“SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY.”
“Some sheep-heads from the Chancellery, I’ll dare swear, whose business
would have been the better for sleeping on,” testily said Niklaus, as
he rose and went out.
Sabina laid aside the virginal and crossed to her old seat in the
window.
“It is very sultry to-night,” she said.
“Very,” assented the mathematician.
“Do you think there is a storm brewing, Master Dasipodius?”
“I think it is possible, Mistress von Steinbach.”
“It quite looks like it.”
“It feels like it.”
“Everything is so still.”
“Death still.”
“Not a leaf stirring.”
“No, apparently.”
“And a good shower would be a great relief.”
“An infinite one.”
“It would——” remarked the hostess after another prolonged pause, “it
would clear the air so.”
“Yes.”
“I fancied I heard thunder just now.”
“I am sure of it.”
How long was the Burgomaster going to be? What a shame of people to
come worrying about stupid business things after sundown—Midsummer
sundown! That suggested another original observation.
“To-morrow will be the longest day,” she said.
“Yes. The twenty-first of June.”
“Yes. They are delightful, these long evenings.”
“Well, yes, in the country perhaps.”
“Ah, of course in the country, that’s what I mean.”
“In town, I fancy, winter is preferable.”
“Oh very, very much better,” acquiesced Sabina, letting her eyes travel
sadly round the room, while memory called back one winter’s night
when its polished wainscoted walls had shone in the ruddy fire glow;
and bitter cold as it had been without, how warm were hearts which
now seemed chill as moss that grows on dead men’s graves. “Very much
better. Summer in cities is so—so melancholy somehow.”
“You find it so?”
“Oh dear no. I thought you—oh no, not in the least.”
“You are too well occupied for that sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?” she said vaguely.
“To be dull, or sad.”
“Oh yes.”
When would these Chancellery people take themselves off? She could hear
them chattering across at the open window there, fast as mill-clappers.
“You have your wheel and your tapestry,” continued Dasipodius.
“Oh yes. My wheel and my tapestry.”
“And you find it sufficient. Yes?”
“Oh quite.”
“And then your music?”
“Ah, of course my music,” animatedly assented the proprietress of the
dusty virginal.
“By the way, that song you sang just now, it is very sweet. Who is the
composer?”
“Master Dachstein.”
“Our Cathedral Orpheus. I guessed as much. There is no man living can
touch these wild sad harmonies like he. And the words, Mistress Sabina,
who wrote those?”
“They are Doctor Bruno Wolkenberg’s.”
“Ah, Doctor Wolkenberg’s. And he gave them to you?” enquired Dasipodius
in tones as chilly and as measured as though that little foot measure
he carried in his pocket had ruled them.
“No,” answered Sabina, with the faintest perceptible smile. “He gave
them to my Cousin Radegund, just as he often does; but she, just as she
generally does, crumpled them up in her way—you know her way, Master
Dasipodius, and throwing them aside, said they were rubbish.”
“And you?”
“I—well I—thought they were nice. And I picked them up, and asked if
I might have them. What was left, that is; for they were dreadfully
torn about and crumpled. And Radegund said why of course I might; and—I
can’t read writing much, but when one has taken a liking for anything,
one seems to grow—quite clever, as one may say,” she added with a
little laugh, “and I spelt it out, and learned it by heart. It’s a
great shame though!” she went on, some sudden wave of indignation
sweeping away her constraint.
“What is, Mistress Sabina?”
“That Radegund,” sturdily began she, “should—should,” she added,
faltering a little, “behave so.”
“And why?” as stoutly challenged he.
“Well, because—because it is.”
“Quite so. You mean that you think Wolkenberg loves your cousin?”
“Of course he does. Why, if it were needed, he would die for her.”
“It is well, is it not, to be loved so?”
But there was no answer. Only Mitte’s loud contented purring where she
lay curled up on the red cushion of the Burgomaster’s chair in the last
lingering sunrays, and the old clock’s wait-tic wait-tac broke the
stillness.
“You are silent, mistress?” continued Dasipodius. “You do not agree
that love unto death is a good thing?”
“I think there can be no other,” she murmured.
“No other kind of love?”
“No, if it will not stretch to that——”
“To death.”
