors of the despised people of G.o.d; and they shall drive thee away like a mangy cur, and thou shalt be cast to the earth like a rotten branch. And instead of the sound of the harp, moths shall be thy fellows, and dogs shall make a divan of the tomb of thy mother!

Curses!--curses!--curses upon thee! Commissionsrath Melchior Bosswinkel!"

And, having thus delivered himself, this raging Mana.s.seh seized hold of his nephew, and went storming out of the house with him.

Albertine, in her terror and horror, had taken refuge with Edmund, hiding her face on his breast; and he held her closely to him, though he had difficulty in mastering his own emotion. But the Goldsmith went up to those two, and said, with a smile, and in a gentle voice:

"Don't you be put out in the slightest by all this business: everything will come right. I give you my word for it. But, just now, you must bid each other good-bye, before Tussmann and Bosswinkel come back to their senses."

And he and Edmund left Bosswinkel's house.