CHAPTER XLIII.
“MAKING NIGHT HIDEOUS.”
Syndic Hackernagel’s household was not a little put about at finding that on his return from the palace, he was in anything but a genial humour. Endowed, ordinarily speaking, with the healthiest of appetites, he declined to touch a morsel of supper; and with not a good-night to throw at a creature about the place, he betook himself sulkily to bed.
Over and above these portents, there were to be seen certain sparks scintillating in Tobias’ small green eyes, which were understood by melancholy experience, to bode ill for domestic tranquillity; and so, in the fervent hope that he might be better in the morning, he was let go his ways unquestioned.
“And to-morrow,” muttered the discomfited magistrate, as he put on his night-cap, and drew it well over his lank jaws, “to-morrow this proud churchman shall know who Syndic Hackernagel is.”
“It is an accursed thing,” continued Tobias, anathematising the Horologe as cordially as his predestined lips dared. “An evil thing invented to bring tribulation on the righteous. An accursed—verily a most accursed——” Then he sank to sleep, but not into oblivion; far off into the land of dreams that supreme subject of his waking moments followed him. Now it made itself into a hideous nightmare, and from its grinning face sprouted dead-cold claw-like fingers, which pinched and scratched him, and preternaturally long legs radiated from it, dancing and stamping upon him, till he awoke gasping with horror. Anon the spirit of his dreams waxed kinder, and the Syndic beheld himself hand on heart, haranguing all Strassburg from the forensic platform, and the dreamer smiled sweetly, for he thought then he heard the sound of his own voice.
“Good people,” he fancied he was saying, “go your ways. I wash my hands of you and your Horologe.”
Alas! that it was only a dream! One from which he was rudely awakened by a confused uproar of feminine shrieks within doors, and a deafening hubbub of masculine voices without.
And that red flare! illumining his room to daylight clearness? Merciful powers! was the house on fire? With one bound the Syndic sprang from his bed to the window, and wrenching it open, thrust out his head.
As well have put it in the pillory at once, for before he had time to draw it in again, a shower of such loathly missiles as only the ingenuity of a riotous mob can devise, fell around the benight-capped object showing out so conspicuously white through the darkness. Physically, however, Syndic Hackernagel sustained no further abiding damage from that dark night’s encounter than the marring of his nose’s bold outline by a broken eggshell, the mark of which, by the enigmatical law of scarification, which sometimes refuses ever to obliterate traces of a pin’s scratch, Tobias did carry with him to the grave.
Not so many weeks back, this justice of the peace, posted at a safe distance, had watched the exit of Conrad Dasipodius under a course of similar attentions from the crowd; and he had speculated a little curiously as to what sort of a sensation rotten egg and brickbat pelting might superinduce in the patient. Now enabled to realise it to the full, he slammed to his window even faster than he had opened it. His nocturnal visitors were not to be balked however, and with a crash and a prickly shower, the glass of the latticed panes lay shattered around him; while borne in upon the incoming chilly and damp night breeze, yells of laughter, mingled with ominous low growls, assailed the shivering Syndic’s ears through their cotton coverings.
“The Horologe!” shouted a hundred throats, till the very roof gables echoed again, causing every upper window in the street to fly open, bristling with heads.
“The Horologe! Where’s our Horologe?”
Tobias shrank back into the shadows.
“Come out! Show yourself!”
But he shrank to utter extinction, and was no more to be seen than a snail prodded with a bit of stick.
“If you don’t show yourself,” shouted an awful voice, “we’ll be up in a twinkling, and bring you out.”
Foremost among his besiegers, Hackernagel’s one glance had shown him more than one of the Dial horologiers, and for their lithe limbs to clamber over the projecting cornices of the lower casements, and jump in through the smashed one above, would be, as he knew, the work of half-a-dozen seconds; convinced therefore that nothing but surrender remained to him, he again advanced, in an agony of terror.
“The Horologe! the Horologe!” shouted the mob, as soon as his face, white now as his head-gear, peered forth into the red flare of the torches they carried.
“Where’s Dasipodius? We want Dasipodius.”
And with that shout, Hackernagel’s last lingering hope of being able to defy my lord Bishop faded from his calculations. Whatever doubt had hitherto remained, it was clear to him now that by hook or by crook these Strassburgers meant to have their man back again. He whom not two months since they had hounded from their streets, he on whose head one-half of the city had heaped insult and opprobrium, and the other half had not stretched out a finger to defend.
They wanted him back again. Well, what wonder? Was not his absence threatening dolorous danger to their pockets? Slowly but certainly it had dawned upon these good people that the Horologe had fallen into incompetent hands, and the hideous fact had become patent to them, that if they did not bestir themselves, every batzen of their subscribed florins would be as much lost as if thrown into the Rhine. Against this frightful possibility Calvinist and Catholic rose as one man, beginning hurriedly to catechise each other as to the legality of those summary proceedings at the Chancellery, and into a jeopardy it had never known before, Tobias Hackernagel’s name was falling now. Such ominous rumblings of discontent had for the last two or three weeks been growing so audible, that any man less in love with himself and all his actions than Syndic Hackernagel would have long since begun to tremble. To this most self-complacent of Sir Oracles, however, the notion of any dog whatsoever daring to bark after once he had opened his mouth had not occurred. Notwithstanding, the growls had daily grown louder; and if only a few days more had flowed on in their usual course, even Tobias must have been driven to mark whither the tide of opinion was tending.
