"Madame my princess, could you tell me kindly why some of the
figures and furniture dance and speak, and some lie up in a corner
like lumber? It does make me curious. Is it rude to ask?"
For it greatly puzzled him why, when some of the bric-a-brac was
all full of life and motion, some was quite still and had not a
single thrill in it.
"My dear child," said the powdered lady, "is it possible that you
do not know the reason? Why, those silent, dull things are
IMITATION!"
This she said with so much decision that she evidently considered
it a condensed but complete answer.
"Imitation?" repeated August, timidly, not understanding.
"Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrications!" said the princess in
pink shoes, very vivaciously. "They only PRETEND to be what we
ARE! They never wake up: how can they? No imitation ever had any
soul in it yet."
"Oh!" said August, humbly, not even sure that he understood
entirely yet. He looked at Hirschvogel: surely it had a royal soul
within it: would it not wake up and speak? Oh, dear! how he longed
to hear the voice of his fire-king! And he began to forget that he
stood by a lady who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white china,
with the year 1746 cut on it, and the Meissen mark.
"What will you be when you are a man?" said the little lady,
sharply, for her black eyes were quick though her red lips were
smiling. "Will you work for the Konigliche Porcellan-Manufactur,
like my great dead Kandler?"
"I have never thought," said August, stammering; "at least--that
is--I do wish--I do hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin
Hirschvogel at Nurnberg."
"Bravo!" said all the real bric-a-brac in one breath, and the two
Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, "Begone!" For there is
not a bit of true bric-a-brac in all Europe that does not know the
names of the mighty masters.
August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew
as red as the lady's shoes with bashful contentment.
"I knew all the Hirschvogels, from old Veit downwards," said a fat
gres de Flandre beer jug; "I myself was made at Nurnberg." And he
bowed to the great stove very politely, taking off his own silver
hat--I mean lid--with a courtly sweep that he could scarcely have
learned from burgomasters. The stove, however, was silent, and a
sickening suspicion (for what is such heartbreak as a suspicion of
what we love?) came through the mind of August: WAS HIRSCHVOGEL
ONLY IMITATION?
"No, no, no, no!" he said to himself stoutly; though Hirschvogel
never stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it!
After all their happy years together, after all the nights of
warmth and joy he owed it, should he doubt his own friend and
hero, whose gilt lion's feet he had kissed in his babyhood? "No,
no, no, no!" he said again, with so much emphasis that the Lady of
Meissen looked sharply again at him.
"No," she said, with pretty disdain; "no, believe me, they may
'pretend' forever. They can never look like us! They imitate even
our marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can
they chassent de race."
"How should they?" said a bronze statuette of Vischer's. "They
daub themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to
get rusted; but green and rust are not patina; only the ages can
give that!"
"And MY imitations are all in primary colors, staring colors, hot
as the colors of a hostelry's signboard!" said the Lady of
Meissen, with a shiver.
"Well, there is a gres de Flandre over there, who pretends to be a
Hans Kraut, as I am," said the jug with the silver hat, pointing
with his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner.
"He has copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us.
Almost he might be mistaken for me. But yet what a difference
there is! How crude are his blues! how evidently done over the
glaze are his black letters! He has tried to give himself my very
twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of that playful
deviation in my lines which in his becomes actual deformity!"
"And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a
contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out
on a table. "They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give
him my name; but look! _I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin
as a film and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de
las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed
reign of Ferdinand the Most Christian. HIS gilding is one part
gold to eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been
laid on him with a brush--A BRUSH!--pah! of course he will be as
black as a crock in a few years' time, whilst I am as bright as
when I first was made, and, unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt
its heretics, I shall shine on forever."
"They carve pear wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown, and
call it ME!" said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.
"That is not so painful; it does not vulgarize you so much as the
cups they paint to-day and christen after ME!" said a Carl Theodor
cup subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel.
"Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping ME!"
interposed the princess in the pink shoes.
"They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture," said a
Trauerkrug of Regensburg in black-and-white.
