CHAPTER XLV.
OLD FRIENDS.
“Hush! I hear music. Do not you, Kaspar?”
“No, master.”
“It is coming this way,” and the mathematician bends his head attently.
The boy lies stretched at Dasipodius’ feet, in their favourite haunt by the stalactite cavern’s mouth. It is early June now; and for miles round there is no such blessed refuge from the burden and heat of midday as this green turf, sloping downwards to the lake’s silent shores. Not a ripple stirs the water, for there is hardly a breath of air, and the heat is at its sultriest. Seemingly the very birds in the leafy branches overhead are indulging in a siesta, for they are silent, and not so much as the fluttering of a wing breaks the stillness. There has been hardly a sound for a good hour past, save the sweet tones of Kaspar Habrecht, who has been dipping hap-hazard into a new edition of Euclid, just issued from the famous new Amsterdam printing press, and is reading aloud fragments of it for the blind man’s contentment. Not much for his own, excepting in so far as Dasipodius’ pleasure is always his; but from a selfish point of view, Kaspar would undoubtedly rather have been delighting his soul with the gay, daintily-illustrated volume of Gudrun with all its sea kings, and its vikings, and storm waves, which had come to hand in the self-same package, cheek by jowl with the sober, leathern-bound Euclid.
“Rectilineal figures which are similar to the same rectilineal figure are also similar to each other,” reads Kaspar, with a suspicion of weariness, not to say of contempt in his tones; did one, thought he, need Euclid to tell one that?
“Turn over,” nodded Dasipodius.
“If,” reads Kaspar again, this time suppressing a veritable yawn, “from the greater of two unequal magnitudes there be taken more than its half and——”
“Never mind about that,” says the mathematician.
“Next let E coincide with D,” continued the boy, making another chance dip, “then of the two angles ADC and BDC one must be obtuse and one acute. Suppose the angle ADC obtuse——”
“Shut the book, Kaspar,” smiled the mathematician, laying his hand on the boy’s, and helping him to the act; “it is you who are ADC this morning. You are yawning; ay, but I heard you; shut the book, I say.”
“Nay,” faintly protested Kaspar.
“Hush! and there, I hear that music again. Listen!” And now as Kaspar sat up, and also caught its faint strains, a joyful animation flashed into his dulled eyes; and heedlessly flinging aside “the elements of all true worldly wisdom,” he sprang to his feet, and listened breathlessly.
“It’s some water party landing down at Schaffhausen yonder; that’s what it is. Holy Mary! if they would but come up our way! what luck it would be, wouldn’t it, master? We never so much as hear the squeak of a fife, excepting at mass on Sundays, and when we were at Strassburg—” he stopped abruptly with a sigh.
“Sighing for the fleshpots, Kaspar?” said Dasipodius. “Is life growing so wearisome to you here already?”
“Nay,” said the boy blushingly; “but somehow a little music does so help one over the stones.”
“Ay,” and it was the master’s turn to sigh; “it is rough riding when all the music has died out of one’s life. And so—tell me, Kaspar, you want to be back in Strassburg again?”
“Yes,” sturdily answered Kaspar; “do not you, master?”
And next instant, seeing the shadow of pain which passed over the mathematician’s face, he would have given his deft right hand to have those words unspoken. “I never shall return to Strassburg, Kaspar,” he said with assumed calmness; “you know that.”
“Never?” cried the boy, opening wide his blue eyes.
“I think not; my place there is gone. If I cannot be as I have been there,” said the mathematician proudly, “I will not be there at all. I must seek out some new field for work; some place, if such there be, where a man’s word is taken for his bond, and his infirmity is not his crime. And by Saint Laurence,” he added more briskly, “I must be finding it quickly too. It will never do to stay rusticating away the days in this delightful way much longer. Yes, you and I will have to bid each other a ‘God be with you’ soon, Kaspar, and go our separate ways; we must part, lad.”
“Part?” echoed the boy, wrinkling his smooth white brow in saddened perplexity.
“Yes, listen. In Strassburg I have but to speak for you to find you work. The hands that carved the Horologe, interest or no interest indeed, would not hold themselves out idle long for want of something to do, and find a rich reward for it too. Are you listening, Kaspar? do you understand?”
“I am listening, master.”
“And when will you like to be going?”
“Going!” mechanically ejaculated the boy; “where?”
“Did not I say now you were gone wool-gathering this morning? Back to Strassburg.”
“I will never again set foot in Strassburg,” said Kaspar, a crimson flush kindling in his cheeks, and a fiery light to his eyes, “excepting it is by your side, master.”
“Then never again, I take it, will your foot be set there; for I am going—nay, as yet I do not know where.”
“But where you go, there I shall go too. Do not shake your head, do not—master, if you send me away from you, I—no—you shall not—master dear—” a burst of tears choked his pleading, and he flung himself on the blind man’s neck, and sobbed bitterly.
