WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK.
Whether Dasipodius’ visit at the Munster-gasse had brought Sabina
consolation, or rendered her fifty times more wretched, she was wholly
unable to determine; only she knew that her young life had come to
be very very hard to bear, and there were times when her desolation
was so utterly unendurable, that she was fain to creep away like some
poor sick animal, and do battle alone with her grief. Very womanfully
she strove to stifle into silence the memories which were as dear to
her as they were bitter. The more effectually to live them down, the
little woman had a habit of selecting that spot for her meditations
where hardly more than six months since, she and Conrad Dasipodius had
plighted their mutual troth.
There had been snow on the ground then, icicles had hung from the bare
trees, and the north-east wind had whistled over the frozen river, but
then there had been beating against each other two warm hearts which
knew not cold. Now there was but one, lonely and chilled to the core;
and not all the sunlight smiling so cheerily among the branches, and
flecking the grassy banks, and sparkling diamond-bright among the Ill’s
gentle ripples, could shed into it one ray of genuine warmth.
There was not a single word of that brief sweet stolen interview which
the girl had not treasured up; and the spot’s associations so vividly
recalled the mathematician’s every look and accent, that sometimes
Sabina almost cheated herself into the belief that all the later past
was some ugly dream, and that still he was beside her murmuring those
words of love. “Is it to end like this?” he had asked; and oh Heaven!
to think of the passionate tenderness breathing through his low calm
tones then! To end like this! Ah me! ah me! And then—then those strange
words more enigmatical now their signification had been in some sort
solved, than then when it had been utterly obscure to her. “Darling, I
think I could work miracles for your sake. And you? You will be brave
for mine?”
And belted knight was not braver than that love-lorn girl. She had not
dreamed then that it was such sort of courage which would have been
required of her. The giving up of his love itself; the very life’s
blood and nourishment of hers. Her pride of maidenhood would have
simply whispered her that if such a fearsome chance as that should
befall, then at one and the same breath, hers for him must perish too.
And yet the love she was bearing him now, outshone the old affection as
the finer’s gold outshines the earth-dulled nugget. Brave for his sake?
Ay, ay, for his sake.
And so one of those latter July mornings, Sabina von Steinbach, as
many a time she had done, and looked to do again, having set household
matters in good training for the day, donned hood and mantle, and
intimated to Niklaus, with a kiss on his bald crown, that she was going
out.
“Ay. So do, heart’s dear one,” said the Burgomaster, looking up from
his ledgers. “So do. The fresh air will give your cheeks some roses,
and I would come with you if——” and then he glanced with divided
affection from his girl’s face to the huge folios before him. “Shall I?”
“No, Väterle,” hurriedly assured Sabina. “I shall do quite well alone.
I am only going to take a little stroll by the river.”
“Bless my soul!” half-frowningly, half-smilingly soliloquized Niklaus
when she was gone. “What a fancy she always has for the river to be
sure! Now I call it rather a dismal sort of a promenade myself; but I
expect she carries her pockets full of crumbs for that posse of ducks
and geese that always quack one deaf just about there. That’s the
secret of it. Never was such a girl as she is for dumb animals!”
A veritable lover’s walk of summer evenings was that tree-bordered
river path leading from below the fishmarket, out under the bridges
to the Fisherman’s Gate. In the forenoon however the place was quiet
enough; and once past the St. Stephen’s Tower, it was (save for the
waterfowl, who, boasting an island domain somewhere out in midstream,
were given to prosecuting voyages of discovery along the banks) silent
and sequestered as saddest heart could desire; and Sabina, strolling
slowly onward, barely anticipated encountering a single straggler.
As however she neared the spot sacred to her hopeless love, which
stood somewhat hidden by a bend in the path, and shaded round by tall
bramble bushes, her ear caught a low wailing sound, broken by cruel
sobbings. Instinctively she stopped and listened. A woman’s voice! and
she made a step forward.
