CHAPTER XXX.
A CAUSE CÉLÈBRE.
Never was such a curious trial—for if it was not to be called a trial, what was it to be called?—as this of the Professor Conrad Dasipodius; and not one of the pundits of the city felt that he cared to pronounce any foregone conclusions upon the case, because the head and front of the mathematician’s offending had not the shadow of a parallel in Strassburg’s archives; nor as far as curious enquirers could ascertain, in any other records ancient or modern; and even the Decalogue itself had provided no code against such an emergency.
Certainly the question was a most delicate one; and preliminary formalities must, so the wisest heads counselled, be conducted with the utmost discretion, and all appearance of coercion carefully avoided. Hitherto, it could only be generally conceded the Professor Dasipodius had borne a high, not to say most exalted reputation for probity and integrity; and his word of honour that he would appear to speak for himself must be accepted. In other words, he was not as yet manacled and ironed and dieted in a dungeon. This was held by Strassburg generally to be a mistake; and when standing agape at their shop doors, and hanging about the streets between old Christian’s house and the Chancellery, the people saw Dasipodius pass serene and composed through their midst, without so much as a halberdier at his back, they were sorely disappointed and put about.
“But just wait,” they said more cheerfully, “till he comes out again. He’ll sing another sort of tune then.”
“Maybe,” said Prudentius the sacristan, who leaving the Cathedral to take care of itself, had come out to see the fun; “but for my part, I’d liefer it had been the painting woman.”
“What?” said a bystander. “Mistress von Steinbach do you mean?”
Prudentius nodded.
“And what has she to do with it?”
“What hasn’t she? I’ll swear,” grumbled the sacristan, “they’ve got the wrong pig by the ear somehow.”
“And I’ll swear you’re turned idiot,” contended the other. “Aren’t they going to try this fellow because he’s the devil’s own cousin?”
“Oh, ho!” laughed Prudentius, “and what then may be your opinion of her?”
“Have a care how your tongue wags, you popish bald pate! or you shall have a taste of what this can do,” retorted Radegund’s champion, baring a brawny arm.
Having first wedged his stout person between the wall and the broad back of a spectator double his own height, the sacristan found himself in a position to reply that he never wasted breath on heretics; but finding his point of view worse than disadvantageous, he clambered on to the edge of the stone fountain, and there maintained his equilibrium by clinging with both arms round the neck of a marble Hebe, whose contrasted slender figure with his portly outlines, excited the crowd beneath him to a hailstorm of delicate badinage. Prudentius was not, however, easily discomfited, he was used to heretics and triflers, and could at anyrate afford to laugh at them; for none could see the show as well as he could, and he so dearly loved a show. The merest flash of a scarlet surcoat, or the faintest tweak of a horn, would charm the lay brother to the street corner, long before men and women of the world had even a notion that anything unusual was going on, and this morning promised a treat indeed. Professor Dasipodius’ case had become such a nine days’ wonder, as had not been heard of for miles round, time out of mind; and from a comparatively private piece of business, was grown into a question concerning which every citizen and citizeness from highest to lowest, recognised as a manifest duty to say all that chanced to enter their heads; and further, seeing that the Horologe was public property, they claimed a right to assist at the enquiry, hinting that if there should be closed doors on the occasion, the Town Council should hear about it afterwards. It had been therefore finally arranged that the great Justice Hall of the Chancellery should be the scene of the proceedings; and as mere work-a-day gowns and doublets would have been gratuitous insult to that awesome chamber, all the syndics and civic dignitaries wore their ceremonial garb, and presented an imposing picture as they filed in order due to their places.
Love of pomp and circumstance is inherent in the human heart, and let levellers strive to crush it as they may, will crop through; and although a large majority of the Strassburgers had discarded from their religious observances every iota of ornament and ceremonial, until their conventicles had become very valleys of bareness and dry bones, they were as eager as ever to feast their senses with a piece of colour, or a strain of music, even though such things were but heralding a rebel to the block, or some wretched thief to be broken on the wheel.
And such with its difference was the question now at issue. On that particular morning, justly or unjustly, there was a man to be worried, and Strassburg meant to make holiday; but whether it was to be a real red-letter day seemed questionable, because many were of opinion that not by any stretch of logic or sophistry, could the mathematician’s affliction be construed into a crime. Others, however, maintained that never was deeper-dyed criminal than he, and compared with him murderers or high treasoners were pure as the driven snow; for what doubt could there be but that the man, thwarted by this visitation of Heaven’s wrath upon him in his ambition to be the maker of their Horologe, had, rather than relinquish the work, invoked the devil and all his angels to finish it for him; and for those who defended him, what were they but aiders and abettors of his fearful crime? And so as the mathematician passed, the crowd pressed heavily after him, until to save him from being crushed, a guard was sent from the Chancellery for his safe conduct.
