THE SILVER DIAL.
BY
MARY C. ROWSELL.
AUTHOR OF
“ST. NICOLAS’ EVE,” “LOVE LOYAL,” “TRAITOR OR PATRIOT,” &c., &c.
* * * * *
“AS MANY LINES CLOSE IN THE DIAL’S CENTRE;
SO MANY A THOUSAND ACTIONS, ONCE AFOOT,
END IN ONE PURPOSE.”—_Henry V._
* * * * *
VOL. I.
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LONDON: SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LE BAS & LOWREY, PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
* * * * *
1886.
THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS.
CONTENTS.
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CHAPTER PAGE
I.—A Young Mathematician 1
II.—The Strassburgers’ Dilemma 11
III.—The “Lily-Flower” 19
IV.—“Favour and Prejudice” 32
V.—Father Chretei’s Bequest 46
VI.—Radegund’s Inspiration 54
VII.—“The Best of all Words” 66
VIII.—“Oh, dark, dark, dark, without all hope of day!” 74
IX.—A Woman’s Guile 83
X.—A Famous Clock 96
XI.—The Pass Key 105
XII.—“Spirits of Health, or Goblins damn’d?” 121
XIII.—Old-World Tales 135
XIV.—“Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer” 153
XV.—Dr. Wolkenberg 176
XVI.—“Is there no Hope?” 187
XVII.—Farewell 200
THE SILVER DIAL.
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CHAPTER I.
A YOUNG MATHEMATICIAN.
Long ago, there lived in the city of Strassburg a worthy burgher
named Christian Dasipodius. Very highly esteemed was this man by his
fellow-citizens, and there were few among them who had not an approving
word for him. This was a little remarkable, inasmuch as Christian was
by no means a rich man. It is true that he had a goodly house of his
own, and wore his fur-bordered gown of stout murrey-cloth with the best
of them, and held his head high among the wealthiest of his merchant
brethren, looking every inch the honest trader in skins and furs that
he was. Still, comparatively, Christian Dasipodius was poor; he had
not contrived, after the wont of so many of his fraternity, to lay up
much goods for many years. In earlier life he had met with one or two
heavy pecuniary losses; and afterwards, when Fortune did smile on him,
and everybody said that now Christian really bade fair to be a rich
man, there began to develop in him some rather rare characteristics.
He found it, for example, so utterly impossible to pass unheeding by a
distressed fellow-creature, or to withhold any help it was in his power
to afford strugglers up the hill of life. If some poor but honest young
apprentice, whose years of servitude had just expired, chanced to cross
his path, and Christian saw him painfully toiling to amass the little
capital necessary for setting himself up in his craft, he immediately
began to think of his own once meagre purse, and how to him, in early
days, a friend in need would have been a friend indeed; and then he
would come forward with a word of encouragement on his lips, and nice
little gold pieces in his hand, which the recipient was to repay only
at some date quite convenient to himself.
Now and then it happened this convenient date was so long a coming,
that Christian knew he would have to bid farewell for ever and a
day to his gold pieces; but then he always consoled himself with the
reflection that if his generosity had been misplaced, or went otherwise
unrequited, it was far oftener his privilege to see those to whom
he had afforded such timely aid pushing on with a lighter heart and
better courage. It is, perhaps, needless to reiterate that Christian’s
generosity had not made him a richer man by so much dross sterling;
but it did make the pure metal of his nature shine out through his
eyes, and in his kindly smile; and perhaps there was not to be found
in all Strassburg a happier, more thoroughly contented-minded man
than Christian; but this was before his great sorrow fell upon him,
a sorrow in whose presence all his pecuniary trials and losses faded
to nothingness,—the death of his wife. Christian, who was a handsome
fellow, and might have chosen pretty nearly where he would from among
the maidens of his native city, had with that perversity innate in the
masculine mind, chosen to fall in love with a beautiful Lorraine woman,
whom he married. One son was born to them. This boy while inheriting
his father’s tall, well-knit figure and manly features, was endowed
also with much of his mother’s soft, intelligent beauty; and as the
boy, whom they christened Conrad, grew up, it was small wonder that the
parents were very proud of their only child.
At an unusually early age, Conrad evinced a talent for figures and
geometry, and an affection for Euclid which mightily astonished his
schoolmates. His mother, marking the bent of the boy’s mind, bade
her husband mark it too; and Christian, with something of a sigh—for
he would so infinitely have preferred to discover in him a talent
for skin-dressing, said: “Good—let it be so, then; and I will spare
nothing that Conrad may learn all he seems to have such a fancy
for. Mathematics is a grand science, and has made men famous and
honourable—only he must work.” And Conrad did work; and his mother
watched him with a proud, thrilling heart, longing earnestly for that
day when her son should take his place among the great and learned of
their city. But years—many years ere that day could come, the mother’s
heart had ceased to throb, and her marvellously beautiful eyes were
closed in death. A sharp, brief illness carried her away from Christian
and her child, and the two were left alone to fight their life’s
battle together.