“Lonely and miserable is she, poor thing,” murmured the girl to
herself, the ready sympathy welling up into her eyes. “And why, I
wonder? why?”
With a light warning rustle of the bushes, Sabina stepped forward,
and found herself in the presence of a woman seated on the trunk of a
fallen tree; a market-basket, whence straggled the dislocated necks
of a couple of capons into the long rank grass, lying beside her.
Unconscious of the intruder, her face hidden in her arms folded upon
her lap, she sat rocking herself to and fro, moaning, “Otto—Otto—my
Otto!” and not a word besides.
“Why, Gretchen!—Gretchen Hackernagel,” said Sabina in a soft tone of
recognition.
“Who sent for you, Sabina von Steinbach?” fiercely demanded the
Syndic’s daughter, sitting bolt upright, and tossing back the red
golden luxuriant hair, all dank and tear matted, while she stared
through her blurred eyes at the intruder. “Who sent for you?” If
anything could have aggravated the girl’s misery, it was this most
palpable reminder of the existence of her, whom Gretchen in some sort
regarded as her rival in the graceless Otto’s affections.
“Dear Gretchen”—began Sabina.
“Leave me alone!” sobbed out the unhappy girl. “I hate vipers.”
“You hate?” reiterated the puzzled Sabina.
“Vipers. That’s what I said, Miss Innocence; and I suppose you’re as
happy as the day is long, now you’ve managed to coax him back. And—oh,
isn’t it nice to have come here, and caught me crying about him? Only
I wasn’t. Don’t flatter yourself. Cry about him indeed! Oh!” and she
laughed hysterically. “I like that. He’d be a rare fine bargain to cry
about.”
“He?”
“Ho! don’t stare at me like that, you false cat, you. You think I don’t
know. But I do—I do. And you’d like to be having them all to twist
round your little finger, wouldn’t you, if you could, and then bid them
be off for a pack of idiots: like you served Master Dasipodius. Oh, ho!
don’t I know? Doesn’t all Strassburg know?”
“Like I——” faltered Sabina, turning deadly pale. “Do you know what
you’re saying, Gretchen Hackernagel?”
“Every bit as much as you do, Sabina von Steinbach,” retorted Gretchen,
in broken but fierce tones, rising and picking up her basket, and
stepping a pace or two forward, she stood boldly confronting Sabina
with her tear-swollen eyes. “I suppose it doesn’t want spectacles to be
seeing that the prosperous Catholic Burgomaster’s dainty daughter is
a better bargain than the disgraced Protestant, Tobias Hackernagel’s.
Oh, no, he’s sharp enough when it suits him, is Otto—Otto!” and at the
name’s recurrence, her tears broke forth afresh, “and—do you hear—ah!
don’t go on staring at me like that. It will drive me mad—mad.”
“I won’t. I won’t,” assured Sabina, fixing her astonished gaze more and
more persistently on the broken-hearted Gretchen.
“And next, I suppose,” continued Gretchen, “you’ll be making believe
you know nothing about it all. Have done!” for Sabina strove to speak,
“telling me you don’t know where he went the other night, after he’d
rushed off like a whirlwind, swearing it was for ever—and ever—and
ever—oh.”
“Do you mean Otto——”
“Yes, yes, I mean—oh.”
“By our dear Lady’s honour, I do not know,” asseverated Sabina, lifting
her blue eyes from Gretchen’s to the hardly bluer sky, “for I have not
seen Otto for an age. He has not been near our house for——”
“Well?”
“Ah, for more than a fortnight.”
Gretchen’s face softened perceptibly.
“And,” continued Sabina, “tell me, Gretchen, calmly—if you can. You do
not mean that you and Otto have quarrelled?”
“He has,” said Gretchen, wiping her eyes, and turning them shyly, and
more than half emptied of their harsh mistrust and defiance, on Sabina.
“But, dear child, what about?” insisted Sabina, laying her hand
caressingly on Gretchen’s.