That was as it should be, and the mob beside itself with excitement and anticipation, pushed on, its vanguard squeezing into the vast council chamber, till the place was too densely packed for a pin to fall to the floor; while those whom ill luck had left in the rear, were forced to swarm outside in the raw morning mist, where they strove their best to keep from utterly congealing, by saluting the respective popular or unpopular representatives of their civic rights, with cheers and howls as the case might be. And as political opinion was just then very far from unanimous, the demonstrations became once or twice so uproarious, that some of the chief agitators found themselves spending the rest of the day in the guard-house cells, with ample leisure for reflecting whether they had not been better doing a good day’s work at home, and leaving the Horologe and its maker to settle their own affairs.
By the time the last official attendant at the proceedings had passed in, a heavy snowstorm fell on the vast gathering, beneath which it subsided in stolid silence, to indulge in the unsatisfactory pastime of speculating how those enviable persons who had got themselves a footing inside might be finding their reward for all the shoving and toe crushing they had endured.
This for some half hour or so was undoubtedly meagre; for save and excepting the dignitaries on the raised platform in their scarlet and gold bravery, which, though immensely imposing, was a sight as old as the hills, and the place’s architectural adornments, which for a couple of batzen they could, if they wanted, see comfortably any day of the week, there was nothing particularly amusing in the proceedings. There, indeed, was the Professor Dasipodius—but not, as everybody had anticipated, and Syndic Hackernagel had been distinctly heard to say would be the case, behind the bar where felons were always tried, but positively accommodated with a seat, and looking neither bowed with shame nor haughtily defiant, but much the same as he looked always,—perfectly calm and self-collected. To aggravate the prevailing disappointment and annoyance, his eyelids were not even closed; and a tremor chilled to the very marrow of the spectators, lest after all the whole affair should be a hoax.
It was simply impossible to suppose those eyes could not see. Rumour, it is true, had declared them to be wide open like a cat’s in the dark, but they had conceived that to be such a mere three black crow story, that it had not been credited for an instant by the thinking part of the community. Such sort of tales everyone had heard before—from their grandmothers, but hitherto no such instance of blind eyes, wide open, clear and lustrous, unusually lustrous, had come under their notice, and why should it occur now? And in short, with your common-sense, practical people, only seeing can be believing—and all they could say was, that if the case were actually as asserted, there must be something quite wrong at the bottom of it all; and with a thankful feeling that everything had come to light, they set about lending their earnest attention to the proceedings, which after a few preliminary formalities, virtually opened with the summoning of the informer against Conrad Dasipodius.
This person was not mentioned by name, and for the two or three intervening seconds the mathematician’s face was seen to grow deadly pale. A terrible suspicion had been forcing itself upon him. Was it—could it be possible that—no. Thank Heaven—no. Such bitterness at least was spared him, and the voice which answered to the summons was a man’s—the voice of Otto von Steinbach.
Otto looked discomposed and flushed, and his eyes kept glancing uneasily from the solemn circle before him, towards a woman in the crowded court, for whom everybody had made way; but of whose face, so closely concealed by a black hood, only an occasional flash of dark eyes could be seen.
“Now, tell us how you came by your information?” said the Burgomaster, sternly addressing his nephew. “Through some letter, I believe you said.”
“Y—yes,” answered Otto, shifting his eyes for an instant from Niklaus’ face, to seek those of the woman. “The letter I was charged to deliver to Master Dasipodius.”
“Charged by whom?”
“By my sister,” he mutteringly replied.
“Speak out,” shouted the town clerk, who was a little hard of hearing, or said he was.
“By my sister,” reiterated Otto, with a start.
“Did she write that letter?”
“That letter—yes—I mean no—it was from Mistress Sabina——”
“Gentlemen! gentlemen!” interposed the Burgomaster, whose face looked terribly harassed and aged. “This is not a formal trial. We know without any bush-beating that Master Dasipodius is blind. More’s the pity. Surely there’s no need to——”
“Produce that letter,” said Syndic Hackernagel, turning to Dasipodius.
“I cannot,” he replied.
“Cannot!” mockingly echoed the Syndic.
“These hands never touched it,” continued Dasipodius, “and these eyes, as you know, never saw it.”
“Then where is the letter?” demanded the Burgomaster, looking round, and finally letting his eyes rest on Otto. “Who has it?”