“Ay, it is not worth the keeping.”
“Perhaps you are right—child.”
The girl’s heart bounded, and her cheek flushed at the old familiar
endearing term, sweet to her as yonder star just glimmering out among
the fretted gables.
“At least,” added Dasipodius, “you are consistent,” and if now his
tones had grown hard and metallic, still she found her comfort in his
words. She liked, for example, to be called consistent, and by him. It
would be something that, to tell Cousin Radegund, who was eternally
calling her the most ridiculously inconsistent atomy on the face of the
earth, that somebody—somebody who had sense and logic, and logarithms,
and cubes and squares, and all the rest of it at his fingers’ ends, had
judged her differently. The words which in all bitterness had emanated
from her old lover’s heart, carried to her ears no ring of their
sarcasm, bore no deeper significance than in so far as they regarded
Cousin Radegund and her mad folly in trifling away that deep, almost
idolatrous love of Bruno Wolkenberg’s.
“And so you think Mistress Radegund is wrong in despising Bruno’s
devotion,” challenged Dasipodius in tones of one who means to be
answered.
“If she—loves no one better, surely I do,” said the girl in a low
steady voice, and lifting her eyes to the blind attent ones near her.
“Yes, it is a great gift.”
“Dr. Bruno’s love?”
“Nay; I mean any real true love,” blushed she.
“Your theories are excellent, Mistress Sabina,” he said with cold
contempt.
“I am not sure,” contended Sabina, not ill-pleased, “that I quite know
what theories are.”
“Do you ever read the Scriptures?”
“Of course I do,” she answered, bridling a little under the implied
doubt. “Doesn’t everybody?”
“Maybe they do; as parrots talk. There is in the Gospels, do you
remember, the story of a man who bade his son go do a certain thing,
and he said, ‘I go, sir,’ and went not? You remember, mistress?”
“Of course I do,” she answered; “and the other, he didn’t want to go—at
least he said, ‘I go not,’ and still he went, and did what he had been
told.”
“Ay.”
“It is a nice story. Our Lord Christ’s always were, but——”
“Well?”
“I don’t quite see—what—it has to do with Cousin Radegund.”
“Nothing at all. But clearly that man, that first man had his theories.
You see now what they mean?”
“You explain things so beautifully clearly always, Master Dasipodius,”
said she almost happy.
“It is as wide apart from practice——”
“Of course. Oh yes,” acquiesced she, twiddling the tips of Mitte’s
ears. “I know that. Ever so wide.”
“And yet—oh Sabina—child——”
Again! No bitterness now; no echo of sarcasm in that cry; only a world
of longing, a burst of passionate entreaty, from the heart yearning to
gather to itself that lily flower.
And she? Her eyes attently upturned to the deep translucent sky, seemed
to be reflecting all its glad starlit glory; and her mobile lips,
half open, quivering for the sudden joy broken in on all her weary
desolation.
“Sabina! my——!”
“Nay, come in, niece, come in,” and lifting the arras, and stepping
in to one side, Burgomaster Niklaus entered, ushering in Radegund von
Steinbach and Otto. “What, all in the dark, child? Shoemaker’s holiday?
You should have had lights.”
“We,” stammered the young hostess, “we—were admiring the stars, and—and
forgot——”
“Forgot!” hissed Radegund in her ear, as she swept past her to a seat,
and under cover of some voluble observations from Otto. “Forgot of
course how many eyes there might be to see them! Always true to your
nature, selfish, cruel girl!”
“Oh Radegund!” cried Sabina in a voice wrung with the sharpness of some
sudden agony; and indeed Radegund as she spoke, had gripped with savage
force into her arm.
“An enjoyable occupation for your companion, star-gazing!” she added
with a scornful laugh; “and a whole half-hour too,” she continued,
while in the light of the now kindled lamp, her dark eyes scrutinized
the faces of Sabina and Dasipodius, “a whole half-hour of it!”
“Oh no, indeed,” pleaded Sabina, “my father hasn’t been gone ten
minutes.”
“We came in,” returned the relentless Radegund, “as the clocks were
striking eight; and look now what your own says.”
