CHAPTER XLIV.
VOX POPULI.
True as the needle to the pole, Tobias Hackernagel kept his appointment next morning. He clearly saw that there remained to him no choice but to deliver himself up with the best grace he could to the tide of circumstances. But alas, bad was the best. Never had his ingenuity been more heavily taxed, and his self-esteem more sharply pricked, than while he sat pondering over the terms which were to make it seem as though Dasipodius’ recall were the effect of his own spontaneous heart-promptings. In the end, however, the Syndic succeeded very fairly indeed to his own satisfaction, and that of his own devoted adherents; and for the general, they were content, so only he did as they demanded, to leave him his own way of doing it.
Even the most obstinately inimical allowed themselves, out of the generosity which conquest brings, to be kept in check; and with the exception of one or two solicitous enquiries pitched in a shrill key, as to what had befallen the most important feature of his face, they quietly settled themselves to listen to what some present afterwards pronounced to be the most astounding piece of oratory which had ever left the lips of Syndic Hackernagel.
That this, in the very nature of it, occupied some time, may be conceived; and for one whole hour and a quarter, the Syndic, with a few trifling interruptions, held forth from the Chancellery steps, to those who during the previous night’s small hours had convened that rendezvous, and to as many more who made it their business or their pleasure to hear what Master Hackernagel might be having to say for himself.
Himself! Gracious Powers! Self, in any case, was not to be his text on this occasion. Every nerve and sinew of him were, on the contrary, strained to turn the mental vision of his hearers in upon themselves, and to demonstrate to them what an egregious blunder they had committed in deposing the king of horologiers, the Professor Conrad Dasipodius. For who but they, as he boldly and indignantly demanded, had been guilty of this, by their own suffrages? The whole matter, as with a wave of the hand towards Burgomaster von Steinbach, who stood silently watching the scene, the whole matter, Tobias said, had been publicly and thoroughly sifted, and if it was not their subsequent voting which had thrust out Dasipodius, what had?
“Good people, there are things,” hurried on Hackernagel, incited to mend the pace of his oratory at this point, by certain ominous rumblings—“there are things a man may sorely repent of having done,” and here his saddened tones producing the soothing effect he aimed at, he perorated on, ringing the changes upon his syllogism with curious skill, and sticking to it with leech-like tenacity. Then too in that scarlet and fur panoply, he was almost invulnerable. Tobias Hackernagel shivering in his thin night-gear, under a cross-fire of practical hard-hitting, and Syndic Hackernagel clothed about in all the magnificence of his civic raiment, were as two utterly different men.
Personal courage was, as he always said, a mere animal attribute. In words, solely and entirely, his strength lay; and valiantly he squared up now to his difficulty, attacking at every point, never leaving one threatening salient angle looking in the slightest degree threateningly for himself, until he had smoothed it round to look like the work of the people. With meteoric bursts, his periods rushed across their intellectual vision, dazing it so utterly, that only afterwards some of his hearers found breath to question the flawlessness of his arguments.
And ever again, when he felt the smallest danger of getting out of his depth, he returned to that one incontrovertible assertion. “Did you not, each and all of you, enjoy your free right of voting for whom you pleased at the close of the enquiry? And was not Dasipodius’ name included among the candidates? Answer me that.”
“Ay, ay, that’s true, Master Hackernagel; we don’t deny that of course, but then——”
“And what is the result? That Dasipodius is rejected.” With mutual reproachful glares and contrite groans, they made the required admission.
“And Otto von Steinbach appointed.”
Longer and deeper utterances of contrition testified to this fact.
“Ay. Groan away,” muttered Burgomaster von Steinbach. “I’ll be hanged if I could have believed Strassburg was made up of such arrant——”
“Pray! I beg, Burgomaster,” said Tobias, “do not blame these good people. If only for your own sake, do not do that. What is it but the old story of popular ingratitude? You nurse a viper in your bosom, and it turns and stings you. Give these people here two seconds to speak in, and believe me it is on us they would cast the blame—on Us!”
“Speak for yourself, Tobias Hackernagel!” furiously cried Niklaus.
“Nay, for myself possibly—for you—for the whole bench I speak. Good friends,” he continued, turning again to his auditors, “Burgomaster von Steinbach here places the whole matter in—in——”
“A nutshell,” prompted Niklaus.
