lips angrily muttered in his ear, “Little knave, peace! be quiet! hold
your tongue! It is the king!”
They were about to drag him out of the august atmosphere as if he had
been some venomous, dangerous beast come there to slay, but the voice
he had heard speak of the stove said, in kind accents, “Poor little
child! he is very young. Let him go: let him speak to me.”
The word of a king is law to his courtiers: so, sorely against their
wish, the angry and astonished chamberlains let August slide out of
their grasp, and he stood there in his little rough sheepskin coat and
his thick, mud-covered boots, with his curling hair all in a tangle, in
the midst of the most beautiful chamber he had ever dreamed of, and in
the presence of a young man with a beautiful dark face, and eyes full
of dreams and fire; and the young man said to him,—
“My child, how came you here, hidden in this stove? Be not afraid: tell
me the truth. I am the king.”
August in an instinct of homage cast his great battered black hat with
the tarnished gold tassels down on the floor of the room, and folded
his little brown hands in supplication. He was too intensely in earnest
to be in any way abashed; he was too lifted out of himself by his love
for Hirschvogel to be conscious of any awe before any earthly majesty.
He was only so glad—so glad it was the king. Kings were always kind; so
the Tyrolese think, who love their lords.
“Oh, dear king!” he said, with trembling entreaty in his faint little
voice, “Hirschvogel was ours, and we have loved it all our lives; and
father sold it. And when I saw that it did really go from us, then I
said to myself I would go with it; and I have come all the way inside
it. And last night it spoke and said beautiful things. And I do pray
you to let me live with it, and I will go out every morning and cut
wood for it and you, if only you will let me stay beside it. No one
ever has fed it with fuel but me since I grew big enough, and it loves
me;—it does indeed; it said so last night; and it said that it had been
happier with us than if it were in any palace——”
And then his breath failed him, and, as he lifted his little, eager,
pale face to the young king’s, great tears were falling down his cheeks.
Now, the king likes all poetic and uncommon things, and there was that
in the child’s face which pleased and touched him. He motioned to his
gentlemen to leave the little boy alone.
“What is your name?” he asked him.
“I am August Strehla. My father is Hans Strehla. We live in Hall in the
Innthal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so long,—so long!”
His lips quivered with a broken sob.
“And have you truly travelled inside this stove all the way from Tyrol?”
“Yes,” said August; “no one thought to look inside till you did.”
The king laughed; then another view of the matter occurred to him.
“Who bought the stove of your father?” he inquired.
“Traders of Munich,” said August, who did not know that he ought not to
have spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, and whose little brain
was whirling and spinning dizzily round its one central idea.
“What sum did they pay your father, do you know?” asked the sovereign.
“Two hundred florins,” said August, with a great sigh of shame. “It was
so much money, and he is so poor, and there are so many of us.”
The king turned to his gentlemen-in-waiting. “Did these dealers of
Munich come with the stove.”
He was answered in the affirmative. He desired them to be sought for
and brought before him. As one of his chamberlains hastened on the
errand, the monarch looked at August with compassion.
“You are very pale, little fellow: when did you eat last?”
“I had some bread and sausage with me; yesterday afternoon I finished
it.”
“You would like to eat now?”
“If I might have a little water I would be glad; my throat is very dry.”
The king had water and wine brought for him, and cake also; but
August, though he drank eagerly, could not swallow anything. His mind
was in too great a tumult.
“May I stay with Hirschvogel?—may I stay?” he said, with feverish
agitation.
“Wait a little,” said the king, and asked, abruptly, “What do you wish
to be when you are a man?”
“A painter. I wish to be what Hirschvogel was,—I mean the master that
made my Hirschvogel.”
“I understand,” said the king.
Then the two dealers were brought into their sovereign’s presence. They
were so terribly alarmed, not being either so innocent or so ignorant
as August was, that they were trembling as though they were being led
to the slaughter, and they were so utterly astonished too at a child
having come all the way from Tyrol in the stove, as a gentleman of
the court had just told them this child had done, that they could not
tell what to say or where to look, and presented a very foolish aspect
indeed.
“Did you buy this Nürnberg stove of this little boy’s father for two
hundred florins?” the king asked them; and his voice was no longer soft
and kind as it had been when addressing the child, but very stern.
