CHAPTER LIX.
WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK.
Whether Dasipodius’ visit at the Munster-gasse had brought Sabina consolation, or rendered her fifty times more wretched, she was wholly unable to determine; only she knew that her young life had come to be very very hard to bear, and there were times when her desolation was so utterly unendurable, that she was fain to creep away like some poor sick animal, and do battle alone with her grief. Very womanfully she strove to stifle into silence the memories which were as dear to her as they were bitter. The more effectually to live them down, the little woman had a habit of selecting that spot for her meditations where hardly more than six months since, she and Conrad Dasipodius had plighted their mutual troth.
There had been snow on the ground then, icicles had hung from the bare trees, and the north-east wind had whistled over the frozen river, but then there had been beating against each other two warm hearts which knew not cold. Now there was but one, lonely and chilled to the core; and not all the sunlight smiling so cheerily among the branches, and flecking the grassy banks, and sparkling diamond-bright among the Ill’s gentle ripples, could shed into it one ray of genuine warmth.
There was not a single word of that brief sweet stolen interview which the girl had not treasured up; and the spot’s associations so vividly recalled the mathematician’s every look and accent, that sometimes Sabina almost cheated herself into the belief that all the later past was some ugly dream, and that still he was beside her murmuring those words of love. “Is it to end like this?” he had asked; and oh Heaven! to think of the passionate tenderness breathing through his low calm tones then! To end like this! Ah me! ah me! And then—then those strange words more enigmatical now their signification had been in some sort solved, than then when it had been utterly obscure to her. “Darling, I think I could work miracles for your sake. And you? You will be brave for mine?”
And belted knight was not braver than that love-lorn girl. She had not dreamed then that it was such sort of courage which would have been required of her. The giving up of his love itself; the very life’s blood and nourishment of hers. Her pride of maidenhood would have simply whispered her that if such a fearsome chance as that should befall, then at one and the same breath, hers for him must perish too. And yet the love she was bearing him now, outshone the old affection as the finer’s gold outshines the earth-dulled nugget. Brave for his sake? Ay, ay, for his sake.
And so one of those latter July mornings, Sabina von Steinbach, as many a time she had done, and looked to do again, having set household matters in good training for the day, donned hood and mantle, and intimated to Niklaus, with a kiss on his bald crown, that she was going out.
“Ay. So do, heart’s dear one,” said the Burgomaster, looking up from his ledgers. “So do. The fresh air will give your cheeks some roses, and I would come with you if——” and then he glanced with divided affection from his girl’s face to the huge folios before him. “Shall I?”
“No, Väterle,” hurriedly assured Sabina. “I shall do quite well alone. I am only going to take a little stroll by the river.”
“Bless my soul!” half-frowningly, half-smilingly soliloquized Niklaus when she was gone. “What a fancy she always has for the river to be sure! Now I call it rather a dismal sort of a promenade myself; but I expect she carries her pockets full of crumbs for that posse of ducks and geese that always quack one deaf just about there. That’s the secret of it. Never was such a girl as she is for dumb animals!”
A veritable lover’s walk of summer evenings was that tree-bordered river path leading from below the fishmarket, out under the bridges to the Fisherman’s Gate. In the forenoon however the place was quiet enough; and once past the St. Stephen’s Tower, it was (save for the waterfowl, who, boasting an island domain somewhere out in midstream, were given to prosecuting voyages of discovery along the banks) silent and sequestered as saddest heart could desire; and Sabina, strolling slowly onward, barely anticipated encountering a single straggler. As however she neared the spot sacred to her hopeless love, which stood somewhat hidden by a bend in the path, and shaded round by tall bramble bushes, her ear caught a low wailing sound, broken by cruel sobbings. Instinctively she stopped and listened. A woman’s voice! and she made a step forward.
“Lonely and miserable is she, poor thing,” murmured the girl to herself, the ready sympathy welling up into her eyes. “And why, I wonder? why?”
With a light warning rustle of the bushes, Sabina stepped forward, and found herself in the presence of a woman seated on the trunk of a fallen tree; a market-basket, whence straggled the dislocated necks of a couple of capons into the long rank grass, lying beside her. Unconscious of the intruder, her face hidden in her arms folded upon her lap, she sat rocking herself to and fro, moaning, “Otto—Otto—my Otto!” and not a word besides.
“Why, Gretchen!—Gretchen Hackernagel,” said Sabina in a soft tone of recognition.
“Who sent for you, Sabina von Steinbach?” fiercely demanded the Syndic’s daughter, sitting bolt upright, and tossing back the red golden luxuriant hair, all dank and tear matted, while she stared through her blurred eyes at the intruder. “Who sent for you?” If anything could have aggravated the girl’s misery, it was this most palpable reminder of the existence of her, whom Gretchen in some sort regarded as her rival in the graceless Otto’s affections.
