CHAPTER XXXIV.
“INTER ALIA.”
On hearing that the Horologe designs had been safely deposited at the Chancellery, Syndic Hackernagel took to himself no small credit for the satisfactory issue to which he had conducted the whole affair; and as he reflected how entirely Otto von Steinbach was beholden to him, his green eyes gleamed with triumph.
All the same, he was puzzled by his easy conquest.
“It is of course entirely gratifying,” as he passingly observed to Councillor Job Klausewitz. “I myself had an impression that the man would have made more difficulty about it. However,” he loftily added, “I must own that it shows his sense.”
And Job, who had caught a bad cold in his head on the trial day, and done nothing but sneeze ever since, said he thought it did; and that the Professor Dasipodius must be uncommonly glad at finding himself quit of the whole business.
The Syndic’s exultations fell considerably, however, when he found that both the Habrechts had resigned their posts. While he shrank from owning it even to himself, he had uncomfortable misgivings as to Otto’s scientific capabilities; and in the event of any deficiencies becoming inconveniently conspicuous, he had counted on Habrecht for glossing them over.
His vexation applied almost equally to Kaspar, who, stripling though he was, no older craftsman in all the city could replace. Any forlorn hope, however, Hackernagel had entertained, that the two brothers might be compelled to work on at the studio by the terms of their indentures, was annihilated when he consulted these; and the desperate final attempt he made to induce the two to remain, met with stout refusal.
To Niklaus von Steinbach the result of that day’s work at the Chancellery had been very grievous. He felt that under a guise of friendly delicacy a crying injustice had been done Dasipodius; and yet he did not feel that he had had the power to avert it. He had hoped and believed that calm discussion of facts would have put an end to the absurd rumours and ignorant scandal concerning the mathematician’s infirmity, and have done him the service of raising him still higher in public esteem; but there had been no discussion, only the empty pipings of a bigoted enthusiast, and Niklaus sorely repented of the manner in which he had permitted the whole affair to be conducted; and yet he feared still more to retrace the false steps, lest Dasipodius should be exposed to even worse than he was already enduring. Niklaus, after his lights, was a clever, even shrewd man, but he was not equal to grappling with, and trampling down the hydra-headed superstition and ignorance surging around him. It was no empty bugbear which Hackernagel held aloft, when he hinted at fire and stake as the reward of men who dealt in matters of which the ruck of that generation had no conception, and consequently no toleration. Had his relations towards the mathematician been less intimate and kindly disposed than they were, it seemed to him he might have been able to have spoken out on his behalf more freely, and found better eloquence for refuting Hackernagel’s absurd sophisms. That the Syndic’s mode of attack had been thoroughly unworthy of the position he occupied, it did not need half of the Burgomaster’s perception to see; but the people’s ignorant infatuation for this man had shown itself more than once before now, and if the demagogue chose to say black was white, they infinitely preferred saying so too, rather than use their prescriptive right of thinking out a question for themselves. There was nothing they appeared more to enjoy than letting Syndic Hackernagel lead them by the nose.
Had this all happened a year earlier, Niklaus felt that he might have said out all that came uppermost in his mind concerning Dasipodius, and done him real service thereby; but with that knowledge of his character which a closer intercourse with him had brought, the Burgomaster knew himself to be under the influence which the mathematician seemed to exercise upon all who had to do with him. If ever for prudential motives he had striven to withstand this influence, he had capitulated long since, and been constrained besides, not even to refuse him his treasure of treasures, his one ewe lamb, his Lily; and yet more than this, since when he learned the affliction which had befallen Dasipodius, although he certainly strove, to persuade himself that Heaven had been very merciful in averting such a marriage, he failed miserably, and soon gave up vexing himself with the fiction that he was glad.
Had he been told in the past years that he would have been content to see his child the wife of a blind man, and one even by comparison with his own worldly state, a poor blind man, he would have indignantly spurned the monstrous notion; but the Burgomaster bowed to facts, and now his warm generous heart only yearned to bring back the roses to Sabina’s cheeks, and to shield Dasipodius from the storm which was buffeting him.
