CHAPTER LIII.
“ON THE GOOD FAITH OF SYNDIC HACKERNAGEL.”
“But,” continued Hackernagel, watching with eager scrutiny the cloud gathering deeper and deeper on Otto’s face, “I must be careful what I say of course. You and Master Habrecht are doubtless as friendly as a pair of love-birds in one cage.”
“No,” broke forth Otto, “that we are not. He was always an awful nuisance, Habrecht, and always will be. Obstinate as a pig, you know, when he’s got a fancy into his head of how a thing’s to be done; just square and square that way it must be, and no other.”
“Just so,” said Tobias sympathetically; “and—tells you you’re a fool if you don’t obey orders to a hair’s breadth, yes?”
“Well, he doesn’t stop to pick his words,” acknowledged Otto.
“No,” said Tobias, “I know Isaac Habrecht, and I owe him—that is, but for my, humanly speaking, strangely weak proneness to forgive injuries, I should owe him a grudge or two. But good for evil, my dear Otto, always good for evil.”
“Yes,” sighed Otto, “and after all Habrecht’s bark is worse than his bite. I do think that.”
“You defend his tyranny then?” challenged Tobias.
“No I don’t.”
“You do, my good fellow; you have your points, but you’ve no more spirit than a sheep. I suppose,” he added with a cynical sneer, “it was all given to that sister of yours.”
“No such thing!” flashed Otto; “I’ve—I’ve a tremendous spirit. Why, I’d knock you down as soon as look at you; that is, you know, if I wanted.”
“And yet,” contended Hackernagel, in compassionately emotional tones, “you sit calmly down and accept any abuse this fellow chooses to throw at you, and look as if you liked it. Perhaps you do.”
“No I don’t,” fervently protested Otto.
“Then let him know that. It’s only your duty; a duty you owe, if not to yourself, to the whole studio he despotises over.”
“Think so?” ruminatingly said Otto.
“They’d thank you for it, I’m convinced.”
“But how? How’s it to be done? that’s the point. You don’t know what a tough-hide he is; words don’t make as much impression on him as a knife does on a tortoise’s back. You may spend all the sharpest wits you’ve got and——”
“Yes,” nodded Tobias, “that is perfectly true, I’m sure. It happened to come under my own observation not long since, this odd insensibility of his to even the most brilliant kind of wit. He got himself invited to a public supper at our Hall, Fishmonger’s Hall; and I, being senior warden, was called upon to make a speech, and I made it; one of the most brilliant emanations, I distinctly remember it was, that perhaps ever left my lips. An absolute incrustation of my keenest, neatest, most incisive style. And he never so much as smiled once, I give you my honour, not once.”
“Ah,” said Otto, “I’m not surprised.”
“Never moved so much as a muscle; and he ought to smart for it. I mean for that tyranny he exercises over you.”
“Oh! ah! but how? If one could just give him a touch up or two without—without——”
“Well?” eagerly demanded Tobias.
“Well, you know, without doing him any real harm, why—I’m your man.”
“You’d enjoy it?—ho! ho! ho!—you’d enjoy it?”
“See if I wouldn’t, hare’s heart though I am, hey—ha! ha! ha!”
“I’ll—ha! ha! ha! Shall I,” said Tobias, when his hilarity subsided sufficiently for him to speak, “give you an idea or two? You haven’t any of your own?”
“Not the ghost of one,” grinned Otto, tickled by the Anabaptist’s outburst of laughter; a thing so rare that he had never been the fortunate witness of it.
“Listen then,” went on Tobias. “Habrecht, you say, is thick-skinned.”
“As a rhinoceros.”
“But he’s got his vulnerable point, ha! ha! every bit as much as ever that Nibelung fellow, what was his name?”
“I forget, never mind,” hurriedly said Otto; “it doesn’t matter. And this—tender point?”
“Vulnerable was my term,” corrected Hackernagel with dignity.
“Vulnerable point then?”
“Is Kaspar Habrecht, his young brother.”
“The devil!”
“Hush! my good dear young friend,” besought the scandalised Tobias. “Oh hush, hush.”
“Thunderweather! you’ve hit it,” ecstatically shouted Otto.
“Hey!” and Tobias’ green eyes glittered with yellow light, as he twined his snaky fingers gleefully about. “Yes, I flatter myself. Now this young—prodigy and you are not exactly bosom friends?”
“No,” replied Otto. “There’s no particular harm in the fellow, except that he’s a genius. At least Dasipodius says he is; and I——”
“You’ve nothing in common with him?”
“Yes, that’s it. How can I have? He’s the dreamiest, moonstruckest, fancifullest creature anybody ever saw, and he’s always pottering after Dasipodius. Oh it’s—it’s—I don’t know what it is. Favour and prejudice all round, that’s what it is.”