“Ah!” sneered Gretchen, shaking it off. “Now you’d dearly like to know,
wouldn’t you.”
“Indeed I would, if it could help to right it for you, Gretchen.
Else,” added she with a sigh, and in tones of such weary unmistakable
indifference, that Gretchen started and stood intently studying her sad
patient face, “else I care little enough I think.”
Hitherto there had been small enough sympathy between these two. The
devout Catholic girl with her illuminated missal and her thousand and
one quaint legends of Mother Mary and the Saints, shrank from the more
bare verities of the faith in which Gretchen Hackernagel had been
reared. She could not sit down and share with her dreamy speculations
over the Stigmata of gentle Friar Francis, the “Tolle lege” of the
great Father Augustine, the sweet charity of the blessed Elizabeth
of Hungary, or make with her brain pictures of Heaven’s golden gates
and sapphire walls. For Gretchen Hackernagel, these things wore no
vitality or colour, and her life’s conditions had only shown her the
Christian religion as a hard ungracious task-mistress. Then too, on her
part, Gretchen had for so long secretly hated Sabina as her formidable
rival; and so it had come to be that these two, occasionally thrown
together, were acquaintances, not friends. Yet now those last simple
words of Sabina’s had struck a chord of sympathy in Gretchen’s heart.
It may have been their sad hopelessness, or perhaps the ring of gentle
forbearance to which Gretchen was such a stranger in her own house,
that touched her.
“And I think,” went on Sabina, after a brief pause, “you will like best
to be alone again. If indeed,” she added wistfully, “I can do nothing
to help you to win that—win Otto back.”
“Would you?” and with keenly searching eyes, Gretchen looked into
Sabina’s face. “Would you indeed do that?”
“Ay, indeed,” said Sabina in tones of grave assurance. “Indeed, if
I could. Tell me how, Gretchen?” and again she laid her hands on
Gretchen’s, and this time they were not shaken off. “Tell me what I
could do?”
“He minds all you say to him,” said Gretchen, gazing with gloomy
speculation into the river. “It has always been Cousin Sabina this,
Cousin Sabina that, till I have just hated the very sound of your name.”
“Nay, now, Otto is my cousin,” contented Sabina, “and if he should like
me a little, that is only his duty; he would be dreadfully wicked if he
didn’t, and I won’t have you angry with him, or me either, for that,
you naughty child. If he likes ‘Cousin Sabina,’ isn’t it one Gretchen
Hackernagel we know, he has asked to be his wife? and that should be
enough, and a great deal more too,” she added with a little sigh, “if
you love him, Gretchen, as many a time he has told me he loves you,
don’t you know,” argued the cunning Sabina. “Come now, tell me. This is
no more surely than a little passing cloud between you?”
But Gretchen shook her head. “You know nothing about it,” she said.
“Nay, very well then; I will go. It would make me sorry to have you
fancying I was meddling in what does not concern me. So good-bye,
Gretchen Hackernagel;” and she turned and strolled homeward by the path
she had come, musing greatly as she went.
“Now, what can those two ridiculous creatures have found to quarrel
about? Just as if there wasn’t real misery—oh dear! of all sorts in the
world, without their making up any. Poor dear thing! I won’t have it.
No,” and the little autocrat pursed her lips resolutely, and set down
her small foot as she walked, “I will not have such absurd nonsense,
and I shall tell Otto so.”
Her opportunity speedily presented itself; for she came face to
face with that young gentleman as she turned the corner of the
Munster-gasse, and learning that she had something very particular
indeed to say to him, he followed her, most lamb-like of captives, to
the house, where his brain having been rendered lucid by a tankard of
ale, Sabina demanded without further preamble, “What he meant by it?”
and when, not quite unexcusably perhaps, he said, “Mean by what?” all
the answer she vouchsafed was, “Oh, you know very well”.
“Upon my honour.”