“Yes, your majesty,” murmured the trembling traders.
“And how much did the gentleman who purchased it for me give to you?”
“Two thousand ducats, your majesty,” muttered the dealers, frightened
out of their wits, and telling the truth in their fright.
The gentleman was not present: he was a trusted counsellor in art
matters of the king’s, and often made purchases for him.
The king smiled a little, and said nothing. The gentleman had made out
the price to him as eleven thousand ducats.
“You will give at once to this boy’s father the two thousand gold
ducats that you received, less the two hundred Austrian florins that
you paid him,” said the king to his humiliated and abject subjects.
“You are great rogues. Be thankful you are not more greatly punished.”
He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, and to one of these gave
the mission of making the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge their
ill-gotten gains.
August heard, and felt dazzled yet miserable. Two thousand gold
Bavarian ducats for his father! Why, his father would never need to
go any more to the salt-baking! And yet, whether for ducats or for
florins, Hirschvogel was sold just the same, and would the king let him
stay with it?—would he?
“Oh, do! oh, please do!” he murmured, joining his little brown
weather-stained hands, and kneeling down before the young monarch, who
himself stood absorbed in painful thought, for the deception so basely
practised for the greedy sake of gain on him by a trusted counsellor
was bitter to him.
He looked down on the child, and as he did so smiled once more.
“Rise up, my little man,” he said, in a kind voice; “kneel only to your
God. Will I let you stay with your Hirschvogel? Yes, I will; you shall
stay at my court, and you shall be taught to be a painter,—in oils or
on porcelain as you will,—and you must grow up worthily, and win all
the laurels at our Schools of Art, and if when you are twenty-one years
old you have done well and bravely, then I will give you your Nürnberg
stove, or, if I am no more living, then those who reign after me shall
do so. And now go away with this gentleman, and be not afraid, and you
shall light a fire every morning in Hirschvogel, but you will not need
to go out and cut the wood.”
Then he smiled and stretched out his hand; the courtiers tried to make
August understand that he ought to bow and touch it with his lips, but
August could not understand that anyhow; he was too happy. He threw his
two arms about the king’s knees, and kissed his feet passionately; then
he lost all sense of where he was, and fainted away from hunger, and
tire, and emotion, and wondrous joy.
As the darkness of his swoon closed in on him, he heard in his fancy
the voice from Hirschvogel saying,—
“Let us be worthy our maker!”
He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy scholar, and promises to
be a great man. Sometimes he goes back for a few days to Hall, where
the gold ducats have made his father prosperous. In the old house-room
there is a large white porcelain stove of Munich, the king’s gift to
Dorothea and ’Gilda.
And August never goes home without going into the great church and
saying his thanks to God, who blessed his strange winter’s journey in
the Nürnberg stove. As for his dream in the dealers’ room that night,
he will never admit that he did dream it; he still declares that he
saw it all, and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. And who shall say that
he did not? for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to
see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that
others cannot hear?
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 1610,
master-potter of Delft and Haarlem.
IN THE APPLE-COUNTRY
IT was in one of the green lanes of South Devonshire that Gemma, being
quite tired out, threw herself down on the daisied grass and said to
her grandfather,—
“Nonno, let us rest a little and eat.” Her grandfather said to her,—
“_Carina mia_, I would eat gladly, but we have nothing to eat. The
satchel is empty.”
[Illustration: “LET US REST A LITTLE AND EAT”]
Gemma, lying chest downward on the turf, sighed, and buried her hands
in her abundant curls and cooled her forehead on the damp grass. She
was just thirteen years old, and she was so pretty that she made the
heart of the old grandfather ache often when he looked at her and
thought that she would most likely soon be left alone in the world,
for her little brother Bindo could not be said to count for anything,
being only ten years old. Gemma was very lovely indeed, being tall and
lithe and gay, and full of grace, and having a beautiful changeable
face, all light and color. But she was only thirteen, and all she
could do to get her livelihood was to dance the _saltarello_ and the
_tarantella_. She and her brother danced, which they did very prettily,
and the old man whom they called Nonno told fortunes and performed
some simple conjuring tricks, and these were all bad trades as times
went, for nowadays nobody amuses himself with simple things, and the
rural folk have grown as sharp and as serious as the city people, which
to my thinking is a very great loss to the world, for merry people
are generally kind people, and contented people are easily governed,
and have no appetites for politics and philosophies and the like
indigestible things.
