"Oh, father!--the children--in midwinter!"
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 wolfskin
before the stove. He had been struck backward, and his head had
fallen on the hard bricks where the wolfskin 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."
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 wolfskin 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
forevermore, 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 Nurnberg 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-grand-father, 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 Spritz, 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 traveling 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 courtyard 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 minister 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.
It was very dark in the closed truck, which had only a little
window above the door; and it was crowded, and had a strong smell
in it from the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. But
August was not frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, and
presently he meant to be closer still; for he meant to do nothing
less than get inside Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd little
boy, and having had, by great luck, two silver groschen in his
breeches pocket, which he had earned the day before by chopping
wood, he had bought some bread and sausage at the station of a
woman there who knew him, and who thought he was going out to his
Uncle Joachim's chalet above Jenbach. This he had with him, and
this he ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pounding,
thundering noise which made him giddy, as never had he been in a
train of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast,
and being a child, and half a German, and not knowing at all how
or when he ever would eat again.
When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, but as much as he
thought was prudent (for who could say when he would be able to
buy anything more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make a
hole in the withes of straw and hay which enveloped the stove. If
it had been put in a packing-case, he would have been defeated at
the onset. As it was, he gnawed, and nibbled, and pulled, and
pushed, just as a mouse would have done, making his hole where he
guessed that the opening of the stove was--the opening through
which he had so often thrust the big oak logs to feed it. No one
disturbed him; the heavy train went lumbering on and on, and he
saw nothing at all of the beautiful mountains, and shining waters,
and great forests through which he was being carried. He was hard
at work getting through the straw and hay and twisted ropes; and
get through them at last he did, and found the door of the stove,
which he knew so well, and which was quite large enough for a
child of his age to slip through, and it was this which he had
counted upon doing. Slip through he did, as he had often done at
home for fun, and curled himself up there to see if he could
anyhow remain during many hours. He found that he could; air came
in through the brass fretwork of the stove; and with admirable
caution in such a little fellow he leaned out, drew the hay and
straw together, and rearranged the ropes, so that no one could
ever have dreamed a little mouse had been at them. Then he curled
himself up again, this time more like a dormouse than anything
else; and, being safe inside his dear Hirschvogel and intensely
cold, he went fast asleep, as if he were in his own bed at home
with Albrecht and Christof on either side of him. The train
lumbered on, stopping often and long, as the habit of goods trains
is, sweeping the snow away with its cow-switcher, and rumbling
through the deep heart of the mountains, with its lamps aglow like
the eyes of a dog in a night of frost.
The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the child
slept soundly for a long while. When he did awake, it was quite
dark outside in the land; he could not see, and of course he was
in absolute darkness; and for a while he was sorely frightened,
and trembled terribly, and sobbed in a quiet, heartbroken fashion,
thinking of them all at home. Poor Dorothea! how anxious she would
be! How she would run over the town and walk up to grandfather's
at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, thinking he
had taken refuge with Uncle Joachim! His conscience smote him for
the sorrow he must be even then causing to his gentle sister; but
it never occurred to him to try and go back. If he once were to
lose sight of Hirschvogel, how could he ever hope to find it
again? how could he ever know whither it had gone--north, south,
east, or west? The old neighbor had said that the world was small;
but August knew at least that it must have a great many places in
it: that he had seen himself on the maps on his schoolhouse walls.
Almost any other little boy would, I think, have been frightened
out of his wits at the position in which he found himself; but
August was brave, and he had a firm belief that God and
Hirschvogel would take care of him. The master-potter of Nurnberg
was always present to his mind, a kindly, benign, and gracious
spirit, dwelling manifestly in that porcelain tower whereof he had
been the maker.
A droll fancy, you say? But every child with a soul in him has
quite as quaint fancies as this one was of August's.
So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was so
utterly in the dark. He did not feel cramped at all, because the
stove was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came through
the fretwork running round the top. He was hungry again, and again
nibbled with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He could not at
all tell the hour. Every time the train stopped and he heard the
banging, stamping, shouting, and jangling of chains that went on,
his heart seemed to jump up into his mouth. If they should find
him out! Sometimes porters came and took away this case and the
other, a sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, now a dead
chamois. Every time the men trampled near him, and swore at each
other, and banged this and that to and fro, he was so frightened
that his very breath seemed to stop. When they came to lift the
stove out, would they find him? and if they did find him, would
they kill him? That was what he kept thinking of all the way, all
through the dark hours, which seemed without end. The goods trains
are usually very slow, and are many days doing what a quick train
does in a few hours. This one was quicker than most, because it
was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria; still, it took all the
short winter's day and the long winter's night and half another
day to go over ground that the mail trains cover in a forenoon. It
passed great armored Kufstein standing across the beautiful and
solemn gorge, denying the right of way to all the foes of Austria.
