CHAPTER LII.
“MORE FAVOUR AND PREJUDICE.”
Words lightly spoken, the old aphorism has it, sometimes touch earnest; and the saying was justified very fairly of itself to Otto von Steinbach. Nothing, as far as he could see, was more likely than for that fetish of a Horologe to be driving him mad before it was fairly fixed in its place.
Persistently as some monstrous shadow the thing haunted his life. No sooner had he shifted the burden of it from his own shoulders, than it took up another mode of aggression, and one wholly unexpected, although not novel, in so far as Syndic Tobias Hackernagel was concerned in it.
Recent events might have led the superficial observer to infer that perhaps the Syndic had also had enough and to spare of the Horologe; but that was not to know the real Tobias Hackernagel—the Irrepressible. Easier to stamp out the life of a poisonous worm than to efface his individuality. Of buoyant elastic temperament, as his sincerest admirers in whose foremost ranks stood Syndic Hackernagel, called him, imperviously vain and impudent, as another and increasing section of the community held him to be, still he would not hide from himself that that day’s work at the Chancellery had perilously threatened his social extinguishing. His attempts, failing either to ruin or everlastingly to vilify Dasipodius, had recoiled on himself, and stultified him in the sight of the whole city. If he still outwardly retained his old status, he was secretly conscious that he owed that to the generosity of Dasipodius, who had pleaded with the powers that were on his behalf; and he knew that to him also he was indebted for the hushing up of proceedings against him.
Coals of fire all these, which, gladly as he accepted them, seared his little soul to the quick; and only served to remind him of what was irretrievably lost. Only the scantiest shadow now of all those greetings in the market-place, and bowings down, which the crowd so dearly loves to lavish on a man who can talk by the yard, and talk well, as words go. There are limits even to this sort of homage. While he had observed the golden rule with some show at least of decency, his neighbours, in consideration of his tongue’s attributes, were willing to fool him to the top of his bent, and amiably fell in with his idea of being of a clay superior to their’s; but the cord can be stretched too far, and the people, not a hoodwinked, lynch-law loving proletariat, but a peaceable orderly community, with some reverence for fair dealing, and a conviction, somewhat tardily arrived at perhaps, that this man had been leading them by the nose, turned the tide of his popularity to the lowest ebb, and the salvos and Io pæans were his no more, and great had been the fall of Tobias Hackernagel.
He had only to put his head outside his own door to come in contact with the unpalatable truth. Differ and harry and snarl even to blood-shedding as they might, over Justification, and Predestination, and Election, and Grace, and Original Sin, as these Catholic and Calvinist, and Lutheran, and Servetian, and Zwinglian Strassburgers might, at least pretty nearly all had come to be of one mind concerning Tobias Hackernagel’s moral wrong against themselves and Dasipodius. Only the handful best able to pronounce his own particular Anabaptist Shibboleth, still held to his immaculacy; just as their creed sanctioned any other extravagance and outrage against laws divine and human. But Anabaptism was not just then in the ascendant in Strassburg; it had been eating its own head off, its popularity was on the wane, and many of the saints had fallen away. Even Hackernagel, staff and anchor of the sect, had come under suspicion of unsoundness; just as, generations later, the very chiefs of the Reign of Terror came to be held suspects; and in his hour of greatest need his supporters had dwindled to an insignificant minority, chiefly by reason of doubt touching his absolute faith in that doctrine which enunciates that a community of goods is indispensable to a soul’s salvation. Some, chiefly the leaner and hungrier of the elect, went so far as to wait upon him, and to represent to him this blessed truth in all its undisguised purity; and to admonish him that his failing to recognise its exceeding loveliness had brought this judgment upon him; and when he kicked them out of his luxurious house for their pious pains, they, fired with zeal for returning evil with good, fell upon their knees in the street before his door, and in a loud voice besought that the scales might be torn from his eyes, and that he should be brought to a practical recognition of the wondrous doctrine.
In fairness, however, it must be acknowledged that Tobias had never heartily subscribed it. If his co-religionists chose to run naked about the woods like forked radishes, and grub for roots like pigs to feed themselves, that was not his own especial taste; he preferred scarlet and fine linen, and a carnivorous diet, and had spoken on his abhorrence of fanaticism on such points as savouring of accidental force of circumstance outside and beneath the consideration of the true spiritual believer. And so while outwardly conforming, the thing Tobias Hackernagel called his heart had grown somewhat estranged from his sect, which, as he said, pushed matters to lamentably unwarrantable length; and that there were delicate distinctions to be drawn between what you preach and what you practise.