"And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!"
sighed the little white maid of Nymphenburg.
"And they sell hundreds and thousands of common china plates,
calling them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a
muffle of to-day; it is blasphemy!" said a stout plate of Gubbio,
which in its year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.
"That is what is so terrible in these bric-a-brac places," said
the princess of Meissen. "It brings one in contact with such low,
imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless
under glass at the Louvre or South Kensington."
"And they get even there," sighed the gres de Flandre. "A terrible
thing happened to a dear friend of mine, a terre cuite of Blasius
(you know the terres cuites of Blasius date from 1560). Well, he
was put under glass in a museum that shall be nameless, and he
found himself set next to his own imitation born and baked
yesterday at Frankfort, and what think you the miserable creature
said to him, with a grin? 'Old Pipeclay,'--that is what he called
my friend,--'the fellow that bought ME got just as much commission
on me as the fellow that bought YOU, and that was all that HE
thought about. You know it is only the public money that goes!'
And the horrid creature grinned again till he actually cracked
himself. There is a Providence above all things, even museums."
"Providence might have interfered before, and saved the public
money," said the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes.
"After all, does it matter?" said a Dutch jar of Haarlem. "All the
shamming in the world will not MAKE them us!"
"One does not like to be vulgarized," said the Lady of Meissen,
angrily.
"My maker, the Krabbetje,[Footnote: Jan Asselyn. called Krabbetje,
the Little Crab, born 1610, master-potter of Delft and Haarlem]
did not trouble his head about that," said the Haarlem jar,
proudly. "The Krabbetje made me for the kitchen, the bright,
clean, snow-white Dutch kitchen, well-nigh three centuries ago,
and now I am thought worthy the palace; yet I wish I were at home;
yes, I wish I could see the good Dutch vrouw, and the shining
canals, and the great green meadows dotted with the kine."
"Ah! if we could all go back to our makers!" sighed the Gubbio
plate, thinking of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious days
of the Renaissance: and somehow the words touched the frolicsome
souls of the dancing jars, the spinning teapots, the chairs that
were playing cards; and the violin stopped its merry music with a
sob, and the spinnet sighed, thinking of dead hands.
Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a master forever lost; and
only the swords went on quarreling, and made such a clattering
noise that the Japanese bonze rode at them on his monster and
knocked them both right over, and they lay straight and still,
looking foolish, and the little Nymphenburg maid, though she was
crying, smiled and almost laughed.
Then from where the great stove stood there came a solemn voice.
All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and the heart of its little
human comrade gave a great jump of joy.
"My friends," said that clear voice from the turret of Nurnberg
faience, "I have listened to all you have said. There is too much
talking among the Mortalities whom one of themselves has called
the Windbags. Let not us be like them. I hear among men so much
vain speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in
empty boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant
argument, ignoble mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a
curse, laid on man to weaken and envenom all his under-takings.
For over two hundred years I have never spoken myself: you, I
hear, are not so reticent. I only speak now because one of you
said a beautiful thing that touched me. If we all might but go
back to our makers! Ah, yes! if we might! We were made in days
when even men were true creatures, and so we, the work of their
hands, were true too. We, the begotten of ancient days, derive all
the value in us from the fact that our makers wrought at us with
zeal, with piety, with integrity, with faith,--not to win fortunes
or to glut a market, but to do nobly an honest thing and create
for the honor of the Arts and God. I see amidst you a little human
thing who loves me, and in his own ignorant childish way loves
Art. Now, I want him forever to remember this night and these
words; to remember that we are what we are, and precious in the
eyes of the world, because centuries ago those who were of single
mind and of pure hand so created us, scorning sham and haste and
counterfeit. Well do I recollect my master, Augustin Hirschvogel.
