CHAPTER LXXII.
DE PROFUNDIS.
With that returning consciousness, hope glimmered for the watchers, and as each day passed, grew high. True that Hackernagel’s weapon had driven cruelly, so that her white flesh would bear an ugly seamy mark to her life’s end; but it had struck with a sideways random clumsiness, inflicting a gaping terrible surface wound, yet not hopelessly dangerous, provided it were treated with care and patience, and these were never less wanting.
And so the shadow of the dread Reaper’s scythe was lifted from the Lily flower, and never had life been so fair and sweet to her as now in this time of weakness and of pain, which all Surgeon Wolkenberg’s skill and Gretchen Hackernagel’s tender nursing could do no more than lighten.
At the wounded girl’s own faintly whispered wish, eloquently endorsed by her eyes, Gretchen Hackernagel had remained beside her; and Aunt Ottilie, with her gentle-hearted common-sense view of the case, had taken no umbrage at Sabina’s preference, but on the contrary had made it her special mission to bring over the demurring Niklaus. “Nun I may be, brother, but woman I am too, and I know; and trust me, you mustn’t interfere. They understand each other, these two young things; and though it is truer than true, as you are always saying, that the parent tree is a baneful one, the dear God’s providence has let the antidote grow upon its branches; and it is not for you to grumble, but to thank Heaven on your bended knees, that so much good can come out of evil; for good that Gretchen Hackernagel is to the core, Anabaptist castaway though the poor thing was brought into the world, and understands sick folks as well as I do myself.”
And Niklaus after that held his peace.
Yes, never so fair—not in the earliest morning tide of her wooing had life been for Sabina as now. To the bruised and broken Lily, slowly lifting her pale head once more, all the past was like some hideous dream; out from the tangle and the darkness she seemed to have wakened in some fair garden, where the rushing of turbid waters had stilled into a clear streamlet, glinting in the gentle shadows of green whispering boughs, and catching the sheen of the fleecy sun-gilded cloudlets in the azure far overhead. Shadows indeed there were still; and shadows to the end there must be for her. Heaviest of all the one which dimmed her eyes when they rested on her lover’s face, and she strove to realise something of what the deprivation of his lost sight must be. Tears would brim then to overflowing in her own eyes, and his quick ear, catching the quiver of her breath, would bring his hands stealing to the cheeks, gathering each day something of their old roundness and bloom, and insist on the meaning of such telltale drops being explained to him.
“What is it, dear one?” he would ask, bending over her, and oh, Mother Mary! the sweetness of those moments to kiss them away. “Is your wound paining you?”
“The one in my heart is,” she would confess, drawing down the hand with her own unhurt one, and stroking it tenderly.
“In your heart?”
“Ay—when I think how night-dark everything is for you. Oh, Conrad—Love.”
“Child, no,” he answers her, an infinite tenderness welling up into the sightless eyes’ calm mysterious depths. “Sometimes the light grows too great for me. It seems like Heaven’s own endless day.”
And so with thoughts too many and too blessed for words, he sits beside her, where in the broad window seat she lies couched and softly pillowed, with Mitte curled snugly up on the coverlet, purring her song of supreme content to the measure of the sun-god’s “wait-tic, wait-tac,” whose eyes goggle and roll through the gathering gray with a world of intelligence, and one by one in the gloaming the stars twinkle out, and presently comes in Burgomaster von Steinbach, and balancing on the couch’s outermost edge—for has he not the fear of damage to Mitte before his eyes if he should trespass further?—he falls to contemplating his girl’s bright face, and speculating how many days before Dr. Bruno will be letting her take house-mistress’s place again at table yonder; and Dr. Bruno, looking in as he goes home, promises great things, if only she is careful, and takes no undue liberties.
“She won’t do that,” laughingly says the Burgomaster, looking up from the hearth, whither he is gone to set light to the logs, for the evenings are beginning to grow chilly again, and a blaze looks comfortable. “I’ll warrant you she won’t be let do that, with Gretchen standing over her. Gretchen’s a gorgon!”
“Gretchen’s a jewel!” says Bruno.
“And deserves the best husband Elsass has to give,” says Niklaus. “Though by the Mass, I believe she means to stick to that nephew of mine.”
“Of course she does,” says Sabina.
“It looks like it,” smiles the doctor; “I nearly tumbled over them as I came up the steps there, just now.”
“Well, well. There is never any accounting for what womenkind take into their heads, is there, Professor? Foot-rule nor plumb-line can’t make head or tail of it, eh?”
And while the Professor smiles a grave, assenting smile, Sabina, with a slight access of colour, changes the conversation, and asks how cousin Radegund is?
“Much the same, Mistress Sabina,” answers Bruno, the transient cheerfulness of his face all fading into the sad hopeless look it always wears now.
“I wish she was well,” sighs Sabina, “if only for my own selfish sake, so that she might come and see me.”
“No, no,” and the hand hers lies nestling in grips it with almost convulsive force. “That must not—cannot be.”
“I know it can’t,” she quietly rejoins. “I must wait patiently till I can go to her, poor girl. Though she refuses herself to everybody, she would see me. Don’t you think she would, Dr. Bruno?” pleadingly urges Sabina. “She would not refuse me,” she adds in a lower tone.
