THE SILVER DIAL.
BY
MARY C. ROWSELL.
AUTHOR OF “ST. NICOLAS’ EVE,” “LOVE LOYAL,” “TRAITOR OR
PATRIOT,” &c., &c.
* * * * *
“AS MANY LINES CLOSE IN THE DIAL’S CENTRE;
SO MANY A THOUSAND ACTIONS, ONCE AFOOT,
END IN ONE PURPOSE.”—_Henry V._
* * * * *
VOL III.
[Illustration]
LONDON: SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LE BAS & LOWREY, PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
* * * * *
1886.
THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS.
CONTENTS.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER PAGE
XLVIII.—The Horologe 1
XLIX.—“Les Neiges D’Antan” 21
L.—“So near, and yet so far away” 32
LI.—“Shoemaker’s Holiday” 45
LII.—“More Favour and Prejudice” 63
LIII.—“On the Good Faith of Syndic Hackernagel” 77
LIV.—Love’s Alchemy 96
LV.—A Visit to Dr. Wolkenberg’s 113
LVI.—Playing with Fire 131
LVII.—“Motive Power” 142
LVIII.—Vade Satana 155
LIX.—When Greek meets Greek 172
LX.—“Man proposes” 191
LXI.—St. Stephen’s Tower 201
LXII.—A Dilemma 213
LXIII.—“The Three Ravens” 230
LXIV.—“In vino veritas” 243
LXV.—A Confession 260
LXVI.—“Sweet is true Love, tho’ given in vain, in vain” 282
LXVII.—“Lady’s Leap Corner” 294
LXVIII.—A Vigil 306
LXIX.—Saved! 317
LXX.—“Finis Coronat” 331
LXXI.—“There could not be greater Love than this” 345
LXXII.—De Profundis 363
LXXIII.—Syndic Hackernagel retires from Public Life 374
LXXIV.—“Ich habe Gelebt, and Geliebet” 385
LXXV.—“To the End” 402
THE SILVER DIAL.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XLVIII.
THE HOROLOGE.
Looking just one week later in at the Dial, it would have been hard to
credit that an interdict of weeks had but so recently been lifted from
it. True enough Otto von Steinbach’s disastrous usurpation had left a
fearsome chaos there; but out of it the hand of the master had brought
back nearly all the old order; and not by any means the least diligent
hands put forth to help him, were those which had compassed the
confusion. Under discipline, as Dasipodius had said, Otto von Steinbach
could do good work; and never as now had his heedless nature so
schooled itself to fulfil the wishes of the reinstated master, and to
obey even unmurmuringly the orders of Isaac Habrecht. Doubtless this
was still more cheerfully done out of that sense of regained freedom.
He found it inexpressibly enjoyable; and the lissomeness it lent his
fingers, and perception it gave his brain, made a new creature of him.
That of course had been a terrible moment for him when he delivered up
the studio key to Dasipodius, and all his bungling lay naked under the
keen eye of the elder Habrecht, and the still more critical handling of
Dasipodius; but the chief horologist silenced Isaac’s jeremiads.
“Nay, Isaac,” he said, laying his hand on Habrecht’s arm, “there is no
time to spend in regrets. Here already we have St. Barnabas——”
“The Son of Consolation, as the gospels say,” murmured Kaspar.
“St. Barnabas day, and by the feast of St. Laurence, not quite two
months hence remember, the Horologe has to be ready.”
“But it never can be so now!” exclaimed Isaac aghast. “You don’t dream
of it, master.”
“That’s as it may be,” quietly laughed Dasipodius. “I know only that,
God willing, it is my intention to have it finished.”
“But,” continued Isaac, “they don’t deserve any such thing of you. Not
if we could do it ten times over.”
“If you will stand discussing the question, I tell you it will be hard
enough to get through with it once. Come, are we to work together, or
not?”
With a grunt Habrecht signified his assent; and then the task of the
Horologe’s deliverance from durance proceeded in good earnest. Not so
very long passed before it was restored to the state in which it had
been left by Dasipodius, and the workers started afresh upon their fair
field.
