CHAPTER XXVII.
A MOONLIGHT MEETING.
Next morning found Dasipodius back in his accustomed place. Every hand was hard at work over its appointed task, and there was no evidence in that silent well-ordered hive, of the recent little revolution.
When the mathematician, having made his way to his own work-bench, had passed his unerring hand over it, he found all as he had left it—not a thing disturbed; every tool, every scrap of metal, every morsel of wire lying intact. Even the little steel coil which had come to such sudden grief, had been carefully rewound into proper compass, and placed ready to hand by Isaac Habrecht. “It is correctly adjusted, I think?” he said, as Dasipodius took it up.
“Never fear for that,” answered his chief. “There is no surer hand for these things in all Elsass than yours.”
“Saving your own.”
“You and I will not bandy compliments. Isaac,” laughed Dasipodius.
“I meant no compliment,” grunted Isaac. “Nor split hairs then,” returned the mathematician. “I was but thinking what a useful right hand you have been to me all these months, Isaac Habrecht.”
His subordinate’s stolid face kindled. Nothing ever brightened it like an approving word from the master.
“Right hands,” went on Dasipodius, “sometimes become heads.”
There was a pause; while Habrecht’s face grew impenetrable again.
“I have no talent for riddles,” he said bluntly. “I mean,” said the mathematician, “that if the good people of Strassburg should take any fancy into their heads that this blindness of mine incapacitates me for the Horologe work—”
“Tut!—nonsense!” interrupted Isaac with an impatient wag of his bushy head. “D’ye think they’re likely to quarrel with their own noses like that?”
“I don’t think it is probable,” shrugged Dasipodius, “but it’s possible. The town council—”
“Would be greater asses even than I have ever taken them for. Can’t they see for themselves what you have already done? Can’t they judge?”
“Who can tell,” said Dasipodius, with a smile of some bitterness. “But in any case they will have you to fall back upon, Habrecht; and that would be an indescribable consolation to me.”
“Then I am sorry——” blurted Isaac; then he stopped abruptly, leaving unfinished, perhaps for the only time in his life, what he had begun to say, and silently concentrated his attention on his work.
“There is something amiss with this,” he went on presently, examining with a magnifier the piece of infinitesimal chain-work he was occupied upon. “Yet it measures the right length.”
“No such thing,” said the blind man, taking it from him and rapidly passing it through his fingers; “it has a link too many,” and he took up his tool and pinched off the superfluous scrap. “Try now,” he went on, returning it to Habrecht, and bending his neck with that attentive lateral movement peculiar to the blind, while Isaac adjusted the chain round a small cylinder. “Yes,” he nodded, “it’s right enough now”; and then the two horologists subsided into silence, and for the rest of that day all went on as usual.
Whatever the other clockmakers there might have to say, was not spoken out in their chiefs presence: natural generosity constrained them to silence. They were of course cognizant of the citation which had been served on Dasipodius, and were agreed to await the verdict of those assembled to judge the question; and so the hours passed until the sickly January sunbeams faded, and the short afternoon grew sombre and grey, and the students putting up their tools, wrapped themselves in their cloaks, and bade the master good-night.
“And since, as you all know, friends,” said Dasipodius, returning the valediction, “I have a summons to attend at the Chancellery to-morrow, it must be a—a holiday.”
“A waste day, the master means,” growled Isaac.
And silent as if they were at a funeral, the young men went out.
“But the next day, master?” wistfully asked a fresh young voice at his elbow.
“That will be seen to-morrow, my Kaspar,” said Dasipodius, laying his hand kindly on the lad’s head. “By the way, tell me, have you been able to learn anything about that letter?”
It was interesting to observe with what precipitation Otto von Steinbach, who was still hanging about the studio, caught up his cap and cloak, and effected his exit at that precise moment.
“I can learn nothing. I begin to think it must have fallen on the hearth and got burnt,” said Kaspar.
“Perhaps,” said Dasipodius. “Never mind,” he added wearily. “It is of little consequence. Good-night.” Then the brothers went away, leaving Dasipodius alone.
The moon rose, and cast a chill clear chequered light through the broad lattice down on the oaken floor which Dasipodius long unceasingly paced. In wild tumult thoughts were crowding the calm judging, clear brain of this man, who could tell to a millionth part when anything was amiss with his wheels and cogs, and springs and chains—whose geometrical and algebraical knowledge made him a proverb in Strassburg; and whose precision in the minutest particular made him a very terror to his pupils. This gifted man it is who is now struggling to thread the maze of trouble closing him so suddenly in. Here all parallel, and logic, and syllogism fail him. He knows indeed, that of one bitter heart-trial, others have been born; but which of these is parent to the others, he can in no wise tell.
