CHAPTER XL.
GRETCHEN.
Many a heart, the old saw says, is caught at the rebound; and Otto von Steinbach, discharging himself as he did like a catapult from the Burgomaster’s house, never stopped till he fell flushed and almost breathless into a chair beside fair Mistress Gretchen Hackernagel. She, as kind fate would have it, sat at home alone in the absence of her father and sisters, who had all gone to a great treat which had been some time promising in the shape of a peripatetic preacher of the Anabaptist persuasion, who was to shed his eloquence on Strassburg for one day only; but Gretchen had, with the grain of sturdiness which no domestic tyranny could entirely eradicate, refused to join in the pious dissipation. There was something of the black sheep in Gretchen Hackernagel. Her compeers called her “odd,” her eccentricity developing itself mainly in a dislike to the tenets the rest of her family professed. This might, in the first place, have arisen from the surfeit of surface sanctity oppressing the domestic atmosphere, tainted as it was beneath with endless bickerings and petty jealousies; and the Christian faith, which she had heard called beautiful and love itself, wore for her a hateful ugliness.
One dreadful day, Gretchen had so far forgotten herself as to say in her father’s hearing that the few sweet organ tones which reached her as she came home from market round by the Cathedral, always told her more about Heaven in five minutes, than the longest discourse she ever remembered Master Boanerges Bakkerzeel to have poured forth. Henceforth, Gretchen Hackernagel’s path of life was not peace to her; she lived suspected of every sort of wickedness, and responsible for every mishap occurring in the household, not regulated better than one boasting four mistresses usually is. “It’s all Gretchen’s fault,” was synonymous there, with “the cat did it,” in other establishments.
With many secret tears Gretchen endured her misery, and with the sort of apathetic patience which sees no gleam of happier things. The Syndic’s house was none so cheerful, nor his womenkind so fair, that young men or women either, ever felt drawn to cultivate close acquaintance there; and life had grown to be a burden to poor Gretchen. It was little wonder, therefore, that when the handsome Otto took to looking in at Syndic Hackernagel’s, Gretchen’s heart was lost to her, before she was well aware she was burdened with one; and with all his faults, there was something to like in the young man. He was gentle and chivalrous with women, and spoke up frankly and openly, without the snuffle and whine which characterised the few young men it had been her dreary fortune to converse with. Then Otto wore such beautiful clothes, gay enough in all conscience they were, but still innocent of vulgarity. The vain creature had an instinctive taste for self-decoration, and well understood the difference between gew-gaw smartness, and real arrangement and blending of colour, and his clothes fitted him to perfection. No wonder Otto became an object of interest in Syndic Hackernagel’s house. The worst of it was, as three of the ladies said, he was a Catholic, and in making much of him, they told each other they had in view the charitable aim of effecting his conversion to their own persuasion, then—then—Après?—but since they did not confide even to each other any word of what ultimate course they intended to adopt, in regard to this brand which was going to be snatched from the burning, it would be presumption to surmise, and perhaps superfluous, seeing that Otto stuck to his creed with a pertinacity and mulishness creating as much disgust in the three elders as it charmed Gretchen, who plucked heart at the reflection that this ray of an outer world could breathe in their gloomy atmosphere and live.
The greatest marvel was how Syndic Hackernagel permitted such an intimacy to exist; but that was not to know Syndic Hackernagel aright, or else to forget that Otto von Steinbach belonged to an influential family, and had excellent private expectations. In short he was a gilded pill, which Tobias, faithful to his creed, was prepared, and with cheerful resignation, to swallow, should the young man’s final election to the state of being his son-in-law prove preordained by a wise providence.
Wedded as Tobias Hackernagel was to his own form of belief, and holding every other, Catholic and Protestant alike for inodorous pitch, his confidence in his own immaculacy was so great, that he believed he might yet touch it, and not be defiled; and by no means shrank from having worldly dealings with the hereafter-doomed of any persuasion whatsoever, provided they chanced to represent the dominant party.
