“THE THREE RAVENS.”
After winding round the base of the St. Stephen’s Tower, the river path
terminated in a wilderness of plane and lime trees, whose unrestrained
luxuriance overshadowed a wild undergrowth of coarse grass and bramble,
through whose labyrinth, however, careful seekers might thread out
a narrow serpentine footpath, slippery and slimy with damp, and the
trailings of the slugs and toads, who in undisturbed tranquillity lived
and multiplied exceedingly thereabouts. All other winged creatures,
save and excepting the bats, and a brown owl or two, seemed to shun the
dense thicket’s sunless branches; and if they did chance to get astray
there, would rush through the heavy air into the cheerier world beyond,
as though oppressed by the dismal spot.
Pursued laterally for about a hundred yards, this path widened on
through an irregular alley of chestnut trees, finally sloping down to
the brink of a stagnant weed-grown pond, on one side of which, sunken
amid sombre willows, stood a low-gabled house, whose plaster walls,
green with the water’s exhalations, were timbered with reddish-brown
beams in many a fantastic criss-cross device. The wooden cornice-work,
belting the entire building, and mildewed and broken in many parts,
still showed patches of faded colour and half-defaced characters, once
eloquent of scriptural saws and other sage instances, but the whole
aspect of the place was now dilapidated, and peeling away with damp and
neglect.
Immediately above the low dark doorway, hung, in a scrolled iron
framework, a painted signboard, but so weather-worn and dirt-encrusted,
that something of the gift of second sight was needed to make out
its bearings. Minute consideration, however, revealed that those
three couples of yellowish-white small circles, pierced like shooting
butts with black spots, made the semblance of so many eyes in the
heads of a trio of weird and evil-looking sable-winged birds. These,
as the superscription explained, were the tutelary genii of the
establishment, “The Three Ravens,” kept by Ezra Schlau, and that
“accommodation for man and beast was obtainable there”.
The present Ezra was, however, only the blurred copy of another and
now defunct original, who had managed to hold his head higher among
his fellow-men than ever his son had been able to do. Ezra the first,
living and moving in all the stir of those days which had seen Luther
pin the Pope’s Bull up to scorn, had warmly embraced that Reformer’s
teachings; but in later years he had passed over into the ranks of
Doctor Calvin’s disciples, whose tenets recommended themselves strongly
to his gloomy temperament, which regarded everything as corrupt in this
world save the heaping up of money. The change had not been for the
better, inasmuch as his new creed rendered the man, by nature morose
and irritable, a contentious and overbearing fanatic. Notwithstanding,
he was as much a Christian as his religion permitted him to be, and
sincere to the backbone, but he had imparted little of this sincerity
to his son; and while he, for example, would have kicked a papist
customer from his doorstep, though he lay there perishing with cold
and hunger, his descendant, albeit as strictly conforming in outward
profession, was looser in his ways of conducting business, and by no
means ever over-careful to enquire too closely into the whence and
whither of his patrons.
This Ezra’s creed was one of inheritance, not of conviction; he had
taken it with his sire’s other goods and chattels, and drifting
with the fashion of the day, the rigid Predestinarian had developed
into the rank, self-asserting, but not more moral Anabaptist; and
though, pecuniarily regarded, he had found the change no unprofitable
investment, still somehow the glory of his house had departed; and
while thirty years since there had not been in all Strassburg, or its
neighbourhood, a more respected and well conducted hostelry than the
Three Ravens, there were worthy Protestant folks now given to shake
their heads dubiously about it, and allowed its allurements to become
a monopoly of the Anabaptist portion of the community; and those three
ill-omened birds on Ezra Schlau’s signboard, with their stolid eyes and
cunning beaks, curiously typified the stamp of humanity which came to
refresh itself in his guest parlour.
Once the place had been a centre where men of the various shades of
reformed opinion would meet to discuss and wire-draw the teachings
enunciated by their several leaders. The spot was a secluded one, and
the disputants felt themselves comparatively secure from inquisitorial
eyes and ears; and argument is dry work; and many a horn and beaker
were called in to whet the edge of those edifying discussions; and old
Ezra’s coffers waxed fat; and when the time came that his soul was
required of him, he, bidding his son take example, and strive to be
just such another godly and thrifty man as himself, paid the debt of
nature.
