and golden Ermengilda climbed up into her lap. “Hirschvogel is so warm,
the beds are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell us another tale,
August?”
“No,” cried August, whose face had lost its light, now that his story
had come to an end, and who sat serious, with his hands clasped on his
knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the stove.
“It is only a week to Christmas,” he said, suddenly.
“Grandmother’s big cakes!” chuckled little Christof, who was five years
old, and thought Christmas meant a big cake and nothing else.
“What will Santa Claus find for ’Gilda if she be good?” murmured
Dorothea over the child’s sunny head; for, however hard poverty might
pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that Dorothea would not find
some wooden toy and some rosy apples to put in her little sister’s
socks.
“Father Max has promised me a big goose, because I saved the calf’s
life in June,” said August; it was the twentieth time he had told them
so that month, he was so proud of it.
“And Aunt Maïla will be sure to send us wine and honey and a barrel of
flour; she always does,” said Albrecht. Their aunt Maïla had a chalet
and a little farm over on the green slopes towards Dorp Ampas.
“I shall go up into the woods and get Hirschvogel’s crown,” said
August; they always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine boughs
and ivy and mountain-berries. The heat soon withered the crown; but it
was part of the religion of the day to them, as much so as it was to
cross themselves in church and raise their voices in the “O Salutaris
Hostia.”
And they fell chatting of all they would do on the Christ-night, and
one little voice piped loud against another’s, and they were as happy
as though their stockings would be full of golden purses and jewelled
toys, and the big goose in the soup-pot seemed to them such a meal as
kings would envy.
In the midst of their chatter and laughter a blast of frozen air and a
spray of driven snow struck like ice through the room, and reached them
even in the warmth of the old wolf-skins and the great stove. It was
the door which had opened and let in the cold; it was their father who
had come home.
The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the one
wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove, and August flew to set
the jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay pipe;
for their father was good to them all, and seldom raised his voice
in anger, and they had been trained by the mother they had loved to
dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.
To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones’
welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat down
heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.
“Are you not well, dear father?” his daughter asked him.
“I am well enough,” he answered, dully, and sat there with his head
bent, letting the lighted pipe grow cold.
He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with labor.
“Take the children to bed,” he said, suddenly, at last, and Dorothea
obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove; at nine years
old, and when one earns money in the summer from the farmers, one is
not altogether a child any more, at least in one’s own estimation.
August did not heed his father’s silence: he was used to it. Karl
Strehla was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was
usually too tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his beer
and sleep. August lay on the wolf-skin, dreamy and comfortable, looking
up through his drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on the crest of
the great stove, and wondering for the millionth time whom it had been
made for, and what grand places and scenes it had known.
Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds; the
cuckoo-clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her father and
the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning, saying nothing. She
thought he had been drinking in some tavern; it had been often so with
him of late.
There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice; August
dropped asleep, his curls falling over his face; Dorothea’s wheel
hummed like a cat.
Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the pipe on
the ground.
“I have sold Hirschvogel,” he said; and his voice was husky and ashamed
in his throat. The spinning-wheel stopped. August sprang erect out of
his sleep.
“Sold Hirschvogel!” If their father had dashed the holy crucifix on the
floor at their feet and spat on it, they could not have shuddered under
the horror of a greater blasphemy.
“I have sold Hirschvogel!” said Karl Strehla, in the same husky, dogged
voice. “I have sold it to a travelling trader in such things for two
hundred florins. What would you?—I owe double that. He saw it this
morning when you were all out. He will pack it and take it to Munich
to-morrow.”
Dorothea gave a low shrill cry:
“Oh, father!—the children—in mid-winter!”
She turned white as the snow without; her words died away in her throat.
August stood, half blind with sleep, staring with dazed eyes as his
cattle stared at the sun when they came out from their winter’s prison.
“It is not true! It is not true!” he muttered. “You are jesting,
father?”
Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.
“It is true. Would you like to know what is true too?—that the bread
you eat, and the meat you put in this pot, and the roof you have over
your heads, are none of them paid for, have been none of them paid for
for months and months: if it had not been for your grandfather I should
have been in prison all summer and autumn, and he is out of patience
and will do no more now. There is no work to be had; the masters go
to younger men: they say I work ill; it may be so. Who can keep his
head above water with ten hungry children dragging him down? When your
mother lived, it was different. Boy, you stare at me as if I were a
mad dog! You have made a god of yon china thing. Well—it goes: goes
to-morrow. Two hundred florins, that is something. It will keep me out
of prison for a little, and with the spring things may turn——”
August stood like a creature paralyzed. His eyes were wide open,
fastened on his father’s with terror and incredulous horror; his face
had grown as white as his sister’s; his chest heaved with tearless sobs.