“In a nutshell,” smiled Tobias effusively. “It was, he observes, a grievous mistake you made when you——”
Has some invisible thunderbolt stricken Hackernagel, that the word dies on his wide-opening lips, while a paste-white hue overspreads his face, and his eyes fix themselves in a rigid stare on the figure of a woman who has mingled with the crowd, which is no sooner aware of her presence, than it divides respectfully for her to pass to the foot of the steps, where she takes her stand and watchfully eyes the speaker.
“When—when——” stammers Hackernagel.
“Well, Master Hackernagel? Don’t let me interrupt,” she says in a low tone,—“a grievous mistake that was made when——”
“When,” a sickly smile contorts Hackernagel’s lips, “when WE—sent away the Professor Dasipodius,” he gasps out.
“Good!” cried Niklaus. “Courage, man. You’ll do now.”
But never in all his public career had Tobias felt himself so near his undoing. It was all that woman’s eyes which had driven him to the disastrous admission. Had she kept in her own house at her sewing, as became women with an ounce of modesty in their composition, he could have pulled himself through with barely a hair’s damage; but here, forced in spite of himself, to cry peccavi! What in the name of Hecuba had she come here for, setting herself,—literally doing it, between him and the people at this crucial moment? Bearding him on his own particular hunting-ground? To be brow-beaten and trampled upon like this by a woman? Yet no, a million times no! and girting in his crimson and fur, until every crease of it was eloquent of the creature it wrapped about, he returned to the contest.
“Having arrived then,” he continues, “good friends, at the conclusion that you—that it was an error,” for still the artist’s eyes are transfixing his face, “to—to part with the Professor Dasipodius, we have come to the determination of—of fetching him back again.”
A thunder of applause greets the proposition.
“That’s by a long way the finest thing he ever said in his life. Isn’t it, Klausewitz?” said the Burgomaster, appealing to his much-enduring colleague, whom he had dragged to the scene of action.
“The sun’s burning hot,” grumbled Job. “If he doesn’t make haste, we shall all get sunstroke.”
“My Lord Bishop inclines to the opinion,” continued the Syndic, with a side glare of defiance at Radegund, “though here I must confess I am not at one with him, that Dasipodius will—not come. But I think you—we ought not to despair. My own opinion is that he will jump——”
“To the hangman with your opinions. Push on, man, and tell them what my lord said, can’t you?”
“But,” proceeded Tobias, thus assisted, “am I here to advocate my own poor sentiments? Is it not by the desire of the people that I stand here to-day?”
“Ay, ay!” cheered certain voices, which turned Tobias’ skin to gooseflesh under the sweltering crimson and fur.
“And I am prepared to sacrifice—I emancipate myself, so to speak, from my own impressions.”
“Good again,” nodded Niklaus, cheerily contemplating the signs of approval in the faces before him.
“This moment, as I have ever been,” and Tobias’ voice waxed shrill as chanticleer’s at dawn, “I am the people’s, always the people’s, body and soul of me. If it be your desire, good friends, as my Lord Bishop believes, that Dasipodius should be invited back again, I your friend, Tobias Hackernagel, will do it.”
Is it that everybody is stricken speechless with admiration for their Syndic’s disinterested proposition, or that because they are mentally debating the perfect wisdom of constituting him their envoy, that not a sound is heard?
“Ah, h’m,” coughed Hackernagel, “have I been speaking, as it were, over the heads of some of you, friends? Well, let me consider, how shall I convey to you, that some in certain high quarters feel that this mission demands for its ambassador, a person—h’m, h’m—of talent, a diplomatist, a tactician, a man of eloquence, of judgment, of—in short it is myself whom my Lord Bishop has requested——” and here Hackernagel’s eyes, sweeping with modest pride the faces before him, encountered the gaze of my lord himself fixed on him in stern curiosity.
“Choose your words better, Syndic Hackernagel,” he said in clear loud tones, “unless you will have me for a prompter.”
“Good morning, my lord,” said Tobias with a sickly smile. “I was just explaining to these good folks that you have—commanded me to fetch the Professor Dasipodius back again.” So Syndic Hackernagel concluded his peroration, somewhat abruptly; and he crept away from the sea of gaping grinning faces, feeling that somehow the whole city knew how he had been brought to bite the dust; or as Niklaus in his subsequent chats over the subject phrased it, had been made to eat humble pie; “the very sourest, toughest, humblest pie, friend Tobias ever swallowed in all his life!”