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