boy’s breast. The great tears stood in his brown, sad eyes: not for
himself—for himself he was happy.
They lay close together in the piercing cold. The blasts that blew
over the Flemish dikes from the northern seas were like waves of ice,
which froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the
immense vault of stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill
than the snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the
shadows—now and then a gleam of light came on the ranks of carven
figures. Under the Rubens they lay together quite still, and soothed
almost into a dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold.
Together they dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each
other through the flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat
hidden in the tall bulrushes by the water’s side, watching the boats go
seaward in the sun.
Suddenly through the darkness a great white radiance streamed through
the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had
broken through the clouds, the snow had ceased to fall, the light
reflected from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It
fell through the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which
the boy on his entrance had flung back the veil: the Elevation and the
Descent of the Cross were for one instant visible.
Nello rose to his feet and stretched his arms to them; the tears of a
passionate ecstasy glistened on the paleness of his face. “I have seen
them at last!” he cried aloud. “O God, it is enough!”
His limbs failed under him, and he sank upon his knees, still gazing
upward at the majesty that he adored. For a few brief moments the light
illumined the divine visions that had been denied to him so long—light
clear and sweet and strong as though it streamed from the throne of
Heaven. Then suddenly it passed away: once more a great darkness
covered the face of Christ.
The arms of the boy drew close again the body of the dog. “We shall see
His face—_there_,” he murmured; “and He will not part us, I think.”
On the morrow, by the chancel of the cathedral, the people of Antwerp
found them both. They were both dead: the cold of the night had frozen
into stillness alike the young life and the old. When the Christmas
morning broke and the priests came to the temple, they saw them lying
thus on the stones together. Above, the veils were drawn back from the
great visions of Rubens, and the fresh rays of the sunrise touched the
thorn-crowned head of the Christ.
As the day grew on there came an old, hard-featured man who wept as
women weep. “I was cruel to the lad,” he muttered, “and now I would
have made amends—yea, to the half of my substance—and he should have
been to me as a son.”
There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter who had fame in the
world, and who was liberal of hand and of spirit. “I seek one who
should have had the prize yesterday had worth won,” he said to the
people—“a boy of rare promise and genius. An old wood-cutter on a
fallen tree at eventide—that was all his theme. But there was greatness
for the future in it. I would fain find him, and take him with me and
teach him Art.”
And a little child with curling fair hair, sobbing bitterly as she
clung to her father’s arm, cried aloud, “Oh, Nello, come! We have all
ready for thee. The Christ-child’s hands are full of gifts, and the
old piper will play for us; and the mother says thou shalt stay by the
hearth and burn nuts with us all the Noël week long—yes, even to the
Feast of the Kings! And Patrasche will be so happy! Oh, Nello, wake and
come!”
But the young pale face, turned upward to the light of the great Rubens
with a smile upon its mouth, answered them all, “It is too late.”
For the sweet, sonorous bells went ringing through the frost, and the
sunlight shone upon the plains of snow, and the populace trooped gay
and glad through the streets, but Nello and Patrasche no more asked
charity at their hands. All they needed now Antwerp gave unbidden.
Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been.
It had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the
innocence of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense and
for faith no fulfilment.
All their lives they had been together, and in their deaths they
were not divided: for when they were found the arms of the boy were
folded too closely around the dog to be severed without violence, and
the people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored a
special grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest
there side by side—forever!
THE NÜRNBERG STOVE
AUGUST lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favorite name for
several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one especial little
Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most charming Old-World
places that I know, and August for his part did not know any other. It
has the green meadows and the great mountains all about it, and the
gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it. It has paved streets and
enchanting little shops that have all latticed panes and iron gratings
to them; it has a very grand old Gothic church, that has the noblest
blendings of light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead knights, and
a look of infinite strength and repose as a church should have. Then
there is the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out of greenery and
looking down on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid river; and
there is an old schloss which has been made into a guard-house, with
battlements and frescos and heraldic devices in gold and colors, and a
man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size in his niche and bearing
his date 1530. A little farther on, but close at hand, is a cloister
with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a colossal wood-carved
Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich chapel: indeed, so full
is the little town of the undisturbed past, that to walk in it is like
opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated
with saints and warriors, and it is so clean, and so still, and so
noble, by reason of its monuments and its historic color, that I marvel
much no one has ever cared to sing its praises. The old pious heroic
life of an age at once more restful and more brave than ours still
leaves its spirit there, and then there is the girdle of the mountains
all around, and that alone means strength, peace, majesty.
