CHAPTER LV.
A VISIT TO DR. WOLKENBERG’S.
Doctor Wolkenberg was not in when Radegund reached his house. All the forenoon he had not stirred out, as Trudel explained; been as lone in fact as the church weathercock, but about an hour since, he had been sent for; young Hans Vogelweid had fallen out of the apple tree—a pox on his thieving tricks—green sour apples too!—and broke his leg, and the ne’er-do-well’s mother had come shrieking her heart out for the master, who had gone off with his splints and bandages to set young hopeful’s wicked leg. “Just as so ’tis ever,” grumbled on the old housekeeper, who had not been part and parcel of Bruno’s establishment ever since he possessed one, without knowing how the heart’s beat of him jumped; and with a glance of thinly veiled significance at Radegund. “Just so ’tis ever in this weary world. The bad ones make the mischief, and the good ones have to bear the brunt of it.”
Would Mistress von Steinbach walk in, and be pleased to wait till the master came back. There was her own little room—but Trudel offered this special hospitality a trifle frigidly; for besides that she held certain grudges against Radegund on another person’s account, the artist, from a general point of view, was no favourite with her. Mistress von Steinbach, she would confide in a tone of compassionate contempt to her circle of intimates, couldn’t hold a nice little gossip with you to save her life, poor thing! Trudel’s mind therefore felt as if quite a weight had been lifted from it when Radegund declined the proffered civility, and passed on into the doctor’s own room, where the old woman, shutting the door upon her, left her to herself.
Wearied with her long day’s labour, and her walk through the heat, the artist threw herself into the doctor’s chair, a comfortable shabby thing, whose once gilded leather was blackened now, and slippery with age and use. The place is very silent; only the fidgeting up and down of Tobit, the blackbird, in his great wicker cage beside the open window looking into the sombre high-walled garden, breaks the stillness. Never as now has Radegund so entirely realised the utter loneliness of this life of Bruno Wolkenberg’s. Only poor old Tobit, and Balder, of course—Balder the beautiful, shortest and bandiest-legged, longest carcased, most eccentrically eared and tailed, loving-hearted dog in all Strassburg, to wait on the goings in and comings out of this man whose life is more than half spent amid scenes of suffering and sadness, and making the existence of others endurable to them. And where, she asked of herself—asked because the question forced itself upon her, and would not be stifled down—where was the human consolation of this consoler’s life? All that sweetness of companionship, which is the priceless heritage of rich and poor alike.
“It is not good for man to be alone.” And if in the Scripture there were things Radegund dared to question, that at least was not among them. The absolute isolation of her own being, with all its passionate longings, taught her only too well what the solitude of this man must be. And why was it so with him? This foolish golden-haired blue-eyed Bruno, secretly worshipped by a score of fair maidens; and with a smile which, if it has in it something of exultation, is infinitely fuller of sadness, Radegund leaves thinking, and lets her eyes travel in vague drowsy curiosity round the vaulted chamber’s smoke-embrowned stone walls, hung with stuffed scaly reptile creatures, whose scared eyes seemed to be transfixing with a dull watchfulness the surgeon’s truckle bed yonder in the furthermost corner.
Truly a strange grim place to live in, and grow gray in, and so one day to die in! And then those desolate rooms above—she thought of them with their rich furniture rotting and mouldering away like dead things in their shrouds; and how with her lay the power to give life to this joyless silent place; and then with that strange sad smile upon her face, and her tired aching hands clasped upon her bosom, as though, waking or sleeping, she guarded there something which never rack nor sword might tear from her, the weary eyelids closed and she fell asleep. A sleep it was heavy and dreamless as of one physically and mentally tired out; and when at last she stirred, the shadows had begun to gather, and Bruno Wolkenberg stood beside her in a halo of evening sunlight, whose moted haze, streaming in through the tawny glass of the lattice, threw so glamorous a brilliancy round his tall figure, that to the artist’s only half-awakened senses, he seemed for the moment like one of those old romance heroes he could tell of so well.
“Radegund,” he softly murmured.
The sound recalled her to herself; and pushing back the dark rings of hair from her forehead, dyed momentarily with a flush of confusion, she sat up.
