“THE OLD LOVE OR THE NEW?”
Yes, it was all true, as Bruno Wolkenberg had told Dasipodius, that
Sabina von Steinbach sat and span, and attended to household affairs,
and entertained her father’s guests, and so charmingly did all the
thousand and one little duties and courtesies, and odds and ends
of things expected of the daughter of a respected and well-to-do
Burgomaster, that mothers of feather-headed, frivolous girls would say
admiringly, “There’s an old head on young shoulders for you! That now
is something like a daughter! You never see her flaunting all over the
place pranked in furbelows and finery. Take example from her if you
mean to land your sweethearts for husbands. Men like these housewifely
ways a thousand times better than all your butterfly antics. Oh! flirt
and talk nonsense to your fill, but it is such girls mind as Sabina
von Steinbach they make their wives of—if they’ve an ounce of sense.”
And certainly it seemed as if the bachelors of Strassburg had gone
out of their way to lay in a stock of that commodity; and the young
foolish virgins might toss their heads and call this wise one a sly
proud thing as much as they pleased, it did not alter the fact that
masculine hearts did greatly incline towards Sabina von Steinbach,
and no sooner was the coast clear of the old love, than a host of
would-be new ones besieged the house in the Munster-gasse. Those among
them, however, who went as far as to proffer hand and heart retired
nonsuited, and apparently the Lily was not to be won; but backed by the
fortunate accident of his cousinship and his inexhaustible stock of
self-complacency, Otto von Steinbach contrived to renew his old footing
in the goldsmith’s house.
Now, as always, Otto’s company bored the Burgomaster cruelly. Niklaus
by no means delighted in his frequent visits, at the same time he never
could find it in his heart to bid him make them fewer; and so, after
the way of men, he contrived to shuffle the disagreeable task on to his
womankind.
“You don’t like that jackanapes cousin of yours to be eternally
skipping in and out like a tame magpie, do you?” he asked Sabina, after
one of these inflictions.
“Not much,” answered she.
“Not much!” impatiently echoed the Burgomaster. “That is worse than no
answer. If you are so nice about words, I must speak plainer; do you
wish it?”
“Why should I, father?” she listlessly asked.
“Oh,” said Niklaus testily, “how should I know? Do I understand these
things?”
“What things?”
“Well,” said the Burgomaster, growing red, and fidgeting his hands in
his pockets, “it isn’t me nor Mitte he comes to see, I suppose, in his
silver tags and sky-blue doublets; and if it isn’t—well, don’t I say I
don’t understand these things? So do as you will, only—there, there,
kiss your old father, little one, and try to be my dear bright Lily
once again.”
Niklaus von Steinbach was a broad-natured man, and while he found a
modicum of his nephew’s society go a very long way with himself, he
did not overlook the fact that Otto was a well-looking young man; and
reflecting on this fact, as he sat one day sorting a tray of precious
stones, he went on to argue from it, that women did undoubtedly
care for that sort of thing; “though somehow I had a notion that
Sabina—yes,” he went on, critically examining a diamond he had in his
hand, “these are all passable stones; but this—this is a beauty. I
wouldn’t barter it for all the rest put together. I wonder,” and then
Niklaus sighed, “I wonder how Dasipodius gets on; well, well.”
It was weary work for the old goldsmith to stand by and look on his
child’s endurance of some mental suffering marked so unmistakably in
her face, and to find himself powerless to make life brighter for her.
It would, he thought, have been so much better if he could have found
some carelessness or peccadillo in her to grumble at, and so to relieve
his feelings; but day by day she went through her round of duties, and
when he came near, would look up and welcome him with a smile that
was but a poor faint shadow of its old sunny self; and he was not so
blind but that he often saw how tears had been hastily brushed from
the gentle eyes, and it was things such as these which led him to
build up some sort of forlorn hope on Otto, and think that if he were
able after all to stamp down the canker-worm of her jealously-hidden
griefs, he would hardly dare to hinder him. As a practical step towards
superinducing this crisis, which he at once shrank from and desired,
he adopted the custom of betaking himself to his counting-house
whenever Otto looked in, which on an average was at least twice a day,
and leaving the cousins together; but Otto had seemed to lack his
advancement so entirely, that at last out of all patience, Niklaus had
hinted to Sabina that there must be no more shilly-shally, and things
must be settled at once.