In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
people in the stone-paved irregular square where the grand church
stands.
He was a small boy of nine years at that time,—a chubby-faced little
man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls the brown
of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was poor, and there were
many mouths at home to feed. In this country the winters are long and
very cold, the whole land lies wrapped in snow for many months, and
this night that he was trotting home, with a jug of beer in his numb
red hands, was terribly cold and dreary. The good burghers of Hall had
shut their double shutters, and the few lamps there were flickered
dully behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains
indeed were beautiful, all snow-white under the stars that are so big
in frost. Hardly any one was astir; a few good souls wending home from
vespers, a tired post-boy who blew a shrill blast from his tasselled
horn as he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and little August
hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin coat, were all who were
abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of Hall go early
to their beds. He could not run, or he would have spilled the beer; he
was half frozen and a little frightened, but he kept up his courage by
saying over and over again to himself, “I shall soon be at home with
dear Hirschvogel.”
He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the
guard-house, and so into the place where the great church was, and
where near it stood his father Karl Strehla’s house, with a sculptured
Bethlehem over the door-way, and the Pilgrimage of the Three Kings
painted on its wall. He had been sent on a long errand outside the
gates in the afternoon, over the frozen fields and the broad white
snow, and had been belated, and had thought he had heard the wolves
behind him at every step, and had reached the town in a great state of
terror, thankful with all his little panting heart to see the oil-lamp
burning under the first house-shrine. But he had not forgotten to call
for the beer, and he carried it carefully now, though his hands were so
numb that he was afraid they would let the jug down every moment.
The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice of the beautiful
old wooden houses; the moonlight shone on the gilded signs, the
lambs, the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint devices that hung
before the doors; covered lamps burned before the Nativities and
Crucifixions painted on the walls or let into the wood-work; here and
there, where a shutter had not been closed, a ruddy fire-light lit up
a homely interior, with the noisy band of children clustering round
the house-mother and a big brown loaf, or some gossips spinning and
listening to the cobbler’s or the barber’s story of a neighbor, while
the oil-wicks glimmered, and the hearth-logs blazed, and the chestnuts
sputtered in their iron roasting-pot. Little August saw all these
things, as he saw everything with his two big bright eyes that had such
curious lights and shadows in them; but he went heedfully on his way
for the sake of the beer which a single slip of the foot would make him
spill. At his knock and call the solid oak door, four centuries old if
one, flew open, and the boy darted in with his beer, and shouted, with
all the force of mirthful lungs, “Oh, dear Hirschvogel, but for the
thought of you I should have died!”
It was a large barren room into which he rushed with so much pleasure,
and the bricks were bare and uneven. It had a walnut-wood press,
handsome and very old, a broad deal table, and several wooden stools
for all its furniture; but at the top of the chamber, sending out
warmth and color together as the lamp shed its rays upon it, was a
tower of porcelain, burnished with all the hues of a king’s peacock and
a queen’s jewels, and surmounted with armed figures, and shields, and
flowers of heraldry, and a great golden crown upon the highest summit
of all.
It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the letters H. R. H., for it was
in every portion the handwork of the great potter of Nürnberg, Augustin
Hirschvogel, who put his mark thus, as all the world knows.
The stove no doubt had stood in palaces and been made for princes,
had warmed the crimson stockings of cardinals and the gold-broidered
shoes of archduchesses, had glowed in presence-chambers and lent its
carbon to help kindle sharp brains in anxious councils of state; no
one knew what it had seen or done or been fashioned for; but it was a
right royal thing. Yet perhaps it had never been more useful than it
was now in this poor desolate room, sending down heat and comfort into
the troop of children tumbled together on a wolf-skin at its feet, who
received frozen August among them with loud shouts of joy.
“Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold!” said August, kissing its
gilded lion’s claws. “Is father not in, Dorothea?”
“No, dear. He is late.”
Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark-haired and serious, and with a
sweet sad face, for she had had many cares laid on her shoulders, even
whilst still a mere baby. She was the eldest of the Strehla family; and
there were ten of them in all. Next to her there came Jan and Karl and
Otho, big lads, gaining a little for their own living; and then came
August, who went up in the summer to the high alps with the farmers’
cattle, but in winter could do nothing to fill his own little platter
and pot; and then all the little ones, who could only open their mouths
to be fed like young birds,—Albrecht and Hilda, and Waldo and Christof,
and last of all little three-year-old Ermengilda, with eyes like
forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them the life of their mother.
