A MOONLIGHT MEETING.
Next morning found Dasipodius back in his accustomed place. Every hand
was hard at work over its appointed task, and there was no evidence in
that silent well-ordered hive, of the recent little revolution.
When the mathematician, having made his way to his own work-bench, had
passed his unerring hand over it, he found all as he had left it—not a
thing disturbed; every tool, every scrap of metal, every morsel of wire
lying intact. Even the little steel coil which had come to such sudden
grief, had been carefully rewound into proper compass, and placed ready
to hand by Isaac Habrecht. “It is correctly adjusted, I think?” he
said, as Dasipodius took it up.
“Never fear for that,” answered his chief. “There is no surer hand for
these things in all Elsass than yours.”
“Saving your own.”
“You and I will not bandy compliments. Isaac,” laughed Dasipodius.
“I meant no compliment,” grunted Isaac. “Nor split hairs then,”
returned the mathematician. “I was but thinking what a useful right
hand you have been to me all these months, Isaac Habrecht.”
His subordinate’s stolid face kindled. Nothing ever brightened it like
an approving word from the master.
“Right hands,” went on Dasipodius, “sometimes become heads.”
There was a pause; while Habrecht’s face grew impenetrable again.
“I have no talent for riddles,” he said bluntly. “I mean,” said the
mathematician, “that if the good people of Strassburg should take any
fancy into their heads that this blindness of mine incapacitates me for
the Horologe work—”
“Tut!—nonsense!” interrupted Isaac with an impatient wag of his bushy
head. “D’ye think they’re likely to quarrel with their own noses like
that?”
“I don’t think it is probable,” shrugged Dasipodius, “but it’s
possible. The town council—”
“Would be greater asses even than I have ever taken them for. Can’t
they see for themselves what you have already done? Can’t they judge?”
“Who can tell,” said Dasipodius, with a smile of some bitterness. “But
in any case they will have you to fall back upon, Habrecht; and that
would be an indescribable consolation to me.”
“Then I am sorry——” blurted Isaac; then he stopped abruptly, leaving
unfinished, perhaps for the only time in his life, what he had begun to
say, and silently concentrated his attention on his work.
“There is something amiss with this,” he went on presently, examining
with a magnifier the piece of infinitesimal chain-work he was occupied
upon. “Yet it measures the right length.”
“No such thing,” said the blind man, taking it from him and rapidly
passing it through his fingers; “it has a link too many,” and he took
up his tool and pinched off the superfluous scrap. “Try now,” he went
on, returning it to Habrecht, and bending his neck with that attentive
lateral movement peculiar to the blind, while Isaac adjusted the chain
round a small cylinder. “Yes,” he nodded, “it’s right enough now”; and
then the two horologists subsided into silence, and for the rest of
that day all went on as usual.
Whatever the other clockmakers there might have to say, was not spoken
out in their chief’s presence: natural generosity constrained them to
silence. They were of course cognizant of the citation which had been
served on Dasipodius, and were agreed to await the verdict of those
assembled to judge the question; and so the hours passed until the
sickly January sunbeams faded, and the short afternoon grew sombre and
grey, and the students putting up their tools, wrapped themselves in
their cloaks, and bade the master good-night.
“And since, as you all know, friends,” said Dasipodius, returning the
valediction, “I have a summons to attend at the Chancellery to-morrow,
it must be a—a holiday.”
“A waste day, the master means,” growled Isaac.
And silent as if they were at a funeral, the young men went out.
“But the next day, master?” wistfully asked a fresh young voice at his
elbow.
“That will be seen to-morrow, my Kaspar,” said Dasipodius, laying his
hand kindly on the lad’s head. “By the way, tell me, have you been
able to learn anything about that letter?”
It was interesting to observe with what precipitation Otto von
Steinbach, who was still hanging about the studio, caught up his cap
and cloak, and effected his exit at that precise moment.
“I can learn nothing. I begin to think it must have fallen on the
hearth and got burnt,” said Kaspar.
“Perhaps,” said Dasipodius. “Never mind,” he added wearily. “It is of
little consequence. Good-night.” Then the brothers went away, leaving
Dasipodius alone.
The moon rose, and cast a chill clear chequered light through the broad
lattice down on the oaken floor which Dasipodius long unceasingly
paced. In wild tumult thoughts were crowding the calm judging, clear
brain of this man, who could tell to a millionth part when anything
was amiss with his wheels and cogs, and springs and chains—whose
geometrical and algebraical knowledge made him a proverb in Strassburg;
and whose precision in the minutest particular made him a very terror
to his pupils. This gifted man it is who is now struggling to thread
the maze of trouble closing him so suddenly in. Here all parallel, and
logic, and syllogism fail him. He knows indeed, that of one bitter
heart-trial, others have been born; but which of these is parent to
the others, he can in no wise tell.