“Yes, I see,” one day said Otto, to whom he would frequently enlarge on the subtle question. “You mean that what is sauce for the gander, is not always necessarily sauce for the goose.”
“I lent myself to no such vulgar comparison,” indignantly returned Tobias. “Sometimes, do you know, Otto von Steinbach, I look at you——”
Otto nodded animatedly, he had noticed the fact, until its recurrence had grown almost unpleasant; and he was glad to contemplate some possibility of its explanation. “And I confess,” went on his future father-in-law, “that I frequently find myself transfixed with amazement, not to say consternation and perplexity, at the strange vagaries of nature which has implanted in the bosom of a scion of such an illustrious house as the von Steinbachs unquestionably is——”
“Oh yes,” said Otto, elevating his head, “it’s all that. No mistake about it.”
“You interrupt me,” said the Syndic, waving him to silence. “I was observing that nature which has implanted in the bosom of a scion of the illustrious race of von Steinbach, such an inordinate inclination to indulge in inelegant, inept, and indecorous inanities. I am not making these observations in a fault-finding spirit,” went on Hackernagel in honey-sweet accents; “we are none of us perfect, and I am not, you understand——”
“Oh no——”
“You interrupt; I repeat that I am in no way desirous of exposing your weaknesses, I would simply exhort you to evince more saliently the features of the race from which you are sprung, show some marks of the high breeding for which it is renowned. I would have him who is to be so intimately connected with me——”
“Did you get me here to tell me all this?” asked the young man, who had foregone a pleasant evening game at quoits in a meadow out beyond the ramparts, in compliance with the expressed wish of Hackernagel to have a few moments’ conversation with him that evening; and now the conversation threatened that didactic turn which he hated from the bottom of his soul. “Is this what you wanted to chat about you said, you know?”
“Not precisely,” said Tobias, “the opportunity simply suggested a word in season.”
“H’m,” said Otto, drumming his well-shaped fingers on the window-panes, while he gazed regretfully at a passing group on their way to the quoit ground, “but about what you wanted to say to me? Perhaps you are waiting though for Gretchen. Where is she?”
“Curb your ardour, my young friend,” adjured the fond father with an indulgent smile.
“Ardour! Here I’ve been kicking my heels more than half-an-hour, and I’ve only just asked where she may be. There never was such a fish-blooded girl as she is. Doesn’t hurry herself a scrap to come downstairs, though she must know I’m here,” he grumbled on, heartily wishing himself somewhere else, “as well as I do.”
“No,” said Tobias, “I did not tell her. She did not know you were coming.”
“Then,” returned Otto, brightening a little, “I’ll go and find her.”
“Stay,” said the Syndic, laying his hand on his arm as he moved towards the door. “Gently, my good fellow, you cannot see Gretchen to-night. She is—indisposed.”
“Why, her face was red enough this morning,” said Otto in some surprise, “when I met her near the market. What’s the matter with her?”
“A—nothing whatever to be alarmed about,” said Tobias soothingly. “A sudden—headache, a cold, a fit of—well, can I tell?”
“A hole in her temper?” grunted Otto, soured by the prospect of a tête-à-tête with Tobias.
“Nay, fie for shame,” returned Hackernagel, playfully shaking his forefinger. “She appeared to be—not quite herself, and I recommended a night’s rest. She’s in bed and asleep by this time, I make no doubt, and will be perfectly recovered to-morrow.”
“Ah,” said Otto, taking his cap from the table, and with a glance at the door, “then I’ll go, and come again to-morrow, shall I?”
“Go,” sighed Hackernagel, “go to your amusements. Sometimes in the solitude of the night hours I ask myself whether I do well to entrust child of mine to one of an idolatrous and unregenerate race. I ask myself I say, can the heart of one who loves such vain pastimes, such time-triflers as quoits or——”
“It’s a thundering good game,” said Otto, “if you’ve got anything of an arm.”
“Cannot youth spend its days more profitably?”
“Oh well, you know, we’ve talked that over before.”
“We have,” assented Hackernagel.
“And if that’s all—if you’ve nothing else, I mean if you’ve nothing so very particular”—and Otto cast another longing look at the door.
