A CONFESSION.
Towards nine o’clock that same evening, there was brought to the
Professor Dasipodius, where he sat with one or two old friends after
supper, a message on the part of Radegund von Steinbach, desiring to
speak with him.
A shade of annoyance crossed the mathematician’s face; he had promised
himself to spend that evening with his father and his guests in peace
and quietness. It had been with them a sort of little gala night, such
as one does like to keep over some work well carried through, when
brain and hands long on the stretch, slacken their tension at last, and
dare to lie fallow. To-morrow of course, the mathematician must be at
the general disposal, but this night he calls his own holiday; and he
has counted on keeping it alone with Christian and Bruno Wolkenberg,
and those they best care for.
Dasipodius and his two coadjutors, Isaac and Kaspar Habrecht, have come
home late in the afternoon, flushed with their crowning exertions; and
now supper done justice to, they are gathered out in the cool twilight,
to discuss at leisure a bottle of the Marcobrunner; and the festivities
have just reached that comfortable phase embracing the Franco-German
Cession question, when Mistress von Steinbach’s messenger is ushered
into their presence.
“It is tiresome,” said Dasipodius. “I should have been obliged to your
mistress,” he added, addressing the servant, “if she could have let her
business stand over. Is it urgent, think you?”
“She desired me to say it was very urgent.”
“Shall I run across for you, Conrad?” enquired Bruno Wolkenberg.
“Ay, ay, so do,” smiled Burgomaster Niklaus. “I’ll warrant you the
doctor proves more gallant than the mathematician. Upon my honour, Herr
Professor, I dare swear it isn’t many would stand hesitating, when my
lady niece calls a parley.”
“Maybe it is some question concerning the Horologe. Hadn’t you best go,
master?” urged Isaac Habrecht.
“Ay,” answered Dasipodius. “Give me my stick, Kaspar.” And extracting
from the little company a promise that they would not stir till he came
back, he followed the servant across the Platz, and being conducted up
the broad staircase, was ushered into the artist’s presence.
She was alone in the shadowy room, lighted only by the magnificent
silver gilt lamp depending by long chains from the carved ceiling. The
deep windows, wide open, were entirely concealed by the heavy silken
curtains closely drawn, and even, wrapped across. In its accustomed
place stood the artist’s easel, with the Queen Eleanor, if only those
half lights did not deceive, complete as its creator’s hands could
make it; and standing out in its fearsome grandeur, like some terrible
reality of blood and crime. Even as Dasipodius entered, she seemed to
have been bestowing on it some finishing touches, for at the sound of
the opening door she laid down her brush, and gathered up about her
bosom the disarranged lace forming the ruff of the long loose white
wrapper she wore.
Magnificently beautiful the artist looked; yet the beauty was of a
stern, almost repellent sort, until as she advanced a step to receive
her visitor, the fixed severity of the wonderful lips relaxed into
a smile of rare womanly tenderness, and a deep flush suffused the
marble pallor of the perfect features, while a sweetness passing words
moistened the scorching lustre of her dark eyes, as she fixed them on
Dasipodius, standing there in the calm dignity of bearing natural to
him, tempered by the air of patient attentness which his infirmity had
rendered habitual.
A little hard it was to realize that that involuntary setting in order
of her disordered toilette had been a work of supererogation as far
as it concerned Dasipodius; so difficult to grasp the fact that those
luminous eyes, which seemed to see far beyond and above the ken of
ordinary men, saw indeed nothing. Only more careful consideration of
the grand face taught, that not in the eyes, but in the conformation
of brow and temples, and of the deep-fringed eyelids, lay all its
marvellous force.
“You sent for me?” he said.
“Ay, yes,” she answered. “Will you not be seated?”
“I thank you, no. I have left guests at home; and I must return to them
as soon as possible.”
“As you always must, Master Dasipodius,” she said with a bitter smile,
“when I crave a word with you.”
“Nay,” contended he. “It is always your pleasure to twit me with
discourtesy; but I am all attention. Is it the Horologe?”
“The Horologe! the Horologe!” she burst forth. “Is that thing to be for
ever and ever dearer to you than human hearts?”
“I trust,” he said with a half smile, which yet was very sad, “that it
may prove itself truer than some are. And now, mistress, your commands.”
