LOVE’S ALCHEMY.
Radegund von Steinbach stands before her easel, palette and brush in
hand. Throughout the long mid July day she has been working at the
Queen Eleanor, which has stood at such a long standstill in favour of
the more pressing claims of the Horologe pictures; but they are all
complete now.
Glad of it, and yet sorry, the artist was; with their last touches she
felt that something had faded out of her life. While the work had been
in progress, it had linked her existence with Dasipodius; necessarily
placing her in almost daily communication with him, and still even,
while he was in his banishment, it had seemed to her that the spiritual
presence of him hovered about the Cathedral, and brought her a strange
content. Then too there had been her unceasing toil to disentangle
the meshes which had been woven around him, and the glory of her
share in helping him back to his own; a glory cruelly dashed with its
humiliations. Those were no light pangs which wrung her proud soul,
when brother of hers, by reason of his incapacity, was set aside. But
now all these things belonged to the past; and the general content she
had aided so materially in bringing about, was to her a living death.
Restless by temperament, an idiosyncrasy aggravated by circumstance,
Radegund recoiled from prosperity’s dull dead level. She loathed the
sunny calm of orthodox well-to-do existence, which made the _Ultima
Thule_ of the ordinary women of her social rank in the old city; just
as unshadowed yellow noon sunshine glittering on a waveless sea was
charmless and wearisome to her. Stormful billows tossing beneath a
moon half-veiled in the wind-driven rack, the creaking of the black
pine boughs on the rugged mountain-side of her own native Elsass, were
dearer to her than the softest of its meadowed uplands. A Dorothea’s
saintly patience, if it did not irritate her, assuredly never inspired
her brush; and yet—once she had limned a saint passing well; but then
in that San Lorenzo, it was not the passive resignation of mediæval
art she had helped to perpetuate, but the grand dauntless endurance
of a living sentient man. The spirit of the _Renaissance_, in all its
comminglings of strength and of weakness, of evil and of good, was
dominant in the genius of Radegund. In the delineation of the power of
human passion she was unsurpassed, and never, save perhaps in that one
notable exception, had her brush obeyed the conception of her brain, as
in this Queen Eleanor.
It is bespoken, as Radegund’s pictures invariably are, and by no less
a personage than her dowager Majesty of France, Catherine de Medicis.
The subject the queen had pronounced a most interesting one, and her
pleasure in the contemplated possession of it is infinitely enhanced by
the consideration that she had carried it off in triumph from his Grace
the Duke of Alva, who had also bidden high for it; higher indeed than
the state of his coffers altogether warranted. He had however stretched
a point, on account of being specially desirous of presenting it to
his master King Philip, whose sweet countenance he had some particular
object in propitiating just then, and in whose sight the _chef d’œuvre_
could not but find favour; but the artist had roundly refused to enter
into any bargaining of whatsoever kind with the “gentle viceroy,” and
with a scornful laugh signed the contract which made it over to the
queen, saying that between two ills, one might choose the lesser, and
at all events, she had rather think of her “poor picture in the Louvre
than in the Escorial”.
To watch Radegund at her work now, one would infer that her tether of
time for completing it was at its end, or well-nigh so; but that is not
the case. With the one exception of the Horologe pictures, Radegund had
never been brought to fetter herself to dates; and clients had always
to bide her good pleasure for their pictures, and neither could she
be brought to make any promises about the Queen Eleanor by the envoy
of royalty, who had found himself compelled to return to his gracious
mistress and explain that it would be ready when it was ready, in such
courtly euphemisms as his wits might help him to devise.
And now to-day, after long surcease, Radegund has toiled at it since
dawn, which in July smiles mockingly on midnight. The light shadows on
the Cathedral dial are telling three o’clock of a sweltering midsummer
afternoon, whose burden and heat one would fancy oppressive enough to
subdue the veriest enthusiast to a siesta; and indeed Strassburg, for
all the animation its streets present, might be a city of the dead. But
the beautiful hands of the artist—beautiful, yet somewhat wasted and
transparent, work on in that still chamber with fevered haste, only
pausing now and again hurriedly to brush back the dark rings of hair
falling dankly over her knitted brows, or to wipe away their gathering
moisture.