“How—how should I know?” stammered the young man, with changing colour, and his eyes again straying helplessly to the dark ones under the hood, as if his senses belonged to the woman who stood there, rather than to himself. “How should I know, I—I——”
“Be careful, sir, how you speak.”
“I am being—I—what could I have to do with it—af—after I gave it up?”
“Into whose hands?”
“Into Kaspar Habrecht’s,” he added in pathetically innocent tones, “as I was bidden.”
“By whom?”
“By Master Dasipodius himself to be sure. He never does lose a chance of favouring that boy, I can tell you, and——”
“Go down. Let Kaspar Habrecht be called.”
And then Kaspar told his simple story of how Dasipodius bade him read the letter aloud, and how he obeyed, “until”—and then the boy paused and coloured. “Go on,” prompted Tobias. “Until,” went on Kaspar, “I began to see that it was meant for my master’s ears alone, and——”
“Why?” interrupted the Syndic.
“Let the boy finish his story, Master Hackernagel,” said the Burgomaster.
“And I suppose I stopped short; and then Otto von Steinbach snatched it from me, and went on with it himself.”
“So that it was Otto von Steinbach who finished the reading of the letter?” said the Burgomaster.
“By all the saints, that I did not,” said Otto, glaring at Kaspar, “and if you say I did——”
“I do not say so, Otto von Steinbach,” answered the boy. “No one finished it, you know quite well.”
“Was it, then, never read to the end?” enquired Niklaus.
“Not to my knowledge,” replied Kaspar. “I left the studio with my master after his accident, and when, at his bidding, I returned for the letter, it was nowhere to be found.”
“But where the deuce—ahem—where could it have got to?” said Niklaus.
“Where the deuce indeed?” sympathetically murmured the crowd.
“Some one must have that letter?” queried Syndic Tobias looking round.
“Ask the witches!” said a mocking voice.
“Yes—that’s just it,” said Otto, “there is no dealing, is there, with a fellow who has doings with—with——”
“Doctor Bruno Wolkenberg!”
And Bruno came forward, his blue eyes sad, and his broad frank brow furrowed with anxious lines. He replied mechanically, almost absently, to the first few general questions put to him, but on being asked if he were a friend of the mathematician’s, his face brightened, and he animatedly answered “Yes”.
“And Master Dasipodius has sought your surgical aid for his blindness?”
“Yes.”
“It has been beyond your skill, Doctor Wolkenberg?” questioned Niklaus slowly.
“Yes,” sighed the surgeon.
“You believe him then to be stone blind?” asked Tobias Hackernagel, staring hard at Dasipodius.
“Assuredly, yes. I know him to be so,” said Bruno, flushing petulantly. “Has he not himself said it?”
“And what is your opinion, Surgeon Wolkenberg,” enquired Syndic Hackernagel in his best manner, “of a man who does such work as that of the Horologe, without the assistance of his natural vision?”
“That he is very clever,” answered Bruno, backing to make way for the next witness, Isaac Habrecht.
“Do you consider,” went on Tobias, “do you consider, Isaac Habrecht, that Master Dasipodius is competent for the work he has undertaken?”
“Yes,” nodded Isaac, with an emphasis betokening that a more superfluous question could not well be propounded.
“Do you consider that it might be placed in better hands?”
Isaac gazed round him as if he did not thoroughly understand.
“Your own, for instance,” blandly insinuated Tobias.
“Mine?” gruffly ejaculated Isaac.
“I am told, my friend, that you are an excellent workman.”
“Yes—I am a good workman.”
“None better?” sweetly smiled Tobias.
“That may be so,” nodded Isaac.
“And if—it should be decided to transfer the completion of the Horologe to your hands——”
“You may decide till doomsday, the whole pack of you, but I take no decisions excepting from my master, Conrad Dasipodius,” said Habrecht; then he leisurely turned his broad shoulders on the august convention, and mixed with the crowd again.
Otto von Steinbach being now again called to the fore, the query already put to Bruno Wolkenberg was propounded to him: “What do you think of a man who can work without being able to see?”
“Oh, you know,” said Otto, “it’s such nonsense.”
“What is?” gravely asked Niklaus.
“Why—whoever supposes he does?”
“Suppose! jackanapes,” thundered the Burgomaster, “are not the proofs all before us that he does?”
“Oh! but it is so absurd though,” insisted Otto; “why, I couldn’t do it myself. Such a thing was never heard of since the world began—by lawful means, you know.”
“You believe,” began Syndic Hackernagel in impressive tones, “that supernatural aid——”
“I’m sure of it,” nodded Otto.
“And the form assumed by such aids?”