“You are bitter on your friends,” she said, paying no heed to his last
words.
“Not so,” returned he with some fire. “Not so, by my faith. Do not
think that I complain. Then I should hate myself for the ungratefullest
wretch that ever cumbered this fair world. I wonder who in their trial
time have ever been blessed with such kind sympathy and help, Mistress
Radegund, as I?”
“Indeed,” she murmured tremulously, “we—they have all loved you well!”
“True metal all of them, save only one.”
“And she?” challenged Radegund, looking up earnestly into his face.
“God help me,” he said solemnly, “for prizing her beyond all the rest.
Dearly as the sailor prizes the Pole Star, though the sky be ablaze
with planet and constellation.”
“And that lost?”
“I beat about on a lifeless sea.”
“And pray for death?”
“No. I trim my sails as best I can, and bide my Master’s bidding. And
now——”
“And she? That life star?” said the artist.
“You push me too close,” he said with a touch of petulance; “and I used
a false simile. I tell you I deceived myself. You know I did. Such a
star I never saw, poor blind wretch that I am! It was but an empty
fleeting flash. Not the gentle saving beacon-light which most men find.”
“You are wrong,” she said in less hurried tones. “Wrong.”
“I was. To my sorrow,” assented he, bowing his head. “And as the tree
falls, it lies. Now will you be pleased to——”
“Cruelly, bitterly wrong,” she went on vehemently. “You were a fool, I
say. A miserable, blind, blind fool, Conrad Dasipodius.”
“As you say, mistress,” assented he, again colouring deeply. “And
if—well, you always were famous for speaking home truths.”
“Oh my God!” she cried, shivering at the chilly sarcasm of his tones,
and turning her head from side to side, like some distraught creature.
Was it her doom that he should always misapprehend her, that her words
should always sting him to the quick? “Did I mean that? I mean—it is
all a lie! A bare foul hideous deception.”
Once again the stately head drooped acquiescingly.
“It was no vain fiery toy. She was true; true, I tell you, and loyal
and constant as ever pole star.”
“We will leave metaphors alone,” he interrupted coldly. “Such
holy comparison can never stand for a poor shallow-hearted child
like—like——” he faltered, her name seemed sacred to him even yet.
“Her you loved?” demanded Radegund, her breath coming in short quick
gasps, and the hectic crimson in her hollow cheek fading and deepening,
and fading again.
“Like her I love.”
The artist’s eyes closed, and heavily as the head of a corpse, hers
fell upon her breast, while she sank down upon the couch near, and for
a space there was silence, broken first only by the striking of the
Munster clock. Ten! Then slowly lifting her face, fearsomely drawn and
death-white, she fixed her eyes, terrible now in their piercing but
lustreless brilliancy, upon Dasipodius.
“Yet,” she said, “you think her false?”
“I think,” he answered, “that I exacted from her what she had not to
give.”
“You do not blame her?”
“I,” he paused—“Mistress Radegund, I do not know by what right of yours
I should be brought here to lay bare that which my own soul,” and his
whole frame drooped and trembled agonizedly as he spoke, “flinches from
looking into. Is it some pleasure you find in mocking me, or do you
perhaps make yourself my scourge for my presumptuous folly?”
She smiled scornfully.
“Then bethink you,” he went on; “look into your own heart, ask yourself
whether there is nothing, no experience of your own life, to plead for
my weakness, and tell you we may curb, but not kill love.”
No answer, save the low panting breath of the woman near him. His
keen ear caught the sound, and he mistook it for the expression of her
heart’s pity for him.
“Have I not your compassion now?” he asked gently. “I know you can be
generous. Do you throw away your scorn, and give me your pity?”
Still no answer. Only silently the artist’s hand stole to the bosom of
her dress, and she drew from it a folded square of parchment somewhat
frayed and soiled, whose green tying ribbon was attached to it by a
broken seal.
“If,” went on Dasipodius, “she did not love me——”
“Ay, but she did, Conrad Dasipodius.”
He shook his head slowly.
“As that star you spoke of just now,” she continued; “true and
faithful, pure and unsullied as five times tested gold, Sabina von
Steinbach’s love is for you.”
But he only shook his head more persistently.