Nonno and Gemma and Bindo were merry enough even on empty stomachs. The
old man was as simple as a duck, and as gentle as a rabbit, and was
rather more of a child than either of the children. Bindo was a little,
round, playful, gleeful thing, like a little field-mouse, and Gemma was
as gay as a lark, though she had to bear the burden of the only brains
that there were in the family.
They were little Neapolitans; they had been born in a little cabin on
the sunny shore facing Ischia, and in their infancy had tumbled about
naked and glad as young dolphins in the bright blue waters. Then their
parents had died,—their father at sea, their mother of fever,—and left
them to the care of Nonno; Nonno, who was very old, so old that they
thought he must have been made almost before the world itself, and who,
after having been a showman of puppets to divert the poorest classes
all his life, was so very poor himself then that he could hardly
scrape enough together to get a little drink of thin wine and an inch
or two of polenta. Being so very poor, he was seduced into accepting
an engagement for himself and the children with a wicked man whose
business it was in life to decoy poor little Italians and make money
out of them in foreign lands. Nonno was so good and simple himself
that he thought everybody was as harmless as he was, and his grief
and amazement were very great when on reaching the English shores with
this wicked man he found that the wicked man meant to give him the slip
altogether and go off with the two children. By a mere hazard, Nonno,
whose name was Epifania Santo (a droll name, but he himself had been a
foundling), was able to defeat the wicked man so far that he got out
of his clutches and took his grandchildren with him. But there they
all three were in England, with no money at all, and nothing on earth
but a few puppets, and a conjurer’s box of playthings, and the stilts
on which the wicked man had had the children taught to walk. And in
England they had now been four years, remaining there chiefly because
they had no notion how to get home again, and partly because Nonno had
such a great terror of the sea. He had suffered so much on the long
voyage into which he had been entrapped from Naples, round by the Bay
of Biscay up the Bristol Channel, that he would sooner have died there
and then than have set foot again on board a sea-going vessel. So in
England they had stayed, wandering about and picking up a few pence
in villages and towns, and clinging together tenderly, and being very
often hungry, cold, tired, roofless, but yet being all the while happy.
Sometimes, too, they fared well: the children’s brilliant uncommon
beauty and pretty foreign accent often touched country-people’s hearts,
and sometimes they would get bed and board at homely farm-houses high
on lonely hills, or be made welcome without payment in little wayside
inns. They had kept to the southwest part of the kingdom, never being
able to afford other means of locomotion than their own feet, and the
farthest distance they had ever compassed had been this far-south
country-side, where the green woods and pastures roll down to the broad
estuaries of Exe and Dart. This green, wet, shadowy country always
seemed strange to the children; for a long while they thought it was
always evening in England. They could remember the long sunshiny years
at home, and the radiant air, and the blue, clear sky, and the sea
that seemed always laughing. They could never forget it indeed, and
when they were together they never talked of anything else: only the
cactus-fruit and the green and black figs, the red tomatoes and the
rough pomegranates, and the big balls of gold to be had in the orange
woods just for the plucking; the boats with the pretty striped sails,
and the villas with the marbles and the palms, and the islands all
aglow in the sunset, and the distance you could see looking away, away,
away into the immeasurable azure of the air. Oh, yes, they remembered
it all, and at night they would weep for it, the old man’s slow salt
tears mingling with the passionate rain of the childish eyes. Here it
was green and pretty in its own way, but all so dark, so wet, so misty!
“When I try to see, there is a white wall of shadow,—I think it is
shadow; perhaps it is fog, but it is always there,” said Gemma. “At
home one looks, and looks, and looks; there is no end to it.”
Gemma longed sorely to go home; she had not minded the sea at all.
Bindo, like Nonno, had been very ill on the voyage and cried even now
whenever he saw a ship, for fear he should be going in it. Bindo was
sadly babyish for ten years old; to make amends, his sister was almost
a woman at thirteen.