“Dear Gretchen”—began Sabina.
“Leave me alone!” sobbed out the unhappy girl. “I hate vipers.”
“You hate?” reiterated the puzzled Sabina.
“Vipers. That’s what I said, Miss Innocence; and I suppose you’re as happy as the day is long, now you’ve managed to coax him back. And—oh, isn’t it nice to have come here, and caught me crying about him? Only I wasn’t. Don’t flatter yourself. Cry about him indeed! Oh!” and she laughed hysterically. “I like that. He’d be a rare fine bargain to cry about.”
“He?”
“Ho! don’t stare at me like that, you false cat, you. You think I don’t know. But I do—I do. And you’d like to be having them all to twist round your little finger, wouldn’t you, if you could, and then bid them be off for a pack of idiots: like you served Master Dasipodius. Oh, ho! don’t I know? Doesn’t all Strassburg know?”
“Like I——” faltered Sabina, turning deadly pale. “Do you know what you’re saying, Gretchen Hackernagel?”
“Every bit as much as you do, Sabina von Steinbach,” retorted Gretchen, in broken but fierce tones, rising and picking up her basket, and stepping a pace or two forward, she stood boldly confronting Sabina with her tear-swollen eyes. “I suppose it doesn’t want spectacles to be seeing that the prosperous Catholic Burgomaster’s dainty daughter is a better bargain than the disgraced Protestant, Tobias Hackernagel’s. Oh, no, he’s sharp enough when it suits him, is Otto—Otto!” and at the name’s recurrence, her tears broke forth afresh, “and—do you hear—ah! don’t go on staring at me like that. It will drive me mad—mad.”
“I won’t. I won’t,” assured Sabina, fixing her astonished gaze more and more persistently on the broken-hearted Gretchen.
“And next, I suppose,” continued Gretchen, “you’ll be making believe you know nothing about it all. Have done!” for Sabina strove to speak, “telling me you don’t know where he went the other night, after he’d rushed off like a whirlwind, swearing it was for ever—and ever—and ever—oh.”
“Do you mean Otto——”
“Yes, yes, I mean—oh.”
“By our dear Lady’s honour, I do not know,” asseverated Sabina, lifting her blue eyes from Gretchen’s to the hardly bluer sky, “for I have not seen Otto for an age. He has not been near our house for——”
“Well?”
“Ah, for more than a fortnight.”
Gretchen’s face softened perceptibly.
“And,” continued Sabina, “tell me, Gretchen, calmly—if you can. You do not mean that you and Otto have quarrelled?”
“He has,” said Gretchen, wiping her eyes, and turning them shyly, and more than half emptied of their harsh mistrust and defiance, on Sabina.
“But, dear child, what about?” insisted Sabina, laying her hand caressingly on Gretchen’s.
“Ah!” sneered Gretchen, shaking it off. “Now you’d dearly like to know, wouldn’t you.”
“Indeed I would, if it could help to right it for you, Gretchen. Else,” added she with a sigh, and in tones of such weary unmistakable indifference, that Gretchen started and stood intently studying her sad patient face, “else I care little enough I think.”
Hitherto there had been small enough sympathy between these two. The devout Catholic girl with her illuminated missal and her thousand and one quaint legends of Mother Mary and the Saints, shrank from the more bare verities of the faith in which Gretchen Hackernagel had been reared. She could not sit down and share with her dreamy speculations over the Stigmata of gentle Friar Francis, the “Tolle lege” of the great Father Augustine, the sweet charity of the blessed Elizabeth of Hungary, or make with her brain pictures of Heaven’s golden gates and sapphire walls. For Gretchen Hackernagel, these things wore no vitality or colour, and her life’s conditions had only shown her the Christian religion as a hard ungracious task-mistress. Then too, on her part, Gretchen had for so long secretly hated Sabina as her formidable rival; and so it had come to be that these two, occasionally thrown together, were acquaintances, not friends. Yet now those last simple words of Sabina’s had struck a chord of sympathy in Gretchen’s heart. It may have been their sad hopelessness, or perhaps the ring of gentle forbearance to which Gretchen was such a stranger in her own house, that touched her.
“And I think,” went on Sabina, after a brief pause, “you will like best to be alone again. If indeed,” she added wistfully, “I can do nothing to help you to win that—win Otto back.”
“Would you?” and with keenly searching eyes, Gretchen looked into Sabina’s face. “Would you indeed do that?”
“Ay, indeed,” said Sabina in tones of grave assurance. “Indeed, if I could. Tell me how, Gretchen?” and again she laid her hands on Gretchen’s, and this time they were not shaken off. “Tell me what I could do?”