“Your kind words,” he said, “are bitter cruel. My wound is sharp; I
have borne—I do bear it as I may; but these sweet deluding assurances
of yours are cankerous torture to me, and by all your own heart loves——”
“Have done!” she wailed, starting from her seat; and staggering to his
side, she thrust the parchment into his hands. “Read that!”
“Mistress?” he said, reaching it back to her, a world of rebuke and
pained enquiry in his chill reproachful tones.
“God help me!” she murmured under her breath, gently, almost
reverentially, receiving it back from him. “Are my senses forsaking me?
Listen then.”
And in hoarse broken accents, with parched and cleaving lips, but word
for word, end to end, she read out to him Sabina’s sad little epistle
of farewell; just as she herself had written it at the girl’s dictation
that wintry afternoon, there in that very room, on the very spot where
they stood.
Once or twice as he listens the mathematician’s face lightens and
overclouds again with varying emotion, but as the last words leave
Radegund’s lips, it settles into stillness.
“I cannot tell,” he says then in icy tones, “what end this jugglery of
yours may be having to serve, Mistress von Steinbach.”
“Jugglery!” she cries, her eyes flaming now with wounded pride. “Oh,
I am well served, well served!” and she gnaws her pale lips. “Is not
this conclusive evidence enough how you have misjudged her?”
“Surely no,” returned he, with a slight shrug of his shoulders, and a
smile whose bitterness ill-suited the graciousness of his lips. “Any
more than I can conceive how this letter—which is mine, mistress,” and
he claimed and took it with both hands outstretched; “and which was
sought for high and low—got into your keeping. Any more,” he went on,
after a momentary pause, “than I can form a guess whom your cousin
deputed to write it for her. She is not able, I know, to do such things
for herself.”
“It was I who wrote it.”
“So,” he bowed. “At her bidding? You served her well in her hour of
need. She must feel herself beholden indeed to you.”
“And it was I,” continued the artist, cowering under the steel-cold
edge of his tones, “I who when Otto brought it back here again to me——”
“And why did he do that?”
“He can best tell, or some devil who prompted him. I cannot; I am
guiltless of that at least.”
“But——”
“Sometimes I have thought that its ending seemed kinder than its
beginning. You remember you deputed my brother to read it?”
“Yes, yes.”
“And perhaps for his own love suit’s sake with the child, he judged you
had best never come to know how warmly it closed.”
“Chilly warmth at best,” bitterly laughed Dasipodius.
“It might have whispered to you that she loved you still.”
“At the time? Yes, it might have done so,” he conceded. “It might have
deluded me into dreaming some such foolishness. Do you wish me to thank
you for keeping it from me?”
“That is why I was glad to keep it from you,” she murmured, in the
tones of some rack-wrung creature.
“Glad to—Mistress Radegund?” and slowly into the pure clear colourless
face of the mathematician uprose a crimson flush.
“Ay. Glad! glad! I tell you. To come between her happiness and—oh my
God! to think indeed that it was yours too!”
“For your brother’s sake you did this thing? For the sake of Otto’s
love for her?”
“Poor boy, no!” she cried, with a strange hard laugh. “I troubled
little enough about him. It—it was for my own love’s sake for you,
Conrad Dasipodius!” And seizing the mathematician’s hands, she laid
them against her eyes and cheeks and lips, covering them with wild
burning kisses.
“Woman!” he cried, recoiling and shaking her from him as if she were a
loathsome poisonous thing.
“Ay,” half said, half sung she, in a tone of reckless defiance, her
tall figure swaying like some fragile tempest-stricken reed, under the
violence of his gesture, while she turned her eyes luminous with their
passionate love upon him. “Woman! woman!—yes. Or devil was I? My own
love’s sake—my own love—for that, for you, I have staked all—body and
soul of me, and lost! lost! lost! Woman, you said? Are women fiends
then? for that,” and her voice sank to a low monotonous wail, “that
was I. Like a devil incarnate I stole between you and her—your love,
Conrad—your little love, Sabina. I told her you had no love for her;
and longed, if only you dared, to throw her by like some faded flower,
whose fragrance had sweetened your life for a day and then grown
loathsome to you, harmful even. Do you hear me?—do you hear, I say?”