“Caught napping!” she cried with a petulant smile. “Well—I suppose I was tired out with waiting for you, Dr. Wolkenberg. I thought you’d never come. Where have you been such an age?”
“I am sorry,” began Bruno, who did not think it necessary to explain that he had been back an hour at least, and creeping about like a thief on his own premises for fear of wakening her. “I am very sorry I was not in when you did me so great an honour.”
“Ay,” interrupted she, glancing through the window at the flowers gratefully stirring in the light evening breeze, and then up at Tobit, composing himself for the night. “It was provoking of you, Dr. Wolkenberg. Very vexatious; and now, nothing more can possibly be done to-day. It’s hopeless to think of it.”
“Is anything amiss?” asked Bruno, looking for the hundredth time within the last hour at the thin nervously restless hands and wan face of the woman he so passionately loved.
“Very much amiss; my picture——”
“Ah, the picture,” said the doctor more cheerily.
“And it is your fault; all your fault.”
“Give me the symptoms,” he said, his face clearing, “and perhaps I shall hit upon the remedy.”
“It’s past retrieving—almost,” she returned crossly. “Your grand new medium’s a failure. The colours run all one into the other, till my best touches come like hideous daubs.”
“The chromes or the crimsons?”
“Both—all, they muddle, I tell you, into each other—ah sickeningly; but the white’s the worst. Streaky whitewash; and though I’ve been hard at work hours upon hours——”
“How many?” challenged Bruno.
“Since dawn. And the longer I worked, the worse it has come.”
“Ah!” said Bruno, nodding his profoundest Æsculapian nod, “exactly so.”
“And what,” demanded she, “is the reason of it?”
“The heat,” he answered, his eyes still searchingly studying her face. “Only the heat I hope.”
“Ah,” she said, leaning forward and scanning the doctor’s pharmacopeia arranged on the stone-slabbed bench before her, “that is what I guessed. It wants some more of that deadly poison stuff you said it was, to stay it. Make haste, Dr. Bruno, and give it me, I must be going again.”
“So soon?” asked he, stifling a sigh, and his blue eyes still thoughtfully considering her. “Nay, have patience just a little while.” Then he dragged a low stool beside her, and seating himself he took the fevered hand hanging over the chair’s arm, and counted as well as he might for its wayward restlessness, its throbbing beats. “A little patience. Qui va sano—remember the wise saying of your Italian friends—va lontano—and do not fret and worry yourself so over this picture. Believe me, I do not think the pigments are all to blame.”
“Is it this hand then?” she cried, fiercely wrenching it from him, “which has lost its skill. That is what you mean, Bruno Wolkenberg!”
“Heaven forbid!” he said, looking at her in perplexed amazement, “why should I say anything so far from my thoughts? No, no. What did I mean more than that you have been toiling too closely at the Horologe pictures; and now this one, and the weather so scorching hot, and—and—take a doctor’s advice,” he pleaded with an effort at a smile, “and rest a little. You need it.”
“Rest,” she murmured, her gaze wandering once again to the chemical array before her. “Rest is only for the dead; you know that, Bruno, as well as I do. Here there is neither rest nor peace. They talk of hell, these priests and pietists, but that is here—in this world. Beyond is nothing; you know it is so, Bruno Wolkenberg,” challenged she, gripping the arm of her chair, and turning her hollow eager eyes on his face. “Nothing!”
“Radegund,” he said gently, “what are you saying? You are ill, you are not yourself.”
“Ho!” she cried with a discordant laugh. “Am I not? Well, well, I have heard them call you Saint Bruno, and—yes, it is very well for people like you to please yourselves with such pretty fancies; but for me—Bruno, tell me,” and she swept her hand lightly over the glass phials and boxes on the table before her. “That stuff, that vehicle you mixed for my colours, it is poison, you say?”
“Deadly.”
“And to think now,” she said in dreamy tones, “that such deadliness should have power to give life to such beauty.”
“It is but the natural law,” said the surgeon, with a sudden light in his face, momentarily chasing all the shadows. “Good even out of evil itself. God’s own world, Radegund. ‘And when He made it, He saw that it was good.’”