Amid the never-ending alternations of power at that time, the Catholics were, and for some prolonged period had been, in the ascendant; and with the Catholics Hackernagel was careful to maintain peaceful, almost amicable relations, until the hour of their downfall should bring him his opportunity for turning upon them. The man, with all his veneer of holiness, was timeserving to the backbone, and felt no grain of compunction in bowing down in the house of Rimmon, nor even in taking to the domestic hearth such a rag of the Scarlet Lady as Otto von Steinbach; who, on his part, steeped from his earliest years in Catholic associations, and hating the reformers, from Luther to the last mushroom hair-splitter of yesterday, and the very name of Reformation for its general tendency towards levelling away all that made existence amusing and consequently endurable, still felt himself under no small obligation to the Syndic for his present lofty state, and thought his debt cheaply paid by making himself agreeable to the Syndic’s daughters. It cost him nothing; and if they liked it, why, you know, there was no harm done. There, however, the argument somehow failed. Harm was done, a very great deal, to poor Gretchen’s heart; and being one of that tenacious sort whose hearts, once given, will break if they are cast aside, there is no guessing what misery would have been in store for her, had not Otto, affronted and aggrieved by Sabina’s insensate treatment of him, fled where consolation was infallibly to be found; and then and there offered his delicate white hand and his fortune in esse and in posse to the happy Mistress Gretchen Hackernagel. With tears, and blushes, and rapture but transparently veiled, she accepted; and Otto found his consolation for his snubbings elsewhere. Here were favour and prejudice of the right sort if you like. If only cousin Sabina could have been there to see—and repent, now it was too late, he thought his content would have been complete.
“I shall never ask you again,” he had said to her, and he meant it too; and now here, an hour later, he was an engaged man.
The new sensation was as agreeable as complex. He was, of course, experiencing all the delights attendant upon a public career; but then the sweets of notoriety have their bitters, while these new joys were perfect—in their way. Honestly he found them so. He really liked Gretchen Hackernagel; there was something lacking to his volatile nature, which he found in hers. Pique, for once in a way, had done its victim a kind turn; and he confessed to himself that to be loved for one’s own sake was a good thing. And to love again?—well—and that was a good thing too; and might come to grow by what it fed on. Then Otto did so thoroughly enjoy his inamorata’s malicious little confidences which their closer intimacy brought him, touching certain sharp contests between her sisters for the distinction she had won; and he never tired of hearing how, with all their simulated scorn and indifference, they were so madly jealous.
Only once he found it incumbent on him to check such innocent small-talk; and that was when she said that the last new taunt they had conjured up was, that people were beginning to say he could no more make a clock than could the painted Cupid, who was to strut out and in of the little door above the second cornice-work of the new Horologe. With a ghastly smile, Gretchen’s fiancé said it was very amusing, excessively amusing, but he was afraid her words lacked charity in repeating what the poor disappointed things said, and that there was no need to talk about the Horologe at all.
The very word sent a cold shudder through Otto now; it had come to be to him such a hateful thing, this great unmanageable Horologe with its wheels—above all, possibly from certain older associations, he hated the wheels worst—and its chains and little spiky bits; and its whirring wires and springs which, if you were not tremendously careful, shot out, and gave you ever such a stinging rap on your cheek or your nose before you knew where you were.
