DE PROFUNDIS.
With that returning consciousness, hope glimmered for the watchers,
and as each day passed, grew high. True that Hackernagel’s weapon had
driven cruelly, so that her white flesh would bear an ugly seamy mark
to her life’s end; but it had struck with a sideways random clumsiness,
inflicting a gaping terrible surface wound, yet not hopelessly
dangerous, provided it were treated with care and patience, and these
were never less wanting.
And so the shadow of the dread Reaper’s scythe was lifted from the Lily
flower, and never had life been so fair and sweet to her as now in this
time of weakness and of pain, which all Surgeon Wolkenberg’s skill and
Gretchen Hackernagel’s tender nursing could do no more than lighten.
At the wounded girl’s own faintly whispered wish, eloquently endorsed
by her eyes, Gretchen Hackernagel had remained beside her; and Aunt
Ottilie, with her gentle-hearted common-sense view of the case, had
taken no umbrage at Sabina’s preference, but on the contrary had made
it her special mission to bring over the demurring Niklaus. “Nun I may
be, brother, but woman I am too, and I know; and trust me, you mustn’t
interfere. They understand each other, these two young things; and
though it is truer than true, as you are always saying, that the parent
tree is a baneful one, the dear God’s providence has let the antidote
grow upon its branches; and it is not for you to grumble, but to thank
Heaven on your bended knees, that so much good can come out of evil;
for good that Gretchen Hackernagel is to the core, Anabaptist castaway
though the poor thing was brought into the world, and understands sick
folks as well as I do myself.”
And Niklaus after that held his peace.
Yes, never so fair—not in the earliest morning tide of her wooing had
life been for Sabina as now. To the bruised and broken Lily, slowly
lifting her pale head once more, all the past was like some hideous
dream; out from the tangle and the darkness she seemed to have wakened
in some fair garden, where the rushing of turbid waters had stilled
into a clear streamlet, glinting in the gentle shadows of green
whispering boughs, and catching the sheen of the fleecy sun-gilded
cloudlets in the azure far overhead. Shadows indeed there were still;
and shadows to the end there must be for her. Heaviest of all the one
which dimmed her eyes when they rested on her lover’s face, and she
strove to realise something of what the deprivation of his lost sight
must be. Tears would brim then to overflowing in her own eyes, and his
quick ear, catching the quiver of her breath, would bring his hands
stealing to the cheeks, gathering each day something of their old
roundness and bloom, and insist on the meaning of such telltale drops
being explained to him.
“What is it, dear one?” he would ask, bending over her, and oh, Mother
Mary! the sweetness of those moments to kiss them away. “Is your wound
paining you?”
“The one in my heart is,” she would confess, drawing down the hand with
her own unhurt one, and stroking it tenderly.
“In your heart?”
“Ay—when I think how night-dark everything is for you. Oh, Conrad—Love.”
“Child, no,” he answers her, an infinite tenderness welling up into the
sightless eyes’ calm mysterious depths. “Sometimes the light grows too
great for me. It seems like Heaven’s own endless day.”
And so with thoughts too many and too blessed for words, he sits
beside her, where in the broad window seat she lies couched and softly
pillowed, with Mitte curled snugly up on the coverlet, purring her
song of supreme content to the measure of the sun-god’s “wait-tic,
wait-tac,” whose eyes goggle and roll through the gathering gray with
a world of intelligence, and one by one in the gloaming the stars
twinkle out, and presently comes in Burgomaster von Steinbach, and
balancing on the couch’s outermost edge—for has he not the fear of
damage to Mitte before his eyes if he should trespass further?—he falls
to contemplating his girl’s bright face, and speculating how many days
before Dr. Bruno will be letting her take house-mistress’s place again
at table yonder; and Dr. Bruno, looking in as he goes home, promises
great things, if only she is careful, and takes no undue liberties.
“She won’t do that,” laughingly says the Burgomaster, looking up
from the hearth, whither he is gone to set light to the logs, for
the evenings are beginning to grow chilly again, and a blaze looks
comfortable. “I’ll warrant you she won’t be let do that, with Gretchen
standing over her. Gretchen’s a gorgon!”
“Gretchen’s a jewel!” says Bruno.
“And deserves the best husband Elsass has to give,” says Niklaus.
“Though by the Mass, I believe she means to stick to that nephew of
mine.”
“Of course she does,” says Sabina.
“It looks like it,” smiles the doctor; “I nearly tumbled over them as I
came up the steps there, just now.”
“Well, well. There is never any accounting for what womenkind take into
their heads, is there, Professor? Foot-rule nor plumb-line can’t make
head or tail of it, eh?”
And while the Professor smiles a grave, assenting smile, Sabina, with a
slight access of colour, changes the conversation, and asks how cousin
Radegund is?
“Much the same, Mistress Sabina,” answers Bruno, the transient
cheerfulness of his face all fading into the sad hopeless look it
always wears now.
“I wish she was well,” sighs Sabina, “if only for my own selfish sake,
so that she might come and see me.”
“No, no,” and the hand hers lies nestling in grips it with almost
convulsive force. “That must not—cannot be.”
“I know it can’t,” she quietly rejoins. “I must wait patiently till I
can go to her, poor girl. Though she refuses herself to everybody, she
would see me. Don’t you think she would, Dr. Bruno?” pleadingly urges
Sabina. “She would not refuse me,” she adds in a lower tone.