Now it seems his loss of sight, now his passionate love for Sabina. Certainly it is clear that had it not been for her, he would have been able to have kept his secret, until it had come to be no longer worth the keeping. It was natural for people to say, as they were saying, that they had known he was blind all along. “Why, there—you had but to use your own eyes to see that!” and so on, and so on. People, prompted no doubt by revenge for having been so long hoodwinked, always do love to talk in that way, when once a cat is irretrievably out of its bag; and it does not lessen his sense of Sabina’s blame, that he has come to be a nine days’ wonder in the place.
“And yet,” he groaned, out of his soul’s heaviness, “I could have borne it all, if you had not been false to me, child!”
Feeling his way to the casement, and throwing it wide open, he loosened the collar of his doublet, and leaned his throbbing brow against the cold stone mullion, letting the keen frosty air breathe upon his face. This window high up and deep-sunken in the massive wall, commanded a good side view of the Cathedral Platz, whose heavily-gabled house roofs all muffled in their hoods of thick white snow, seemed to be clustering like cowled Dominicans about their mighty superior, with its one fair tower reaching far above towards the myriad stars glistening in the steel-blue sky.
Conrad Dasipodius was a man for whom the simplest objects of daily life had borne a significance. It had been his nature to see “sermons in stones, and good in everything”; and could he have looked on this scene before him, with all its wedded glory of nature and of art, he must have found in it some anodyne for the gnawing pain of hope disappointed. But he could have no part now in such joys, and to him the world was a dull leaden-hued wilderness. Winter and summer, day and night, in all the years to come, the same. A dismal chaos, a dark and thorny way indeed, where love and friendship had left him in his utmost need, to blunder on alone. Love! friendship. Well, well! It was a sharp necessary lesson; one that came no doubt sooner or later to be learned by every son of Adam. Love! friendship—why, in this world there was none of it—none—none!
So in the moonlight stood Dasipodius, seeming to see with fixed steadfast gaze, the ghosts of his dead joys. A strange visionary light gleamed in his eyes, and you would rather have guessed that they penetrated strangely far into life’s mysteries, than that all earthly objects at least were utterly hidden from them.
Almost incredible it seems, that indeed he can see nothing of that tall majestic figure standing in the glow of crimson drapery curtaining the window on the first floor of old Erwin’s house opposite. Instantly after, however, all is dark, and the figure, enveloped in a long mantle, stands in the ancient doorway; then softly closing it, turns to ascertain, seemingly, if any stragglers chance to be about; but the coast is quite clear, and gliding stealthily under the shadow of the cathedral’s broad western end, and reaching the opposite side of the Platz, it hurries on up the narrow street, halting at last beneath the open turret lattice of the Dial. The illusory moonlight throws this figure into strong relief, lending it a height it does not really possess; but its peculiar undulating grace of movement and of general outline, would tell it is a woman, even though the long robe sweeping the frosty ground entirely concealed the night wanderer’s form.
Laying her hand, glittering with costly jewels, upon the latch of the turret door, she lifts her eyes to the window above, and in a voice low and singularly sweet, calls the mathematician by his name.
“Ay!” he said, starting from his prolonged reverie. “Who is there? That is your voice, Mistress von Steinbach?”
“Yes,” replied the artist. “I have a word to say to you—about the Horologe.”
“I will come down,” he said, beginning to close the lattice.
“It will be better that I should come up,” she said, pushing the door further ajar, and setting one foot inside the threshold.
“No. By your leave I think not,” answered he, and before she could say more, he was descending the stair. “We can pace the Platz together,” he said, as he reached the foot; “there is little fear of our being disturbed. Our good neighbours seem to love their firesides better than to be out in this biting cold.”
“Yes, because they are all such dull fools,” she answered contemptuously.
“That is a sweeping assertion,” smiled he.
“You will find it is a true one—to-morrow,” she retorted.
“You had something to say about the Horologe?” he said, waiving away her last remark.
“Why, yes,” she replied. “You will of course carry on the work in spite of these men?”
“That is jumping at conclusions, as I could not have conceived—pardon me, Mistress von Steinbach—conceived of you, who have something beyond an ordinary woman’s mind.”
