CHAPTER XLI.
A CLEAN CONFESSION.
One morning, about ten days after Bishop John’s return into residence, there was great rejoicing in the house of Hackernagel, for the Syndic had received a command to wait upon my lord. It was an honour hitherto unaccorded him; and in a flutter, concealed beneath an air of nonchalance which deceived nobody, he informed his daughters that he was going to the palace, as the Bishop desired to confer with him on important business; then dressing himself with extreme care, but excruciating simplicity, he sallied forth.
Syndic Hackernagel’s smug air of satisfaction, as he walked along, expressed but a tithe of the elation he really felt. What he was wanted for, he had not the faintest conception, and cared not at all. If my lord had been in a merry humour, and been pleased to make a may-goose of him, and only said, “Bo! Syndic Hackernagel; now you can go home again,” still that would have been useful; and it was with infinite sweetness that the Anabaptist returned the covert, not too amiable, glances of the Bishop’s servants and hangers on scattered about the vestibule, and returned with insinuating graciousness the courteous but cold obeisance of Master Gottlieb, who silently ushered him into the audience-chamber. It was then not to be a tête-à-tête with my lord? By no means, for there, gathered in an irregular semi-circle towards the upper end of the room, stood some dozen or more of the city’s representatives, among whom Hackernagel’s needle-sharp eyes distinguished the countenances of Burgomaster von Steinbach, Councillor Job, and every one without exception of those who had been officially present at the Chancellery to enquire into the case of Dasipodius.
Facing them stood the Bishop, who acknowledging Hackernagel’s presence by a faint inclination of his head, relegated him by a gesture to a position midway between himself and the group before him. With an uneasy glance at the faces on his left, the Syndic obeyed. If only some voice had spoken one syllable; but not a conclave of corpses could have been more still and silent, where they stood, some with their eyes fixed in cold scrutiny upon himself, some upon the stately, but fragile form of Bishop John, whose benevolent face was set into resolute patient lines, while he waited for the last comer to settle himself. Fully impressed as he might be with the distinction of which he was the object, never had the Syndic felt himself more ready to exchange conditions with the obscurest citizen of Strassburg, than at that moment, and he cast an involuntary glance of longing at the lofty double-oaken doors by which he had entered, and which were guarded by two tall halberdiers still as statues, and with eyes inscrutable as glass ones, whose weapons gleamed dazzlingly in the bright May morning sunlight.
“I have desired your presence here, gentlemen, and Master Tobias Hackernagel,” began the Bishop, putting an abrupt termination to that person’s survey of his surroundings, and engendering in his mind a flutter of half-flattering, half-uneasy wonder at the speaker’s classification of his audience. “Gentlemen and Master Tobias Hackernagel—to ask your consideration of a matter touching the new Horologe. There is, I find,” continued the Bishop, lifting his hand to enforce the silence which Tobias’ opening lips seemed about to break, “an impression prevailing among the better informed persons of this city, that the Professor Dasipodius has been unjustly set aside, and an incompetent man put in his place. Gentlemen and Master Tobias Hackernagel, have you anything to say to this?”
Apparently not, in so far as the former division of the Bishop’s hearers was concerned. It contented itself with an interchange of glances, while Syndic Hackernagel answered in a low sullen tone: “The Town Council is not a pack of children. We knew what we were doing, my lord,” and he glanced round at the worshipful body in search of its approving nod, but not an eye met his.
“Even grey hairs,” replied the Bishop, “occasionally mistake, Syndic Hackernagel; and you were all gravely in error when you offered this appointment to a man who is totally incapable of carrying it through. I am leaving, for the moment, entirely out of the question the injury done the Professor Dasipodius.”
“Injury!” cried Tobias, his brush-like yellow-red hair bristling. “He ran a very near chance, my lord, of burning for a sorcerer.”
“Fortunate for you, Master Hackernagel,” calmly returned the Bishop, “that that did not happen. The torture for false accusers is, if I do not err, hardly less painful than the stake itself.”
“The man is blind,” Tobias muttered, after a somewhat prolonged silence.