“Well, I only know that Mother Barepenny’s black cat——”
“What the foul fiend——” interrupted the Burgomaster.
“Yes, exactly,” said Otto, plucking courage in the light of Syndic Hackernagel’s smiling countenance turned full upon him; “Dasipodius gives Mother Barepenny money—gold. I’ve seen him do it myself, many a time,” and Otto glanced round triumphantly.
“Is this true?” asked Hackernagel in sepulchral tones of Dasipodius, who assented with the suspicion of a smile curving the grave lips.
“This is indeed a fearful accusation,” continued the Syndic. “And your ostensible purpose in going to Mother Barepenny’s has been—?”
“Because those who should look after the poor seem invariably to forget to go to her,” answered Dasipodius. “Mother Barepenny has been very near dying of cold and starvation.”
“Mother Barepenny,” said a fat voice from the scarlet and gold and fur, “is a god-forsaken old woman.”
“At least a friend-forsaken one, gentlemen,” said the mathematician.
“Friend-forsaken!” croaked Hackernagel; “friend, forsooth! Why, she may thank Heaven she has not been burned for a witch ages ago! And you imperil your name for such a hag as this! Oh! no, no. That is too much! a head like yours, which perfectly well knows how to put two and two together! No. Have a care, Professor Dasipodius! have a care. We are getting on dangerous ground—very dangerous ground indeed,” and the countenance of Tobias Hackernagel waxed radiant. “And danger,” he went on addressing his compeers, “which I think, gentlemen, you will all agree with me, is not lessened by the additional facts I find here,” and Hackernagel opened his tablets. “Master Dasipodius, I have reason to believe, has in his possession several printed volumes, very curious books. I assume you will not deny this fact?” he enquired of the blind man.
“Indeed, no,” answered Dasipodius, a ray of proud content overspreading his face, “they are very rare and precious.”
“You see!” cried Tobias, pitching his voice to a high triumph key. “He is proud of it, absolutely proud. And these,” he added, dropping his voice to a groan, as he referred again to his tablets, “these are the books he glories in: Copernicus—Terrestrial Rotation. I think you will agree with me that the less we say about that the better.”
“Well, I don’t know,” speculatively began Counsellor Klausewitz. “I don’t know——”
“You do not, Master Klausewitz,” snapped Tobias; “none of us do. I trust we never shall—meddle with such things.”
“A History of the Gnostic Sect,” continued Hackernagel, referring again to his list.
“Now, that’s the first I’ve heard of it!” remarked a meditative voice. “Does it believe, I wonder, in Justification by——”
“Donnerwetter!” ejaculated the Syndic, surprised into an expletive, “these interruptions are unseemly.”
“Order!” cried the town clerk.
“Master Coverdale’s Bible,” read on Tobias, “and the only book on my list to the soul’s edification, excepting a manuscript book of the Gospels, whose popish pictures and gaudy colouring, however, completely nullify the grains of truth it may contain—hem, hem. And here: Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools.”
A deep pleasurable murmur greeted this mention of the popular favourite.
“Quite so, good people—yes, yes,” assented Tobias, a little haltingly. “Quite right and proper of you all. Master Brandt’s work is clever, undoubtedly so; but shall we make idols unto ourselves? I cannot conceal from myself that for a scholar and an intellectual person to devote his powers to mere ethical teaching is a soul-ensnaring thing. When shall we grasp the precious truth that not our mode of self-conduct in this world is of any moment? It is the saving of our souls which is the one concern. What does it matter what we happen to do here below. Is this wicked world our resting-place? No, I must confess, I myself regard Master Brandt’s work as a monument of misdirected intellectual power. And,” continued the logical Tobias, “what is intellectual power? A dry stick—a puff of wind—a bubble—a—nothing. And this wit and humour you prize so curiously highly in him—what is it? nothing. I can’t even see it myself,” went on the Syndic, fillipping his podgy fingers among the leaves, “though I assume Master Dasipodius apprehends something in this passage, for these lines I find doubly underscored: Another fool is he who judges of hidden and mysterious things, such as God the Lord is alone able to judge. Hidden and mysterious things, and underscored! That looks suspicious, friends. You cannot deny that looks as if it signified something more than meets the eye—a blind man’s eye!” and the Syndic’s shoulders touched his ear tips. “And here again:
The old exploded, popery-sated doctrine of works! Can a heart be regenerate and applaud such sentiments. Oh! lamentable! lamentable! Estimate for yourselves, my good friends, the frame of mind a man must be in who singles out such a passage as this! But it speaks for itself—let me pass on. The History of Reynard the Fox. Oh yes,” assented Tobias, as another loud cheer rang through the hall, “a well-aimed shaft, an excellently well-aimed shaft at the craft and cunning of popish rule, but——”
“But a knife that might cut two ways, if pure protestantism slipped into the throne; we’ll take it as said, Syndic,” interrupted Burgomaster von Steinbach.