“Honour! Oh, really, now, that’s too good,” sarcastically flushed up
the indignant little lady. “A great deal too good. And you treating
poor Gretchen so. Oh, whistle as much as you like, sir,” as Otto
indulged in a long low sibilation. “That shows how true it all is; and
I know all about it, I tell you. Yes—all.”
“By Jove, you do!” cried he, starting up.
“By Jove, I do,” nodded she; “and now, see here, Otto, if you don’t go
back this minute, and make up with her, I’ll—I’ll never speak to you
again.”
“But—but—” said Otto, staggered by the awful threat, “but, look here.”
“I won’t,” she said, throwing her hood down on the table, and smoothing
back her bright ripples of hair, she seated herself at her frame, and
proceeded to stab her tapestry work with extraordinary energy. “And I
hate the sight of you, cross-grained, false, unkind, cruel creature
that you are. I should like to stick you all over with this needle;
that I should.”
“But, Cousin Sabina——”
“Oh! I’m no cousin of yours, I can tell you; and I won’t be. Never
again till”—and then just the very faintest flicker of a smile relaxed
the tightened lips—“till you turn Gretchen Hackernagel into another
cousin for me.”
“Are you so very anxious then for the connection, Sabina?” demanded
Otto in tones whose measured soberness impelled her to look up at him.
“That,” she answered, more composedly resuming her work, “has nothing
to do with it. A promise is a promise. Is it or isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes; all that.”
“And you’ve promised to marry Gretchen Hackernagel. Have you or haven’t
you?” persisted his stern inquisitrix.
“Yes! oh, yes; you know,” said Otto, “all that. I don’t deny that.”
“Very well then.”
“But look here, Sabina. You wouldn’t—I say you know, look here now,
Tobias Hackernagel is such an infernal old rascal.”
“For shame!” said Sabina with an odd gleam of satisfaction dancing
under the cast-down eyelids.
“Oh well, it’s the same thing. He would be, if he dared.”
“Are you going to marry Tobias Hackernagel?” she demanded grimly.
“Upon my word and honour now, Sabina,” cried the despairing derelict,
“who’d have imagined you’d go looking at it in that light? I should
have—hem—supposed that you of all others—that—that—oh! really, you
can’t understand all about it; you can’t indeed!”
“I can, sir; I do, I tell you. I know a great deal too much; and I hate
people who—who make love to girls, and then, well, change their minds,
and want to draw back. And why pray? Just because fathers-in-law are
not saints.”
“It’s just because he is one,” groaned Otto, “that there’s no knowing
how to take him.”
“It isn’t very likely,” she rejoined, “that I should be fond of Syndic
Hackernagel. You ought to know that, Otto. I think you do,” and Sabina
bent her head very low over her work, to examine some ugly flaw in the
golden thread she was using. “But I’m a woman for all that; and I
should hope I’m able to reason properly, and I tell you that you are
very unreasonable, and very, very wicked, and very, very, very cruel,
and—oh, so horribly, so detestably stupid,” and the thread snapped off
at a tangent, “not to know a good thing when you’ve got it.”
“A good thing?” vacuously echoed Otto.
“Oh thou dear Heaven!” sighingly ejaculated Sabina, a bright rose-flush
dyeing her pale cheeks. “How plain one has to speak, to be sure! Yes,
that’s what I said, sir. A good thing. A true woman’s love.”
“Oh, well, as to that,” returned he, stroking his hyacinthine locks,
“there’s no end of it. I mean, you know, there are heaps of girls.”
“Otto,” gravely said Sabina, pausing in her work, and resting her hand
on the frame’s edge, “there is not the faintest necessity for you to be
telling me that our Antinous there,” and she pointed with her needle
out to the courtyard fountain, on whose marble ledge a magnificent
peacock stood pluming his spread tail, and arching his satin neck in
the mid-day sunlight, “is nothing like the vain, conceited animal you
are. But girls, as a rule—as a rule, mind—don’t like that sort of
thing. I don’t, for example; it’s turning things, as it were, wrong end
first. And you may look a long time—a very long time—before you’ll find
any other girl to worship and bow down to you, and make you everybody,
and herself nobody, as Gretchen Hackernagel does.”