“That is a circumstance which concerns neither you nor me, nor”—and the Bishop’s glance swept the faces of his auditors—“anyone but himself.”
“Not concern——” echoed Tobias, staring round him in open-mouthed amazement. “Not concern—— Do you assert, my lord, that you believe——”
“Alas no, Master Hackernagel,” sighed the Bishop. “By nature it may be, I am incredulous. I feel that I must see to believe; I hope to be able to test for myself the truth of what Dr. Bruno Wolkenberg here asserts.”
“He’d swear black was white for Dasipodius,” grumbled Hackernagel, covertly glaring at the surgeon, whom he now perceived among the group.
“And Mistress Radegund von Steinbach,” said the Bishop with a slight smile, “is she also so staunch a partizan?”
“Oh ho!” sneeringly answered Tobias. “Hardly likely; Otto’s own sister.”
“You would accept her word then against her brother’s incapacity?”
“Ah well,” returned Tobias with an insolent chuckle, “let her offer it first.”
The Bishop, turning silently, advanced towards the extreme upper end of the chamber, the rich crimsons and purples of the emblazoned window lights tinging his pale face and silver hairs, as his silken cassock swept along the parqueted floor. The vast audience-room of the Episcopal Palace was rich in oaken and ebony and ivory carvings. Its loftily-coped fireplace reaching half-way to the fretted and gilded ceiling, was crowded with historic alabaster statues of nearly life size; and where its wings terminated, a high-panelled wainscoting met them, heavy with allegorical figures and carvings of flowers and foliage.
The wall towards which the Bishop now slowly made his way, bore in its lower centre a large panel some three feet wide by five or six in height, carved in high relief with a gigantic sword thrust between the chains of a pair of scales. Extending on either side of this, ran two smaller series of panels, the one bearing, amid enframing wreaths and other graceful devices, sweet women’s and children’s faces, emblematical of the heavenly virtues; the other, the seven deadly sins, hideous mask-like countenances, with snaky hair and gnashing teeth writhing forth from their encircling flames, and fetters strung with instruments of torture.
Before this central panel, which was in fact a door communicating with several narrow corridors leading to the dwelling part of the palace, the Bishop paused, and pressing with his finger one of the bosses of the carved woodwork, it fell open, revealing a shadowy recess, where like some picture on a dim background stood Radegund von Steinbach, richly attired, as it was generally her pleasure to be, in a close-fitting dress of blood-red velvet, finished about the neck with a ruff of white Venice lace; while a black veil of the same costly fabric, wrapped about her head and shoulders, threw into startling contrast the faultless beauty of her face, pale now to ivory whiteness, after its wont when under the influence of strong concentrated excitement.
If to the startled assemblage the artist seemed more like a picture than a reality, she quickly dispelled the illusion, stepping at once to the floor, and following in the Bishop’s wake as he returned silently to his place. Then taking up the position to which he motioned her on his right hand, she swept a swift searching glance round, and turning to the Bishop, said: “But he is not here, my lord”.
Bishop John touched a little hand bell, in answer to whose summons the chaplain appeared.
“Bid Master Otto von Steinbach come in,” said his chief.
Gottlieb retired, but the next instant reentered, ushering in the trembling Otto von Steinbach. With downcast eyes, changing colour, and scared face, Otto stood, just within the threshold, shifting from one trembling leg to the other.
“Come close,” commanded Radegund, before the Bishop could speak. And the unhappy creature started, and with a wild stare round, shambled forward.
“I am here, gentlemen, and Syndic Hackernagel,” said his sister, addressing the group before her, “by my lord’s desire, to bear to you my witness that Otto von Steinbach——”
“Your own flesh and blood,” interrupted Hackernagel.
“My brother, Otto von Steinbach,” she went on, with the faintest possible flush crossing her pale forehead, but looking straight before her high above the Syndic’s head, “is incapable of doing the work which you have caused to be entrusted to his care. Further, I desire to state my conviction that the late horologist, Conrad Dasipodius,” and a faint tremour agitated the clear ringing tones, as his name left her lips, “has been unjustly and illegally set aside.”