He led a wise and blameless life, and wrought in loyalty and love,
and made his time beautiful thereby, like one of his own rich,
many-colored church casements, that told holy tales as the sun
streamed through them. Ah, yes, my friends, to go back to our
masters!--that would be the best that could befall us. But they
are gone, and even the perishable labors of their lives outlive
them. For many, many years I, once honored of emperors, dwelt in a
humble house and warmed in successive winters three generations of
little, cold, hungry children. When I warmed them they forgot that
they were hungry; they laughed and told tales, and slept at last
about my feet. Then I knew that humble as had become my lot it was
one that my master would have wished for me, and I was content.
Sometimes a tired woman would creep up to me, and smile because
she was near me, and point out my golden crown or my ruddy fruit
to a baby in her arms. That was better than to stand in a great
hall of a great city, cold and empty, even though wise men came to
gaze and throngs of fools gaped, passing with flattering words.
Where I go now I know not; but since I go from that humble house
where they loved me, I shall be sad and alone. They pass so soon--
those fleeting mortal lives! Only we endure--we, the things that
the human brain creates. We can but bless them a little as they
glide by: if we have done that, we have done what our masters
wished. So in us our masters, being dead, yet may speak and live."
Then the voice sank away in silence, and a strange golden light
that had shone on the great stove faded away; so also the light
died down in the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic melody stole
gently through the room. It came from the old, old spinnet that
was covered with the faded roses.
Then that sad, sighing music of a bygone day died too; the clocks
of the city struck six of the morning; day was rising over the
Bayerischenwald. August awoke with a great start, and found
himself lying on the bare bricks of the floor of the chamber, and
all the bric-a-brac was lying quite still all around. The pretty
Lady of Meissen was motionless on her porcelain bracket, and the
little Saxe poodle was quiet at her side.
He rose slowly to his feet. He was very cold, but he was not
sensible of it or of the hunger that was gnawing his little empty
entrails. He was absorbed in the wondrous sight, in the wondrous
sounds, that he had seen and heard.
All was dark around him. Was it still midnight or had morning
come? Morning, surely; for against the barred shutters he heard
the tiny song of the robin.
Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step up the stair. He had but a
moment in which to scramble back into the interior of the great
stove, when the door opened and the two dealers entered, bringing
burning candles with them to see their way.
August was scarcely conscious of danger more than he was of cold
or hunger. A marvelous sense of courage, of security, of
happiness, was about him, like strong and gentle arms enfolding
him and lifting him upwards--upwards--upwards! Hirschvogel would
defend him.
The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the redbreast away, and
then tramped about in their heavy boots and chattered in contented
voices, and began to wrap up the stove once more in all its straw
and hay and cordage.
It never once occurred to them to glance inside. Why should they
look inside a stove that they had bought and were about to sell
again for all its glorious beauty of exterior?
The child still did not feel afraid. A great exaltation had come
to him: he was like one lifted up by his angels.
Presently the two traders called up their porters, and the stove,
heedfully swathed and wrapped and tended as though it were some
sick prince going on a journey, was borne on the shoulders of six
stout Bavarians down the stairs and out of the door into the
Marienplatz. Even behind all those wrappings August felt the icy
bite of the intense cold of the outer air at dawn of a winter's
day in Munich. The men moved the stove with exceeding gentleness
and care, so that he had often been far more roughly shaken in his
big brothers' arms than he was in his journey now; and though both
hunger and thirst made themselves felt, being foes that will take
no denial, he was still in that state of nervous exaltation which
deadens all physical suffering and is at once a cordial and an
opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel speak; that was enough.
The stout carriers tramped through the city, six of them, with the
Nurnberg fire-castle on their brawny shoulders, and went right
across Munich to the railway station, and August in the dark
recognized all the ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing
railway noises, and thought, despite his courage and excitement,
"Will it be a VERY long journey?" for his stomach had at times an
odd sinking sensation, and his head sadly often felt light and
swimming. If it was a very, very long journey, he felt half afraid
that he would be dead or something bad before the end, and
Hirschvogel would be so lonely: that was what he thought most
about; not much about himself, and not much about Dorothea and the
house at home. He was "high strung to high emprise," and could not
look behind him.