“It is not true! It is not true!” he echoed, stupidly. It seemed to him
that the very skies must fall, and the earth perish, if they could take
away Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of tearing down God’s sun out
of the heavens.
“You will find it true,” said his father, doggedly, and angered because
he was in his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered away the
heirloom and treasure of his race and the comfort and health-giver
of his young children. “You will find it true. The dealer has paid me
half the money to-night, and will pay me the other half to-morrow when
he packs it up and takes it away to Munich. No doubt it is worth a
great deal more,—at least I suppose so, as he gives that,—but beggars
cannot be choosers. The little black stove in the kitchen will warm
you all just as well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor
house like this, when one can make two hundred florins by it? Dorothea,
you never sobbed more when your mother died. What is it, when all is
said?—a bit of hardware much too grand-looking for such a room as this.
If all the Strehlas had not been born fools it would have been sold a
century ago, when it was dug up out of the ground. ‘It is a stove for a
museum,’ the trader said when he saw it. To a museum let it go.”
August gave a shrill shriek like a hare’s when it is caught for its
death, and threw himself on his knees at his father’s feet.
“Oh, father, father!” he cried, convulsively, his hands closing on
Strehla’s knees, and his uplifted face blanched and distorted with
terror. “Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what you say? Send
_it_ away—our life, our sun, our joy, our comfort? We shall all die in
the dark and the cold. Sell _me_ rather. Sell me to any trade or any
pain you like; I will not mind. But Hirschvogel!—it is like selling
the very cross off the altar! You must be in jest. You could not do
such a thing—you could not!—you who have always been gentle and good,
and who have sat in the warmth here year after year with our mother.
It is not a piece of hardware, as you say; it is a living thing, for a
great man’s thoughts and fancies have put life into it, and it loves
us though we are only poor little children, and we love it with all
our hearts and souls, and up in heaven I am sure the dead Hirschvogel
knows! Oh, listen; I will go and try and get work to-morrow! I will
ask them to let me cut ice or make the paths through the snow. There
must be something I could do, and I will beg the people we owe money
to to wait; they are all neighbors, they will be patient. But sell
Hirschvogel!—oh, never! never! never! Give the florins back to the
vile man. Tell him it would be like selling the shroud out of mother’s
coffin, or the golden curls off Ermengilda’s head! Oh, father, dear
father! do hear me, for pity’s sake!”
Strehla was moved by the boy’s anguish. He loved his children, though
he was often weary of them, and their pain was pain to him. But besides
emotion, and stronger than emotion, was the anger that August roused in
him: he hated and despised himself for the barter of the heirloom of
his race, and every word of the child stung him with a stinging sense
of shame.
And he spoke in his wrath rather than in his sorrow.
“You are a little fool,” he said, harshly, as they had never heard him
speak. “You rave like a play-actor. Get up and go to bed. The stove is
sold. There is no more to be said. Children like you have nothing to
do with such matters. The stove is sold, and goes to Munich to-morrow.
What is it to you? Be thankful I can get bread for you. Get on your
legs, I say, and go to bed.”
Strehla took up the jug of ale as he paused, and drained it slowly as a
man who had no cares.
August sprang to his feet and threw his hair back off his face; the
blood rushed into his cheeks, making them scarlet; his great soft eyes
flamed alight with furious passion.
“You _dare_ not!” he cried, aloud, “you dare not sell it, I say! It is
not yours alone; it is ours——”
Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks with a force that shivered
it to atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his son a blow that felled
him to the floor. It was the first time in all his life that he had
ever raised his hand against any one of his children.
Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at his elbow and stumbled off to
his own chamber with a cloud before his eyes.
“What has happened?” said August, a little while later, as he opened
his eyes and saw Dorothea weeping above him on the wolf-skin before the
stove. He had been struck backward, and his head had fallen on the hard
bricks where the wolf-skin did not reach. He sat up a moment, with his
face bent upon his hands.
“I remember now,” he said, very low, under his breath.
Dorothea showered kisses on him, while her tears fell like rain.
“But, oh, dear, how could you speak so to father?” she murmured. “It
was very wrong.”
“No, I was right,” said August, and his little mouth, that hitherto
had only curled in laughter, curved downward with a fixed and bitter
seriousness. “How dare he? How dare he?” he muttered, with his head
sunk in his hands. “It is not his alone. It belongs to us all. It is
as much yours and mine as it is his.”
[Illustration: “IT IS A SIN, IT IS A THEFT, IT IS AN INFAMY,” HE SAID]
Dorothea could only sob in answer. She was too frightened to speak. The
authority of their parents in the house had never in her remembrance
been questioned.
“Are you hurt by the fall, dear August?” she murmured, at length, for
he looked to her so pale and strange.
“Yes—no. I do not know. What does it matter?”