“He minds all you say to him,” said Gretchen, gazing with gloomy speculation into the river. “It has always been Cousin Sabina this, Cousin Sabina that, till I have just hated the very sound of your name.”
“Nay, now, Otto is my cousin,” contented Sabina, “and if he should like me a little, that is only his duty; he would be dreadfully wicked if he didn’t, and I won’t have you angry with him, or me either, for that, you naughty child. If he likes ‘Cousin Sabina,’ isn’t it one Gretchen Hackernagel we know, he has asked to be his wife? and that should be enough, and a great deal more too,” she added with a little sigh, “if you love him, Gretchen, as many a time he has told me he loves you, don’t you know,” argued the cunning Sabina. “Come now, tell me. This is no more surely than a little passing cloud between you?”
But Gretchen shook her head. “You know nothing about it,” she said.
“Nay, very well then; I will go. It would make me sorry to have you fancying I was meddling in what does not concern me. So good-bye, Gretchen Hackernagel;” and she turned and strolled homeward by the path she had come, musing greatly as she went.
“Now, what can those two ridiculous creatures have found to quarrel about? Just as if there wasn’t real misery—oh dear! of all sorts in the world, without their making up any. Poor dear thing! I won’t have it. No,” and the little autocrat pursed her lips resolutely, and set down her small foot as she walked, “I will not have such absurd nonsense, and I shall tell Otto so.”
Her opportunity speedily presented itself; for she came face to face with that young gentleman as she turned the corner of the Munster-gasse, and learning that she had something very particular indeed to say to him, he followed her, most lamb-like of captives, to the house, where his brain having been rendered lucid by a tankard of ale, Sabina demanded without further preamble, “What he meant by it?” and when, not quite unexcusably perhaps, he said, “Mean by what?” all the answer she vouchsafed was, “Oh, you know very well”.
“Upon my honour.”
“Honour! Oh, really, now, that’s too good,” sarcastically flushed up the indignant little lady. “A great deal too good. And you treating poor Gretchen so. Oh, whistle as much as you like, sir,” as Otto indulged in a long low sibilation. “That shows how true it all is; and I know all about it, I tell you. Yes—all.”
“By Jove, you do!” cried he, starting up.
“By Jove, I do,” nodded she; “and now, see here, Otto, if you don’t go back this minute, and make up with her, I’ll—I’ll never speak to you again.”
“But—but—” said Otto, staggered by the awful threat, “but, look here.”
“I won’t,” she said, throwing her hood down on the table, and smoothing back her bright ripples of hair, she seated herself at her frame, and proceeded to stab her tapestry work with extraordinary energy. “And I hate the sight of you, cross-grained, false, unkind, cruel creature that you are. I should like to stick you all over with this needle; that I should.”
“But, Cousin Sabina——”
“Oh! I’m no cousin of yours, I can tell you; and I won’t be. Never again till”—and then just the very faintest flicker of a smile relaxed the tightened lips—“till you turn Gretchen Hackernagel into another cousin for me.”
“Are you so very anxious then for the connection, Sabina?” demanded Otto in tones whose measured soberness impelled her to look up at him.
“That,” she answered, more composedly resuming her work, “has nothing to do with it. A promise is a promise. Is it or isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes; all that.”
“And you’ve promised to marry Gretchen Hackernagel. Have you or haven’t you?” persisted his stern inquisitrix.
“Yes! oh, yes; you know,” said Otto, “all that. I don’t deny that.”
“Very well then.”
“But look here, Sabina. You wouldn’t—I say you know, look here now, Tobias Hackernagel is such an infernal old rascal.”
“For shame!” said Sabina with an odd gleam of satisfaction dancing under the cast-down eyelids.
“Oh well, it’s the same thing. He would be, if he dared.”
“Are you going to marry Tobias Hackernagel?” she demanded grimly.
“Upon my word and honour now, Sabina,” cried the despairing derelict, “who’d have imagined you’d go looking at it in that light? I should have—hem—supposed that you of all others—that—that—oh! really, you can’t understand all about it; you can’t indeed!”
“I can, sir; I do, I tell you. I know a great deal too much; and I hate people who—who make love to girls, and then, well, change their minds, and want to draw back. And why pray? Just because fathers-in-law are not saints.”
“It’s just because he is one,” groaned Otto, “that there’s no knowing how to take him.”
“It isn’t very likely,” she rejoined, “that I should be fond of Syndic Hackernagel. You ought to know that, Otto. I think you do,” and Sabina bent her head very low over her work, to examine some ugly flaw in the golden thread she was using. “But I’m a woman for all that; and I should hope I’m able to reason properly, and I tell you that you are very unreasonable, and very, very wicked, and very, very, very cruel, and—oh, so horribly, so detestably stupid,” and the thread snapped off at a tangent, “not to know a good thing when you’ve got it.”