They ought now to have been all three serious and alarmed, for Nonno’s
satchel had not a penny in it, nor a crust, and they were all hungry,
for it was noonday. But instead of being miserable they joked, and
laughed, and kissed each other, as thousands of their country-folks
at home with equally empty stomachs were doing, lying on sunny moles,
or marble-strewn benches, or thymy turf under ilex shadows. But then
in our dear Italy there is always the sun, the light, the air that
kisses and feeds and sends to soft sleep her children, and Gemma and
her brother and grandfather were in a wet English lane, with the clouds
hurrying up over the distant hills by Dartmoor, and the raindrops still
hanging to the great elm-boughs overhead.
Yet they were merry, and sang snatches of Neapolitan songs, and took no
thought for the morrow. They were not far off Dartmouth, and they meant
to go into the quaint old town by market-day, and the Dart fisher- and
boating-folk were always kind to them. If they were hungry now they
would eat to-morrow.
Suddenly, however, Nonno grew thoughtful as he looked at Gemma, lying
face downward on the wet grass, her sandalled feet in air, a dragon-fly
fluttering above her head.
“What would you do if I were to die, my _piccicotta_?” said the poor
old man, all at once remembering he was nigh eighty years old. Gemma
raised herself, and said nothing. Her eyes, which were very beautiful
eyes, grew sad and moist.
“I would take care of Bindo, Nonno,” she answered, at last. “Do not be
afraid of that.”
“But how? It is easy to say. But how?”
“I suppose I could dance at theatres,” said Gemma after reflection.
Nonno shook his head.
“For the theatres you would need to dance differently: it is all
spinning, craning, drilling there; you dance, my child, as a flower in
the wind. The theatres do not care for that.”
“Then I do not know,” said Gemma. “But something I would do. Bindo
should not suffer.”
“You are a good child,” said the old man, tenderly. She sank down again
on the grass.
“Do not think of dying, Nonno,” she said. “It is all so dark where
death is.”
“Not when one gets to the saints,” said the simple old man. He always
fancied Paradise just like Amalfi,—his own Amalfi, where long ago,
so long ago, he had run and leaped, a merry naked boy, in the azure
waves, and caught the glittering sea-mouse and the pink column of the
gemmia in his hands. Paradise would be just like Amalfi; the promise of
it consoled him as he trotted on tired limbs along the wet gravel of
English market-roads, or meekly bore the noisy horse-play of English
village crowds.
The rain had ceased, and the sun was shining a little in a drowsy
half-hearted way, as if it were but half awake even at mid-day. There
were big hedges on either side of the lane, and broad strips of turf.
These lanes are almost all that is left of the rural and leafy old
England of Seventeen Hundred; and they are beautiful in their own way
when midsummer crowds them with flowers, and in spring when their
palm-willows blossom, and in autumn when their hazel-coppices are brown
with nuts, and in winter when their holly and ivy clamber high, and
their fine trees make a tracery of bare boughs delicate as the net-work
of lace against the gray skies.
On the other side of the hedge, to their right, there was a large
corn-field; it was now the time when wheat is ripe in England, and the
men and women who were reaping it were sitting, resting, drinking their
cider and eating their noonday bread and bacon. Bindo watched them
through a hole in the hedge, and began to cry.
“It makes me hungrier to see them eat!” he said, with a sob. Gemma
sprang to her feet.
“Do not cry so, my Bindo,” she said, with a tender voice: “I will ask
them to give you some.”
She thrust her lithe body through the gap, and walked boldly across the
field,—a strange figure for an English corn-field, with her short white
skirt, and her red bodice, and her striped sash of many colors, and her
little coral ear-rings in her ears; she was bareheaded, and her dusky
gold hair, the hair that the old painters loved, was coiled rope-like
all around her small head.
“My little brother is hungry: will you be so very gentle and give us a
little bread?” she said, in her pretty accent, which robbed the English
tongue of all its gutturals and clothed it in a sweetness not its own.
She was not fond of begging, being proud, and she colored very much as
she said it.
The reapers stared, then grinned, gaped once or twice, and then
stretched big brown hands out to her with goodly portions of food, and
one added a mug of cider.
“I do thank you so much,” she said, with a smile that was like a
sunbeam. “The drink I take not, for Nonno has no love of it; but for
the bread I pray may San Martino bless you!”