“On the contrary,” said Tobias, smiling meekly; “it is simply that I am waiting my turn to speak; my chance of rendering myself audible. But it is as well perhaps as it is; you have afforded me the more opportunity for reflection, and perhaps what I would have said had best be left unsaid”; and with another deep sigh Tobias sank into a chair.
“Is it amusing?” asked Otto, laying down his cap again, and seating himself on the edge of the table close beside the Syndic, who made no answer, but sat rubbing his stubbly little chin.
“It is merely one of my ideas,” he replied at last. Otto’s face fell. “One of my ideas,” reiterated Tobias; “how shall I preface it?”
“Don’t; come to the point at once.”
“The point? Ah, well, it’s a many-sided one, so to speak,” said Tobias reflectively; “you, as a mathematician——”
“Never mind about that,” interrupted Otto.
“As a mathematician may feel disposed——”
“If you’re going to begin to talk about whether a point’s got any sides,” said Otto with a ghastly smile, “Dasipodius is your man.”
The Syndic’s brow darkened, and his lean hand shook uncontrollably as he lifted it almost threateningly. “He and I differ,” he said, feigning a carelessness, “too fundamentally in our systems of philosophical enquiry for me to care to enter upon any disquisition with him, of whatsoever nature. And I should have imagined, Otto von Steinbach, that instinctive delicacy on the part of one who is soon to find himself allied so nearly with myself, would have for ever banished from that individual’s lips all reference to a name which cannot but sound offensive in the ears of both myself and you.”
“If you find it so, Master Hackernagel,” rejoined Otto, reddening a little, “why then—you do, you know; but just you be content to speak only for yourself. For my part I’ve no fault to find with Dasipodius; and if I choose to say his name, why, I might say a worse, there!” And thrusting his hands into his pockets, Otto sat staring fixedly before him, with an unwonted determination written deep into every feature of his face.
“You are always so impetuous, my young friend, so excitable; that is your besetting—ahem—defect, and——”
“You were going to tell me something amusing.”
“Your last observation inclines me to a doubt whether you will reap the amusement I anticipated,” said the Syndic, setting hard his two rows of long yellow teeth like some snarling wolf, “if you have grown so fond of Dasipodius all of a sudden——”
“Did I say that?”
“If you like seeing him ride the high horse over you, if you enjoy being trampled on and made a laughing-stock of, if your ears delight in such music as I heard howled after you as you turned the corner of this very street, half an hour ago: ‘There goes our fine Horologier! ya—ah!’”
The young man winced and reddened painfully. Such sounds had indeed grown cruelly familiar to him.
“‘Ya—ah! cock-a-doodle doo! a heller for stick-in-the-mud Steinbach! ya—a—ah!’”
“For Heaven’s sake!” writhed Otto.
“‘A fine sort of fellow he is,’” mocked on the merciless Hackernagel, “‘eh, neighbour Hans? Don’t know how many twice twelve make yet, ya—ah!’” and the Syndic snapped his fingers in Otto’s face.
“That,” said the young fellow, paling and quivering, but with a certain cool sturdy endurance Tobias was hardly prepared for, “is not Dasipodius’ fault. If anybody’s to blame, it’s——”
He stopped abruptly; to utter the word on his tongue’s tip would have set irrevocable enmity between them.
“Not his fault?” furiously hissed Hackernagel; “not his?”
“No; he has never uttered a word of—well, what he might have said, don’t you know.”
“Oh! he’s a saint of saints, isn’t he?” savagely sneered the Syndic. “Not the idolatrous bread on your mass-tables is more bowed down to now than this Dasipodius. He can do no wrong, this infallible figure-machine, can he? The men, one and all of them, shout his praises through the very streets; the women love the ground his proud feet tread!”
“Some may,” said Otto qualifyingly.
“Ho!” sneered Tobias, “well, only look at home. There’s Mistress Radegund, the most talented woman in Strassburg, and——”
“And my sister,” said Otto; “and we’ll leave her name alone if it’s all the same to you.”
“Oh, as you please,” jauntily replied the Syndic. “I alluded to it simply as an instance of the court which he gets paid him.”
“Gets paid him, yes,” echoed Otto; “he doesn’t seek it anyhow. It comes; I don’t know how he manages it,” he continued with a rueful sigh, “but it comes.”
“Of course it does. Your idols, your saints never do speak, do they? They leave that to their high priests; and he’s got his. That fellow Habrecht.”