It had, however, but very recently dawned upon Sabina that there could
be anything to settle. Otto had had his answer ever so long ago to a
certain question he had put. It was because she had felt herself so
safe in his cousinly society that she had allowed him within these few
last weeks to indulge the fancy he appeared to have for making a sort
of tame cat of himself about the place.
She knew very well that for some time past he had been dancing
attendance at Syndic Hackernagel’s, and had rejoiced to think that in
the society of the four ladies there, he might have come upon the
heart which she once prophesied to him he would find. As time went on
however, she discovered that these visits at Hackernagel’s house had
grown few and far between, in favour of spending his valuable leisure
at the Munster-gasse.
“Now it’s hard,” said Sabina, with a faint smile of self-complacency
born of Otto’s return to his old allegiance, and an indignant frown
for such fast and loose tricks; “it’s abominably hard if she’s fond of
him; and there is, of course, no accounting for taste, poor thing!”
The object of her compassion being Gretchen Hackernagel, whom, by some
occult instinct, she was persuaded had been the chosen fair, though
nobody had ever said so, least of all the young gentleman himself; and
Sabina determined to do battle with him on Gretchen’s behalf, if it
should come to any tug of war. Moreover, the wily little woman, in this
determination to help her neighbour, found her own small difficulties
lightened. “I will not have you making believe,” she said coquettishly,
“when all the time you are dying to be round at Master Hackernagel’s.
Oh yes, I know all about it,” she went on with a gleam of merriment in
her eyes; “pray what would Ortruda say, or Adelheid, or—which is it,
Otto?”
“Gretchen, I suppose you mean,” blushed the unwary Otto.
“Ah yes, Gretchen to be sure,” she said delightedly; “and what, pray,
would she say to hear you talking this nonsense to me?”
“It isn’t my fault,” groaned Otto, “if they’re after me.”
“For shame!” flushed up she, “to say such a thing when you have gone
spending half your time there, and they’ve been so kind to you!”
“Yes, but where there’s a pack of girls, one always is civilly treated.”
“And you—have been civil back?”
“Oh well, but it doesn’t follow because a fellow’s been civil to a
girl, he must marry her.”
“And what may be her view? What, I mean, may be her opinion of you?”
“Opinion! ho!” airily smirked Otto—“opinion! I like that. My dear
child, what has a woman to do with opinions, when she’s over head and
ears in love with you.”
“With you?”
“Rather.”
“Ah! she has told you so?”
“Now, Sabina, don’t be absurd; of course she hasn’t.”
“Then how can you know?”
“Ah, there—one does pretty well know these things.”
“But I’d be quite sure, I would indeed, Otto. It would be so bad for
you to have made any mistake after all,” she said gravely.
“Oh! I’m not in the least afraid of that.”
“Then you are fortunate, sir, and must never cease thanking Heaven for
this true love which you have found. Do you remember I told you you
would find it; and am I not a true Sibyl?—say now?”
But Otto only growled, and vowed he did not care one straw for Gretchen
Hackernagel. “And she has become positively hideous to me since—come
now, look here, Sabina, you’d better not be trifling with me in this
cat and mouse way. I never mean to ask you a third time, I swear I
don’t.”
“Otto, I cannot be your wife.”
“Well, it’s great nonsense, let me tell you; but people never do know
their best chances when they’ve got them. It’ll just serve you right
if you find yourself sticking here with your father all your life, that
it will.”
“It is my desire,” she answered.
“But look here now, if the Burgomaster should—if you should be left
alone?”
“I don’t care to think of that,” she replied, paling a little.
“Neither do I,” said he rather chokingly. “I couldn’t bear to think of
you—left all alone in the world. It makes me wretched.”
“Don’t let it, Otto dear,” interrupted the girl, touched by his tones.
“The Sisters at Freiburg would give me shelter if—if I wanted it. Aunt
Ottilie——”
But what Otto said of the reverend mother and her little community at
this juncture, need not be recorded here. “You’d never become a nun!”
he burst out. “Oh! it’s a shame! a confounded horrid shame! and all
because that Conrad Dasi——”
“Hush!” the girl’s thin cheek, which had flushed slightly, paled to
ashen white; and her mobile lips closed so sternly, that the last
syllables died on Otto’s lips. “There must be no word on that subject,”
she said in cold steady tones. “Do you understand?”