“Treuer Kamerad!” murmured Dasipodius; and the firm, beautiful lips quivered, and the blind eyes grew unwontedly lustrous as he stroked the boy’s sunny hair. “My faithful Kaspar! I think among those same stars we talked of once, which rose for me when my sun set, and I thought all my life was to be midnight blackness, that you are the brightest. And shall I repay you so? Let your unselfish heart profit mine, and teach me to think what is best—and right for you. Listen here now, Kaspar—hush, hush,” for still the boy clung fast to him, crying bitterly: “Come, be reasonable.”
“And so he is—reasonable,” growled the voice of Isaac Habrecht. “It is you who are unreasonable, Master Dasipodius.”
“Isaac?”
“Ay. Yes it’s Isaac; and Isaac—and Kaspar too, seemingly, it’s to be the end of the chapter for you. Come, Kaspar, don’t go weeping your soul out like that, dear boy,” continued Isaac, gently disengaging Kaspar’s arms from Dasipodius.
“The master was but jesting.”
“Nothing of the kind,” began Dasipodius.
“He never really meant to be sending you away.”
“But I did,” protested Dasipodius. “I have been thinking.”
“Then for shame!” indignantly cried Isaac. “Do you hear, Master Dasipodius, for shame!”
“It is best; it must be,” gravely urged Dasipodius. “Reflect for an instant how utterly my lot is changed from what it was. Once I might have lifted him as I rose, and you too, Isaac; I might have served you both; but now——”
“Now our turn has come to serve you; or at least it’s fair of you, master, to let us try; but with such a proud, independent, obstinate——”
“Have done!” smiled Dasipodius. “Am I to sit here and be called names? Et tu Brute! You, Isaac, of all others; in whose hands I am just a piece of clay, to be moulded as you will. Who was it, I wonder, bade me say like any parrot, ‘Take the drawings, Isaac Habrecht, and carry them to the Chancellery!’ and I said it, by heaven, I said it—I!”
“And I,” returned Isaac, a grim smile of satisfaction relaxing his massive features, which bore a marvellous family likeness to some of Kaspar’s wooden saints and heroes, “I obeyed, and took them, and—there they are now.”
“How?” asked Dasipodius, turning his head quickly. “You say——”
“There they are now.”
“But Otto von Steinbach——”
“Ah! von Steinbach. Yes, he fetched them away,” said Isaac, in tones of careless contempt, “of course; and he kept them—till they burnt his fingers. Then he took them back again, and there they are, safe and sound. So Syndic Klausewitz has just been telling me.”
“Syndic Klausewitz!” echoed Kaspar, passing his hand over his still wet eyes, and staring in amazement at his brother, and then in utter bewilderment at the apparition of Dr. Bruno Wolkenberg, who availing himself of his intimate acquaintance with the by-paths to their haunt, has suddenly appeared upon the scene, and is silently stretching his length upon the grass, within a few feet of Dasipodius. “And what brings him here?”
“What brings them all,” said the sententious Switzer. “Duty. There’s some two score,” he continued, jerking his head in the direction of a confused sound of tramping feet and many voices growing louder each moment, “of the Town Council, and ever so many old friends of yours besides, master, coming here to have a word with you; if they’re not grilled to death before they get as far. My last batzen to a florin, they’re rueing the day now, if they haven’t done it before, that they meddled with our Horologe. Ho! ho! ho! ha! ha! ha!” and the cavernous recesses behind them resounded again and again with the deep bass of Isaac’s laughter, grave stolid Isaac Habrecht. “I thought maybe,” he continued, “that you’d like me to step on and tell you they were coming; but they won’t be here yet awhile. It is no joke,” and Isaac lifted his hat and wiped the heat drops from his massive forehead, “tramping up yonder road; every inch of it in a white heat as it is; and a pig’s nothing to the way Syndic Hackernagel pulls backward.” And once more Isaac’s sonorous ha! ha! echoed through the cave as if all the gnomes of the Venusberg were gathered there, and sharing his enjoyment. “Well, well, patience! They’ll get him here in time. And there’s Burgomaster von Steinbach, and Dr. Bruno Wolk——”
“Dr. Bruno is welcome,” said Dasipodius, stretching out his hand to his friend. “Welcome as unexpected. But how about your large retinue, Dr. Wolkenberg? Have you been appointed Imperial Physician since last you came to Schaffhausen? or how else may your planet be in the ascendant?”
“Nay,” returned the surgeon; “if only you will have it so, it is yours which is in the fortunate house, Conrad.”
“Come! come! if we must have metaphor, minstrel mine, that same planet is far too cloud-covered ever to show again. Only a miracle could unveil it.”
“And lo! a miracle is here!” flourished Bruno. “A horse, a horse, Conrad! brought to the water, and made to drink. That’s what is going to happen.”
“The Sphinx’s riddle was child’s play to yours,” said Dasipodius, with a half-provoked smile. “What on earth do you mean?”
“Hush! hark!” said Bruno; “they’re here.”
“They? and must your horse then be drinking to such a clarion blast as that?” demanded the mystified mathematician.
“The Strassburgers would have it so,” shrugged Bruno.
“And the horse?”
“Stands before you,” answered Bruno, stepping back, and leaving Dasipodius to face his deputation alone.