Already before nightfall, there were few who were not cognizant of the light in which the Bishop, whose opinion Catholics venerated, and Protestants could not choose but respect, regarded Tobias Hackernagel’s dealings towards Dasipodius. The details of that interview between himself and my lord the previous afternoon had been circulated with no small gusto by more than one of the municipality who had been witnesses to it, and had spread before sundown like wildfire through the city’s breadth and length. Many of these men, while acknowledging that his very meddling proclivities had done their state some service by preventing stagnation, bore him personal grudges for his contemptuous bearing and pompous opposition to measures proposed by any but himself, and above all, his inter-meddling with matters he understood nothing about. And with an unction they were at no pains to conceal, they spread the story of Tobias’ explanation with Bishop John, and the upshot of it. By all which, it will be clear that the Syndic’s popularity was at zero. Even his very co-religionists had begun to lose confidence in him, when the appalling conviction loomed upon them that he had perhaps blundered away their money.
Compared with the horror of this, the very accusation of sorcery against Dasipodius paled to insignificance; and the firiest fanatics of every persuasion piteously added their suffrages to the general opinion, that at all hazards the blind mathematician must be fetched back to finish their clock for them, even though they should arrange to burn him afterwards.
Thus of self-interest was born what the Strassburgers pleased themselves by calling a sense of justice. It had however, in truth, long been honestly burning in many hearts. In none perhaps more purely and ardently than in Burgomaster von Steinbach’s. Not an hour had passed since that day when he had watched the blind man leave the presence of his inquisitors, that Niklaus had not pondered and planned for his reinstation; but there were many motives forbidding Niklaus from openly declaring himself the mathematician’s champion, dearly as he yearned to do it; though they were such as he did not care too nearly to analyse even to himself. Simply when they arose, he would look thoughtfully at Sabina, and the old speculations anent the mysterious ways of womankind would begin to worry his brain.
The ends and aims, however, of creatures of his own sex were things of altogether a different calibre, and quite, he believed, and justly too, within his powers of disentangling; and very attentively, but sharing his observations with no mortal creature, he had watched the current of public opinion, quietly making it his business to feed the growing discontent against Hackernagel, and the desire for the recall of Dasipodius. That the people as a body should desire it was, Niklaus believed, the one condition on which the mathematician would be induced to resume his old duties.
“But I wouldn’t answer for it,” he sighed. “They threw away their loaf, and if they can’t fish it up again, there’s nobody to blame but themselves. Hey, Master Klausewitz, what do you think of it?”
Klausewitz said that only so long as they didn’t make another endless day of it at the Chancellery, he “didn’t care how it was settled. The place in summer was like a furnace.”
Meantime Syndic Hackernagel is striving to address his midnight visitors as well as his chattering teeth permit.
“Good people,” he said, as the clamour for the banished horologier rose up on all sides of him, “Master Dasipodius——”
“Ay, ay!”
“The—the Horologe, I mean,” he continued piteously. “The Horologe——” But his weak attempts are drowned in fresh uproar, and while the unhappy Syndic, daring neither to retreat, still less to advance by half an inch, stands quaking with terror, amid yells and shouts, and catcalls, and every imaginable sort of rat’s music, high above all rise the chorused shouts for Dasipodius and the Horologe.
“Himmelsdonnerwetter! What is the meaning of all this?” broke forth a deep bass voice through the din; and never had it sounded so welcome in the Syndic’s ears. “Does the man keep the Horologe under his pillow, that you come disturbing the whole neighbourhood like this? See here, comrades, if you don’t instantly disperse, and take yourselves home to bed like decent fellows, I’ve got the watch behind me,” and Burgomaster Niklaus jerked his finger over his shoulder to a compact dark mass in his rear, “and they shall conduct you all to less comfortable lodgings.”
“Ah! ah! Dear Master von Steinbach,” screeched Tobias.
“Have done, Hans,” cried Niklaus, bringing down his strong hand on an arm just lifted to hurl some fresh missile at the white pyramidal object now oscillating over the parapet.
“Dear Master von Steinbach! is that really you? For the Lord’s sake——”
“How can the man speak, if you go breaking his head first?” demanded Niklaus of the surging mob.
“No, to be sure not, dear Master Niklaus. That’s what I say—what you say, I mean. You always do put it so sensibly; and if they’ll only listen, I’ll say anything they like—anything.”
“Time enough for that to-morrow morning, Tobias Hackernagel,” answered Niklaus. “You see you’ve come an hour or so too soon, comrades—hey?” continued he, turning to the ringleaders with a face stern as Rhadamanthus, but his eyes dancing gleefully in the gleam of their torches. “Just an hour or so too soon. In the morning I’m sure Syndic Hackernagel will talk to you, if you’ll meet him outside the Chancellery—eh, Master Tobias?”
“To be sure, Burgomaster, to be sure; and I’ll——”
“Ay, ay, of course he will; and tell you what will be sure to please you all.”
“Yes, yes,” protested the grateful Tobias. “It shall be just what they like. Tell them, will you, dear Master von Steinbach, anything.”
“It’s deeds we want, not words,” growled an angry voice. “We’ve had enough of them and to spare. And if he don’t fetch Dasipodius back, and look pretty sharp about it too——”
“Oh, but I will! I will. I will indeed.”
“Good,” said Niklaus.
“Good,” chorused Tobias’ visitors. “Tell us that again to-morrow morning. Good-night. Sweet dreams to you, Master Hackernagel.”
“Good-night,” piped the Syndic, of whom not a vestige was now visible. “Good-night, good people.”
“Oh! but that won’t do at all,” shouted up his tormentors. “We must see you again once more before we go. We shouldn’t sleep a bit if we didn’t. Here! Hi! Look out!”
And Tobias looked out. “Now tell us if you’ve been glad to see us,” exhorted their fugleman. “Too much for words to express? Is that it? Smile then. We shall understand.”
And Tobias smiled, a smile so ghastly, so abjectly wretched, than even his tormentors were satisfied; and with a parting yell which brought the last sleepiest heads in the street to their windows, they went quietly home.