It passed twelve hours later, after lying by in out-of-the-way
stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border of Bavaria. And
here the Nurnberg stove, with August inside it, was lifted out
heedfully and set under a covered way. When it was lifted out, the
boy had hard work to keep in his screams; he was tossed to and fro
as the men lifted the huge thing, and the earthenware walls of his
beloved fire-king were not cushions of down. However, though they
swore and grumbled at the weight of it, they never suspected that
a living child was inside it, and they carried it out on to the
platform and set it down under the roof of the goods shed. There
it passed the rest of the night and all the next morning, and
August was all the while within it.
The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all
the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had
not been whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron
rails of the snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily
for August, the thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped
and the stoutness of its own make screened him from the cold, of
which, else, he must have died--frozen. He had still some of his
loaf, and a little--a very little--of his sausage. What he did
begin to suffer from was thirst; and this frightened him almost
more than anything else, for Dorothea had read aloud to them one
night a story of the tortures some wrecked men had endured because
they could not find any water but the salt sea. It was many hours
since he had last taken a drink from the wooden spout of their old
pump, which brought them the sparkling, ice-cold water of the
hills.
But, fortunately for him, the stove, having been marked and
registered as "fragile and valuable," was not treated quite like a
mere bale of goods, and the Rosenheim station-master, who knew its
consignees, resolved to send it on by a passenger train that would
leave there at daybreak. And when this train went out, in it,
among piles of luggage belonging to other travelers, to Vienna,
Prague, Buda-Pest, Salzburg, was August, still undiscovered, still
doubled up like a mole in the winter under the grass. Those words,
"fragile and valuable," had made the men lift Hirschvogel gently
and with care. He had begun to get used to his prison, and a
little used to the incessant pounding and jumbling and rattling
and shaking with which modern travel is always accompanied, though
modern invention does deem itself so mightily clever. All in the
dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty; but he kept feeling the
earthenware sides of the Nurnberg giant and saying, softly, "Take
care of me; oh, take care of me, dear Hirschvogel!"
He did not say, "Take me back;" for, now that he was fairly out in
the world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think that
they must have been all over the world in all this time that the
rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his
ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales that
had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather's good
house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors, and
the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and--and--and he
began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream
outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no
one, had there been any one nigh, would have heard him; and in
another minute or so the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and
he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, "Munchen! Munchen!"
Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart
of Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by
the Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a
black bear he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.
That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois hunter who had
taught him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very
name of Bavaria a terror to August.
"It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!" he sobbed to the stove; but the
stove said nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no
more speak without fire than a man can see without light. Give it
fire, and it will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in
return all the sympathy you ask.
"It is Bavaria!" sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread
augury to the Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter struggles and
midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings
of jager and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But the train stopped;
Munich was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking
like a little aspen leaf, felt himself once more carried out on
the shoulders of men, rolled along on a truck, and finally set
down, where he knew not, only he knew he was thirsty--so thirsty!
If only he could have reached his hand out and scooped up a little
snow!
He thought he had been moved on this truck many miles, but in
truth the stove had been only taken from the railway station to a
shop in the Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was always set
upright on its four gilded feet, an injunction to that effect
having been affixed to its written label, and on its gilded feet
it stood now in the small dark curiosity shop of one Hans Rhilfer.
"I shall not unpack it till Anton comes," he heard a man's voice
say; and then he heard a key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken
stillness that ensued he concluded he was alone, and ventured to
peep through the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square
room filled with pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs,
old steel armor, shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna china,
Turkish rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a
bric-a-brac dealer's. It seemed a wonderful place to him; but, oh!
was there one drop of water in it all? That was his single
thought; for his tongue was parching, and his throat felt on fire,
and his chest began to be dry and choked as with dust.
There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice window
grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge covered with
snow. August cast one look at the locked door, darted out of his
hiding-place, ran and opened the window, crammed the snow into his
mouth again and again, and then flew back into the stove, drew the
hay and straw over the place he entered by, tied the cords, and
shut the brass door down on himself. He had brought some big
icicles in with him, and by them his thirst was finally, if only
temporarily, quenched. Then he sat still in the bottom of the
stove, listening intently, wide awake, and once more recovering
his natural boldness.