“She could refuse you nothing, I think,” answers the surgeon in a voice yet lower.
For Bruno Wolkenberg knew all now—knew it by Radegund’s own confession to him. That Saint Laurences’s day, at the close of the brief ceremonial, the artist had tottered homeward, and had thrown herself half dead with fatigue, upon the couch in her studio, where she had lain almost ever since, fiercely battling with her mortal weakness.
The distracted Bruno, called upon by Bishop John to give a name to the mysterious disease, which, with rare misgivings, the gentle-hearted priest saw had taken such hold upon Radegund, spoke of overwork, and falteringly admitted that the symptoms were of a consumptive tendency; but the bishop, receiving the confession which, with a meekness sitting strangely on the proud Radegund, she had desired to make to him, passed out from her presence, with a startled, saddened preoccupation in his ordinarily calm and serene face, and apprehended that there might be a consuming of heart and soul, beside which that of the body would be but a slight thing.
Such restitution as the conditions of her priestly absolving had imposed on her, Radegund had, as far as lay in her power, already made; but the penance had still to come, and that Bishop John uncompromisingly demanded should lie in a full confession of all to the man who so devotedly loved her. He would have nothing short of this, perceiving as he did that justice to all concerned was only so to be attained.
To which of those two hapless hearts the ordeal was the more cruel, who can say? Sword sharp as the pang of shame to her, it was hardly keener than the humiliation of him who had given this woman his best treasure, and found himself driven at last to face the truth that she valued it at less than nothing. For that poor substitute she had always declared to be his was, to his passionate devotion, worse than her hate. And yet, under the scathing test of all this wretchedness, the gold of the man’s humble and unselfish nature shone out pure; and when, all being told, she waited to see him turn spurningly from her, he said no more than that Dasipodius was a man worthy of such love as she had to give, and such indignation as could force itself into his breaking heart, at that overwhelming moment, was all concentred round a vague mazed astonishment that the mathematician could have so misprized the rich gift she had laid at his feet.
But misery too completely overmastered the surgeon to leave him space to think, and utterly prostrated, he would sit for hours in his dreary laboratory, gazing at the poisonous simples there, and yearning for the oblivion they could give.
He might have yielded to the temptation of them, but for the saving grace of his calling, which whispered that if indeed no power could ever quicken his own perished happiness, his life could still be useful to his fellow mortals, and so Surgeon Wolkenberg continued to do the work nearest to him; only now, as he went to and fro on his merciful missions, people would silently mark how fast those locks were silvering, which but a little while since were golden as a Norse god’s.
Against Bruno, the lot of Conrad Dasipodius promised a sharp contrast. Sweet and fair beyond all dreaming his future lay before him. His affliction, which he knew was a hopelessly incurable one, was indeed as grievous to him now as when the dense darkness of it first set in; and so it would be for him to the end. He put no gloss upon this truth, assumed no meretricious cheerfulness, but simply nerved himself as best he could to endure. Many a quest and venture into the science world his genius had aspired to follow was impossible for him now that he was at the mercy of others’ eyesight. Marvellous as was the atonement of his acquired delicacy of touch, and of his natural powers of mental perception, there remained practical difficulties, more or less like those which had beset him in the course of the Horologe’s production, which must for ever be hindering him, marring his loftiest efforts, and denying his noblest ambitions; but that saddening conviction that his intellectual life could at best be such a maimed and circumscribed one was not the haunting, oppressive misery it had been in the time of his loneliness and heart desolation. Heaven had seen fit to take away, but then what had it not given! And then the high-souled, lofty spirited scientist bowed his head in thankfulness, and felt he would not have bartered his lot for the combined faculties, mental and physical, of all the mathematicians of Heathendom and Christendom, when he felt the gentle touch and the warm breath of that woman, who had counted her life at less than a pin’s fee beside her love for him.
Only as time went over, bringing with it old routine and daily habits once more, he was able calmly to set himself to try and gauge something of that love’s breadth and depth; and then the great mathematician failed utterly, finding it as boundless and immeasurable as that fair world, which one winter’s night he had told his little betrothed wife a certain legendary mouse suddenly found himself in. And Dasipodius was content to accept his problem, as a divine inestimable gift, and to hold it in his heart a thing apart, yet mysteriously hallowing the meanest as entirely as the highest conditions of existence, and making light its darkest crevices.
Equally when time brought healing, and he dared speak unreservedly with Sabina, and there were no longer any restrictions laid by Dr. Bruno on references to that terrible day, the words that passed between them concerning it were comparatively few. Sabina did not need their poor eloquence to tell her that the life she had nearly paid her own for, would have been too hateful a possession had hers been sacrificed; while the future now spared her to share with him was too holy and precious to be much spoken of, even by each to each. Tongue could tell but in a poor halting sort of way, how gladly, if the decree had been reversed, and it had chanced to have been his life whose risking had been demanded for her, he would have done it. All that the silent eloquence of the daily intercourse of the years they trusted were to be theirs, could alone realise for them.