Now it seems his loss of sight, now his passionate love for Sabina.
Certainly it is clear that had it not been for her, he would have been
able to have kept his secret, until it had come to be no longer worth
the keeping. It was natural for people to say, as they were saying,
that they had known he was blind all along. “Why, there—you had but to
use your own eyes to see that!” and so on, and so on. People, prompted
no doubt by revenge for having been so long hoodwinked, always do love
to talk in that way, when once a cat is irretrievably out of its bag;
and it does not lessen his sense of Sabina’s blame, that he has come to
be a nine days’ wonder in the place.
“And yet,” he groaned, out of his soul’s heaviness, “I could have borne
it all, if you had not been false to me, child!”
Feeling his way to the casement, and throwing it wide open, he
loosened the collar of his doublet, and leaned his throbbing brow
against the cold stone mullion, letting the keen frosty air breathe
upon his face. This window high up and deep-sunken in the massive wall,
commanded a good side view of the Cathedral Platz, whose heavily-gabled
house roofs all muffled in their hoods of thick white snow, seemed
to be clustering like cowled Dominicans about their mighty superior,
with its one fair tower reaching far above towards the myriad stars
glistening in the steel-blue sky.
Conrad Dasipodius was a man for whom the simplest objects of daily
life had borne a significance. It had been his nature to see “sermons
in stones, and good in everything”; and could he have looked on this
scene before him, with all its wedded glory of nature and of art,
he must have found in it some anodyne for the gnawing pain of hope
disappointed. But he could have no part now in such joys, and to him
the world was a dull leaden-hued wilderness. Winter and summer, day
and night, in all the years to come, the same. A dismal chaos, a dark
and thorny way indeed, where love and friendship had left him in his
utmost need, to blunder on alone. Love! friendship. Well, well! It was
a sharp necessary lesson; one that came no doubt sooner or later to be
learned by every son of Adam. Love! friendship—why, in this world there
was none of it—none—none!
So in the moonlight stood Dasipodius, seeming to see with fixed
steadfast gaze, the ghosts of his dead joys. A strange visionary light
gleamed in his eyes, and you would rather have guessed that they
penetrated strangely far into life’s mysteries, than that all earthly
objects at least were utterly hidden from them.
Almost incredible it seems, that indeed he can see nothing of that tall
majestic figure standing in the glow of crimson drapery curtaining the
window on the first floor of old Erwin’s house opposite. Instantly
after, however, all is dark, and the figure, enveloped in a long
mantle, stands in the ancient doorway; then softly closing it, turns
to ascertain, seemingly, if any stragglers chance to be about; but the
coast is quite clear, and gliding stealthily under the shadow of the
cathedral’s broad western end, and reaching the opposite side of the
Platz, it hurries on up the narrow street, halting at last beneath
the open turret lattice of the Dial. The illusory moonlight throws
this figure into strong relief, lending it a height it does not really
possess; but its peculiar undulating grace of movement and of general
outline, would tell it is a woman, even though the long robe sweeping
the frosty ground entirely concealed the night wanderer’s form.
Laying her hand, glittering with costly jewels, upon the latch of the
turret door, she lifts her eyes to the window above, and in a voice low
and singularly sweet, calls the mathematician by his name.
“Ay!” he said, starting from his prolonged reverie. “Who is there? That
is your voice, Mistress von Steinbach?”
“Yes,” replied the artist. “I have a word to say to you—about the
Horologe.”
“I will come down,” he said, beginning to close the lattice.
“It will be better that I should come up,” she said, pushing the door
further ajar, and setting one foot inside the threshold.
“No. By your leave I think not,” answered he, and before she could say
more, he was descending the stair. “We can pace the Platz together,”
he said, as he reached the foot; “there is little fear of our being
disturbed. Our good neighbours seem to love their firesides better than
to be out in this biting cold.”
“Yes, because they are all such dull fools,” she answered
contemptuously.
“That is a sweeping assertion,” smiled he.
“You will find it is a true one—to-morrow,” she retorted.
“You had something to say about the Horologe?” he said, waiving away
her last remark.
“Why, yes,” she replied. “You will of course carry on the work in spite
of these men?”
“That is jumping at conclusions, as I could not have conceived—pardon
me, Mistress von Steinbach—conceived of you, who have something beyond
an ordinary woman’s mind.”