Whether for a long or a short journey, whether for weal or woe,
the stove with August still within it was once more hoisted up
into a great van; but this time it was not all alone, and the two
dealers as well as the six porters were all with it.
He in his darkness knew that; for he heard their voices. The train
glided away over the Bavarian plain southward; and he heard the
men say something of Berg and the Wurm-See, but their German was
strange to him, and he could not make out what these names meant.
The train rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, and roar of
steam, and stench of oil and burning coal. It had to go quietly
and slowly on account of the snow which was falling, and which had
fallen all night.
"He might have waited till he came to the city," grumbled one man
to another. "What weather to stay on at Berg!"
But who he was that stayed on at Berg, August could not make out
at all.
Though the men grumbled about the state of the roads and the
season, they were hilarious and well content, for they laughed
often, and, when they swore, did so good-humoredly, and promised
their porters fine presents at New Year; and August, like a shrewd
little boy as he was, who even in the secluded Innthal had learned
that money is the chief mover of men's mirth, thought to himself
with a terrible pang:--
"They have sold Hirschvogel for some great sum! They have sold him
already!"
Then his heart grew faint and sick within him, for he knew very
well that he must soon die, shut up without food and water thus;
and what new owner of the great fire-palace would ever permit him
to dwell in it?
"Never mind; I WILL die," thought he; "and Hirschvogel will know
it."
Perhaps you think him a very foolish little fellow; but I do not.
It is always good to be loyal and ready to endure to the end.
It is but an hour and a quarter that the train usually takes to
pass from Munich to the Wurm-See or Lake of Starnberg; but this
morning the journey was much slower, because the way was
encumbered by snow. When it did reach Possenhofen and stop, and
the Nurnberg stove was lifted out once more, August could see
through the fretwork of the brass door, as the stove stood upright
facing the lake, that this Wurm-See was a calm and noble piece of
water, of great width, with low wooded banks and distant
mountains, a peaceful, serene place, full of rest.
It was now near ten o'clock. The sun had come forth; there was a
clear gray sky hereabouts; the snow was not falling, though it lay
white and smooth everywhere, down to the edge of the water, which
before long would itself be ice.
Before he had time to get more than a glimpse of the green gliding
surface, the stove was again lifted up and placed on a large boat
that was in waiting--one of those very long and huge boats which
the women in these parts use as laundries, and the men as timber
rafts. The stove, with much labor and much expenditure of time and
care, was hoisted into this, and August would have grown sick and
giddy with the heaving and falling if his big brothers had not
long used him to such tossing about, so that he was as much at
ease head, as feet, downward. The stove once in it safely with its
guardians, the big boat moved across the lake to Leoni. How a
little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got that Tuscan-sounding name I
cannot tell; but Leoni it is. The big boat was a long time
crossing; the lake here is about three miles broad, and these
heavy barges are unwieldy and heavy to move, even though they are
towed and tugged at from the shore.
"If we should be too late!" the two dealers muttered to each
other, in agitation and alarm. "He said eleven o'clock."
"Who was he?" thought August; "the buyer, of course, of
Hirschvogel." The slow passage across the Wurm-See was
accomplished at length; the lake was placid; there was a sweet
calm in the air and on the water; there was a great deal of snow
in the sky, though the sun was shining and gave a solemn hush to
the atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer were going up and
down; in the clear frosty light the distant mountains of
Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were visible; market people, cloaked
and furred, went by on the water or on the banks; the deep woods
of the shores were black and gray and brown. Poor August could see
nothing of a scene that would have delighted him; as the stove was
now set, he could only see the old worm-eaten wood of the huge
barge.
Presently they touched the pier at Leoni.
"Now, men, for a stout mile and half! You shall drink your reward
at Christmas-time," said one of the dealers to his porters, who,
stout, strong men as they were, showed a disposition to grumble at
their task. Encouraged by large promises, they shouldered sullenly
the Nurnberg stove, grumbling again at its preposterous weight,
but little dreaming that they carried within it a small, panting,
trembling boy; for August began to tremble now that he was about
to see the future owner of Hirschvogel.
