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.