Content with Dasipodius’ promise that they should still have their
Horologe by the date originally agreed upon, the Strassburgers went
their several ways, as ardent now in their admiration as they had been
eager three months since to hound him from their midst, and their faith
in Tobias Hackernagel’s infallibility not a little shaken. The Syndic
however, with lowered crest indeed, but not by any means extinguished,
consoled himself in the reflection that his meddling had not brought on
his devoted head loss of place or of emoluments, as it ran perilously
near doing; and persuaded by some still small voice, that temporary
self-effacement was the wisest course, retired into the bosom of his
family, occasioning much disorganization there. The most eloquent voice
of the municipality was now heard scarcely at all on the forensic
platform, but so very much by the domestic hearth, that the servants
groaned, and were given audibly to asking each other what a bear with
a sore head might be like; and the mistresses languished cruelly under
the paternal ill temper, sighing as never they had sighed before,
for the laggard heroes who should come and carry them off from such
wretched durance.
Naturally the one fortunate Andromeda who had found her Perseus, met
with the worst time of it all; and many a sour taunt she endured for
his sake, from the thwarted Syndic, who found it for certain far-seeing
reasons of his own, more convenient to visit his vexation on the
hopeless Gretchen than on the real delinquent. Hackernagel knew a hawk
from a hernshaw; and perfectly well understood the girl’s power of
dogged endurance.
“She’s the very double of her mother,” the Syndic would say to himself,
calling up visions of the uncomplaining woman whom he had nagged and
fretted ten years earlier into her grave; and he knew very well, that
worry as he might, no word of his vented spleen against Otto would find
its way to the young man’s ears. And so at his own sweet will, Otto
came and went as usual, unconscious, or perhaps choosing to appear so,
of Hackernagel’s smothered wrath against him, serenely self-satisfied
as ever; and if he alluded, as now and again he might, to past
misfortunes, it was only for the sake of illustrating the lamentable
way in which Strassburg was shackled hand and foot by prejudice, or
to indulge in interesting speculations concerning the strikingly
singular variations of human organisms in regard to their powers of
endurance. “Some men have nerves of iron, while I—well you know, it
was the worry of the thing which so preyed upon me,” he would explain
with that exquisitely languorous air, which rendered him ten times more
excruciatingly interesting than ever in his Dulcinea’s eyes. “It just
played the deuce with my brain. I assure you, that had I kept on with
it as—more than one urged me to do, I should have been in a lunatic
asylum by now. I’m persuaded I should. I’m anything but bright still. I
want tone; Wolkenberg was only saying so yesterday.”
“Balance” had been Dr. Bruno’s precise term, but, as Otto himself would
have said, “wherever is the good of hair-splitting over convertible
expressions?”
Amid the general satisfaction at Dasipodius’ return, no one rejoiced
more truly than he who had been the prime agent in bringing it about,
Bishop John; and he soon found his way to the Dial. His delight was
boundless when he learned that the Horologe would still be ready by the
originally promised date.
“You are a magician!” he cried enthusiastically.
“So they say, my lord,” smiled Dasipodius.
“It has been a cruel time for you, my son,” said the Bishop, sobering
down as he scanned, though somewhat furtively, for it seemed to him
incredible that indeed those eyes were not conscious of his gaze, the
face of the mathematician, worn with premature lines of care. “But you
do not suffer now?” he asked.
“Physical pain you mean, my lord? Very little. The world is simply a
blank to me, that is all.”
“May God make it up to your brave heart,” replied the Bishop. “Your
burden is indeed a heavy one.”
“The truest friends a man ever had lighten it for me, my lord.”
“Well, well, and so may He comfort you—always.”
“Amen. Will it please you to come round and see what we have been doing
these last few days? The larger works are all up now.”
“Already!” said the Bishop, following his companion down stairs.
“They were in readiness the very day my régime was stopped, last March.”
“And that—mind the door cornice; these posterns were not made for
giants like you—Otto von Steinbach, he wasn’t able to put them up of
course?”
“Pardon me, my lord; he did put them up, and we have had to take them
all down again. It has been our week’s work, pretty well.”
