The sickness undermined itself. Gaspard remained without sympathy for himself; only his affairs, not his end, troubled him. He held private interviews with his step-father Lauria, by way of impressing the finishing black seal of justice on his life. An express must stand in readiness to fly, the moment after his death, with a letter to Linda; his son must himself break one open, and deliver a sealed one to the Princess. Very harshly and imperiously did he demean himself toward the son, when he demanded of him an oath, immediately after his death, to travel off to Pestitz; for when Albano, who so longed to see Naples, and upon whom all these conditions, presupposing his father's death, fell hard, hesitatingly declined, Gaspard said, "That is so really human and common, to bewail the pains of others immoderately, and sympathize with them sincerely, and yet ungraciously to sharpen them so soon as the smallest thing must be done." Albano gave his word and oath, and never let himself be seen by his father again, when he wept out of a child's love. Unexpectedly there presented himself before this sickbed Gaspard's nearest and earliest kinsman, his brother. Albano stood by when the strange being came up and spake to the mortally sick man, and turned two stiff, glassy eyes, which looked as if they had been set in, quite away from him with whom he spake,--so fantastic, and yet full of the cold world toward his dying brother,--with loosely hanging face-skin upon significant face-bones,--a gray were-wolf on his hind legs, just charmed out of the beastly hide into the human skin,--like the destroying angel, a destroying man, and yet without passion. It stretched out toward Albano its long hand, but he, repelled by something unnamable, could not grasp it. This brother said he had come from Pestitz,--handed over two letters from there, one to Gaspard, one for the Princess,--and began to say something about his travels, which seemed uncommonly acute, fantastical, learned, incredible, and oft really unintelligible. Once Albano said, "That is a downright impossibility." He began the narration again, made it still more incredible, and insisted it was actually so. Thereupon he went away, to Greece, as he said, and took the coolest leave imaginable of his dying brother. Gaspard now said to Albano, "I should like to have you, after my death, rightly estimate this strangeling, if he ever comes near you, or rather avoid him altogether, as he never says a true word, and that from a pure and disinterested delight in pure lies; still more," he continued, "shun the deep, deadly scorpion-sting of Bouverot, as well as his cheating hand at play." Albano was surprised at the aspect of this speech (agreeably so at its moral sharpness), for he had hitherto imagined that he found in his father quite other sentiments regarding Bouverot.