“But less than an ordinary woman’s heart, as you always seem to think,”
she interrupted in bitterly impetuous tones.
“Indeed no,” he said. “I know the contrary too well to say any such
thing. I wonder who could count the sick and poor of our great city,
who bless the charity of Radegund von Steinbach.”
“Psha! what is that?” answered she. “I should be a skinflint indeed not
to share a few of my gold pieces so. Does a woman’s love end where her
charity does, think you?”
“Nay,” replied he, thus challenged. “You must not ask me. I cannot
guess what woman’s love may be like. Once I thought—— But let that be,
I was mistaken.”
“And did you indeed believe that was love?” she asked. “The foolish
dallying of that pretty child? To think,” and she laughed mockingly,
“how easily you clever men are deceived! And now—positively you are
annoyed, as miserable almost as a child whose fragile toy is broken!”
“You know, then, that Sabina has been false?”
“I heard that—the bond between you had snapped,” she said. “I did not
dream that you could regret it as you seem to do.”
And to give her her fair meed of justice, she spoke no more than the
truth, as she saw it. “I say I did not dream you could regret her,” she
reiterated, for he made no reply.
“Regrets are useless,” he said; “but it is a cruel thing for a woman to
play a man false. Take warning from it, Mistress Radegund.”
“Nay, I would stake my soul for him I loved,” she murmured.
“That would be good hearing for——” Dasipodius paused.
“For whom?” she demanded hurriedly. “Say then.”
“For Bruno Wolkenberg,” said Dasipodius with a faint smile.
An angry spasm contracted her face. “Bruno Wolkenberg!” she echoed
scornfully. “When will Strassburg learn to unlink our names?”
“Never, I trust,” he answered, “for Bruno loves you, Mistress Radegund,
as I——”
“As you?——”
“As men seldom love.”
“Dr. Bruno Wolkenberg and I are good friends. How many a time have I
not said so? But nearer—and dearer? No, that we can never be. He does
not expect—he does not wish it,” she added, with an effort at unconcern.
“Ay, but he does, and you know it,” said Dasipodius.
“As soon might these snow crystals beneath our feet strive to rival the
glory of yonder stars, as Bruno Wolkenberg seek to link his lot with
mine,” she answered haughtily.
“Can it be true then, as some declare, that your heart does not know
what affection means?” demanded Dasipodius, driven on his friend’s
behalf, out of his usual reticence. “Nay, but you are not the woman I
took you for,” and he turned on his heel.
“No indeed, there you speak truly, Conrad Dasipodius. You do not
know—you cannot guess at the thoughts that are in my heart. Love Bruno
Wolkenberg! Who dares say it? Poor Bruno, with his pretty golden curls,
and his face, that I have heard languishing girls call ‘divine’! Oh,
they are very welcome. To my soul, his beauty speaks not, conjures no
bright dreams, kindles in it no fire. When has my heart ever throbbed
one pulse the quicker because he came near——”
“Radegund!” interposed the mathematician.
“When has it ever seemed to me,” she hurried on passionately, “that to
look once more—just once more upon him, I would have freely bartered
all eternity’s promised joys? Has it been his face I have striven to
picture to myself through the long dark night hours, until sleeping at
last, I have dreamed that he has clasped me in his arms and said: ‘I
love thee, Radegund’? No, no, and yet for one—for one I have done this,
Conrad Dasipodius—I take no shame to myself that I have done it. But
it was all a dream—a dream!” she murmured, drawing closer to the blind
man’s side, until he felt her warm breath mingling with his.
“My heart bleeds for Bruno Wolkenberg,” he said, receding a step.
“Was it so,” she went on, affecting not to hear, “that Sabina loved
you, Master Dasipodius?”
“Sabina is not free of speech,” he coldly answered.
“Ay—no,” she returned scornfully. “Always discretion itself is
my little cousin. Charmingly discreet; but is it these models of
maidenhood, think you, who will stand by a man when things go wrong
with him, or your bold, unscrupulous women—such for instance as I——”
“Nay, but I would think you neither bold nor unscrupulous,” he
contended.
“She has done well for herself. Very well,” continued Radegund. “She
foresaw, this clever little girl, that the world might be about to deal
hardly with you, Conrad Dasipodius.”
“To think,” said the mathematician sadly, “that Bruno should have so
utterly betrayed me. Bruno!”
“Is it then so strange,” she asked, “that this fair lily—this syren,
should have dragged Bruno Wolkenberg into her toils, when they have
lured wiser men than he before now?”