“Not by me!” cried Hackernagel, starting forward with savage defiance scintillating in his pale eyes. “Not by me!”
“I dare to say, Tobias Hackernagel,” said the artist, letting her glance fall to the level of his face, “that saving yourself, I exonerate every person here from any desire to do the Professor Dasipodius an injustice.”
“Infamous!” fumed the Syndic.
“Lastly, I have to declare my conviction, founded on my own knowledge of the matter—”
“Presumption!” hissed the seething lips of Hackernagel.
“And confirmed by authority not lightly to be ignored,” here Radegund’s eyes turned on Otto, “that if the work of the Horologe remain under Otto von Steinbach’s direction, the oath of the Town Council to Strassburg is likely to become a mock. There stands my brother; let him refute what I have said if it so pleases him.”
But Otto stood speechless and immovable.
“All this,” said Hackernagel with a sneer, “is absurd—informal.”
“Ah!” said the Bishop. “It can be made a formal question if you so prefer, Syndic Hackernagel; but I am given to understand you are partial to informalities.”
“This is merely a friendly little enquiry,” said the Burgomaster, with an irrepressible smile. “Just such another as you proposed for the Professor Dasipodius at the Chancellery, if you remember. But, niece,” he continued, addressing Radegund—“your pardon, my lord—niece, I say, you should have told us all this long ago. It would have saved us needless vexations and heartburnings and——”
“And colds,” dolefully muttered Councillor Job. “I haven’t half got over mine yet. They do hang about one so——”
“And scandal,” continued Niklaus; “and if, let me tell you, you had had a spark of real consideration for Dasipodius——”
“He refused my poor aid,” said Radegund, with burning cheeks.
“Well,” sturdily observed Job, “we shouldn’t have done that. And you might as well have given it us first as last, Mistress von Steinbach.”
“You don’t understand women,” began Tobias. “Don’t you know they only find fault when it suits their purpose.”
“I leave expediency to you, Tobias Hackernagel,” retorted Radegund, a spot of angry scarlet burning on each cheek. “I speak only now in obedience to my Lord Bishop.”
“These churchmen!” muttered Hackernagel. “What a genius they have for meddling.”
“Have a care, Master Hackernagel,” sternly said the Bishop, who had caught the significance more than the actual words of the Syndic.
Hackernagel started, but hiding his confusion under a smile of cringing insolence, “I meant to observe, my lord,” he said, “that I marvel that spiritual guides—that is, I—I should say, I wished to remark, my lord, that the Horologe being so purely and entirely a secular matter, and as such so utterly beneath your consideration——”
“To see that men act justly towards each other, doing as they would be done by, cannot be beneath my consideration, Syndic Hackernagel. It is a charge specially committed to my keeping. And I should be an unworthy servant of a righteous Heaven were I to neglect it; either in the matter of our Horologe or of the meanest trifle I am cognizant of. And though all the forces of this heretical age were against me, I will see justice done! Those were good words of the blessed Apostle,” and now the Bishop’s voice rang clear through the chamber. “It seems to me you may search the Holy Scriptures through for better, ‘Show me thy faith, and I will show thee my works’.”
“An epistle of straw,” muttered the reformed Hackernagel, shrugging his narrow shoulders.
“Straw is a sterling commodity,” answered the Bishop, “as Master Luther himself found, when he tried to build without it. And at least our people—the bulk of our people,” sighingly amended he, “know better than to starve on a poor empty windbag of righteousness, or bow down to puppets of hypocrisy. I tell you, Master Hackernagel, they will have this business sifted to the bottom.”
“They did as they pleased,” said the Syndic sulkily.