He sat up upon the wolf-skin with passionate pain upon his face; all
his soul was in rebellion, and he was only a child and was powerless.
“It is a sin; it is a theft; it is an infamy,” he said, slowly, his
eyes fastened on the gilded feet of Hirschvogel.
“Oh, August, do not say such things of father!” sobbed his sister.
“Whatever he does, we ought to think it right.”
August laughed aloud.
“Is it right that he should spend his money in drink?—that he should
let orders lie unexecuted?—that he should do his work so ill that no
one cares to employ him?—that he should live on grandfather’s charity,
and then dare sell a thing that is ours every whit as much as it is
his? To sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear God! I would sooner sell my soul!”
“August!” cried Dorothea, with piteous entreaty. He terrified her, she
could not recognize her little, gay, gentle brother in those fierce and
blasphemous words.
August laughed aloud again; then all at once his laughter broke down
into bitterest weeping. He threw himself forward on the stove,
covering it with kisses, and sobbing as though his heart would burst
from his bosom.
What could he do? Nothing, nothing, nothing!
“August, dear August,” whispered Dorothea, piteously, and trembling
all over,—for she was a very gentle girl, and fierce feeling terrified
her,—“August, do not lie there. Come to bed: it is quite late. In the
morning you will be calmer. It is horrible indeed, and we shall die of
cold, at least the little ones; but if it be father’s will——”
“Let me alone,” said August, through his teeth, striving to still the
storm of sobs that shook him from head to foot. “Let me alone. In the
morning!—how can you speak of the morning?”
“Come to bed, dear,” sighed his sister. “Oh, August, do not lie and
look like that! you frighten me. Do come to bed.”
“I shall stay here.”
“Here! all night!”
“They might take it in the night. Besides, to leave it now!”
“But it is cold! the fire is out.”
“It will never be warm any more, nor shall we.”
All his childhood had gone out of him, all his gleeful, careless, sunny
temper had gone with it; he spoke sullenly and wearily, choking down
the great sobs in his chest. To him it was as if the end of the world
had come.
His sister lingered by him while striving to persuade him to go to his
place in the little crowded bedchamber with Albrecht and Waldo and
Christof. But it was in vain. “I shall stay here,” was all he answered
her. And he stayed,—all the night long.
The lamps went out; the rats came and ran across the floor; as the
hours crept on through midnight and past, the cold intensified and the
air of the room grew like ice. August did not move; he lay with his
face downward on the golden and rainbow-hued pedestal of the household
treasure, which henceforth was to be cold for evermore, an exiled thing
in a foreign city in a far-off land.
Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers came down the stairs
and let themselves out, each bearing his lantern and going to his work
in stone-yard and timber-yard and at the salt-works. They did not
notice him; they did not know what had happened.
A little later his sister came down with a light in her hand to make
ready the house ere morning should break.
She stole up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder timidly.
“Dear August, you must be frozen. August, do look up! do speak!”
August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sullen look in them that
she had never seen there. His face was ashen white: his lips were like
fire. He had not slept all night; but his passionate sobs had given
way to delirious waking dreams and numb senseless trances, which had
alternated one on another all through the freezing, lonely, horrible
hours.
“It will never be warm again,” he muttered, “never again!”
Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands.
“August! do you not know me?” she cried, in an agony. “I am Dorothea.
Wake up, dear—wake up! It is morning, only so dark!”
August shuddered all over.
“The morning!” he echoed.
He slowly rose up on to his feet.
“I will go to grandfather,” he said, very low. “He is always good:
perhaps he could save it.”
Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of the house-door drowned his
words. A strange voice called aloud through the keyhole,—
“Let me in! Quick!—there is no time to lose! More snow like this, and
the roads will all be blocked. Let me in! Do you hear? I am come to
take the great stove.”
August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his eyes blazing.
“You shall never touch it!” he screamed; “you shall never touch it!”
“Who shall prevent us?” laughed a big man, who was a Bavarian, amused
at the fierce little figure fronting him.
“I!” said August. “You shall never have it! you shall kill me first!”
“Strehla,” said the big man, as August’s father entered the room, “you
have got a little mad dog here: muzzle him.”
One way and another they did muzzle him. He fought like a little demon,
and hit out right and left, and one of his blows gave the Bavarian a
black eye. But he was soon mastered by four grown men, and his father
flung him with no light hand out from the door of the back entrance,
and the buyers of the stately and beautiful stove set to work to pack
it heedfully and carry it away.
When Dorothea stole out to look for August, he was nowhere in sight.
She went back to little ’Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbed over the
child, whilst the others stood looking on, dimly understanding that
with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth of their bodies, all the
light of their hearth.
Even their father now was sorry and ashamed; but two hundred florins
seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought the children could
warm themselves quite as well at the black iron stove in the kitchen.