Touching the thrift, Ezra stuck to his parent’s counsel like a leech.
Touching the godliness, if a sour-natured, mean, grasping fellow,
who made long prayers in his conventicle, or at least turned up his
ferret eyes, and beat his breast, and groaned as if he were really
addressing high Heaven after his sect’s approved mode—if a creature
who adulterated his wine for his casual customers with poisonous
abominations, and strengthened his jugs and tankards with double
bottoms, until indeed these graceful artifices were detected, and he
was beaten for them within an inch of his life by his patrons, who
knew a good article from a bad one every whit as entirely as they
could tell you the difference between sanctification and self-imputed
righteousness—if a wretch who starved his dog and cat, and kept the
breath going in his one hapless servant’s body with cold bones and
mouldy scraps, and the dregs of his beer cups, and laid a gold piece in
the alms-platter after Lord’s day sermon—were a godly man, then, not
excepting Syndic Hackernagel himself, was there in all the city, or out
of it, a godlier than Ezra Schlau.
To-day, which is the eve of the great Horologe day, mine host of
the Three Ravens rose with the lark, and has been on his legs sans
intermission ever since, entertaining the strangers who are pouring
into Strassburg from all corners of the compass for leagues round;
and liberal-minded soul that he is, has been at less than even his
usual pains to ascertain whether they may be children of light or of
Beelzebub, or what may be the sound of their special Shibboleth, but
has pocketed Catholic and Protestant monies with equal alacrity, so
only that they rang sterling currency.
But the long day is drawing in at last; and the darkness is bringing
with it a heavy stormful feeling, and ever and anon, low thunderous
boomings echo distantly; and the late comers and loiterers who have
been patronizing the wayside hostelry, straggle out to the door, and
glancing overhead, and then yonder to the lights dotting up here and
there over the great city, pay their reckoning and trudge onward.
It must be close now upon the stroke of eight. From the pool a heavy
mist is beginning to rise; and the reptile creatures come crawling
and wriggling through the dank grass, to keep their nightly Walpurgis
with the croaking frogs under the alders. From the inn’s back premises
sounds a ceaseless clatter of plate and cup washing; and Schlau’s low
growling accompaniment of admonition to his luckless factotum Hans,
to mind what he is about, finds a continuous _basso obligato_ in the
music proceeding from some half-dozen nasal organs of varied shapes and
sizes, and all more or less delicately carnation-tinted, of the residue
of the revellers in the common room.
Soon, however, these will have to be ejected; and only because, for
the last hour and more past, Ezra has been expecting a distinguished
guest, grace has been extended to them; but the guest, no less a person
than one of his chief patrons, Syndic Tobias Hackernagel, is long a
coming.
“Still,” as he explained with a fatigued smile, when intimating his
intention of looking in that evening on Ezra, he might be late, “a
public man is never master of his own time; and the unforeseen so often
occurs for him. We are such slaves,” added the Syndic. “Sometimes not
even able to choose our very company.” And while Tobias sighed heavily,
Ezra, feeling himself called upon to say something, intimated with the
utmost delicacy in his choice of euphemisms, that if Syndic Hackernagel
found it advisable to bring the Prince of Darkness himself there to
hob and nob, he would ask no questions; and the pair of them would be
welcome to the best his poor house afforded.
Which assurance notwithstanding, it must be granted that Ezra’s faith
in his wealthy customer met a sharp test when, through the gathering
twilight mists, he caught a glimpse of Benedictine black skirts nearing
his door in juxtaposition with the prim grey cloth trunk hose of the
Anabaptist; and his amazement and perplexity increased tenfold when,
by the light of the oil lamp he held aloft to illumine the way of the
new comers, he beheld the shining round visage of Brother Prudentius
himself! for all Strassburg, friend and foe alike, knew the Cathedral
sacristan. Ezra was however equal to the occasion; and obedient to
the look in Hackernagel’s face, plainly intimating that now, if ever,
silence would best become him, he proceeded, as he was bidden, to see
after tapping a fresh cask of the Niersteiner.