“Why the mischief do you work so hard, Radegund?” Otto had daundered
out eight hours earlier in the day, as he had betaken himself lazily to
his own concerns. “I don’t believe Dasipodius himself will do a stroke
of anything to-day.”
“I wouldn’t stay away from the Dial, if I were you,” laughed she, “on
the strength of that supposition.”
“I didn’t say I meant to, did I? But it’s enough to kill one to put
one leg before the other, that’s all I know. And as to one’s hands,
its just all their work to keep mopping one’s face,” said the martyr
to meteorological circumstance, as he suited the action to his words,
with a delicate wisp of cambric, and stretched his elegant length on
a couch beside the open window, shaded by the broad green leaves of a
luxuriant vine. “And fancy anybody doing anything when anybody’s not
obliged. That picture now——”
“It must be finished. If I don’t make haste——”
“Make haste. _Du lieber Himmel!_” ejaculated Otto, closing his eyes, as
if the mere words exhausted him.
“It will never be done.”
“Oh come! Never’s a long day. Just as if there weren’t months and
months coming for you to be doing it in.”
“Nay,” she answered, contemplating it with a strange loving
wistfulness. “How do I know that? and I would not like to die leaving
it undone.”
“Die!” echoed Otto, opening his closed eyes to their broadest and
fixing them on Radegund. “Why should you talk of such—such—Radegund?”
and rousing back to a half-sitting posture, he repeated her name in
tones of piteous enquiry. “Why should you talk of—of dying?”
“Why should I not? As well as another.”
“Oh, ah!” replied he, sinking back again with a relieved sigh into the
cool shadows. “That way of course. But it isn’t cheerful such sort of
talk. And I don’t like to hear it.”
“And if I were to die?”
“Don’t,” whimpered Otto.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Would you fret for me a week, I wonder?
Sisters are of small enough account, dear, to married brothers.”
“I shall never marry, if you’re talking at me,” he said gloomily,
rising and lounging towards the picture, where he stood with his eyes
fixed on it, but somehow able to see only a confusing mist of colour.
“Oh, indeed!” laughed Radegund. “I should like Gretchen to be behind
you now.”
“Gretchen be——”
“What!” interrupted Radegund, turning, brush in hand, upon him, and
transfixing him with her astonished gaze. “You two have quarrelled?”
“Never you mind, Radegund,” he said, flushing uneasily.
“You have.”
“Never you mind, I say.”
“Otto! Gretchen has never jilted you?”
“Oh! ho! ho! Jilted ME! Come, that is a good notion! Jilted ME. No, my
dear; not exactly.”
“You’re a wondrous bargain,” she said with a careless smile, turning
again to her easel. “But——”
“Now look here, Radegund. If you’re going to preach—look here,
Radegund, I’m not a baby, and I’m not going to stand here for you to be
telling me I’m dishonourable.”
“My dear boy.”
“And this and that,” and he shifted uneasily from one leg to the
other, “this and that, don’t you know; because there isn’t an inch of
dishonour in it. That is, there is a great deal, but it’s all on the
other—now see here, Radegund, I’m not going to tell you a word about
it, nor anybody else neither; so it’s no use asking.”
“My dear child, do I want to know; was I so much in love with this
brilliant alliance, and your beautiful Gretchen?”
“Oh come! there are plainer women than Gretchen, now then!”
“Her sisters, yes,” said the merciless Radegund. “No, my dear, I cannot
offer you my condolence. The connection was no such desirable one.”