The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his heart and his conscience
with a hard squeeze now and then; but he thought to himself, "If I
can take her back Hirschvogel, then how pleased she will be, and
how little 'Gilda will clap her hands!" He was not at all selfish
in his love for Hirschvogel: he wanted it for them all at home
quite as much as for himself. There was at the bottom of his mind
a kind of ache of shame that his father--his own father--should
have stripped their hearth and sold their honor thus.
A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin sculptured on a
house eave near. August had felt for the crumbs of his loaf in his
pocket, and had thrown them to the little bird sitting so easily
on the frozen snow.
In the darkness where he was he now heard a little song, made
faint by the stove-wall and the window glass that was between him
and it, but still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was the
robin, singing after feeding on the crumbs. August, as he heard,
burst into tears. He thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw
out some grain or some bread on the snow before the church. "What
use is it going THERE," she said, "if we forget the sweetest
creatures God has made?" Poor Dorothea! Poor, good, tender, much-
burdened little soul! He thought of her till his tears ran like
rain.
Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home.
Hirschvogel was here.
Presently the key turned in the lock of the door, he heard heavy
footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father,
"You have a little mad dog; muzzle him!" The voice said, "Ay, ay,
you have called me a fool many times. Now you shall see what I
have gotten for two hundred dirty florins. Potztausend! never did
YOU do such a stroke of work."
Then the other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two
men approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-
a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse's does when it is on the top of a
cheese and hears a housemaid's broom sweeping near. They began to
strip the stove of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise
they made with the hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it
wholly: that, too, he knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder
and surprise and rapture which broke from the man who had not seen
it before.
"A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivaled thing!
Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime!
magnificent! matchless!"
So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a smell
of lager beer so strong as they spoke that it reached August
crouching in his stronghold. If they should open the door of the
stove! That was his frantic fear. If they should open it, it would
be all over with him. They would drag him out; most likely they
would kill him, he thought, as his mother's young brother had been
killed in the Wald.
The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had
control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by
the Nurnberg master's work for nigh an hour, praising, marveling,
expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved to a
little distance and began talking of sums of money and divided
profits, of which discourse he could make out no meaning. All he
could make out was that the name of the king--the king--the king
came over very often in their arguments. He fancied at times they
quarreled, for they swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse and
high; but after a while they seemed to pacify each other and agree
to something, and were in great glee, and so in these merry
spirits came and slapped the luminous sides of stately Hirschvogel,
and shouted to it:--
"Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck! To think you
were smoking in a silly fool of a salt baker's kitchen all these
years!"
Then inside the stove August jumped up, with flaming cheeks and
clinching hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to
them that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his
father, when he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word
or make a sound was to bring ruin on himself and sever him forever
from Hirschvogel. So he kept quite still, and the men barred the
shutters of the little lattice and went out by the door, double-
locking it after them. He had made out from their talk that they
were going to show Hirschvogel to some great person: therefore he
kept quite still and dared not move.
Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters from the streets
below--the rolling of wheels, the clanging of church bells, and
bursts of that military music which is so seldom silent in the
streets of Munich. An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of steps on
the stairs kept him in perpetual apprehension. In the intensity of
his anxiety, he forgot that he was hungry and many miles away from
cheerful, Old World little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-
water, with the ramparts of the mountains all around.
Presently the door opened again sharply. He could hear the two
dealers' voices murmuring unctuous words, in which "honor,"
"gratitude," and many fine long noble titles played the chief
parts. The voice of another person, more clear and refined than
theirs, answered them curtly, and then, close by the Nurnberg
stove and the boy's ear, ejaculated a single "Wunderschon!" August
almost lost his terror for himself in his thrill of pride at his
beloved Hirschvogel being thus admired in the great city. He
thought the master-potter must be glad too.
"Wunderschon!" ejaculated the stranger a second time, and then
examined the stove in all its parts, read all its mottoes, gazed
long on all its devices.
"It must have been made for the Emperor Maximilian," he said at
last; and the poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was "hugged up
into nothing," as you children say, dreading that every moment he
would open the stove. And open it truly he did, and examined the
brass-work of the door; but inside it was so dark that crouching
August passed unnoticed, screwed up into a ball like a hedgehog as
he was. The gentleman shut to the door at length, without having
seen anything strange inside it; and then he talked long and low
with the tradesmen, and, as his accent was different from that
which August was used to, the child could distinguish little that
he said, except the name of the king and the word "gulden" again
and again. After a while he went away, one of the dealers
accompanying him, one of them lingering behind to bar up the
shutters. Then this one also withdrew again, double-locking the
door.
The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself and dared to breathe
aloud.
What time was it?
Late in the day, he thought, for to accompany the stranger they
had lighted a lamp; he had heard the scratch of the match, and
through the brass fretwork had seen the lines of light.