“A good thing?” vacuously echoed Otto.
“Oh thou dear Heaven!” sighingly ejaculated Sabina, a bright rose-flush dyeing her pale cheeks. “How plain one has to speak, to be sure! Yes, that’s what I said, sir. A good thing. A true woman’s love.”
“Oh, well, as to that,” returned he, stroking his hyacinthine locks, “there’s no end of it. I mean, you know, there are heaps of girls.”
“Otto,” gravely said Sabina, pausing in her work, and resting her hand on the frame’s edge, “there is not the faintest necessity for you to be telling me that our Antinous there,” and she pointed with her needle out to the courtyard fountain, on whose marble ledge a magnificent peacock stood pluming his spread tail, and arching his satin neck in the mid-day sunlight, “is nothing like the vain, conceited animal you are. But girls, as a rule—as a rule, mind—don’t like that sort of thing. I don’t, for example; it’s turning things, as it were, wrong end first. And you may look a long time—a very long time—before you’ll find any other girl to worship and bow down to you, and make you everybody, and herself nobody, as Gretchen Hackernagel does.”
“I do think she’s fond of me,” languidly smiled he.
“She loves you, Otto. Trust me. I know, I can tell; loves you dearly—dearly. And will you throw such love away? Do you want her heart to break for your sake? Would that be a triumph to please you?”
Otto was not sure that it might not be; but he felt Sabina’s gentle eyes upon him, and contrived to look contrition’s very incarnation. Sabina gathered courage.
“Would you like her death to be at your door?” she hurried on.
“Oh, Himmelsdonnerwetter! What things you do say to be sure, Sabina. No, of course not. Who would? I only thought——”
“Of yourself, as you always do,” she said in stern reproach. “But Otto—dear Otto,” and then her tones softened, and she rose, and coming beside him, laid her hand lightly on his shoulder, “if you have any heart at all, and indeed I know you have, take back, take back this that the good God has given you, and thank Him on your knees you have not lost it for your carelessness.” But he only shook his head gruntingly.
“Do you know,” she went on, “how many there are who have played away with such a thing, or misused it, or lost it—nay, I do not know how. I cannot tell. Maybe because it never was really and truly theirs, as Gretchen’s has been—is yours, Otto.”
“It’s an awful sacrifice,” grumbled he, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and surveying, in a sort of absent admiration, his pair of outstretched comely legs, “and then it’s frightful to think what that dispensation for marrying a heretic will cost. It’s a precious extravagant game; and upon my honour, I don’t altogether think it’s worth its candle. I—I don’t mind telling you I don’t, Sabina.”
“And I wonder you’re not ashamed of yourself for your pains!” flashed she.
“And if I do do it, I do it against my better conscience look you; utterly and entirely against my better conscience.”
“Oh, never mind your conscience!” joyfully cried the unprincipled little woman. “Now go—do,” and she sent forward the chair in which he was tilting himself at perilously sharp angles, with such force, that he had to spring to his feet to save himself the alternative of measuring his length on the floor, “go and set about it at once.”
“Oh, I can’t do that. No, look here now, Sabina, you can’t make me do that.” And Otto emphatically shook his head. “I’d sooner die. See now. I’ve sworn I’ll never set foot in his house again.”
“What a silly boy you are,” laughed she.
“Oh, you may call me names, but hang it, I mean to stick to that, so there!”
“Then do,” she said, still quietly laughing to herself, “go to the Fisherman’s Walk, and if she’s not gone, she’s sitting there—in that little nook, you know it, don’t you, Otto? just short of the St Stephen’s Tower, where I left her, sobbing her heart out, and all for a piece of rubbish like you.”
“Do it on the sly. Be clandestine, be——”
“Oh, Sabina!”
“Ah, be what you will, if only you do it at once, and—see now, Otto, if she’s gone, find her—wherever it is. Yes?”
“Oh, all right,” grunted he.
“You’re safe, you know, always to find her on the way to market at all events.”
“And how is it possible for me, I should like to know, to be leaving the Studio at such an hour?” objected the ardent lover.
“Ah, just as if Conr—the Professor Dasipodius was as strict upon you as all that! I’m quite sure you’re not so precious as not to be spared one little half hour. Come now, if you make good haste, you’ll catch her now. I will walk with you as far as your house. Radegund seemed but poorly last night, and I want to see her, and try to cheer her up a bit. So come. I will take your arm, Cousin Otto, if you’re so gallant as to lend it to me.”
And after this fashion, Sabina compassed the getting of Otto as far on his quest as the corner of the Domplatz.