Then she courtesied to them, as nature and nobody else had taught her
to do, and ran away, fleet as a lapwing, with her treasure.
“’Tis that dancing-girl of the Popish country,” said the men one to
another, and added that if the master caught her in his lane ’twould
be the worse for her, for he couldna abide tramps and vagabon’s. But
Gemma, who knew nothing of that, was sharing her spoils with glee, and
breaking the small bit of bread she allowed to herself with teeth as
white as a dog’s.
“The way to Dartmouth will not now seem so long,” she said, and Bindo
nodded his head with a mouth quite full of good brown bread and fat
bacon.
“How much do they love _carne secca_ here!” said Nonno, with a sigh,
thinking of the long coils of macaroni, the lovely little fried fish,
the oil, the garlic, the black beans, that he never saw now, alas,
alas! “The land is fat, but the people they know not how to live,” he
added, with a sigh. “A people without wine,—what should they know?”
“They make good bread,” said Gemma, with her ivory teeth in a crust.
Meantime, the person who owned the lane was coming out into the fields
to see how his men got on with their work. His house stood near, hidden
in trees on a bend of the Exe. He was rich, young, prosperous, and
handsome; he was also generous and charitable; but he was a magistrate,
and he hated strollers. By name he was known as Philip Carey; his
people had been squires here for many generations; he called himself a
yeoman, and was as proud as if he were a prince.
As fates would have it, he rode down the lane now on his gray horse,
and when he saw the group of Nonno and Gemma and Bindo, with their bags
and bales and bundles, scattered about on the turf of his lane, his
gray eyes grew ominously dark.
“Who gave you leave to come here?” he asked, sternly enough, as he
reined up his horse.
Nonno looked up smiling, and stood up and bowed with grace and ease.
The English tongue he had never been able to master: he glanced at
Gemma to bid her answer.
“We were only resting, Excellenza,” said she, boldly. “It is a public
road.”
“It is not a public road,” said the owner of it. “And if it were, you
would have no right to cumber it. Are you strollers?”
“Strollers?” repeated Gemma: she did not understand the word.
“Tramps? Are you tramps?”
“We are artists,” said Gemma.
“What do you do for your living?” asked her judge.
“We dance,” she answered, “and Nonno yonder he does conjuring tricks,
and sometimes has a little lotto, but that is only when we have got a
little money: we have none now.”
“A lottery!” exclaimed Mr. Carey, whose face grew very stern. “You are
mere idle vagabonds, then, when you are not worse. Do you live by your
wits?”
“We dance,” said Gemma, again.
“Dance! Can you read and write?”
“Oh, no.”
“How old are you?”
“I am thirteen, Bindo is ten, Nonno is—is—is, oh, as old as the world.”
“Is he your grandfather?”
“That is what you say in English. We say Nonno.”
“Cannot he speak English?”
“No: he has lost his teeth, and it is so hard, is your English.”
“You are an impudent girl.”
Gemma smiled her beautiful shining smile, as if he had paid her an
admirable compliment.
She knew the rider by sight very well, though he did not know her.
His housekeeper had whipped Bindo for getting into her poultry-house
and putting two eggs in his pocket, and his gardener one day had
turned them both out of his orchards as trespassers, so that he and
his residence of Carey’s Honor were already scored with black in the
tablets of the children’s memories.
That he was a handsome young man, with a grave and pensive face and a
very sweet smile, when he did smile, which was rarely, did not affect
Gemma’s dislike to him: she was too young to be impressed by good
looks. Philip Carey was not touched by the beauty of her either: he
scarcely saw that she was pretty, he was so angry with her for what
seemed to him her saucy answers.
“Why are you not dressed like a Christian?” he said, somewhat
irrelevantly.
“I am a Christian,” said Gemma, angry in her turn,—“a better Christian
than you are. And what is my dress to you? You do not buy it.”
“It is immodest.”
“Oh! oh!” cried Gemma, with a flame-like lightning in her eyes; and
like lightning she leaped up on to the saddle and gave the astonished
gentleman a sounding box on both ears.
He was so utterly astonished that he had no time to protect himself,
and his horse, which was utterly astonished too, began to plunge and
rear and kick, and fully occupied him, whilst a guffaw from the field
beyond added to his rage by telling him that his reapers had witnessed
his discomfiture.