“Just so. In the meantime—won’t you take my arm?” asked the Bishop,
interrupting himself; for as yet he had not grown accustomed, as others
had, to the blind man’s entire self-reliance. “In the meantime the
outside of the cup and platter is all as it should be?”
“And more, they tell me,” answered Dasipodius. “Mistress Radegund von
Steinbach appears to have surpassed herself.”
Entering by the Cathedral’s western porch, the Bishop and the
mathematician passed up the nave and in behind the canvas covering
stretched across the screen fronting the St. Thomas’ Chapel, and which
concealed the Horologe’s embryo glories from vulgar curiosity.
Externally indeed, little now remained to be done. The dials were, it
is true, as yet mere moon-faced blanks, and the carven niches still
tenantless; but Kaspar Habrecht had been occupied the whole of the
previous day in setting up his masterpiece, the marvellous crowing cock.
“I suppose,” said the Bishop, pointing up at the wooden bird, “that
that fellow hasn’t anything to say for himself yet?”
“The cock? no; his lungs borrow their breath from the main works.”
“And the quartette up in the middle there? the youngster with his
golden apple, and the youth, and the man-at-arms, and the old fellow
with his crook——”
“Are to strike the bells above. They are up, my lord?”
“No,” said the Bishop; “I see no bells.”
“Ah! Otto von Steinbach talked of putting them up yesterday; that means
to-day or to-morrow of course,” said Dasipodius with a slight smile.
“But everything comes, it is said, to those who know how to wait. And
that is what they will do, these four ages of man.”
“That ogee moulding on the apex is lightness and grace itself.”
“It is Kaspar Habrecht’s work. And the cornice details, they are good?”
“A fairy’s chisel might have done it all. It is perfect.”
“So Mistress von Steinbach tells me,” nodded Dasipodius. “It was an
onerous undertaking for such a youth; but he was to be trusted before
men double his age.”
“Young Habrecht?”
“It is all his work. Every stroke.”
“A comely lad, Master Dasipodius; somewhat fragile-looking though.”
“But a stout heart, my lord.”
“Ay,” returned the Bishop, with an assenting wave of the hand, “like
enough. Your delicate blossoms that look as if Zephyr’s gentlest breath
would break them, are sometimes stronger than your forest monarchs. And
now tell me, how about these dial rims?”
“They are to be gilded; Master Niklaus von Steinbach is seeing to that.”
“Good; and these notches in the woodwork of the dial frames?”
“Mark the spaces which are to contain the agates and chalcedonies.”
“Real gems, Master Dasipodius! Costly work, eh?”
“It is for the church, my lord.”
“And they fancy this man heresy bitten!” mentally ejaculated the
Bishop. “Quite so,” he assented. “And Burgomaster von Steinbach, if I
remember rightly, also supplies these jewels?”
“Yes; they are being faceted now; and will be ready to-morrow, with all
the enamels. I am going to-morrow evening to fetch them from his house.”
“Yourself—of course?” said the Bishop.
“Myself of course,” answered Dasipodius, with the faintest access of
colour.
“Ah—h’m—naturally. Exactly so.”
“The world,” continued Dasipodius in slightly hurried tones, “would
have to grow more trustworthy, before I should dare depute that part of
the contract. And why should I?”
“Precisely,” nodded his companion, “why should you, as you say. In such
matters, all—ahem—private feeling ought to give way.”
“My lord?”
“Ought—h’m—as one may say, to go to the wall.”
“I do not understand you,” and the flush deepened on Dasipodius’ brow.
“Ah; I was given to—to—I had an impression, that is, that there was
some slight hitch in your friendship with Burgomaster von Steinbach.”
“I know of no shadow of any such thing, my lord,” returned Dasipodius
stiffly. “May I ask who was your informant?”
“Let me think. Was it Dr. Wolkenberg?”
“Wolkenberg it could not be. He knows differently.”
“No, no,” hurriedly interrupted the Bishop; “no, it was Mistress
Radegund von Steinbach of course. I recollect now. She intimated,
merely intimated, something to that effect.”
A deep shade of displeasure darkened the mathematician’s face. “I do
not know what has come to Mistress von Steinbach,” he said; “she is
curiously changed from the woman she used to be.”