“Twenty minutes to nine,” said Niklaus, glancing proudly at his quaint
timekeeper with its ever-goggling eyes and monotonous tic-tac, “by the
honestest clock in Strassburg; not forgetting your own that is to be,
Master Dasipodius.”
Can it be possible that Sabina, poor child, has all this time been
reckoning by Cupid’s chronometer, whose hours are seconds? “Well, well,
what does it matter o’ summer nights like these? Sit you down, niece,
and rest a bit; and Sabina here will sing us the song she was over when
you came.”
“Did we interrupt your music, child?” asked Radegund; “what was it?”
“Just a little love ditty, niece, nothing more; but as pretty a
trifle——”
“Then begin it again,” said Radegund.
“Yes, do, Cousin Sabina,” yawned Otto; “there’s a dear child.”
“No, I can’t; no, Otto, not to-night,” pleaded the girl in low wearied
tones; and Niklaus, looking at the face grown so pale and lifeless
again, urged her no more.
“Oh but I say, Sabina,” persisted Otto, whom his sister, on the plea
of having business with the goldsmith concerning some elaborate inlaid
framework for her new picture, had dragged out, just as he was going to
bed, “do; we want waking up a bit.”
“No, Otto.”
“Leave her alone,” said Niklaus, “you can’t make little birds sing that
won’t; you ought to know that by this time.”
This _jeu d’esprit_ of the Burgomaster’s seemed, hopelessly to quench
the smouldering conversation; and Radegund rose to go. “Come,” she
said, shaking the semi-somnolent Otto by the arm, “let us go home.”
“We go the same way,” said Dasipodius, who had also risen.
“Nay,” remonstrated Niklaus; “so early yet! The sparrows are hardly
abed.”
“I have to be up as soon as they, Burgomaster,” replied the
mathematician. “The Horologe——”
“Oh, ay, the Horologe, the Horologe, as you please then, Herr
Professor,” laughed Niklaus, giving him a gentle push; “if every swain
was as true to his mistress as you are to the Horologe, the ladies
would have nothing to complain of. The body of you may be here, but
heart and soul of you’s in a certain pitch-dark wooden case we wot of.
Come, dear child, bid the professor good-night, and let him go.”
The girl silently laid her cold hand in the departing guest’s, so chill
it was that it sent a shiver through him for all that summer night
heat. “Farewell, Mistress Sabina,” he said.
“_Auf wiedersehn._ Till we meet again. Good night, niece, sleep well,
nephew”; and patting the blinking, yawning Otto on the back, the
Burgomaster accompanied the trio to the postern; then carefully bolting
it, he proceeded to take his nightly patrol of the premises. That done,
he returned to the dining hall.
Elbows resting on the table, her chin in the palms of her hands, Sabina
sat, gazing into the lamp’s dull flame. One by one the big tears
were coursing unheeded down her cheeks, and fell heavily on the dark
polished oak table. In spite of her bravest efforts, they had welled up
as the comparison forced itself upon her, between that January night,
when the snow had lain half a yard deep outside, and within the fire
had crackled and danced so cheerily there upon the hearth, all dark
and sepulchral-looking now, with its brass dogs idly grinning. Each
incident of that time, and of this just past, her memory recalled.
How different! Such difference they had, as life and death can show.
Then, the transfiguring light of love overspreading that face, which
she never knew whether to call more grand, or beautiful; only this
she remembered of it now, how earnestly, how solicitously it had bent
over her, and ah, sweet angels! the caress of those hands that would
not let hers go! To-night that face, grand and beautiful indeed, nay,
if it could be so, nobler still; but alas, so cold, and chill as hewn
marble itself! like some sculptured monumental crusader away there in
the cathedral shadows; and though once again they had been face to
face, had spoken together, and he? well, kindly and gently enough, what
hollow empty words! More than half of them a mere waste, such as two
people will interchange who have nothing in common.
It was strange too, marvellously strange, how unlike in their
unlikeness were those two evenings of her young life. Each time, for
example, Dasipodius had had his little story to tell her; but that one
he had told to-night, although, heaven forgive her, it was the dear
Christ’s own, was, though she could not tell why, harsh and bitter
sounding; while that story of the little mouse—and the saints only know
where he had got it from!—was a nice odd fairy-tale sort of thing; and
though indeed she had pouted and demurred to its pointless ending,
it had flowed so sweetly and softly from his lips, that she had felt
herself in a veritable dreamland of all that was brightest and gladdest
and best. And—and then she shivered, and her eyes stared fixedly into
the flame of the lamp—then the appearance of Radegund upon the scene!