“What an old-fashioned creature you are!” she said with a petulant smile. “And when it’s the thing too to believe everything and everybody is going to the bad.”
“That comes of heretical teaching,” shrugged Bruno. “We owe our new-fledged pessimism to the learned Doctor Calvin.”
“Ay, but some,” she said mockingly, “some, he says, are to be saved.”
“I’d rather be in limbo,” said the daring Bruno, “than with those same good folks. Heaven forgive me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that a more worthless——”
“For shame, Dr. Wolkenberg!” laughed she, “and be careful, do. Remember the fate of one Servetus.”
“A more worthless idle set than these Elect ones does not cumber the earth,” persisted Bruno.
“You believe in the efficacy of works—good works?”
“Ay, that do I,” said the doctor fervently.
“Then prove your argument,” she said, rising abruptly, “and give me this stuff I want, and let me go back—to my work.”
“Nay,” he contended, smiling. “I am too faithful to my proposition for that. Everything in its own good time and place. I cannot give you this you ask me for.”
“Cannot!” and angry sparks kindled in the artist’s eyes. “Is it then so costly?” she said, laying her hand on the embroidered velvet aumonière at her side. “I have money, Dr. Wolkenberg.”
“Radegund,” he said, paling, “I should have said I will not.”
“I see—I know,” she rejoined quickly. “You are afraid to trust me with poison. Why?”
“You accredit my words to-night with strange meaning,” he said, colouring a little. “Why indeed?” he added, with grave dignity. “It is not natures made of such stuff as yours which would stoop, even in their worst need, to such baseness as that.”
“You rate me too highly, Bruno,” she said.
“And with all the world,” he went on, as though he had not heard her interruption, “all the world at your feet. Poison? nay, no. Why speak of it?” he said shudderingly. “What did I mean more than that I would not give you this stuff because I want you to lay aside this painting work for a while; only a little while,” he said beseechingly. “You need rest I tell you, Radegund; you are ill.”
“And you—are a croaker, Dr. Bruno. No, listen now,” she said, softening at the utter misery in his face. “I tell you, you do not understand. Rest would kill me.”
“Only a week,” pleaded Bruno.
“Every hour of delay frets me,” she rejoined, waving her hands to and fro. “When the night comes, and I can work no more, then I cannot sleep for the haunting of it.”
“Exactly so,” nodded the doctor. “And what is that but the evidence of an overtaxed brain?”
“It may be as you say,” acknowledged she. “It may be only that. Still your remedy is worse than my disease. Come, Bruno,” and she laid her hand caressingly on his sleeve, “give me the stuff and let me go.”
“I cannot conceive,” said Bruno, thrilling with the witchery of the sweet contact, and blundering out the words that came uppermost, for the sake of keeping the glory of her presence yet a little longer in his gloomy sanctum, “I cannot conceive why this picture is so dear to you, Radegund. It is masterfully thought out I grant, and its execution is faultless, but the subject!—such a gruesome one! How on earth came you to think of it?”
“Can we account for our—inspirations?” asked she, evading his eyes.
“It is very terrible.”
“It is true.”
“The more hateful then.”
“You are hard on my poor queen.”
“Poor!” echoed Bruno, his eyes growing round. “It is her victim, I would take leave to say, one is more inclined to pity.”
“Not so,” murmured Radegund. “She was happy. Happy, though a thousand daggers and poison cups tortured her. She was beloved.”
Bruno sighed. Who was he that he could gainsay her?
“Tell me, Bruno,” she said, after a silence long enough for the last fleck of red sunlight to fade from the darkening room, “had you lived then, and chanced to love that woman——”
“That murderess!” he cried, with a loathing shiver.
“Ay, yes, her. Would you—how about your love for her then, Bruno?” she said, tightening her grasp upon his arm, and gazing hungrily into his face. “How about it?”
“Love? with blood upon her hands?”
“No; I do not mean that—no. How literal you are!”
“God in Heaven! what do you mean?” he cried, in his vexed bewilderment.
“You foolish Bruno,” she said, lifting her hand from his arm, and sending him from her with a light push; then breaking into a hollow mirthless laugh, she sank down again into the chair from which she had risen. “May not I weave my little romances as well as you?”