He would have to pass the night here, that was certain. He and
Hirschvogel were locked in, but at least they were together. If
only he could have had something to eat! He thought with a pang of
how at this hour at home they ate the sweet soup, sometimes with
apples in it from Aunt Maila's farm orchard, and sang together,
and listened to Dorothea's reading of little tales, and basked in
the glow and delight that had beamed on them from the great
Nurnberg fire-king.
"Oh, poor, poor little 'Gilda! What is she doing without the dear
Hirschvogel?" he thought. Poor little 'Gilda! she had only now the
black iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how cruel of
father!
August could not bear to hear the dealers blame or laugh at his
father, but he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell
Hirschvogel. The mere memory of all those long winter evenings,
when they had all closed round it, and roasted chestnuts or crab
apples in it, and listened to the howling of the wind and the deep
sound of the church bells, and tried very much to make each other
believe that the wolves still came down from the mountains into
the streets of Hall, and were that very minute growling at the
house door--all this memory coming on him with the sound of the
city bells, and the knowledge that night drew near upon him so
completely, being added to his hunger and his fear, so overcame
him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth time since he had
been inside the stove, and felt that he would starve to death, and
wondered dreamily if Hirschvogel would care. Yes, he was sure
Hirschvogel would care. Had he not decked it all summer long with
alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and made it sweet with thyme
and honeysuckle and great garden lilies? Had he ever forgotten
when Santa Claus came to make it its crown of holly and ivy and
wreathe it all around?
"Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of me!" he prayed to the old
fire-king, and forgot, poor little man, that he had come on this
wild-goose chase northward to save and take care of Hirschvogel!
After a time he dropped asleep, as children can do when they weep,
and little robust hill-born boys most surely do, be they where
they may. It was not very cold in this lumber-room; it was tightly
shut up, and very full of things, and at the back of it were the
hot pipes of an adjacent house, where a great deal of fuel was
burnt. Moreover, August's clothes were warm ones, and his blood
was young. So he was not cold, though Munich is terribly cold in
the nights of December; and he slept on and on--which was a
comfort to him, for he forgot his woes, and his perils, and his
hunger, for a time.
Midnight was once more chiming from all the brazen tongues of the
city when he awoke, and, all being still around him, ventured to
put his head out of the brass door of the stove to see why such a
strange bright light was round him.
It was a very strange and brilliant light indeed; and yet, what is
perhaps still stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, nor did
what he saw alarm him either, and yet I think it would have done
you or me. For what he saw was nothing less than all the bric-a-
brac in motion.
A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, was solemnly dancing a
minuet with a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going
through a gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a very
droll porcelain figure of Littenhausen was bowing to a very stiff
soldier in terre cuite of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was
playing itself, and a queer little shrill plaintive music that
thought itself merry came from a painted spinnet covered with
faded roses; some gilt Spanish leather had got up on the wall and
laughed; a Dresden mirror was tripping about, crowned with
flowers, and a Japanese bonze was riding along on a griffin; a
slim Venetian rapier had come to blows with a stout Ferrara sabre,
all about a little pale-faced chit of a damsel in white
Nymphenburg china; and a portly Franconian pitcher in gres gris
was calling aloud, "Oh, these Italians! always at feud!" But
nobody listened to him at all. A great number of little Dresden
cups and saucers were all skipping and waltzing; the teapots, with
their broad round faces, were spinning their own lids like
teetotums; the high-backed gilded chairs were having a game of
cards together; and a little Saxe poodle, with a blue ribbon at
its throat, was running from one to another, whilst a yellow cat
of Cornelis Lachtleven's rode about on a Delft horse in blue
pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the brilliant light shed on the scene
came from three silver candelabra, though they had no candles set
up in them; and, what is the greatest miracle of all, August
looked on at these mad freaks and felt no sensation of wonder! He
only, as he heard the violin and the spinnet playing, felt an
irresistible desire to dance too. No doubt his face said what he
wished; for a lovely little lady, all in pink and gold and white,
with powdered hair, and high-heeled shoes, and all made of the
very finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped up to him, and
smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him out to a minuet. And he
danced it perfectly--poor little August in his thick, clumsy
shoes, and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough
homespun linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He must have danced it
perfectly, this dance of kings and queens in days when crowns were
duly honored, for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and never
scolded him at all, and danced so divinely herself to the stately
measures the spinnet was playing that August could not take his
eyes off her till, their minuet ended, she sat down on her own
white-and-gold bracket.
"I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale," she said to him, with a
benignant smile; "and you have got through that minuet very
fairly."