For the face of the dead is not more impenetrable than his has grown.
“Do you hear me?”
“And she—believed you?” he said at last.
“Ay,” hurried on Radegund, half pityingly, all contemptuously. “Pretty
little fragile lily bud. I crushed her, though maybe I found my task
harder than I reckoned. Lily she may look, yet ivy never clung closer
to oak, than her love clung to yours; but——”
Then weak with the feverous blood of her long consuming passion, and
trembling with the weight of her remorseful shame, a thousandfold more
cruel and bitter that it seemed to her she loved the stern, marble, man
before her, as she had never loved him yet, she staggered towards him,
and sank on her knees at his feet. “But,” she murmured, “there was that
love to cope with, which was unconquerable. Mine for——”
“Ah, hush! hush! Tell me. She—Sabina——”
“Well, listen. Love it was, that grew and grew, until my womanhood
well-nigh forgot itself, and there was neither shame nor pity left in
me; forgot itself, and stooped—as it must now—as it must now, to lie
naked, grovelling in the very dust at your feet.”
“And she?”
“Ah, she. Yes, she of course—well, what I could not unwind, because
no human power could—for she clung to you so lovingly—who would have
guessed it of her? taking her very life from thought of yours—that I
tore—tore from you, and trampled on, and——”
“Stamped out,” he groaned.
“No, no.”
“Stamped out, till not one poor tendril was left. Yes, yes, you were
successful, you——”
“I tell you—no. She loves you still.”
But no gleam of credence in her words lighted the stony agony of his
face.
“By the life which is leaving me—for I am dying—the next spring
snowdrops will not find me here—the life I have sinned away for your——”
He turned shudderingly from her.
“By that I swear,” and she solemnly lifted her shadowy white hands. “I
think she loves you now as dearly—ay—at least as dearly as when first
she gave you her plighted troth. I think——”
“You think,” he interrupted in hard tuneless tones. “Seemingly your
thoughts are apt to run wild. You think, you say, but I—I know. I who
loved her so dearly, and once would not have believed my love was not
returned, though Heaven’s own voice had said it—I know.”
She lifted her eyes, where she knelt, fixing them with mute enquiry
upon his.
“You see, I argue, mistress,” he went on, “from fact, from—herself.”
“If you did that,” returned Radegund more calmly, “then her face, her
whole bearing would witness for me that what I tell you is true.”
“Those form no bases for me to draw conclusions from,” he rejoined with
such calm intonation as he might have used to elucidate some clear but
intricate problem from the University platform. “But if my eyes cannot
see, my hearing is sensitive. Acutely so, I sometimes flatter myself;
and that was wounded to the quick once out of the twice that we have
met, since you, mistress, so effectually sundered us. Once——”
“When, when?”
“When we met——”
“Ay, by chance?”
“By chance, yes; on my trial morning in the Cathedral.”
“And she said?”
“Oh, words, words, nothing more. So cold, so empty of love they
sounded——”
“Ay, perhaps, sounded,” sadly smiled the artist.
“Or of hate even, those I could have borne, I think; and so few, and
yet, few as they were, I have striven—Heaven knows how I have striven,”
he paused for an instant to wipe away the heavy drops of agony beading
on his face, “night and day to put them from me. It was well, was it
not, that I could not see her? At least that misery was spared me.
Could I have looked on the face from which the light of love I used
to fancy once shone for me, had died out—and lived? If I had seen her
then——”
“Ay, if you had,” smiled the artist with infinite scornful pity. “And
so—that other time you have met?”
“Yes, well; eight days since, in her father’s house. You too were
there? Saw for yourself surely, the excellence of your perfect work.”
“I tell you——”
“Ay, say now. Does she not seem all that a father’s heart could desire?
A calm even-minded treasure of a daughter? And that decision you
helped her to? How wise! is it not? Think what her lot might have been
but for you, mistress, you. Think of it. My wife. A blind man’s wife!
Look forward into the years to come, and strive, if you can, to realize
the future of that woman, whose lot should be linked with mine! Have
you ever done that? You sigh. I hear you. Or shudder, which was it?
Nay, nay, if you weep, dry your tears. I would not have them wasted
upon me.”