To Otto, as to Dasipodius, the Horologe had become a nightmare—with a difference. To each it seemed a thing endowed with almost human attributes; only to Otto it was no fair lost mistress, but a fearful monster, whose every shadow haunting his dreams, resolved itself by day into a horrid tangible reality. The creation of the unhappy Frankenstein was nothing by comparison with the Horologe, because the sooner that soulless breathing terror was annihilated, the greater was everybody’s satisfaction; whereas all Strassburg was clamouring in Otto’s ears, and dogging his footsteps, and waylaying him at street corners for the latest intelligence touching this thing’s progress, and plaguing his life out for the precise date of its completion. “Time,” as they said cheerfully, “was getting on now.” If things continued like that much longer, he felt the Horologe would be his murderer, or responsible at least for manslaughter. It was killing him fast. The scraping of the studio files, the tap, tap, tap of its tiny hammers, confused his head till it ached again; the bright brass discs dazzled his eyes, until he began to feel something of sympathy for his predecessor’s affliction; the smell of the varnish and of the paint made him feel sick, and he would gladly have given Gretchen Hackernagel and all his other possessions to have been once more only the careless student, subject indeed to Isaac Habrecht’s fault-finding, or Dasipodius’s grave rebuke, but once outside the Dial’s walls, free as a butterfly to enjoy all the sweets life might afford, a well-looking, pleasant enough young fellow not far along the shady side of twenty-five. And yet he dared utter no thought of what he felt. Vanity, dread of his sister Radegund’s taunts, Tobias Hackernagel’s righteous wrath, what Sabina would say, and still more what the world would say, still bound him to the task which was so utterly beyond his powers. If only Dasipodius had persisted in his refusal to deliver up his plans, all might have been well for Otto. His own design was to be sure an extraordinary conglomerate of intricacy, and curiously characteristic of its originator’s genius for complicating matters; still he had made it himself, and understood perhaps if nobody else did, how he meant to make it go; but he had been tempted by Dasipodius’ plans, because they had looked so delightfully simple, and he had believed he might master them better even than his own, about whose practicability, supposing them even safely launched into working order, he had his misgivings. When, however, he had come into the much-coveted possession of the drawings, he found how sorely he had misapprehended their real nature, and learning too late that his predecessor was a master of the Ars celare Artem, wished he had bitten his tongue out before he had set about moving Heaven and earth to obtain them.
And so, groping in the dark, conscious of being secretly sneered at by those over whom he was set, sick at heart with vexation and wounded vanity, and bored to death by enforced application, the miserable man breathed on, finding his sole consolation in Gretchen. And well indeed it was for him that in those days of wretchedness he was able to turn to this girl, whose unassailable faith in his superiority over all men since the world began, tied him to a life which was fast growing for him into an intolerable burden. Although his ordinary stock of moral courage might not be large, he was by no means deficient in that pinchbeck sort of it which would face self-destruction; but endowed with little beauty, no great wit, nor much wealth, of a temper not faultless, but warm-hearted, Gretchen Hackernagel, in the power of her true honest woman’s love, came to be his saving grace, shielding him from himself; and for the sparks of self-complacency she kept alive in him he repaid her with a certain sort of affection, scanty at first, but gaining in strength as his perplexities gathered closer and thicker about him.
Sympathy in his own home Otto had long ceased to look for. Throughout the whole time, some five or six weeks now, that Dasipodius had been at Schaffhausen, Radegund had maintained a cold indifference towards her brother; and not the faintest allusion to the Horologe or to his new duties in connection with it ever passed her lips. If she had flown into one of her furies with him he thought he could have borne it far better; if she had even mocked him for his incapacity he would have preferred it, because then he might in the end have brought himself to a confession of the wretched truth, and besought her help to ward him from shameful exposure, for he knew quite well that Radegund could, if she would, make clear to him certain of Dasipodius’ intentions regarding the Clock’s mechanism, which would have materially aided in dispersing some of the greater difficulties; or, at all events, brought the problems within a little closer range of his own powers of solution; for though totally unfitted either by temperament or training for his onerous duties, Otto was no tyro in Horology; and could, under direction and when he chose, do good work.
Radegund was, however, impenetrable and imperturbable as a fate, and Otto dared not, ever so delicately, hint that she might be useful to him. He had not spent all the days of his life with her without knowing that these calm moods of hers presaged storm; and he did not care to bring it on his own devoted head by any provocation on his part, as he might by chance do, however ill warranted, for as he said to himself again and again, “She’s cross about Dasipodius. Just as if I could have helped it all! It’s awfully unkind of her to be put out about it with me. It just shows what contrary creatures women are. Crammed up with favour and prejudice. If any other woman now except Radegund had been my sister, she’d have been proud as a peacock of me. And to say nothing too of her reflected honours.”
It was no concern of hers that the honours were trying ones; and then the new chief horologist would groan, and call to mind some sort of a story he had heard once of that king of somewhere or other in the East, who always honoured any courtier he might be having a grudge against, with a present of a white elephant.
Now the courtier is proud of the distinction, but the white elephant on pain of death to the happy recipient must have a household to himself, and servants, and no end of attention and time spent on him; and very frequently that story of the white elephant occurred to Otto’s imagination; and the world, he thought, was much the same, go where you might in it.