“That’s not much wonder.”
“No?”
“Women are changeable.”
“As the wind,” acquiesced the mathematician.
“And then—yes, certainly. She has changed outwardly too. Do you notice
it?”
“My lord,” answered Dasipodius, moving round to the rear of the
Horologe, “you forget; human faces are sealed books to me.”
The Bishop bit his lip vexedly at his slip.
“But,” continued the mathematician, “speaking of Mistress von
Steinbach, will you lend me your eyes, and tell me what you think of
the cornice paintings, especially the two lower front ones? I want an
impartial opinion.”
“Your friend, Dr. Wolkenberg,” modestly objected the Bishop, “is an
apter critic than I.”
“But in this case,” smiled Dasipodius, “not altogether an unbiassed
one. I would at all events prefer to abide by your verdict.”
“I can but say the artist has been faithful to her reputation; the
paintings are excellent, as far as they are complete.”
“Only the left hand outer panel remains to be done, I think.”
“And that is all sketched in.”
“Now, will you come round and see the works? Stay, I will light this
lamp first.”
“It is marvellous!” said the Bishop, when he had gazed long and
silently, with his light lifted aloft, into the dark mysterious wooden
chamber. “A clock always seems to me a thing of life. One involuntarily
sets to comparing it with the organisms of the human body. Each
minutest part so dependent on the whole, that if one member slips out
of gear, all the others suffer with it.”
“And the whole as likely as not to stop altogether.”
“Ay, but some parts if they get injured, threaten its vitality more
than others?”
“Certainly. There are here, for example, will be, that is, works which,
if tampered with, would—Is that you, Prudentius?”
“Yes, Master Dasipodius,” answered the sacristan, who, hearing
the bishop’s voice, and being in search of him, had, not without
considerable personal inconvenience, succeeded in propelling his
rotund person between the Horologe case and the chapel wall, until he
stood wheezing and puffing by the mathematician’s side. “Yes, it’s me.
Mother Barepenny told me she had seen you—come in here with my lord,
and—and,” gasped Prudentius, whose recent manœuvres had nearly squeezed
the last breath out of him, “and I had a question to ask my lord
about—about the great—iron cope chest, one of its hin—hinges——”
“Presently, my son, I will come with you, and see about it. Meantime
find your breath, and hold this lamp here for me.—You were saying,
Professor Dasipodius, that if some of these chains and springs were
tampered with?”
“They would merely stop the action of one set of dial hands, or the
progression of one group of figures.”
“Much as one nerve or tendon destroyed in the wrist or foot would mar
the body’s uniformity of action?”
“In the same way. Again, on the other hand, there are motors—see, here
is one for instance. Hold the lamp closer, Prudentius—and here is
another, and here another, will be the Horologe’s heart and brain.”
“Lord save us!” ejaculated Prudentius, under his breath, and peering in
with distended awe-stricken eyes under the shelter of Dasipodius’ tall
figure.
“Can you see, my lord? These—hold the light down closer, friend—these
when they are finished, if so much as touched, would superinduce total
inaction.”
“Death.”
“Death, as one may say.”
“Holy Virgin, forgive us!” muttered the appalled sacristan. “If the
thing was a Christian they couldn’t——”
“Hold that light still, Prudentius,” said the Bishop. “How can one
see anything with you bobbing it up and down like that? A fortnight’s
abstinence on bread and water would be the best remedy for stilling
those hands of yours a bit, my son. Hold the lamp steady, can’t you.
Where then is this quickening power, Master Dasipodius?”
“Not here as yet, my lord; we have but the Horologe’s embryo. The
quickening, following the universal law, is reserved until all the
material and coarser organism is thoroughly in readiness to receive
it. The fine springs and hair-like wires are still in my studio drawer.
One chief wire of them will pass from that larger wheel round this
cylinder, and so over to the lesser wheel here. Do you see, my lord?”
“And that—supposing it destroyed, cut?”
“Too cruel a supposition to entertain,” smiled the mathematician. “All
the work would be ruined.”