“I do think she’s fond of me,” languidly smiled he.
“She loves you, Otto. Trust me. I know, I can tell; loves you
dearly—dearly. And will you throw such love away? Do you want her heart
to break for your sake? Would that be a triumph to please you?”
Otto was not sure that it might not be; but he felt Sabina’s gentle
eyes upon him, and contrived to look contrition’s very incarnation.
Sabina gathered courage.
“Would you like her death to be at your door?” she hurried on.
“Oh, _Himmelsdonnerwetter!_ What things you do say to be sure, Sabina.
No, of course not. Who would? I only thought——”
“Of yourself, as you always do,” she said in stern reproach. “But
Otto—dear Otto,” and then her tones softened, and she rose, and coming
beside him, laid her hand lightly on his shoulder, “if you have any
heart at all, and indeed I know you have, take back, take back this
that the good God has given you, and thank Him on your knees you
have not lost it for your carelessness.” But he only shook his head
gruntingly.
“Do you know,” she went on, “how many there are who have played away
with such a thing, or misused it, or lost it—nay, I do not know how.
I cannot tell. Maybe because it never was really and truly theirs, as
Gretchen’s has been—is yours, Otto.”
“It’s an awful sacrifice,” grumbled he, thrusting his hands into his
pockets, and surveying, in a sort of absent admiration, his pair of
outstretched comely legs, “and then it’s frightful to think what
that dispensation for marrying a heretic will cost. It’s a precious
extravagant game; and upon my honour, I don’t altogether think it’s
worth its candle. I—I don’t mind telling you I don’t, Sabina.”
“And I wonder you’re not ashamed of yourself for your pains!” flashed
she.
“And if I _do_ do it, I do it against my better conscience look you;
utterly and entirely against my better conscience.”
“Oh, never mind your conscience!” joyfully cried the unprincipled
little woman. “Now go—do,” and she sent forward the chair in which
he was tilting himself at perilously sharp angles, with such force,
that he had to spring to his feet to save himself the alternative of
measuring his length on the floor, “go and set about it at once.”
“Oh, I can’t do that. No, look here now, Sabina, you can’t make me do
that.” And Otto emphatically shook his head. “I’d sooner die. See now.
I’ve sworn I’ll never set foot in his house again.”
“What a silly boy you are,” laughed she.
“Oh, you may call me names, but hang it, I mean to stick to that, so
there!”
“Then do,” she said, still quietly laughing to herself, “go to the
Fisherman’s Walk, and if she’s not gone, she’s sitting there—in that
little nook, you know it, don’t you, Otto? just short of the St
Stephen’s Tower, where I left her, sobbing her heart out, and all for a
piece of rubbish like you.”
“Do it on the sly. Be clandestine, be——”
“Oh, Sabina!”
“Ah, be what you will, if only you do it at once, and—see now, Otto, if
she’s gone, find her—wherever it is. Yes?”
“Oh, all right,” grunted he.
“You’re safe, you know, always to find her on the way to market at all
events.”
“And how is it possible for me, I should like to know, to be leaving
the Studio at such an hour?” objected the ardent lover.
“Ah, just as if Conr—the Professor Dasipodius was as strict upon you
as all that! I’m quite sure you’re not so precious as not to be spared
one little half hour. Come now, if you make good haste, you’ll catch
her now. I will walk with you as far as your house. Radegund seemed but
poorly last night, and I want to see her, and try to cheer her up a
bit. So come. I will take your arm, Cousin Otto, if you’re so gallant
as to lend it to me.”
And after this fashion, Sabina compassed the getting of Otto as far on
his quest as the corner of the Domplatz.