“As they were cheated into fancying they pleased. Oh, I understand it all, Master Hackernagel. I know your petty grudges against Conrad Dasipodius. I know how Isaac Habrecht refused to play into your hands. I know how against his better judgment, you flattered this poor weak boy here into a task beyond his powers, and cozened him into believing himself to be what he never can be, that you might win a passing popularity—that as you went by, people might point after you and cry, ‘There goes our great Syndic! the upholder of our privileges! the champion of our liberties! who will see we are not trampled upon!’ and for such empty triumphs as these, you toyed with their ignorance, by the false witness you bore, and sacrificed to it the noblest heart among us. Has it ever broken one hour of your rest, I wonder, to think you have driven this man into banishment? Thank Heaven that there were those about you frustrated your yet fouler designs against him. Does it ever tell you that to feed your paltry—vanity—ambition is no fit word—a bond of honour should have been broken? The hard-earned money of our people frittered, and a work of Art reduced to a useless gimcrack, so your turn might be served? Did you ever spare a thought to the humiliation which sooner or later must have befallen this young man? Look at him now, and see what you have done.”
The Bishop paused, his eyes softening a little as he cast a brief glance at Otto, but they kindled again at the sound of Hackernagel’s voice demanding, tremulous with suppressed rage, “Who says he cannot do it?”
“Himself,” said Radegund. “He has confessed so much to me.”
Tobias laughed a low sneering laugh.
“Couldn’t he say it again,” suggested Job, in his tone of happiest inspiration. “That would settle the question, wouldn’t it, my lord?”
“Well, you know,” jerked out Otto, with painful twitchings about the mouth corners, “I—you see——”
“Come, speak out, nephew,” said Niklaus, but not harshly; “we won’t be shuffled with.”
“Well, I—I——” His voice failed him, and he stood mute and fumbling with damp fingers, burning and ice-cold by turns, at the long broken white feather in his hat.
“Yes or no?” demanded the Bishop in inexorable tones. And still only some faint inarticulate sounds gurgled through the miserable man’s pale and quivering lips.
“Speak,” commanded Radegund.
“No—I can’t—” he gasped, starting at the sound of her voice like some galvanized corpse, and then, heavy as death, his two arms fell beside him.
“On your oath do you declare that, nephew,” asked the Burgomaster.
“Oh yes, if—if you like,” he stammered; and staggering to a chair and sinking into it, he burst into tears.
“Coward! Fool!” hissed Hackernagel; but Radegund swept past to Otto’s side. “Eat your own words for lies, Tobias Hackernagel!” she cried, laying her arm protectingly about the young man’s drooping neck; “never less coward or fool than now, when he has dared to tell the truth and shame—you!”
And bending her proud head to the Bishop, she led Otto gently from the audience chamber.
“The lad has done right, my lord,” said Niklaus, breaking at last the prolonged silence which ensued. “If a man can’t do a thing, it’s best he should own to it.”
“It’s a pity he didn’t do it long ago though,” grumbled Klausewitz, “if it’s only to think——”
“My impression,” said the Bishop thoughtfully, “is that he did believe himself able; but—well, we make our mistakes sometimes,” he continued, with a glance of somewhat mitigated severity at Hackernagel. “And now it remains to us to take steps for getting Dasipodius back again.”
“Back again!” shrieked Hackernagel.
“And you, Master Syndic, are the man to ask him.”
“Never!” he gasped out, “never!”
“Ah, well,” said the Bishop, “there is of course the alternative.”
“And that?”
“Is to arrest you.”
“Me! on what charge?”
“Ah! on one or two. You would, for example, in the first place be tried for false accusing, then for misappropriation and waste of the public monies, then for——”
“And I have been brought here—inveigled, deceived into believing that I was wanted——”
“As you certainly were, my dear sir,” gleefully assured the Burgomaster.
“To assist,” went on Tobias, wrathfully glaring at Niklaus, “to assist——”
“Precisely,” nodded his tormentor, “at a friendly little enquiry.”
“And am I to stand here,” continued Tobias, with livid foaming lips, “to be mocked and insulted, and have my private opinions ferreted out of me like this? Am I, in the midst of this free city, to be made the victim of party spirit and cabal? exposed to the ridicule of a pack of—Look here, my lord,” said the Syndic, abruptly changing his key, “these men—it was all their faults, I was but one of them, they consented to be present.”
“Ay, that’s true,” groaned Klausewitz; “but if I’d have known——”
“They sat and heard all,” hurried on Hackernagel. “You know you did,” he said, turning on them in hysterical appealing tones.