“The Horologe destroyed, Master Dasipodius?” exclaimed the sacristan,
horror stricken.
“As surely as your body would be, my friend, if I were to thrust your
heart through with this,” said Dasipodius, taking up a small sharp file.
The sacristan shrank shiveringly into the wall’s uttermost recesses.
“And,” demanded the Bishop, still absorbed in the wonders before him,
“do you mean to tell me that these delicate things have all been at
Otto von Steinbach’s tender mercies?”
“With the rest of the machinery, yes. Fortunately, he has not so much
as touched them. You see, my lord, it was just with them his heart
failed him, and he gave in.”
“There is a hideous tale,” said the Bishop dreamily, “of one who
ransacked graves and charnel-houses, and made from the loathsome
fragments he found there, a creature bearing the semblance of a man,
and then endued it with a mockery of life. ’Twas all his power could
reach to; a debased flesh and blood that wretched student did produce
indeed; but soul and spirit were not for him to give. And so, Master
Dasipodius, these most dainty primary motors are to be fixed—when?”
“Within a week only of St. Laurence’s day.”
“Ah! and just as well to every way. I don’t mean regarded only from its
scientific point of view.”
The mathematician looked puzzled.
“You never considered it in that light.”
“Apart from its scientific aspect? No, my lord. What other?”
“Heaven help these clever heads!” shrugged the Bishop to himself. “Men
who had never passed the _pons asinorum_ would have caught my meaning
with half a word! Simply I was thinking,” he added aloud—“Prudentius,
you can go; I will join you in the sacristy in five minutes,” and
Prudentius, needing no second bidding, departed—“thinking that any
possibility of foul play——”
The mystification increased tenfold in Dasipodius’ face.
“Of foul play, you know, will be reduced to a minimum.”
“I must confess to you, my lord, that what you are saying is an utter
riddle to me.”
“Thou dear gracious heaven!” groaned the churchman to himself, “if
only thou had’st been pleased to grant mathematical brains one iota of
imagination! Now, if I say what I think, he’ll be setting me down as
uncharitable, and a suspector of persons! You never,” he said aloud—“it
has never crossed your mind, that your enemies might take it into their
heads to try and tamper with your work here?”
“My lord, I trust I have no enemies,” said Dasipodius, carefully
setting to the door of the case.
“Ah! We won’t be nice about terms,” answered the Bishop a little
petulantly. “People then who—do not wish you well.”
“If there be any such, they can be only personal enemies. The Horologe
runs little risk of suffering. It is to the general interest to
protect that.”
“But individual interest?”
“I think,” laughed Dasipodius, extinguishing the lamp Prudentius had
set down, “we shall be splitting hairs next.”
“No such thing,” persisted his companion. “Say now for the sake of
argument that Otto von Steinbach——”
“My lord, your choice is an unfortunate, an ungenerous one.”
“Well, well, perhaps. Say—Syndic Hackernagel then. Do you suppose now
that he has any interest or affection for this Horologe of yours? Rank
heretic that he is. Why, the very thought suggested by WORKS is gall to
his Anabaptist soul! He would imperil his wretched little body, fond as
he is of it, to trample down——”
“My lord! my lord!” remonstrated Dasipodius, “really you are letting
fancy run away with you.”
“No such thing I tell you.”
“Let Syndic Hackernagel go his ways; are we—am not I well quit of him?
Thank Heaven, Strassburg is not made up of Syndic Hackernagels.”
“But——”
“And you and I, my lord,” laughingly insisted the mathematician, “will
be most assuredly found guilty, and with justice too, of collusion with
the powers of evil, if we conjure up such fears as these; I assure you
they can but be groundless. You must not fret yourself for the Horologe
and me.”
“And—you have no apprehensions?”
“No shadow of any.”
“Then,” said the Bishop, fixing his eyes filled with a half-anxious,
wholly-admiring gaze on Dasipodius, “Heaven protect you.”
And so he left him to go and discuss about the damaged cope chest with
Prudentius. “For it must be seen to at once,” thought he to himself;
“there are opals and pearls of great price in that cloth of gold cope;
and our professor there may say what he likes, there are—protestants
about.”