They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, half Italian, so common in
the Tyrol; some of the children were white and golden as lilies, others
were brown and brilliant as fresh-fallen chestnuts. The father was a
good man, but weak and weary with so many to find for and so little to
do it with. He worked at the salt-furnaces, and by that gained a few
florins; people said he would have worked better and kept his family
more easily if he had not loved his pipe and a draught of ale too well;
but this had only been said of him after his wife’s death, when trouble
and perplexity had begun to dull a brain never too vigorous, and to
enfeeble further a character already too yielding. As it was, the wolf
often bayed at the door of the Strehla household, without a wolf from
the mountains coming down. Dorothea was one of those maidens who almost
work miracles, so far can their industry and care and intelligence make
a home sweet and wholesome and a single loaf seem to swell into twenty.
The children were always clean and happy, and the table was seldom
without its big pot of soup once a day. Still, very poor they were, and
Dorothea’s heart ached with shame, for she knew that their father’s
debts were many for flour and meat and clothing. Of fuel to feed the
big stove they had always enough without cost, for their mother’s
father was alive, and sold wood and fir cones and coke, and never
grudged them to his grandchildren, though he grumbled at Strehla’s
improvidence and hapless, dreamy ways.
“Father says we are never to wait for him: we will have supper, now you
have come home, dear,” said Dorothea, who, however she might fret her
soul in secret as she knitted their hose and mended their shirts, never
let her anxieties cast a gloom on the children; only to August she did
speak a little sometimes, because he was so thoughtful and so tender of
her always, and knew as well as she did that there were troubles about
money,—though these troubles were vague to them both, and the debtors
were patient and kindly, being neighbors all in the old twisting
streets between the guard-house and the river.
Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big slices of brown bread swimming
in it and some onions bobbing up and down: the bowl was soon emptied
by ten wooden spoons, and then the three eldest boys slipped off to
bed, being tired with their rough bodily labor in the snow all day,
and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel by the stove and set it whirring,
and the little ones got August down upon the old worn wolf-skin and
clamored to him for a picture or a story. For August was the artist of
the family.
He had a piece of planed deal that his father had given him, and some
sticks of charcoal, and he would draw a hundred things he had seen
in the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when the children had
seen enough of it and sketching another in its stead,—faces and dogs’
heads, and men in sledges, and old women in their furs, and pine-trees,
and cocks and hens, and all sorts of animals, and now and then—very
reverently—a Madonna and Child. It was all very rough, for there was no
one to teach him anything. But it was all life-like, and kept the whole
troop of children shrieking with laughter, or watching breathless, with
wide open, wondering, awed eyes.
They were all so happy: what did they care for the snow outside?
Their little bodies were warm, and their hearts merry; even Dorothea,
troubled about the bread for the morrow, laughed as she spun; and
August, with all his soul in his work, and little rosy Ermengilda’s
cheek on his shoulder, glowing after his frozen afternoon, cried out
loud, smiling, as he looked up at the stove that was shedding its heat
down on them all,—
“Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as great and good as the sun! No;
you are greater and better, I think, because he goes away nobody knows
where all these long, dark, cold hours, and does not care how people
die for want of him; but you—you are always ready: just a little bit
of wood to feed you, and you will make a summer for us all the winter
through!”
The grand old stove seemed to smile through all its iridescent surface
at the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though it had known
three centuries and more, had known but very little gratitude.
It was one of those magnificent stoves in enamelled faïence which so
excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nürnberg that in a body
they demanded of the magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel should be
forbidden to make any more of them,—the magistracy, happily, proving of
a broader mind, and having no sympathy with the wish of the artisans to
cripple their greater fellow.
It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica lustre
which Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was making
love to the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married. There was
the statue of a king at each corner, modelled with as much force and
splendor as his friend Albrecht Dürer could have given unto them on
copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove itself was divided into
panels, which had the Ages of Man painted on them in polychrome; the
borders of the panels had roses and holly and laurel and other foliage,
and German mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World moralizing, such
as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to have on their
chimney-places and their drinking-cups, their dishes and flagons.
The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was radiant
everywhere with that brilliant coloring of which the Hirschvogel
family, painters on glass and great in chemistry as they were, were all
masters.
The stove was a very grand thing, as I say: possibly Hirschvogel had
made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he was
an imperial guest at Innspruck and fashioned so many things for the
Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the burgher’s daughter,
who gained an archduke’s heart by her beauty and the right to wear his
honors by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day in
Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug it
up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without a
flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because it
was such a good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever
since then the stove had stood in the big desolate empty room, warming
three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen nothing
prettier perhaps in all its many years than the children tumbled now in
a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the Strehla children,
born to nothing else, were all born with beauty: white or brown, they
were equally lovely to look upon, and when they went into the church
to mass, with their curling locks and their clasped hands, they stood
under the grim statues like cherubs flown down off some fresco.