“Oh, Conrad! oh, my——”
“Hush, hear me. Have you ever done that? Have you ever troubled your
mind, though indeed I scarcely know why you should, to gauge the depths
of such suffering men endure afflicted as I am?”
“If I could bear your pain,” she moaned.
“Nay,” and his voice softened a little, “I think you mistake me. The
bodily pain is trifling enough beside the awful mental agony—the
Tantalus misery of having, and having not. Your art is dear to you,
yes?”
“Yes,” murmured she.
“As my science is to me. Think, if such a thing were possible, as for
you blindly to fix those fair proportions on your canvas—to limn
in colouring glorious almost as Heaven’s own dear nature, for so I
know your work is;—what it would be to you, for never a line—never a
gleam of it, to gladden the eternal blackness clouding you in? Do you
know—no, no, no, you cannot. Only when it is lost, we come to value
all the sweetness, the gladdening joy of looking upon what our hands
have done? The pleasure, the pride. Pride? Such pride it is then as was
Christ’s own when He went about doing the work the Father had set Him.
And that can never be mine again. Once there was a greybeard, they say,
who bartered his soul for his lost youth. Do you know, mistress, there
are moments—God forgive my heavy sin!—when my darkened life wrestles
with my very soul, and for one little hour of eyesight, I would barter
away its eternal hope. Had it pleased Heaven to have afflicted me with
aught but this—aught but this—if it had dulled these ears, maimed these
hands——”
And as involuntarily he stretched them out, the artist, scarcely
conscious of what she did, caught them in hers, and when gently but
resolutely he drew them away, they were wet with her silent tears.
“But why should I be saying this to you, Mistress von Steinbach? Well,
because I would have you know me as I am—to myself. As she, poor
little one, must have come to know me, had her life ever been part
and parcel of mine. As a man often cast down, despondent, impatient
of his burden, groping always in the utter bewilderment of his dark
way; fretful maybe, strive against it as my better angel may, and
struggling eternally; failing, times beyond count, that the shadow of
my affliction shall not vex and embitter the existence of those about
me. And what had she done, poor darling, that her pure sunny young life
should ever come to be blighted so? Could my love, boundless as it is,
atone to her for it? Think, Mistress von Steinbach, of all this, when
you think of your sin against her and me, and find in it what comfort
you may.”
“Comfort! comfort!” wailed Radegund.
“Ay, comfort; that you succeeded in doing what my selfish erring
heart’s love for her shrank and flinched even from dreaming of.”
“You are wrong! wrong!” wildly insisted she. “She, I tell you—she——”
“Is all that a good little daughter should be. And I say God bless her.
And for the rest, may He forgive you, Radegund von Steinbach.”
“But you! Oh, Conrad, you will not forgive?”
“Nay. I cannot.” And he turned slowly from her; but with her encircling
arms she stayed his feet, and laying down her head upon them, all her
dark hair sweeping the ground, she clung to them, sobbing tearless
sobs, which seemed to be tearing her whole fragile frame. But he
uttered no word; and wrenching himself free of her white enchaining
arms, left her where she lay, and descending the dim-lit staircase,
passed out into the night.
* * * * *
Somewhere on the stroke of midnight it was when the drowsy porter
roused up to admit Otto. Seeing the light still burning in his sister’s
studio, the young man ran up to bid her good-night. Scarcely had he
opened the door, than he shrank back, petrified with horror. No picture
lay in its familiar place, but about the empty easel hung a few shreds
of parti-coloured canvas; the rest, torn into a hundred strips, lay
coiling serpent-like upon the floor about the form of Radegund von
Steinbach, stretched motionless there; one hand clutching her bosom,
the other gripping the hilt of the Venetian dagger which had served her
for the model of the one in the murderous queen’s hands, deep stains
lying still wet upon its blade gleaming in the dying lamplight.
Rallying courage, the young man rushed forward, and threw himself
beside the prostrate woman.
“Murder! Help!” he cried. “Help! She has killed herself!”
But no such foul crime lay to her charge; though indeed she had
stricken and destroyed all the last magnificent creation of her own
hands with that weapon, still red with the deed. And when Bruno
Wolkenberg, scarce more conscious than she, lifted her against his
own bursting agonized heart, and bore her to her bed, hers still beat
faintly.