Well, but what of that? Who more welcome in her uncle’s house, when she
chose to come, than Radegund; but of course Radegund being so clever,
and she herself just the most ordinarily gifted little woman from an
intellectual point of view, there could be no close friendship between
them, still she had always striven to make things pleasant for her
cousin, when she did vouchsafe her presence there. All the same, it
did seem hard, that just to-night of all nights—ah heaven! as she had
stood upon the threshold there, not half-an-hour since, what sweet word
was that which had passed his lips. His! Something in his utterance
of it had brought all the memory of his old infinite tenderness to
her sore heart, and then—Cousin Radegund had looked in! and tenfold
more cruelly than before had fallen the old darkness and desolation,
because she misdoubted her own perceptions; and whether it was not the
fainting fevered longing for one such kind poor echo of all those sweet
endearing epithets he used to lavish upon her, which had not created a
delirium, and deceived her own sense of hearing? Ay, yes, it was all a
dream, a blessed, cruel, sweet, deluding dream, and—
“Come, dear child! cheer thee!” So spoke Niklaus, returning from seeing
his guests depart. “’Tis all over now, and tell me, was it not best
so? Oh, ah, trust old fathers for seeing how best to steer the ship.
Say, need there be any more breaking of my little bird’s heart over
scattered crumbs? Now you’ve seen for yourself that Master Dasipodius
has forgot all about it, hey? and hasn’t half a thought to spare for
you, or any other fair maid, from that wooden sweetheart of his. See
now, see these foolish tears have wept the lamp out; and we should be
all in the dark, if it weren’t for the stars. Are they to be my little
lady’s candles, yes? Good-night then, dear love, good-night. Sweet
dreams!”
* * * * *
Meanwhile the Burgomaster’s trio of guests turned homewards together.
At the corner of the Domplatz, the mathematician, pausing, bade the
other two good-night.
“My blind eyes,” he added, “make me a poor squire, Mistress von
Steinbach; and Otto is with you. Don’t be late in the morning,” he
continued, turning to him. “Those bells are not fixed yet, recollect.”
“I say, Radegund,” said Otto, as they crossed the Platz together alone,
“he’s put out about something. What is it?”
“Am I his conscience keeper?” she asked in chilly tones.
“Now, now, you’re always so confoundedly heavy down upon a fellow
directly he makes a little remark. I’m not his confessor any more than
you are, my dear, but I think I know what vexed him.”
“Well?”
“You.”
“I?”
“Yes,” and Otto nodded sapiently. “I don’t think he wanted you—us round
there; and I don’t think Cousin Sabina did neither, for the matter of
that.”
“Nor Uncle von Steinbach neither, eh?” mimicked Radegund. “Speak for
yourself, dear brother, and remember that ladies are always welcome
everywhere and anywhere.”
“Oh, are they!” grunted the gallant creature. “It’s the fashion to say
so; but nine times out of ten they’re just a nuisance.”
“Supposing now,” continued his sister, “that it was your company, my
dear, which could have been spared?”
“Well,” sparred he, “whose fault was it, I’d like to know, that I went?”
“The Horologe must be attended to.”
“Oh, hang it!” groaned Otto. “As if I didn’t know that! But to go
bothering about it just as one’s had one’s supper. If you want to bring
on indigestion, that’s the way to do it; and you know what Wolkenberg
said about me. Oh you may laugh, but if I’d been Dasipodius——”
“Was it my fault, pray, that he was there?”
“No,” said Otto. “I didn’t say it was, Radegund, and——”
“Well?”
“I don’t think it was.”
“Wasn’t it the Burgomaster I went to see?” she challenged, stamping her
foot with impatience. “Speak.”
“Oh, ah, well you know,” yawned he.
“Then don’t talk nonsense; and go to bed, for pity’s sake. Perhaps
you’ll find your wits there. When you’re sleepy, an idiot’s nothing to
you!”