“We did,” feelingly assented Niklaus.
“You hear, my lord; they cannot deny it. And am I—I alone to be answerable?”
“It appears so,” said the Bishop, who, in addition to his own careful review of the bearings of the case, had not omitted to encase himself in the panoply of the best available legal opinion. “It was you, Syndic, who set the matter on foot. These gentlemen were summoned first at your instance, to attend——”
“A friendly little enquiry, my lord,” prompted Niklaus.
“Exactly,” said the Bishop, referring to some papers on the table beside him. “And a mere preliminary, as you intimated, in the event of further measures being found necessary.”
“But, my lord,” urged Councillor Job, “as far as that goes, one sitting was more than enough.”
“Quite so, Councillor; as results prove. Syndic Hackernagel appears to have taken the law entirely into his own hands, and guided the question, begged it rather, into such a channel that the people were drifted into a fresh voting before they knew where they were. You did wrong, Tobias Hackernagel, wrong enough, heaven knows, to Dasipodius; but a wrong yet deeper against the public right, in presuming on your authority, and overstepping your vested power.”
“The people voted as they pleased,” protested Hackernagel.
“Not as they pleased, Tobias Hackernagel,” said Niklaus earnestly. “Their sense of right and wrong was utterly deadened by your sophistries. I thought, thick-headed fool that I was, that it might have been safely left to them. I could not credit, none of us here could have done so, that your special pleadings and your absurd representations would have influenced beings who boast the possession of reason. I thought—we all thought,” said Niklaus, turning on his colleagues, “that justice might be left to the people; but we’ll never think so again,” concluded the Burgomaster—“be sure of that, my lord.”
And as from one man broke forth the echoed assurance, “Never!”
“I am willing to believe,” continued the Bishop, still addressing himself to Hackernagel, “that in this you erred somewhat through ignorance.”
“What!” shrieked the Syndic, bounding from the floor and gasping with fury. Accusations of malice, lying, covetousness, and any other sin of the Decalogue he might in time have brought himself to pocket; but ignorance lying to his charge! Shade of Solomon! “This,” he said, his eyes shaking and rolling in frenzied and nervous indignation, to maintain an unruffled air of wounded dignity, “is the first time m—my ability has ever been called in question. I—I—I am no f—fool.”
“Then,” said the Bishop, “you must be the greatest knave in all Strassburg; and if knowingly, as it appears by your avowal it was, that you did this foul wrong, and refuse to atone for it by the simple means I have, with the general consent of these gentlemen here, offered you, there remains to me no choice but to detain you under a formal warrant of arrest.”
Like a tiger at bay, the Syndic backed, and glaring round at the stolid faces hemming him in, fixed his eyes on the doors; then, as through the dead silence fell the clash of the changing guard outside in the stone corridor, some half-fledged exclamation of defiance died down upon his livid lips into a whining meekness.
“I am a man of peace, my lord,” he said shudderingly.
“A blessed thing, Master Tobias,” said the Bishop, bowing his head.
“I would—do—a great deal—for the sake of peace,” and he looked round, possibly out of mere force of habit, for applause, but there was not a sound. “I think,” he went on, “sooner than bring on the earth a sword or captivity, a man should even lick the dust, especially when he has a family—four daughters. Think of it, my lord.”
“Well, Syndic,” said the Bishop, with a shade of impatience, “we are waiting your decision.”
“And,” went on Hackernagel, “I am convinced—morally convinced—that, provided there be two ways of doing a thing, the lesser should yield to the greater, the individual to the general. Yes, I am persuaded that a man is bound to make any sacrifice of his own private feelings, however painful it may be to——”
“Choose the easier. Come, Master Hackernagel, don’t apologise,” interrupted Niklaus, “but take your chance while you can get it; and thank your lucky star my lord has given it you. I don’t say it isn’t more than you deserve, but there take it, man, take it.”
And on the understanding that he had taken it, Syndic Hackernagel went forth from the palace walls, not altogether the man he entered them, but still a free agent.