“And lamentably ill directed. To encourage this sort of nack of cutting and chopping things out of wood, that the boy has. What is it, logically regarded, but the most barefaced encouragement of idolatry.”
“Oh, I don’t see that,” interrupted the unreformed Otto. “No, I can’t see that. I only should like to—to——”
“Which,” went on Tobias unheeding, and meekly folding his palms, “it is our mission, at any cost—at any cost, I say, to stamp out; and my daily supplication is that a day will dawn for you when you will be able to——”
“Kick him,” said Otto, starting from the reverie into which he had fallen. “I should dearly like to get a chance of it.”
“Just so,” acquiesced Tobias, “I thought as much. But gently, these desires of the flesh must be curbed. The chastening which it comes to be ours to inflict, must be done in a spirit of christian love. If we desire to see pride humbled, still we wish our enemy well.”
“He’s not exactly my enemy, he’s only——”
“Not your friend, you say. I repeat then, if you wish him well——”
“But I don’t,” interrupted Otto with sulky energy.
“Didn’t you say just now you wished to kick him?” asked the Syndic, making one more desperate effort to fire this very damp touchwood into a blaze.
“Oh yes, I shouldn’t mind,” lazily laughed Otto.
“Figuratively, of course?”
“Eh?”
“A figurative kick.”
“No,” said Otto, lifting one of his handsome feet and contemplating its tip.
“My friend, you’re wrong,” said Tobias, following the direction of his eyes. “You’d miss the express aim you had in view.”
“Should I,” laughed Otto out of his conscious supremacy in athletics. “We’d see about that.”
“Yes. Listen to me; there are those, and if I mistake not, this young Habrecht is one, on whom spiritual castigation would approve itself far more salutarily than the severest corporal chastising. Not on the vile body, believe me, of this young upstart should your experiment be made, but on the subjective and tangible results and creations of his mental and intellectual conception. You follow me?”
Otto intimated that he was doing his best.
“From the personal observation which I have been at some pains to make, I am disposed to argue that this could not be more thoroughly and satisfactorily effected than by—in brief—by reducing to silence that graven image, that absurd wooden fowl on the summit of the right-hand tower of the new Horologe.”
“Smash the cock!” gasped Otto, when at last articulation came, his curly locks stiffening and bristling as though stirred by an electric current, his eyes extended to their utmost capacity.
“I said damage, not——”
“Smash the cock! Who is to flap his two wings, and open his beak and screech cock-a-doodle! Smash——”
“Damage,” reiterated Tobias, “is not——”
“Smash!” and then breathless, his eyes still transfixing the Syndic with a stare of horror, Otto rose, and sank again into the nearest chair.
“Fool!” hissed Hackernagel. “Was ever such an idiot as you are? Listen now, I mean no more than to silence the abominable thing’s profane screechings—ha! ha! ha!—a little, just a little sooner than—look,” and touching Otto on the shoulder, Hackernagel pointed up to the Cathedral’s fair fretted spire, crimson glowing in the rays of the setting sun. “When yonder harlot of Babylon shall be cleansed from her impurities, when her rottenness and corruption shall be washed away, and she stands forth in her nakedness, shorn of all the pomps and vanities which superstition, and what her papist lovers in their blind worship of her call the beauty of holiness, and the hour is at hand when she shall be delivered unto us——”
“You!” gasped Otto.
“Ay, us. Us, the Lord’s Elect; the company of His chosen Saints, drawn from Gehenna fires, where in His own blessed time all but we shall lie howling. Do you think then, I say, that we are likely to be tolerating a crowing cock within that sanctuary’s walls?”
“Oh, come now.”
“When the foul idols of the groves of Antichrist shall be cast headlong—when the high places shall be cut off—when Bell boweth down, and Nebo stoopeth—when the priests of Baal shall no more lift up their hands in the tabernacle of the Lord, then surely as darkness follows—that is, I mean as light follows darkness, shall the voice of this profane bird be no more heard crying aloud——”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo! cock-a-doodle-doo!” shrieked Otto, startled by the mental picture Hackernagel’s words had conjured to him of the poor bird protesting for dear existence under such iconoclastic conditions; and then he broke into an hysterical screech of laughter, so wild and weird, that the startled Tobias paused and stared at him in speechless amazement.
“I fail to see,” he said when he could make his voice heard, “how any remark I may have made, can be provocative of such—ahem—unseemly mirth.”
“Why,” and Otto broke forth afresh, “it’s the best joke I’ve heard for ever so long.”