"If he look a good, kind man," he thought, "I will beg him to let
me stay with it."
The porters began their toilsome journey, and moved off from the
village pier. He could see nothing, for the brass door was over
his head, and all that gleamed through it was the clear gray sky.
He had been tilted on to his back, and if he had not been a little
mountaineer, used to hanging head downwards over crevasses, and,
moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the hunters and guides of
the hills and the salt-workers in the town, he would have been
made ill and sick by the bruising and shaking and many changes of
position to which he had been subjected.
The way the men took was a mile and a half in length, but the road
was heavy with snow, and the burden they bore was heavier still.
The dealers cheered them on, swore at them and praised them in one
breath; besought them and reiterated their splendid promises, for
a clock was striking eleven, and they had been ordered to reach
their destination at that hour, and, though the air was so cold,
the heat-drops rolled off their foreheads as they walked, they
were so frightened at being late. But the porters would not budge
a foot quicker than they chose, and as they were not poor
fourfooted carriers their employers dared not thrash them, though
most willingly would they have done so.
The road seemed terribly long to the anxious tradesmen, to the
plodding porters, to the poor little man inside the stove, as he
kept sinking and rising, sinking and rising, with each of their
steps.
Where they were going he had no idea, only after a very long time
he lost the sense of the fresh icy wind blowing on his face
through the brasswork above, and felt by their movements beneath
him that they were mounting steps or stairs. Then he heard a great
many different voices, but he could not understand what was being
said. He felt that his bearers paused some time, then moved on and
on again. Their feet went so softly he thought they must be moving
on carpet, and as he felt a warm air come to him he concluded that
he was in some heated chambers, for he was a clever little fellow,
and could put two and two together, though he was so hungry and so
thirsty and his empty stomach felt so strangely. They must have
gone, he thought, through some very great number of rooms, for
they walked so long on and on, on and on. At last the stove was
set down again, and, happily for him, set so that his feet were
downward.
What he fancied was that he was in some museum, like that which he
had seen in the city of Innspruck.
The voices he heard were very hushed, and the steps seemed to go
away, far away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not
look out, but he peeped through the brasswork, and all he could
see was a big carved lion's head in ivory, with a gold crown atop.
It belonged to a velvet fauteuil, but he could not see the chair,
only the ivory lion.
There was a delicious fragrance in the air--a fragrance as of
flowers. "Only how can it be flowers?" thought August. "It is
November!"
From afar off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite music,
as sweet as the spinnet's had been, but so much fuller, so much
richer, seeming as though a chorus of angels were singing all
together. August ceased to think of the museum: he thought of
heaven. "Are we gone to the Master?" he thought, remembering the
words of Hirschvogel.
All was so still around him; there was no sound anywhere except
the sound of the far-off choral music.
He did not know it, but he was in the royal castle of Berg, and
the music he heard was the music of Wagner, who was playing in a
distant room some of the motives of "Parsival."
Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and he heard a low voice
say, close behind him, "So!" An exclamation no doubt, he thought,
of admiration and wonder at the beauty of Hirschvogel.
Then the same voice said, after a long pause, during which no
doubt, as August thought, this newcomer was examining all the
details of the wondrous fire-tower, "It was well bought; it is
exceedingly beautiful! It is most undoubtedly the work of Augustin
Hirschvogel."
Then the hand of the speaker turned the round handle of the brass
door, and the fainting soul of the poor little prisoner within
grew sick with fear.
The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn open, some one bent
down and looked in, and the same voice that he had heard in praise
of its beauty called aloud, in surprise: "What is this in it? A
live child!"
Then August, terrified beyond all self-control, and dominated by
one master-passion, sprang out of the body of the stove and fell
at the feet of the speaker.
"Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr, let me stay!" he sobbed. "I have
come all the way with Hirschvogel!"
Some gentlemen's hands seized him, not gently by any means, and
their 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 liked 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 traveled 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 Nurnberg stove of this 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 counselor 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 counselor 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 Nurnberg 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 Nurnberg 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?