“She could refuse you nothing, I think,” answers the surgeon in a voice
yet lower.
For Bruno Wolkenberg knew all now—knew it by Radegund’s own confession
to him. That Saint Laurences’s day, at the close of the brief
ceremonial, the artist had tottered homeward, and had thrown herself
half dead with fatigue, upon the couch in her studio, where she had
lain almost ever since, fiercely battling with her mortal weakness.
The distracted Bruno, called upon by Bishop John to give a name to the
mysterious disease, which, with rare misgivings, the gentle-hearted
priest saw had taken such hold upon Radegund, spoke of overwork, and
falteringly admitted that the symptoms were of a consumptive tendency;
but the bishop, receiving the confession which, with a meekness sitting
strangely on the proud Radegund, she had desired to make to him, passed
out from her presence, with a startled, saddened preoccupation in his
ordinarily calm and serene face, and apprehended that there might be a
consuming of heart and soul, beside which that of the body would be but
a slight thing.
Such restitution as the conditions of her priestly absolving had
imposed on her, Radegund had, as far as lay in her power, already
made; but the penance had still to come, and that Bishop John
uncompromisingly demanded should lie in a full confession of all to the
man who so devotedly loved her. He would have nothing short of this,
perceiving as he did that justice to all concerned was only so to be
attained.
To which of those two hapless hearts the ordeal was the more cruel, who
can say? Sword sharp as the pang of shame to her, it was hardly keener
than the humiliation of him who had given this woman his best treasure,
and found himself driven at last to face the truth that she valued it
at less than nothing. For that poor substitute she had always declared
to be his was, to his passionate devotion, worse than her hate. And
yet, under the scathing test of all this wretchedness, the gold of the
man’s humble and unselfish nature shone out pure; and when, all being
told, she waited to see him turn spurningly from her, he said no more
than that Dasipodius was a man worthy of such love as she had to give,
and such indignation as could force itself into his breaking heart,
at that overwhelming moment, was all concentred round a vague mazed
astonishment that the mathematician could have so misprized the rich
gift she had laid at his feet.
But misery too completely overmastered the surgeon to leave him space
to think, and utterly prostrated, he would sit for hours in his dreary
laboratory, gazing at the poisonous simples there, and yearning for the
oblivion they could give.
He might have yielded to the temptation of them, but for the saving
grace of his calling, which whispered that if indeed no power could
ever quicken his own perished happiness, his life could still be
useful to his fellow mortals, and so Surgeon Wolkenberg continued to
do the work nearest to him; only now, as he went to and fro on his
merciful missions, people would silently mark how fast those locks were
silvering, which but a little while since were golden as a Norse god’s.
Against Bruno, the lot of Conrad Dasipodius promised a sharp contrast.
Sweet and fair beyond all dreaming his future lay before him. His
affliction, which he knew was a hopelessly incurable one, was indeed
as grievous to him now as when the dense darkness of it first set in;
and so it would be for him to the end. He put no gloss upon this truth,
assumed no meretricious cheerfulness, but simply nerved himself as best
he could to endure. Many a quest and venture into the science world
his genius had aspired to follow was impossible for him now that he
was at the mercy of others’ eyesight. Marvellous as was the atonement
of his acquired delicacy of touch, and of his natural powers of mental
perception, there remained practical difficulties, more or less like
those which had beset him in the course of the Horologe’s production,
which must for ever be hindering him, marring his loftiest efforts, and
denying his noblest ambitions; but that saddening conviction that his
intellectual life could at best be such a maimed and circumscribed one
was not the haunting, oppressive misery it had been in the time of his
loneliness and heart desolation. Heaven had seen fit to take away, but
then what had it not given! And then the high-souled, lofty spirited
scientist bowed his head in thankfulness, and felt he would not have
bartered his lot for the combined faculties, mental and physical, of
all the mathematicians of Heathendom and Christendom, when he felt the
gentle touch and the warm breath of that woman, who had counted her
life at less than a pin’s fee beside her love for him.
Only as time went over, bringing with it old routine and daily habits
once more, he was able calmly to set himself to try and gauge something
of that love’s breadth and depth; and then the great mathematician
failed utterly, finding it as boundless and immeasurable as that fair
world, which one winter’s night he had told his little betrothed wife
a certain legendary mouse suddenly found himself in. And Dasipodius
was content to accept his problem, as a divine inestimable gift, and
to hold it in his heart a thing apart, yet mysteriously hallowing the
meanest as entirely as the highest conditions of existence, and making
light its darkest crevices.
Equally when time brought healing, and he dared speak unreservedly with
Sabina, and there were no longer any restrictions laid by Dr. Bruno on
references to that terrible day, the words that passed between them
concerning it were comparatively few. Sabina did not need their poor
eloquence to tell her that the life she had nearly paid her own for,
would have been too hateful a possession had hers been sacrificed;
while the future now spared her to share with him was too holy and
precious to be much spoken of, even by each to each. Tongue could
tell but in a poor halting sort of way, how gladly, if the decree had
been reversed, and it had chanced to have been his life whose risking
had been demanded for her, he would have done it. All that the silent
eloquence of the daily intercourse of the years they trusted were to be
theirs, could alone realise for them.