And he knew not how to do it. However iniquitously party spirit might have influenced the public voice to pronounce against Dasipodius, he had still been set aside by a process which in itself was at least fair; and as for Sabina, she maintained such a complete, almost stern silence touching the sudden disruption between herself and her lover, that Niklaus felt like one with his hands tied, and could only be a sad and anxious spectator. It was true he had his suspicions that his niece Radegund knew something of the real state of affairs, and he once went the length of speaking a word with her about these troubles vexing and perplexing to him; but Radegund so fiercely demanded of him if he thought her the mathematician’s keeper, that Niklaus shrank into his shell, and only said: “Well, well, niece, the poor child is troubled; and I fancied that a woman, and such a clever woman too as you are, might have been able to do what a stupid old father only blunders over; and I thought as you and the Professor Dasipodius are such good friends——”
“We are not—friends,” interrupted she.
“Oh!” returned Niklaus, scrutinizing her gloomy face from under his bushy brows. “It looked like it anyhow.”
“Do you mean to insinuate——”
“No,” returned he acridly. “That’s not my way—insinuating.” Then he added rather more hesitatingly: “It is merely that I have twice come upon you, niece, and the Professor Dasipodius in close confabulation together after dark; and that sort of thing always seems—friendly.”
“Things are not always what they seem.”
“Ah, well,” said Niklaus in rather hurried tones, for he stood in dread of Radegund’s oracular moods, “if you could have righted things for my poor little woman, I know you would, niece. So we’ll say no more about it.”
And Niklaus was right. If his child’s troubles had been of any other nature under the sun, there was not woman living who would have gone to her, and soothed, and striven to comfort, and lain aside her own pleasures for her sake. For pain and poverty, and every sort of wretchedness, mental or physical, humanity knows, Radegund had boundless sympathy, and of that sterling sort which spends itself in endeavouring to alleviate the misery it looks upon; but the waves of that swift and troublous current to which she had abandoned herself, hissed and howled their evil music in her ears too deafeningly for her to catch aught beyond the faintest echo of those angel voices beseeching her to return; and the sternest Calvinist in all Alsace could not more calmly have yielded to Destiny’s decree, than did she to the sway of her passionate worship of Dasipodius. It numbed down like an opiate all her generosity and her high sense of honour. Yet dead these were not; and many and many a time wakening from their uneasy sleep, they stirred her to a different course; but fiercely hushing them to quiescence, she abided with sphinx-like impenetrability on her beautiful face and awful outward calmness, the solving of the riddle she had propounded for herself and for those she loved.
Even when rumour said the Professor Dasipodius was about to leave Strassburg, she betrayed no shadow of interest in his goings or comings; but silently and unflaggingly continued to pursue her own share at the Horologe work, and this to her brother Otto’s unspeakable relief. He had dreaded as an almost inevitable outcome of the new order of affairs, that Radegund would throw up her contract, and make things generally unpleasant; but his terrors proved groundless, and it was a comfort to him beyond power of words, to mark how she seemed to be throwing all her energies into superintending the fixing of two of the completed panels into the cornice of the clock. To be sure, the outside of the Horologe was going on promisingly indeed!