Christian’s grief at his wife’s loss was great indeed; he thought when
for the last time his lips touched that face so fair even in death,
that he could never again be the man he had been; and he was right—the
smiles rarely brightened his honest face now; and somehow, when they
did come, they only made it look the sadder. Nevertheless, for the
sake of the boy, through whose eyes the soul of her he so dearly loved
seemed still to commune with his, Christian did strive hard to recall
a little of his old cheeriness. Grief is more transitory in youthful
natures, and dearly as Conrad had loved his mother, time blunted his
sharper sorrow for her loss; but he was always wont to say, that when
he tried to think what his guardian angel was like, it was a bright,
beautiful form, like his dead mother, which his mind’s eye saw; and
though there came a time when he loved as he never believed he could
have loved, and the girl who won his heart was pure and good as one
fancies the angels are, still not even she supplanted the guardian
angel of his boyhood; for dead or living, a good mother is always a
good mother to the end of one’s life.
When still quite a boy, Conrad had been placed in the school or studio
of Chretei Herlin, a monk of the Benedictine Monastery of Saint Thomas,
who, in the seclusion of the cloister, had made himself one of the
greatest mathematicians and mechanists of his age. Possibly if Herlin
and his cotemporaries could rise from their graves now, and see the
wonders of our day—our printing-presses, our looms, our Reuters,
our locomotives, our sewing machines, and all those countless other
contrivances for making steel and wire do duty for human sinew and
bone, they would, in their humility, tell themselves that they could
have no place now among men. And yet, who but men like Chretei Herlin
and Conrad Dasipodius, with their thoughtful brains, their plodding
industry, and poor clumsy apparatus, could have smoothed the way for
our Brunels, our Jacquards, our Stephensons, and all the rest of that
noble company which has applied its knowledge to the uses of every-day
life, and given us comforts and conveniences of which those Middle Ages
might not even dream?
At all events, Conrad Dasipodius did not disgrace his century; and
Chretei Herlin was vastly proud of this aptest among his pupils, and
loved him with that glorious kindred-spirit love which sometimes does
exist between master and pupil, when jealousy does not step in to dull
its brightness. Sometimes Herlin would smile, and say to the elder
Dasipodius: “The world will forget all about Chretei Herlin, Master
Christian; and that is only as it should be; for what am I but a poor
unworthy monk? Still, methinks that now and again, I shall hear the
good Strassburgers say as they pass my grave, ‘Oh, yes, the old monk
Chretei! he lies there. Once he was something of a teacher to the great
Conrad Dasipodius’; and then I shall smile proudly enough in my coffin,
I can tell you, and sing my _Gaudeamus_.”
“He is a good lad, Father Chretei,” Christian would answer with
glistening eyes; and then, with a faint sigh, he generally used to add:
“But you will bid him come home more betimes of a day? I see so little
of him now, and I would fain have him more with me. He is a good son,
and does not neglect his old father; but still his heart is all in his
work; the boy toils too closely.”
And truly Dasipodius did toil from morning till night, and from night
till near morning again; he was for ever at his problems and his
experiments, never daunted by obstacle or defeat—for ever toiling,
persevering on towards what he had undertaken, and happier and more
content over his work than my Lord of Hapsburg himself. The necessity
for eating and sleeping troubled him somewhat; but he satisfied these
demands of Dame Nature in a manner as niggardly as she would possibly
countenance, and a crust of black bread, and a draught of thin red
wine, were as good as a feast to him. As for sleeping, it was difficult
to say when the young mathematician ever did rest his busy brain, for
the lamp seemed always to be gleaming up long after midnight in that
little turret chamber at the angle of the furrier’s house—which, in
compliment to his son’s mathematical and horological talent, Christian
had long ago named the “_Silver Dial_,” for every house in Strassburg
was then distinguished by its sign.
There was no doubt Conrad was burning the candle of his youth at both
ends. It fretted the elder Dasipodius to see this. “It is my own
fault,” he would say; “I urged on this willing horse of mine too hard
at first, and now he has taken the bit between his teeth, and nothing
will stop him. Thou’rt killing thyself, Conrad.” Then Conrad would
smile, and a very winning smile it was. “Why now, Väterchen, what would
you have? You who have worked so hard all your own life too!”
“Nay, but not at night; your health will suffer, and you will blind
yourself poring over these crabbed figures, and then all these coils
and springs, no thicker than threads. Why, see now, this wheel is
hardly big enough for a flea to take hold of!”
“Oh, that wheel, for example. Yes, it is not altogether a bad piece
of workmanship. It is cleanly turned out, but the cogs must be filed
down a little more—just a little”; and so, talking to his wheel, Conrad
would find his way, without looking, up the turret staircase, all
impervious to parental expostulation.
It was about this time that the civilised world was making great
advances in the science of mechanics; and perhaps since Sol, the
primæval time-marker, had first begun to rise and set, never before
had such an impetus been given to improvements in horology. The town
of Nuremberg had claimed for itself the invention of the coiled
watch-spring, and carried on a large trade in the manufacture of
its celebrated “Nuremberg eggs,” as watches came almost universally
to be called. Strassburg was also very foremost in efforts for the
advancement of the sciences; and especially she had been the nursing
mother of several learned geometricians and mathematicians, among these
being Chretei Herlin. Some who understood such matters predicted, as
we have seen had Herlin himself, that the young Dasipodius would rival
him; but as yet Conrad was a comparatively unknown toiler, silently
working his way among a dozen or so of other students in Herlin’s
shady old monastery studio, and when night came on, and his comrades
took holiday, he would go home to the Dial, and mounting the turret
staircase, would work on at the labour he delighted in, until worn out
at last, he would snatch a few hours for rest.