“O certainly. Of course not, if you don’t like it. Not a word; but I
wish Dasi—I mean, I wish the thing had never been born or thought of,
that I do,” and the Horologe’s new master’s brow wrinkled over with
care. “It’ll kill me soon.”
“Kill you?”
“Yes, that’ll be the end of it. I’m very ill already. Don’t I look
awfully pale, Sabina?”
“Well, rather,” she said, lifting her eyes to his face with some
interest; and indeed his almost feminine delicacy and transparency of
complexion was dulled, and a harassed weary look was in his eyes.
“It’s that confounded clock,” continued he. “Women bother a fellow
quite enough, but ten of ’em are nothing to that clock; and I tell you
it will be the death of me.”
“Then give it up,” she said in mildly apprehensive tones.
“Oh yes, likely, isn’t it? and make myself the laughing stock of the
place,” said Otto dismally. “I tell you what it is, Sabina, Dasipodius
knew what he was about, when he wanted me to take it.”
“Wanted you to take it!” echoed she in amazement.
“Oh, depend upon it he did. He just wanted to wash his hands of the
thing, I know. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have let me have his plans of
it quite so easy a bargain. And small blame to him.”
“I think you’re raving,” she answered, still with her eyes transfixing
her cousin’s face.
“There wouldn’t be much wonder if I was,” hysterically returned he,
rubbing his forehead. “And if you could see the inside of that thing,
it would just drive you mad too. Yes, only to look at it.”
“But I have seen it—many a time,” murmured she, thinking of the dear
old days, “and it always looked very nice.”
“Did it!” returned he, in the irony of his despair. “It’s in an awful
mess now, all the same. I don’t mind telling you so, Sabina,” and he
heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. “You can keep a secret I know.”
“Oh, Otto!” she cried in dismayed reproach, “and it was all so
beautiful and tidy when—when——” she hesitated, “everything, I mean,
was in such perfect order; each part only waiting to be put in its
place.”
“Yes, but that was because—don’t you understand—because Dasipodius
knew what he was going to do, and that helps a man on; but I—the very
idea, you know, of its being imagined that I can make head or tail of
what might come into Dasipodius’ brain! Oh it’s absurd!” said Otto,
thrusting his hands into his pockets and pacing the floor to and fro.
“It all comes,” he went on, “of everybody being so prejudiced in favour
of him. Oh you may laugh,” he said, detecting the bitter smile on her
lips, “but they’re just all of them infatuated with him. And Radegund
now, she’s every bit as bad as the rest. Why she won’t help me a bit,
though she knows as well as he does, how it’s all meant to go.”
“And yet,” said Sabina in dreamy tones, “they have treated him so
shamefully.”
“Oh, ha, h’m, well, but of course it wouldn’t have done to go on
employing a man who—h’m, laboured under general suspicion as he did.
Magic, don’t you see——”
“It couldn’t be proved,” she contested; “his worst enemies could
hardly find a shadow of proof.”
“No, they couldn’t exactly find it—but—h’m—there’s no doubt he must.
No fellow—and above all a blind fellow—ha! ha! why it’s ridiculous
to think of!—could have invented such an infernal, confoundedly
complicated bit of machinery, if the devil or somebody hadn’t backed
him up.”
“Then,” cried she indignantly, “how is it they make you go on with his
plans? Why didn’t they order you to begin with your own all over again?
There was nothing—_particular_ about them?”
“Oh no, nothing at all; but the whole thing has been a mass of favour
and prejudice.”
“But if,” insisted Sabina, “if they were afraid of the Professor
Dasipodius’ supervision, how is it they are not afraid to make use of
his plans? I can’t understand.”
“My dear girl, of course you can’t. Women never can. These distinctions
are too nice for them. Logical deduction and mathematical precision are
too much for their brain power, and——”
“And if you’re not careful, they’ll be more than enough for yours,
Cousin Otto. It never was over strong.”
“Ah!” languorously returned Otto, transported to have made of himself
at any cost an object of her solicitude, “if it is your wish that I——”
“That you should take care of yourself?” she said smilingly. “Yes it
is.”
“Then for your sake——”
“Nay—for Gretchen Hackernagel’s, I do hope you will.”
And without staying to say good-bye, Otto departed.