The precious liquor lay down in a circumscribed innermost shrine, only
accessible through a large outer cellar immediately beneath the guest
room in which Hackernagel and his companion now took their seats. The
structural arrangement of these two cellars tallied exactly with that
of the chamber above. Between them was a massive partitioned wall,
pierced by a small iron-clamped door, which closed in the smaller
cellar, while the division in the guest room was marked simply by a
high step raising the floor platform-wise, and forming a sort of second
room, or rather an arched quadrangular space, whose latticed casement,
looking directly on to the pond, commanded a fine view of its green
and stagnant charms. Seen from without, this recess made a deep snug
projecting gable-end, whose walls would have had the appearance of
rising direct out of the water, save for an embanking rush-skirted
ridge of earth, narrowing at the top into a slippery slimy belt some
half-dozen inches wide, fringed with tall dank weeds and rotting sedge.
In the base of the wall, barely above watermark’s level, was fixed a
small rusty iron grating, admitting all available light and air into
the little outermost cellar below. Within doors, the guest room’s
larger division was apportioned to the hostelry’s ordinary frequenters;
while the upper recess had been, time out of mind, by general tacit
consent yielded up to the use of the Three Ravens’ more distinguished
guests, of whom Syndic Hackernagel in his generation might be counted
far from the least important; and to-night, as usual, he with his
companion were conducted to this seat above the salt.
Meantime, lamp and keys in hand, Ezra made his way through the imposing
array of casks and flasks and bottles in the outer cellar to the
double-locked door of the one beyond. Setting his lamp on a bracket,
the thrifty host turned its flame down to the thread of a gleam, for
the moon was up, and its stormy but brilliant light would, as he knew,
be shining full into his treasure house. First removing the heavy
transverse iron bar before the door, he let it slip with a loud clank,
and turned the key in its lock. Then thrusting the door far back, he
looked well round before setting foot inside. A singular precaution
apparently, but full experience had taught Ezra that it was no needless
one.
Like a chequered carpet the moonlight covered the stone floor, and to
its farthest crannies the place was more clearly visible than ever it
was by such scant and sickly daylight as ever filtered in there. Silent
and still as a death vault; yet Ezra, pausing there on the threshold,
gave a start, and then peered in with craning neck and staring eyes,
not caring to advance. Was it a shadow? a slender light-flitting shadow
which momentarily dimmed the luminous floor? Fancy of his it could not
be, the man was such a preeminently unimaginative one. With a grim half
smile at himself, he strode forward to the wine cask and tapped it.
Once again, as he stooped over the spigot, his lank fingers, showing
bluish white in the steely lustre, were overcast with sudden shadow,
and he turned and glanced wrathfully up through the grated aperture and
its rank trailing luxuriance, at the yellowing moon banked amid the
heavy clouds. “There’s a storm brewing,” he muttered to himself, as he
returned to his task. “And not a little one neither. Phew!” and he drew
his sleeve across his face, “what a cold sweat this hole always puts
one in! Enough to give a man his death of—Hei! huish!—sh! a plague on
ye all, for the screeching croaking imps ye are! Why can’t you leave
my premises alone?” growled Ezra up at his amphibious neighbours on
the other side of the grating, and hurling through it an enormous
toad, whose errant proclivities had got him into difficulties, and
precipitated him from his native slush on to the cellar floor. “It’s
well for ye all that water’s your liquor, or I’d pretty soon stop every
one of your noisy throats.”
Then his flagon filled, Ezra, barring and locking up his doors again,
came out and ascended to the guest room, where he placed the wine,
flanked by a couple of tall drinking glasses, on the table before
Syndic Hackernagel and his companion.
“Had I best leave you my lamp, Syndic Hackernagel?” enquired he,
glancing up at the four candles guttering and sputtering _in extremis_
in the rude wooden cross laths depending from the ceiling’s centre.
“Nay, friend,” said Hackernagel, “take it away. There’s light enough.”
“Ay, ay, and to spare,” laughed the sacristan, out of his reasons for
preferring darkness to light. “The moonshine here will show us the way
to our mouths.”
Lifting the lamp with one hand, and pocketing with the other the
gold piece Tobias had tendered him, Schlau retired, still lost in
bewilderment at the odd fraternization of two such inimical spirits.
“But what is to be will be,” was the Calvinist’s sage comment; “and if
there’s anything not—not entirely square about it, it’s the Syndic’s
business, not mine.”