“Tell us a story, August,” they cried, in chorus, when they had seen
charcoal pictures till they were tired; and August did as he did every
night pretty nearly,—looked up at the stove and told them what he
imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows of the human being
who figured on the panels from his cradle to his grave.
To the children the stove was a household god. In summer they laid a
mat of fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up with green boughs and
the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol country. In winter
all their joys centred in it, and scampering home from school over the
ice and snow they were happy, knowing that they would soon be cracking
nuts or roasting chestnuts in the broad ardent glow of its noble tower,
which rose eight feet high above them with all its spires and pinnacles
and crowns.
Once a travelling peddler had told them that the letters on it meant
Augustin Hirschvogel, and that Hirschvogel had been a great German
potter and painter, like his father before him, in the art-sanctified
city of Nürnberg, and had made many such stoves, that were all miracles
of beauty and of workmanship, putting all his heart and his soul and
his faith into his labors, as the men of those earlier ages did, and
thinking but little of gold or praise.
An old trader too, who sold curiosities not far from the church, had
told August a little more about the brave family of Hirschvogel, whose
houses can be seen in Nürnberg to this day; of old Veit, the first of
them, who painted the Gothic windows of St. Sebald with the marriage of
the Margravine; of his sons and of his grandsons, potters, painters,
engravers all, and chief of them great Augustin, the Luca della Robbia
of the North. And August’s imagination, always quick, had made a living
personage out of these few records, and saw Hirschvogel as though he
were in the flesh walking up and down the Maximilian-Strass in his
visit to Innspruck, and maturing beautiful things in his brain as he
stood on the bridge and gazed on the emerald-green flood of the Inn.
So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel in the family, as if it
were a living creature, and little August was very proud because he had
been named after that famous old dead German who had had the genius to
make so glorious a thing. All the children loved the stove, but with
August the love of it was a passion; and in his secret heart he used to
say to himself, “When I am a man, I will make just such things too, and
then I will set Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house that I will
build myself in Innspruck just outside the gates, where the chestnuts
are, by the river: that is what I will do when I am a man.”
For August, a salt-baker’s son and a little cow-keeper when he was
anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the high
alps with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around him, was
quite certain that he would live for greater things than driving the
herds up when the spring-tide came among the blue sea of gentians, or
toiling down in the town with wood and with timber as his father and
grandfather did every day of their lives. He was a strong and healthy
little fellow, fed on the free mountain-air, and he was very happy,
and loved his family devotedly, and was as active as a squirrel and as
playful as a hare; but he kept his thoughts to himself, and some of
them went a very long way for a little boy who was only one among many,
and to whom nobody had ever paid any attention except to teach him his
letters and tell him to fear God. August in winter was only a little,
hungry school-boy, trotting to be catechised by the priest, or to bring
the loaves from the bake-house, or to carry his father’s boots to the
cobbler; and in summer he was only one of hundreds of cow-boys, who
drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumbling cattle, ringing their
throat-bells, out into the sweet intoxication of the sudden sunlight,
and lived up with them in the heights among the Alpine roses, with
only the clouds and the snow-summits near. But he was always thinking,
thinking, thinking, for all that; and under his little sheepskin winter
coat and his rough hempen summer shirt his heart had as much courage in
it as Hofer’s ever had,—great Hofer, who is a household word in all the
Innthal, and whom August always reverently remembered when he went to
the city of Innspruck and ran out by the foaming water-mill and under
the wooded height of Berg Isel.
August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children
stories, his own little brown face growing red with excitement as his
imagination glowed to fever-heat. That human being on the panels, who
was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy playing among flowers,
as a lover sighing under a casement, as a soldier in the midst of
strife, as a father with children round him, as a weary, old, blind man
on crutches, and, lastly, as a ransomed soul raised up by angels, had
always had the most intense interest for August, and he had made, not
one history for him, but a thousand; he seldom told them the same tale
twice. He had never seen a story-book in his life; his primer and his
mass-book were all the volumes he had. But nature had given him Fancy,
and she is a good fairy that makes up for the want of very many things!
only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor thing, and then she
is of no use at all.
“It is time for you all to go to bed, children,” said Dorothea, looking
up from her spinning. “Father is very late to-night; you must not sit
up for him.”