“I’m not accustomed, I believe,” said Tobias, paling with rage, “to indulge in empty and foolish jestings.”
“Not a joke?” said Otto subsiding. “What is it then?”
“And I was never farther from one in my life, than I am at this moment,” sulkily continued Tobias. “Listen to me you—do pay attention, my good Otto, do be serious. Your sister Radegund has a key to the little door of the Thomas’ Chapel, has she not?”
“Of the Saint Thomas’ Chapel. Well, and what if she has?”
“My good fellow, listen. You as her brother—nothing now would be easier than for you, I make no doubt, to—to get possession of that key for an hour or two; say only one little half-hour even.”
“What to do, Master Hackernagel?”
“Say no more than ten minutes, if there’s much difficulty about it.”
“What to do?” reiterated Otto.
“Do?” shiftily laughed Tobias. “Haven’t I said it half-a-dozen times. Wrench that bird’s head off.”
“And the cock,” said Otto, with a speculation in his eyes fixed on Hackernagel’s retreating skull, curiously suggestive of getting his hand in, “the cock is part of the Horologe.”
“Exactly,” cheerfully assented Tobias.
“If I thought you were serious, Tobias Hackernagel.”
“Why, such an act would exalt you into the ranks of the saints elect.”
“Then hang me if I——”
“You will! you will!” cried the Syndic, craning forth his lean neck.
“Will I? What do you think I’m made of? Look you here now, if I thought you so much as dreamed of laying a finger—you mark?”
Hackernagel’s smile dwindled to an uneasy twitching of his thin lips.
“A finger on Master Dasipodius’ Horologe—”
“May it be accursed, I say,” hissed Hackernagel through his clenched teeth; “and may he be double d——”
Beneath the grip of Otto von Steinbach’s iron-strong fingers, the evil word lies strangled at its birth-throes in Hackernagel’s throat. The shrivelled little abortion, the mockery of God’s own image, is a mere scarecrow stick in the hands of the young athlete, and with eyeballs starting from their sockets, and Otto’s knee pinning him to the ground, Hackernagel lies prone, vainly gasping to articulate one word for mercy.
“Now!” shouted Otto, “what do you say?”
“Otto! for dear heaven’s pity—Otto!” and a woman’s hand, small, perfectly shaped, white as snow-drift, its owner’s one indisputable beauty, grapples with the purple red of Otto’s straining fingers. Feeble as is the actual physical strength of those two hands by comparison with his, the suddenness of the action, or possibly something of that mysterious sense of compassion it is the prerogative of a true woman’s touch to exercise, loosens Otto’s clutch; “Otto, leave hold! would you murder him?”
“I might do worse,” muttered the young man through his set white teeth, glaring down on his prostrate victim. “Well, take your life then, coward! miserable, sordid Anabaptist reptile that you are!”
“Lift—your knee,” gurgled the Syndic, “dear Otto—oh!”
“All in good time. Certainly, dear Master Tobias,” mocked his vanquisher; “when first you have made me one promise. Do you hear? do you hear?” for the exhausted Tobias has closed his eyes.
“Anything, anything,” he gasps, “if only, Gr—Gr—Gretchen, darling, if he—would just move the l—least—oh——”
And Gretchen turns her appealing eyes on Otto; but the young man feigns not to see.
“If I could, ugh—ugh—” groans the unhappy wretch, “co—could speak!”
“You must contrive to do that as you are,” growls Otto. “Or if you like it better,” and dragging Hackernagel by the combined leverage of a wrench and a kick to his knees, and holding him gripped fast in that position by the nape of his neck with one hand, he drags with the other at a slender silver chain hanging round his own neck, and draws forth from the breast of his doublet a small exquisitely chased silver gilt crucifix: “Now!” he cries, thrusting it within a couple of inches of Hackernagel’s face, “swear!”
A loathing horror overspreads the Syndic’s livid terror-stricken features, and his head sways heavily from side to side; while his dulled eyes, almost hidden beneath their swollen lids, blink hither and thither, as though to elude the sight of the sacred token which von Steinbach holds persistently before him. “Swear,” continues he, “swear that, by word nor deed, by your own hand, nor by any other means, you will not harm Master Dasipodius’ Horologe, now or ever. Swear!”
Hackernagel maintains a sullen silence.
“Swear!” shouts Otto, shaking him like a sack of chaff. “By this Rood, as you hope for mercy at the Great Judgment. Swear—by this Rood. Dost hear?”
One instant more of dead silence, during which the slightly relaxed grip upon his throat grows tenser, and then the bluish-white eyelids slowly open, and like a lurid lightning flash across a leaden sky a gleam of cunning intelligence lights up the Syndic’s ghastly face and dull green eyes, as for one instant, one brief instant he turns them on the figure of the Crucified Christ. “By this—Rood then,” and a hideous mockery of a smile contorts his livid and swollen lips, “I swear.”