Besides, whether he regretted it now or not, the work of the Nürnberg
potter was sold irrevocably, and he had to stand still and see the men
from Munich wrap it in manifold wrappings and bear it out into the
snowy air to where an ox-cart stood in waiting for it.
In another moment Hirschvogel was gone,—gone forever and aye.
August had stood still for a time, leaning, sick and faint from the
violence that had been used to him, against the back wall of the house.
The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the backs of other
houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze Tower and the peaks of
the mountains.
Into the court an old neighbor hobbled for water, and, seeing the boy,
said to him,—
“Child, is it true your father is selling the big painted stove?”
August nodded his head, then burst into a passion of tears.
“Well, for sure he is a fool,” said the neighbor. “Heaven forgive me
for calling him so before his own child! but the stove was worth a mint
of money. I do remember in my young days, in old Anton’s time (that was
your great-grandfather, my lad), a stranger from Vienna saw it, and
said that it was worth its weight in gold.”
August’s sobs went on their broken, impetuous course.
“I loved it! I loved it!” he moaned. “I do not care what its value was.
I loved it! _I loved it!_”
“You little simpleton!” said the old man, kindly. “But you are wiser
than your father, when all’s said. If sell it he must, he should have
taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Sprüz, who would have given him
honest value. But no doubt they took him over his beer,—ay, ay! but if
I were you I would do better than cry. I would go after it.”
August raised his head, the tears raining down his cheeks.
“Go after it when you are bigger,” said the neighbor, with a
good-natured wish to cheer him up a little. “The world is a small
thing after all: I was a travelling clockmaker once upon a time, and
I know that your stove will be safe enough whoever gets it; anything
that can be sold for a round sum is always wrapped up in cotton wool
by everybody. Ay, ay, don’t cry so much; you will see your stove again
some day.”
Then the old man hobbled away to draw his brazen pail full of water at
the well.
August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzing and his
heart fluttering with the new idea which had presented itself to his
mind. “Go after it,” had said the old man. He thought, “Why not go with
it?” He loved it better than any one, even better than Dorothea; and he
shrank from the thought of meeting his father again, his father who had
sold Hirschvogel.
He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the impossible
looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were still wet on his
pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of the court-yard
by a little gate, and across to the huge Gothic porch of the church.
From there he could watch unseen his father’s house-door, at which were
always hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such as are common and so
picturesque in Austria, for a part of the house was let to a man who
dealt in pottery.
He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passed
through to go to mass or complin within, and presently his heart gave
a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought out and
laid with infinite care on the bullock-dray. Two of the Bavarian men
mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowly crept over the snow of
the place,—snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble old minster looked
its grandest and most solemn, with its dark-gray stone and its vast
archways, and its porch that was itself as big as many a church, and
its strange gargoyles and lamp-irons black against the snow on its
roof and on the pavement; but for once August had no eyes for it: he
only watched for his old friend. Then he, a little unnoticeable figure
enough, like a score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen by any of
his brothers or sisters, out of the porch and over the shelving uneven
square, and followed in the wake of the dray.
Its course lay towards the station of the railway, which is close to
the salt-works, whose smoke at times sullies this part of clean little
Hall, though it does not do very much damage. From Hall the iron road
runs northward through glorious country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague,
Buda, and southward over the Brenner into Italy. Was Hirschvogel going
north or south? This at least he would soon know.
August had often hung about the little station, watching the trains
come and go and dive into the heart of the hills and vanish. No one
said anything to him for idling about; people are kind-hearted and
easy of temper in this pleasant land, and children and dogs are both
happy there. He heard the Bavarians arguing and vociferating a great
deal, and learned that they meant to go too and wanted to go with the
great stove itself. But this they could not do, for neither could the
stove go by a passenger-train nor they themselves go in a goods-train.
So at length they insured their precious burden for a large sum, and
consented to send it by a luggage-train which was to pass through Hall
in half an hour. The swift trains seldom deign to notice the existence
of Hall at all.
August heard, and a desperate resolve made itself up in his little
mind. Where Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave one terrible thought
to Dorothea—poor, gentle Dorothea!—sitting in the cold at home, then
set to work to execute his project. How he managed it he never knew
very clearly himself, but certain it is that when the goods-train from
the north, that had come all the way from Linz on the Danube, moved out
of Hall, August was hidden behind the stove in the great covered truck,
and wedged, unseen and undreamt of by any human creature, amidst the
cases of wood-carving, of clocks and clock-work, of Vienna toys, of
Turkish carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian wines, which shared the
same abode as did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel. No doubt he was
very naughty, but it never occurred to him that he was so: his whole
mind and soul were absorbed in the one entrancing idea, to follow his
beloved friend and fire-king.