CHAPTER XX.
A NOISY COMMITTEE.
When Isaac Habrecht, having watched his master safely down the winding stone staircase, returned to the studio, he found the whole place in commotion. Work cast aside, benches overthrown, a deafening din of voices, and all other impending signs of miniature civil war. From a dozen and more of mouths praise and blame were pouring out on the absent chief. True, the odds were greatly in his favour, still a malcontent minority was not to be put down, just because the majority chanced to idolize Dasipodius.
Otto von Steinbach had reappeared upon the scene, and having constituted himself fugleman of the rebel party, seemed to be amazingly enjoying the distinction.
Mounted on his own work-bench, and gesticulating with marvellous energy, he was haranguing the whole posse comitatus with shrill eloquence.
“I put it to you all,” shrieked he—“to your ordinary powers of discrimination, you know, my friends, to decide whether this Dasipodius has not deceived us?”
“Ay, ay,” shouted some half-dozen voices. “Deceived, do I say?” continued the orator.
“That is no word for it——”
“No, no,” jeered the opposition. “Made egregious fools of us. What do we look like, I ask? What do we look like now, but double-dyed asses——”
“Hear! hear!” fell the universal assent. “And—who, I ask you, who has done this but the man we have called—I say now, called master, Conrad Dasipodius?”
“Ay! ay! So he has!” assented Otto’s party. “No! no! Down! down!” shouted the rest. “Be quiet! Let him say what he wants anyhow,” contended a couple of neutrals.
“Well,” continued Otto, “isn’t it as clear, you know, as the river Rhine——”
“The Rhine’s as thick as mud,” argued a voice; “and we don’t so much as know whether he is blind as yet.”
“He said he was himself.”
“Well, granted then. Whose business is it but his own? Anyway it isn’t ours.”
“Not our business?” wrathfully shouted Otto. “Not our business? And we are to be hoodwinked then in this fashion? Led by the nose by this blind mole of a——”
“Shame! shame!” cried nearly all. “Down! get down!”
But Otto did not mean to get down; he simply modulated his accents a little. “Well, you know what I mean to say is, don’t you see, that a man who can’t so much as tell you white from black is a pretty sort of a fellow to be laying down the law to a set of intelligent, educated, cultivated gentlemen like us. Do we not know,” went on Otto, plucking eloquence from the calm murmur of enthusiasm thrilling through all—“do we not know, and I put it to yourselves, one and all, that we have here among us minds—gifted minds with all their common senses about them—mark you, none of your——”
“Keep to the point.”
“Well, I am keeping to it, an’t I? Minds, I say, who understand horology every bit as well as this—this Dasipodius.”
Only a feeble sound of assent, however, sanctioned this bold utterance, and signs of dissent grew so ominous, that Otto, unable to beat a retreat, took forlorn hope in a desperate following up of the attack. “And do we not know as a fact,” he said, grinding his heel down on the faulty wheel, “that at the time of the competition for the Horologe commission, this fellow’s nomination was from beginning to end a matter of favour and prejudice?”
“Oh ho! prove that!” burst out the Dasipodians, with loud laughter. “Prove that.”
“You may laugh,” hysterically retorted Otto. “Just you see you don’t find yourselves having to do it the wrong side of your mouths one of these fine days. I tell you there were drawings among those sent in for the Horologe ever so much superior to old Herlin’s, or Dasipodius’ either.”
“Yours, for instance,” suggested Isaac Habrecht, speaking for the first time.
A burst of laughter greeted this remark.
“That isn’t for me to say,” modestly said Otto. “Syndic Hackernagel—”
“Ho! ho! ho! The crop-eared Anabaptist—”
“Syndic Tobias Hackernagel did not hesitate to pronounce my poor work as out of all comparison the best—the most attractive—the most——”
“Ho! ho! Kikeriki! Cock-a-doodle-doo! Fish to-day—Good red herring! Fish!”
“That is simply vulgar,” said Otto, crimsoning, and loftily waving away the delicate allusions to his patron’s early avocation. “And it is you who are wandering from the point now, my friends; I didn’t want to talk about it.”
That was true. Time, as he knew, was not yet ripe for him to plead his own cause in so many words. It was one thing for these hotheaded young fellows to enjoy a scrimmage, but quite another to fall in with his desire of waking up some fine morning, and finding himself installed in the Professor Dasipodius’ place. That indeed had not so much as yet entered their minds; he must be circumspect, and feel his way gingerly as a cat over a muddy road. Still it was pleasant to think he might be driving in the thin end of the wedge.
“All I had in my thoughts was that this Dasipodius should be taught to know his place—taken down a peg, as the saying is; and when he comes here in the morning I propose, you know, that we give him a piece of our minds, and—bar him out.”
Never had man more lamentably mis-estimated the temper of his audience; and amid cries of “Shame! Down! down! Let’s give him a souse in the duck-pond!” accompanied by a variety of ungentle lunges and clutches at his shins and ankles, Otto ran a perilous chance of being totally worsted, had it not been for Isaac Habrecht, who elbowing his way to the front of the orator’s extemporised rostrum, turned his broad protecting back on the orator, and lifting his hand, obtained by gestures, the cessation of yells and catcalls his tongue must have demanded only in vain.
“Hear then—hear!” broke forth an almost universal shout. “Isaac Habrecht! Hoch! for Isaac Habrecht. Let us hear what Isaac has to say.”
“What I have to say?” said Habrecht. “Well! it’s not much; only that you ought all to be ashamed of yourselves for a pack of scurvy rioters. What! Might not the master turn his back one poor five minutes, but you must, every man jack of you, be raising a witches’ sabbath loud enough to waken the blessed dead from their rest? Fine bargain you, forsooth! to go picking holes in other men’s coats, when you can’t stick for five minutes together to the work under your fingers. Is that the way the master made himself what he is, d’ye think? But look you, friends, I’m master here for this day; and if three minutes don’t see each one of you back in his place, I’ll have the watch turned in upon you for rioters and tumult-mongers. I’ve said my say,” concluded Isaac, looking round at Otto. “And as for you, young sheepshead! get down at once with you, and be seeing to those wheel teeth.”
And Otto, who knew the playful ways of his comrades when their blood was up, meekly descended from his elevation, and sitting down before it, sulkily took up his half-smashed wheel. Thoroughly disliking Habrecht, on account of his eternal fault-finding with his work, he by no means relished being beholden to him now for salvation from his friends; but he knew also something of that special predilection of the practical fellows for duck-pond pastime, and how they would indulge in it whenever opportunity presented itself. There being just then, moreover, a cold thaw on, he elected promptly to obey Isaac; while those of his compeers who had deprecated the late demonstration, hastened to fall in with Habrecht’s injunctions, and those who did not know their own minds, began to feel something like shame when their eyes fell upon the master’s vacant seat, and settled quietly again to their work; so that when some half-hour or so after my Lord Bishop just looked in to see how the Horologe was progressing, the studio looked quite a model of order and sobriety; and he said to Master Gottlieb, his chaplain, who chanced to be with him, “It quite does one’s heart good to see what a quiet, well-conducted set of young fellows those are at the Dial. Nothing in the least ramshackle about them.”