“But less than an ordinary woman’s heart, as you always seem to think,” she interrupted in bitterly impetuous tones.
“Indeed no,” he said. “I know the contrary too well to say any such thing. I wonder who could count the sick and poor of our great city, who bless the charity of Radegund von Steinbach.”
“Psha! what is that?” answered she. “I should be a skinflint indeed not to share a few of my gold pieces so. Does a woman’s love end where her charity does, think you?”
“Nay,” replied he, thus challenged. “You must not ask me. I cannot guess what woman’s love may be like. Once I thought—— But let that be, I was mistaken.”
“And did you indeed believe that was love?” she asked. “The foolish dallying of that pretty child? To think,” and she laughed mockingly, “how easily you clever men are deceived! And now—positively you are annoyed, as miserable almost as a child whose fragile toy is broken!”
“You know, then, that Sabina has been false?”
“I heard that—the bond between you had snapped,” she said. “I did not dream that you could regret it as you seem to do.”
And to give her her fair meed of justice, she spoke no more than the truth, as she saw it. “I say I did not dream you could regret her,” she reiterated, for he made no reply.
“Regrets are useless,” he said; “but it is a cruel thing for a woman to play a man false. Take warning from it, Mistress Radegund.”
“Nay, I would stake my soul for him I loved,” she murmured.
“That would be good hearing for——” Dasipodius paused.
“For whom?” she demanded hurriedly. “Say then.”
“For Bruno Wolkenberg,” said Dasipodius with a faint smile.
An angry spasm contracted her face. “Bruno Wolkenberg!” she echoed scornfully. “When will Strassburg learn to unlink our names?”
“Never, I trust,” he answered, “for Bruno loves you, Mistress Radegund, as I——”
“As you?——”
“As men seldom love.”
“Dr. Bruno Wolkenberg and I are good friends. How many a time have I not said so? But nearer—and dearer? No, that we can never be. He does not expect—he does not wish it,” she added, with an effort at unconcern.
“Ay, but he does, and you know it,” said Dasipodius.
“As soon might these snow crystals beneath our feet strive to rival the glory of yonder stars, as Bruno Wolkenberg seek to link his lot with mine,” she answered haughtily.
“Can it be true then, as some declare, that your heart does not know what affection means?” demanded Dasipodius, driven on his friend’s behalf, out of his usual reticence. “Nay, but you are not the woman I took you for,” and he turned on his heel.
“No indeed, there you speak truly, Conrad Dasipodius. You do not know—you cannot guess at the thoughts that are in my heart. Love Bruno Wolkenberg! Who dares say it? Poor Bruno, with his pretty golden curls, and his face, that I have heard languishing girls call ‘divine’! Oh, they are very welcome. To my soul, his beauty speaks not, conjures no bright dreams, kindles in it no fire. When has my heart ever throbbed one pulse the quicker because he came near——”
“Radegund!” interposed the mathematician.
“When has it ever seemed to me,” she hurried on passionately, “that to look once more—just once more upon him, I would have freely bartered all eternity’s promised joys? Has it been his face I have striven to picture to myself through the long dark night hours, until sleeping at last, I have dreamed that he has clasped me in his arms and said: ‘I love thee, Radegund’? No, no, and yet for one—for one I have done this, Conrad Dasipodius—I take no shame to myself that I have done it. But it was all a dream—a dream!” she murmured, drawing closer to the blind man’s side, until he felt her warm breath mingling with his.
“My heart bleeds for Bruno Wolkenberg,” he said, receding a step.
“Was it so,” she went on, affecting not to hear, “that Sabina loved you, Master Dasipodius?”
“Sabina is not free of speech,” he coldly answered.
“Ay—no,” she returned scornfully. “Always discretion itself is my little cousin. Charmingly discreet; but is it these models of maidenhood, think you, who will stand by a man when things go wrong with him, or your bold, unscrupulous women—such for instance as I——”
“Nay, but I would think you neither bold nor unscrupulous,” he contended.
“She has done well for herself. Very well,” continued Radegund. “She foresaw, this clever little girl, that the world might be about to deal hardly with you, Conrad Dasipodius.”
“To think,” said the mathematician sadly, “that Bruno should have so utterly betrayed me. Bruno!”
“Is it then so strange,” she asked, “that this fair lily—this syren, should have dragged Bruno Wolkenberg into her toils, when they have lured wiser men than he before now?”