“Good,” said Otto, with a look at his victim dashed with a touch of curiosity which, however, was lost in a smile of scornful triumph, and releasing him with a jerk which sent him sprawling helplessly across a huge oaken chest. Then snatching up his hat and striding to the door, he clutched its handle; but before he could turn it Gretchen was beside him. “Otto!”
“Oh!” he cried, veering sharply round upon her. “Yes—you, I had forgotten you, quite. By the Mass though,” he hurried on with a fierce hysterical laugh, “it’s as well, I suppose, that you came in when you did”; and he turned and gazed with satisfaction at the Syndic, stretched, still apparently past all speech, where he had flung him, “else your precious parent might have been even in a worse case than he is.”
Then he turned his back upon her, and began a desperate struggle with the door handle, which refused to yield. Suddenly it flashed upon him that the Syndic, when he had first come in, had drawn the bolt; alleging as an excuse for doing so, that the catch of the ordinary handle had got a trick of slipping; but the circumstance recurred to him now with its own significance. “Where the deuce,” he cried, fiercely fumbling at the bolt, and then turning again on the trembling Gretchen, “did you get in?”
“Yonder,” she said unhesitatingly, pointing towards a recess in the wall, revealed by a panel slidden back into the rich ebony wainscoting.
“Oh,” said Otto, crossing the floor and peering into the dark ambush. “I see,” he added, with curling lip, “you shut yourself in here to play eavesdropper—yes? A nice pretty game. One that you often play at, eh?”
“Nay, Otto,” shivered the girl. “I—I—” and she turned her eyes fearfully towards the semi-unconscious Hackernagel. “It was for—you—your sake; I was afraid—for you——”
“And why?”
“I do not know; but I was. He”—and again looking shrinkingly at her father, she added in tones only audible to Otto: “When I said you would be coming this evening to—see me—that was what you did say, dear Otto?”
The lover stamped his foot wrathfully and gnawed his comely moustache. “Well?”
“And he,” she hurried on, “was angry with me, and ordered me to my room, and said I was to be ill.”
“And why, pray?”
“Because—he wanted to have a little private chat with you, on a particular and—important matter.”
“Ah! And you, Madame Curious, had a fancy for knowing all about it too?”
The girl hung her head in silence. Otto took it for assent.
“Well, and it was a pretty comedy, wasn’t it?” he asked, keenly scrutinizing her face. “But you had an inkling of the plot beforehand maybe?”
“I could not tell,” stammered Gretchen. “I did not know.”
“That the villain would get the worst of it,” he sneered. “No, that was not set down; but does it please you, this ending? Is it to your liking? Speak!” he yelled out. “Is it to your liking, I say?”
“Otto! spare me,” sobbed the miserable girl. “He is my father.”
“Ay, he is that. The crocodile had spawn; four daughters passing hateful; and one—she was of them all most like him—took woman’s likeness, and would have mated with an honest man.”
“Otto!” shiveringly implored the girl, sinking on her knees beside him, and convulsively seizing the hem of his short Spanish cloak.
“But he—he,” whirled on Otto, striving to tear it from her, “found out the foul nature of her in time and——”
“Otto!”
“Loathed her. Ay, do you hear me, Gretchen Hackernagel? loathed her!” and then he tore his hand, wet with her tears, from her clutching agonized grasp. “I took you,” he hurried on, savagely wiping them away, “I took you for an honest woman. I was a fool.”
“Yes—no,” wailed she, swaying under his rough thrust.
“I’ve been one always somehow. And he,” muttered the young man through his set teeth, glaring at the prostrate Tobias, “and he wanted to make me a thrice-dyed one, and he did it, did it! But look you here, my girl, his knave I will not be!”
Then dragging his hat down over his eyes, he strode to the open door, but Gretchen hung upon him like a dead weight, sobbing his name again and again.
“Why do you hold me?” he cried, tearing the delicate lace ruff of his sleeve into shreds, in his endeavours to free himself. “I wash my hands of you and yours for ever. I will never see you, nor speak to you more. I would sooner touch hell’s burning pitch than such as you. Thumbscrews and iron boots, and—and all the rest of it, should not make me. And,” he cried, facing round on Hackernagel, now painfully bringing himself to a sitting posture on the edge of the chest, “may that curse which you, Tobias Hackernagel, would have cursed Conrad Dasipodius with, light on me, if ever again I set foot in this house while you live in it!”
Then with a creaking wrench and a burst, the door flew open, and he was gone.