“Oh,” interrupted Otto, “we needn’t rake up all that, because it’s done
with; the whole thing’s at an end,” and a heavy sigh broke from him,
which was, however, less for the discarded Gretchen than for Radegund’s
provokingly cool indifference at his startling disclosure. Secretly,
so secretly that he was himself unconscious of it, Otto had trusted
to finding sympathy from Radegund. The faintest spark of it would
have drawn from him the whole truth of his rupture with Hackernagel;
and his shallower nature thirsted now for some counsel from her. He
had half dreaded, half yearned for that anticipated “lecture” from
Radegund. Time had been that she would have taken up the cudgels
for poor Gretchen, and rated Otto soundly, not assuredly out of any
personal affection for the girl, of whom she knew comparatively little
beyond the fact that she seemed better than her kin and surroundings,
and so much she had made it her business to ascertain; but because her
instinctive sense told her that it was ignoble to break the troth he
had plighted; but now—now—“When did this happen?” was all she said.
“Last Wednesday.”
“To-morrow—a whole week!” she replied, lifting her brows in feigned
surprise. “So long! why, you’ll be casting about for a new sweetheart
by Sunday!”
“Well,” dolefully acknowledged Otto, “it is dull without one, awfully.”
“Poor dear boy.”
“Oh, it’s nothing to laugh at, Radegund,” he said, aggrieved by the
smile he fancied he detected lurking about her lips as she bent over
her canvas.
“Laugh, child, why should I do that? I was only thinking that if you’re
really off—and you are?”
“Oh, it’s as real as mud,” said Otto; “I wouldn’t touch him——”
“Him?”
“Her, of course, I mean; how dull you are, Radegund—with a pitchfork.”
“And since, then, you’re so thoroughly off as all that with the new
love, how would it be to return to the old? Cousin Sabina,” she said,
calmly working in her flesh-tints on the murderous queen’s jewelled
fingers.
“Sometimes,” said Otto, after a brief silence, “sometimes I do think
you’re a little mad, Radegund.”
“Is there such insanity in supposing that when a pretty little Jill
like Cousin Sabina is Jackless——”
“That’s no fault of hers—at least, I mean, it is—that is, I mean——”
“Jackless,” insisted Radegund, “that a handsome young fellow like you
are, should not go in and win.”
“Ah!” sighed Otto groaningly, surveying by a severe contortion of
his spine the middle seam down the back of his doublet, in the
tortoiseshell and silver mirror behind him, “it is curious of course.”
“Silly boy,” she interrupted, “what hare hearts you men have! Does it
follow because Sabina happened to refuse you once, once when her little
brain was turned, that she’d do so now?”
“No,” said Otto, calling up remembrances of certain renewed overtures
of his, which he had kept secret in his own heart, as Eleusinian
mysteries; “no, of course it doesn’t follow.”
“And things are changed since last you went a wooing in the
Munster-gasse.”
“Think so?” said Otto ruminatively. “I don’t know so much about that; I
take it there’s been more—well—muddle, you know, than change.”
“Ho!” contemptuously laughed Radegund. “No change?—no change? Next
you’ll be saying that these two still—Heaven help us!—still love each
other!”
“Dasipodius and Cousin Sabina? Ay, yes,” nodded Otto, “I dare swear
they do.”
“Fool! what sort of eyes have you that you could not see the coolness
between them when we called in the other evening at the Munster-gasse?
and how glad Conrad Dasipodius seemed of an excuse to get away?
Couldn’t your stupid head comprehend as much as that?” she demanded,
stamping her foot.
“Yes,” admitted Otto, “oh yes.”
“And how anxious he was to be coming with us. You saw how he wanted to
come with us?”
But Otto was absorbed in critical scrutiny of the canvas before him.
“Radegund, I say, what a she-dragon you are making of this woman!” he
said at last.
“Unchanged!” muttered the artist, staring gloomily before her. “How can
you say so?” she added in a louder tone. “Tell me now, Otto, have you
forgotten already that letter she—asked me to write for her? Speak,
have you forgotten it?”
“Am I likely to?” replied Otto with unwonted animation; “for my part,
I know I wish we, you and I, Radegund, had had nothing to do with the
thing. I had better have burnt my fingers off in the fire like—what was
the fellow’s name, the Roman fellow? Mu—Mu—never mind; but if I could
have guessed what a devil of a business it was going to bring about——”
“Hush!”