“Romances!” echoed the perturbed Bruno, brushing his hand perplexedly before his eyes. “Nightmares, Radegund”; and coming beside her, he knelt, and tenderly strove to possess himself of her two hands. “Love!——”
“No; hush! hush!” she cried, with tearless sobs, “hush!”
“I will not!” broke forth the despairing man. “Radegund, if I do not speak, my heart will break. Is yours so stone-hard—dead to love? Why do you look at me like that? Radegund, have you no pity?”
“Pity?” she echoed coldly. “Pity for whom?”
“For yourself; for me. Something troubles you. Ah, if you look at me so, I shall go mad, I shall go mad, Radegund—love, dear love—Radegund, not all hell’s worst torments could make my soul suffer the misery it feels, to see the shadow of suffering come near you!”
All the deep chivalry of his nature was stirring in him to feed the intense patient love he bore for this woman, whom, in that mind of his, which revelled in type and symbol and imagery, he had always compared with some stately plant; and now after long secret agonized watching, he had come to understand how, beyond all hope of doubt, some canker, mental or physical (or might it be both?), threatened the life of it; and his unselfish devotion yearned with a longing, not all her cold indifference could quench, to take her to himself, and soothe back her pain. To him this moment seemed supreme. Could he have lain down his life for her now, and bought with it for her the old brilliant vitality, could his eyes have caught one ray of the haughty triumphant smile of past days, it seemed to him that to have died here at her feet would have been a joy indeed. But the living death his existence passed in, had grown an unendurable torture, and his clutch now upon her arm was like the convulsive grip of a drowning man; yet she, shaking him off, rose, and with haughty but somewhat swaying gait, swept past him towards the door.
“I do not understand you, Dr. Wolkenberg,” she said, pausing there for an instant, and a smile colder than a marble Pallas Athené’s curved her pale lips. “I think you must have caught the sick fancies of your patients that you see anything amiss in me. When I want your advice, I will ask it of you.”
“Radegund, if there is any pity——”
“Bruno Wolkenberg,” and she fixed her proud sad eyes on him, “I did not dream of this from you. Had I thought you were made of no better stuff than the herd of fools who come plaguing me with their pretty nothings, do you suppose I should have trusted myself here to-day—to-night? under your roof, in your house? Hark!” and as she spoke the Cathedral clock struck seven. “When I go now, think you there will be no curious eyes, no gossip-mongering tongues to mark how Radegund von Steinbach visited the surgeon, Bruno Wolkenberg, yesterday, and did not quit his house till nightfall?”
“If,” began he, with flushing cheek and brows, “if they dare——”
“Oh!” she laughed scornfully. “They would dare much more than that, these worthy gossips. They would call in question the most flawless jewel of Christ’s own crown. And for me—well, is this the place, the time——” she hesitated, her face crimsoned, and her eyes fell beneath his gaze.
“You are false,” he said, “to yourself, Radegund. You are saying what your heart does not feel. God knows,” he went on, earnestly watching the attent half-lifted eyelids, “as I do, God knows how pure, how noble your heart is.”
“Bruno,” she wailed, “no, no, you do not, you cannot——”
“And how it is proof against the paltry malice of a thousand slanderous tongues, Radegund. No, do not let that wretched phantom of what the world calls ‘propriety’ come between our——”
“Friendship!” she said, returning a step or two, and stretching out her hands to him, with a smile so sweetly, radiantly defiant, that for the moment she looked again like the Radegund of old days. “No, by the mass! that it shall not. You are a magician, Dr. Bruno! I think indeed I was only trying what it might feel like, to play the dainty damozel, and be coy and maidenly, like my little Mistress Cousin Sabina, and the thousand and one of her stamp. Come, forgive me, Bruno, comrade, brother—how shall I best call you? Nay, now, but I know, it shall be friend again—yes? Now and always friend; the best, truest name of all. Bruno, dear Bruno, if you look at me with those Rhadamanthus eyes an instant longer, they will annihilate me. Don’t be cruel any more, but give me,” and grasping his trembling hands, she dragged him back to the table—“which is it? The stuff—give it me, and let me go, dear, dear Bruno.”
And the surgeon did even as he was commanded.