And truly time was not to be lost now. The last winter snows had melted, and among the little ones of the old city a whisper had gone forth that if you looked very carefully indeed along by the river banks, out there beyond the walls, you would find a few tiny violets; and bolder spirits, though they of course were “Sunday children,” who always know pleasant things before others, declared that Cuckoo had begun to hint his agreeable intelligence. This must certainly have been true, because on the very next sunny morning, before a creature was up, the primroses peeped out, and rather in a fluster at having been so long caught napping by the quiet violets and the fresh young grass blades, hastily shook out their golden stars, for the saucy little yellow things do so love to have the best freshness of the dark purple foil of their modest sisters, declaring that without it their beauty is not seen to anything like the same advantage; though at this indirect compliment of course the violets can afford to smile in their gentle way, and say: “Foil, forsooth; well, well, they are dear merry little things, the primroses, let them chatter as they like!” But ere long spring must ripen into summer, and later summer was to give Strassburg its new Horologe. Under Dasipodius’ untiring supervision, there had been little fear that its nearly completed mechanism would have been ready even some weeks before Saint Laurence’s day. But the master’s hand was stayed now, and his successor stumbled beneath the weight of his own responsibility. Yet for very shame he dared not share his burden with those about him. If he could have taken his sister Radegund into his confidence, he knew how useful she could have been to him; but he instinctively comprehended that he might as well have sought counsel from one of the Cathedral marble effigies as from her. She never so much as entered the studio where he now reigned with fussy consequence, and since neither by word nor look she ever troubled herself to enquire how he prospered, he found himself driven to maintain a dignified reticence, which was none the less vexatious, on account of his having to keep his annoyance to himself. “Oh you know,” he one day airily remarked to Syndic Hackernagel, “one has quite enough of the thing all day long; and I make it a rule never to talk shop at home. Besides, one has such an immense objection to women meddling in things so far above their heads, to say nothing of their being so confoundedly self-opinionated.”
Tobias assented with an emphatic nod.
“Yes, you know,” continued Otto, “Dasipodius got into a way of consulting her about one thing or another, till he made her positively unendurable. And that’s just the whole difference between his method and mine. We work you see on curiously contrasting principles; it may have suited Dasipodius to get an opinion from a petticoat, but——”
“I’ve a notion,” said Hackernagel with a knowing wink, “that Dasipodius vastly admired Mistress Radegund.”
“Ah, oh—well, everybody does you know,” returned Otto proudly; “don’t you?”
“H’m,” conceded the other, “she’s a magnificent creature, but——”
“Well?” challenged Otto, who tolerated no buts save his own where Radegund was concerned.
“Ah! I was merely about to observe—hem—I had an impression that fairer beauty was more to your individual taste.”
“Well, perhaps,” sighingly admitted Otto, “I believe you are not wrong, Syndic Hackernagel.”
And then Syndic Hackernagel, smiling an indulgent smile, reminded him of his promise to look in for half an hour that evening on their family circle; a custom which of late had not been infrequent with Otto, who enjoying as he did in an eminent degree, the sensation of having caps pulled for him, found it satisfied in that quarter to almost the top of his bent. The consciousness that behind his back internal strife waged high among the four Mistresses Hackernagel on his account, was balm to Otto’s unhealed love wounds. It was so soothing to find himself appreciated, to feel sure that he had but to hold out his little finger for it to be instantly caught at and caressed by eight fair freckled hands.
Yet it was precisely this overflow of appreciation which confused him, and rendered him for a long time irresolute as to which of the sandy-haired goddesses he should give the golden apple, that is supposing things really went so hard with him that he should be driven into bestowing it in that quarter at all. Clearly he could only marry one of them, and the reflection made him shrink with terror and commiseration from the picture he conjured to his imagination of the three rejected ones. Those smiles he now basked in, and the honeyed flattery which now soothed and tranquilized his whole being, would be all changed to bitterness, and the good times, in short, would be fled for him for ever. And all for what?—for the sake of having chosen where he had no choice, or next to none.
Choice indeed was hardly to be conceived of, since the four ladies, formed on the lines of their sire, so nearly resembled each other, with their light eyes, sandy hair, and sallow complexions. Only the third, Mistress Gretchen’s, eyes were a shade darker, her nose within more feminine proportions, her figure less angular, and above all, her voice less shrill than her sisters’; but Otto clung to liberty a little longer, and moreover he had not jeopardized so much for the mere chance of horological honours when he first set about executing the little manœuvre which had led to the overthrow of Conrad Dasipodius. The chance of being able to win Sabina from him had been at least an equal incentive to his efforts; and that the tide of favour and prejudice had now set in his way so strongly was, he considered, no more than due reward for all his efforts to help himself; and he looked now to be having his way a little with the world and its womankind, for all the coast was clear and his rival trod the steps of the city no more.