“I’d have—I’d have—”
“If you don’t make haste you’ll be late,” said Radegund coldly,
resuming her work; “good-bye, brother mine, till this evening; and—take
my advice, don’t go putting yourself out again to-day about nothing.”
“Nothing!” fumed he, turning to go.
“No, it’s too hot. And Otto,” he looked back, “think over what I’ve
been saying about that first little love of yours.”
With a grunt Otto departed, and through the long sultry morning
Radegund had toiled on without intermission. It seemed as if those
hands must be fraught with superhuman strength; slender always, they
looked cruelly fragile now, and, unless the dark purples in the upper
lights of the mullioned windows were casting strange shadows, had a
wasted sunken appearance, which allowed the veins to show, visibly
threading each other through the transparent skin. Yet hour succeeded
hour, and still with fevered hurrying unrest they toiled on, and the
picture gathered a terrible vividness.
Once she paused to drag off and fling aside the black velvet hood-like
cap she wore; and again and again she wiped away the gathering moisture
on her face, colourless as alabaster, save for two burning spots on
either cheek. The day was indeed a sweltering one. Could it be the
heat, she at last vexedly asked herself, which was marring all her
work, by affecting the colours on her palette? so that, labour as she
might, they refused to stay on her brush, but ran down, and clotted,
and did everything but what was required of them so persistently, that
at last she threw down her maulstick in desperation. “It’s all Bruno’s
fault!” she muttered to herself, angrily considering the delicate white
folds of the hapless Rosamund’s pearl-broidered gown; “he told me
to mix in more white lead, and see what’s come of his cleverness! He
must have meant more of the sulphate powder; I knew he was thinking of
something else when he said it. Well, he told Otto he should be here
to-night—to-night? that is to waste hours. No,” and laying aside her
tools, she picked up the discarded hood, and gathered her dishevelled
hair under it; then throwing a light camlet wrap about her shoulders,
she hurried out in the direction of the surgeon’s house.
“She’ll get sunstroke,” cried more than one, coming to their wide flung
open doors to look after her as she passed swiftly onwards. “In these
dog-days. Think only! thou dear Heaven! To come abroad at this hour!”
“She’s mad!”
“Artist folks always are!”
“Do you mark how pale and thin the painting woman has grown?” demanded
Ezekiel Grumbach the Calvinist, of Isaiah his Anabaptist neighbour.
“Ay,” nodded heaven’s predestined. “Maybe, brother Ezekiel, her papist
sins are finding her out at last, and beginning to gnaw her vitals.”
“Let us hope so, neighbour.”
“She looks pale indeed, poor thing, doesn’t she?” said a buxom little
house-mother, catching up her chubby moon-faced firstborn from his
cradle, and coming to join the group of gazers, “fearfully pale!”
“As the pestilence that walketh at noonday.”
“Nay, brother, thou art wresting the Scriptures. ’Tis the sickness, not
the pestilence that walketh at noonday,” mildly rebuked the other.
“The Bible was made for man,” retorted Isaiah, turning his back on his
neighbour, and retiring under the sanctity of his own roof again. “Thy
quibbling savoureth of the schoolmen; and stinketh in my nostrils.”
“She’s fit to be the Emperor’s wife,” said little Crispin Krebs, the
hump-backed cobbler, looking up after her from the tall buff boots
he was patching. “See only how she walks. Her feet never wore tight
brodequins, if I know leather from prunella.”
“God bless thee, lady!” murmured the blind beggar by the fountain. “I
knew ’twas you, by Strow’s tail.”
“Strow’s tail?” said Radegund, stooping to drop a coin into the dog’s
tin cup, and gently stroking his shaggy head.
“Ay. Let him catch but the sight of you ever so far off, and I feel
it begin to go wag-wag here against my legs so fast that if ’twere
’prentice made, and not the dear God’s own work, ’twould come off, I do
think.”