“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.”