“I said no such thing, Burgomaster; I protest against words being put into my mouth. I hope it is unnecessary. I was simply about to observe that this grotesque, fable acquires an unpleasant significance when we consider——”
“It’ll be growing dark soon, Master Hackernagel,” urged the voice of Councillor Klausewitz. “Will it please you to return to the point?”
“When I see how I have departed from it, Master Job, I’ll thank you for your interruption,” snarled the Syndic, casting a withering glance at his yawning civic brother. “The last volume on our list is, I find, intituled Prometheus Vinctus, set down in Greek characters by a certain heathen person, of whom I make more than doubt you have never heard.” Syndic Tobias had himself first made its acquaintance on the previous day, when, having laid violent hands on it, he surreptitiously conveyed it to a pedagogue neighbour, for coaching up concerning its drift. “We live, my friends, in an enlightened age,” continued Tobias, “and I fail to perceive what we, with our Christian privileges, our sermons, our exhortations, our discourses, our—and the rest of it, to be brief, what, I repeat—what motive—I would say, should move our having recourse to pagan productions, is beyond my conception. Although metaphorically, and in fact physically, I shrink from touching this book, which is a stage play, with a pair of tongs,” he went on, suiting the action of his fingers to marvellous imitations of those implements, “I have in the public interest made it my business to look into it; and I am told”—— a slight momentary huskiness impeded his utterance, “I perceive, of course, that underlying its rounded and incontestably elegant—h’m—hexameters, is a signification which—ahem—which—which——”
“For the dear Heaven’s sake!” cried Niklaus, “we’ll believe you. We take it for said, man.”
“Very good—it shall be so,” briskly assented Tobias, “since you desire it, Burgomaster; and I pass on to the last of my list: Johannes Calvinus on Predestination. Here we have a work,” went on the Syndic, whose accents came pipingly and weak out of the deafening thunder of applause and yells which the name evoked, “a work to be used, or abused, as its student may have put on the new man, or be still of the earth, earthy. Predestination is—now, Professor Dasipodius, let us hear,” continued Tobias, turning on the mathematician with folded arms, and closing his eyes, “do you believe in Predestination? Come, a plain simple answer to a plain simple question.”
“If Heaven be pleased to handle our fate for us as some of our fellow-men do, Master Tobias,” replied Dasipodius, “a man, it seems to me, can have no free will. I fancied until to-day that a person’s house, and what it might contain, were his own.”
“Oh, certainly,” acquiesced Tobias. “That is a rule which works fairly well for normal and properly regulated minds; but when a man, or a woman,—yes, I do not hesitate to assert as my conviction, that it equally applies to women, in those cases, happily so rare, where the female nature—h’m—h’m—forgets itself, and develops the faintest spark of what the world calls genius, there is a prevailing sense in those who look on, that it is as well”—and Tobias significantly laid the extreme tip of his forefinger on his smooth little forehead—“as well to keep an eye on them. I ask any ordinary person if this is not the case?” he asked appealing to his hearers, but the chorus of assent fell feebly. “The case before us amply substantiates my theory,” he continued. “The knowledge of good and evil, as the merest babe is aware, wisdom or knowledge, knowledge or wisdom—convertible or synonymous terms—of good and evil, I say, was the ruin of our first parents. Friends and fellow-citizens, may we all be preserved from too much wisdom!”
“Amen!” murmured the Town Council.
“Together, and side by side with these printed volumes, I have now to add, have been found in the Professor Dasipodius’ study, sheet upon sheet of paper and of parchment, closely covered with every conceivable and inconceivable geometrical shape. I suppose it is not possible to utter that word in disentanglement of its connection with astrological and other unlawful and occult sciences. The attached network of signs and figures is also bewildering to a degree; and ABC intrudes at every available corner. Now, Burgomaster and gentlemen, I presume we all know what ABC means.”
“Tut!” said Niklaus, “let’s hope so. I suppose knowledge——”
“Precisely,” nodded Tobias. “Knowledge—there is my argument. Inasmuch as I have proved, satisfactorily I trust, that knowledge in the best hands, our own for example, gentlemen, even a little of it, is a dangerous thing, what can—what CAN be predicated of that sort of knowledge which a blind man possesses? What, I ask, in such hands, can ABC signify, but abracadabra?”