“MAKING NIGHT HIDEOUS.”
Syndic Hackernagel’s household was not a little put about at finding
that on his return from the palace, he was in anything but a genial
humour. Endowed, ordinarily speaking, with the healthiest of appetites,
he declined to touch a morsel of supper; and with not a good-night to
throw at a creature about the place, he betook himself sulkily to bed.
Over and above these portents, there were to be seen certain sparks
scintillating in Tobias’ small green eyes, which were understood by
melancholy experience, to bode ill for domestic tranquillity; and so,
in the fervent hope that he might be better in the morning, he was let
go his ways unquestioned.
“And to-morrow,” muttered the discomfited magistrate, as he put on his
night-cap, and drew it well over his lank jaws, “to-morrow this proud
churchman shall know who Syndic Hackernagel is.”
“It is an accursed thing,” continued Tobias, anathematising the
Horologe as cordially as his predestined lips dared. “An evil thing
invented to bring tribulation on the righteous. An accursed—verily a
most accursed——” Then he sank to sleep, but not into oblivion; far off
into the land of dreams that supreme subject of his waking moments
followed him. Now it made itself into a hideous nightmare, and from its
grinning face sprouted dead-cold claw-like fingers, which pinched and
scratched him, and preternaturally long legs radiated from it, dancing
and stamping upon him, till he awoke gasping with horror. Anon the
spirit of his dreams waxed kinder, and the Syndic beheld himself hand
on heart, haranguing all Strassburg from the forensic platform, and the
dreamer smiled sweetly, for he thought then he heard the sound of his
own voice.
“Good people,” he fancied he was saying, “go your ways. I wash my hands
of you and your Horologe.”
Alas! that it was only a dream! One from which he was rudely awakened
by a confused uproar of feminine shrieks within doors, and a deafening
hubbub of masculine voices without.
And that red flare! illumining his room to daylight clearness? Merciful
powers! was the house on fire? With one bound the Syndic sprang from
his bed to the window, and wrenching it open, thrust out his head.
As well have put it in the pillory at once, for before he had time
to draw it in again, a shower of such loathly missiles as only the
ingenuity of a riotous mob can devise, fell around the benight-capped
object showing out so conspicuously white through the darkness.
Physically, however, Syndic Hackernagel sustained no further abiding
damage from that dark night’s encounter than the marring of his
nose’s bold outline by a broken eggshell, the mark of which, by the
enigmatical law of scarification, which sometimes refuses ever to
obliterate traces of a pin’s scratch, Tobias did carry with him to the
grave.
Not so many weeks back, this justice of the peace, posted at a safe
distance, had watched the exit of Conrad Dasipodius under a course
of similar attentions from the crowd; and he had speculated a little
curiously as to what sort of a sensation rotten egg and brickbat
pelting might superinduce in the patient. Now enabled to realise it to
the full, he slammed to his window even faster than he had opened it.
His nocturnal visitors were not to be balked however, and with a crash
and a prickly shower, the glass of the latticed panes lay shattered
around him; while borne in upon the incoming chilly and damp night
breeze, yells of laughter, mingled with ominous low growls, assailed
the shivering Syndic’s ears through their cotton coverings.
“The Horologe!” shouted a hundred throats, till the very roof gables
echoed again, causing every upper window in the street to fly open,
bristling with heads.
“The Horologe! Where’s our Horologe?”
Tobias shrank back into the shadows.
“Come out! Show yourself!”
But he shrank to utter extinction, and was no more to be seen than a
snail prodded with a bit of stick.
“If you don’t show yourself,” shouted an awful voice, “we’ll be up in a
twinkling, and bring you out.”
Foremost among his besiegers, Hackernagel’s one glance had shown him
more than one of the Dial horologiers, and for their lithe limbs to
clamber over the projecting cornices of the lower casements, and jump
in through the smashed one above, would be, as he knew, the work of
half-a-dozen seconds; convinced therefore that nothing but surrender
remained to him, he again advanced, in an agony of terror.
“The Horologe! the Horologe!” shouted the mob, as soon as his face,
white now as his head-gear, peered forth into the red flare of the
torches they carried.
“Where’s Dasipodius? We want Dasipodius.”
And with that shout, Hackernagel’s last lingering hope of being able
to defy my lord Bishop faded from his calculations. Whatever doubt had
hitherto remained, it was clear to him now that by hook or by crook
these Strassburgers meant to have their man back again. He whom not
two months since they had hounded from their streets, he on whose head
one-half of the city had heaped insult and opprobrium, and the other
half had not stretched out a finger to defend.
They wanted him back again. Well, what wonder? Was not his absence
threatening dolorous danger to their pockets? Slowly but certainly it
had dawned upon these good people that the Horologe had fallen into
incompetent hands, and the hideous fact had become patent to them, that
if they did not bestir themselves, every batzen of their subscribed
florins would be as much lost as if thrown into the Rhine. Against this
frightful possibility Calvinist and Catholic rose as one man, beginning
hurriedly to catechise each other as to the legality of those summary
proceedings at the Chancellery, and into a jeopardy it had never
known before, Tobias Hackernagel’s name was falling now. Such ominous
rumblings of discontent had for the last two or three weeks been
growing so audible, that any man less in love with himself and all his
actions than Syndic Hackernagel would have long since begun to tremble.
To this most self-complacent of Sir Oracles, however, the notion of
any dog whatsoever daring to bark after once he had opened his mouth
had not occurred. Notwithstanding, the growls had daily grown louder;
and if only a few days more had flowed on in their usual course, even
Tobias must have been driven to mark whither the tide of opinion was
tending.
Already before nightfall, there were few who were not cognizant of the
light in which the Bishop, whose opinion Catholics venerated, and
Protestants could not choose but respect, regarded Tobias Hackernagel’s
dealings towards Dasipodius. The details of that interview between
himself and my lord the previous afternoon had been circulated with no
small gusto by more than one of the municipality who had been witnesses
to it, and had spread before sundown like wildfire through the city’s
breadth and length. Many of these men, while acknowledging that his
very meddling proclivities had done their state some service by
preventing stagnation, bore him personal grudges for his contemptuous
bearing and pompous opposition to measures proposed by any but
himself, and above all, his inter-meddling with matters he understood
nothing about. And with an unction they were at no pains to conceal,
they spread the story of Tobias’ explanation with Bishop John, and
the upshot of it. By all which, it will be clear that the Syndic’s
popularity was at zero. Even his very co-religionists had begun to lose
confidence in him, when the appalling conviction loomed upon them that
he had perhaps blundered away their money.
Compared with the horror of this, the very accusation of sorcery
against Dasipodius paled to insignificance; and the firiest fanatics
of every persuasion piteously added their suffrages to the general
opinion, that at all hazards the blind mathematician must be fetched
back to finish their clock for them, even though they should arrange to
burn him afterwards.
Thus of self-interest was born what the Strassburgers pleased
themselves by calling a sense of justice. It had however, in truth,
long been honestly burning in many hearts. In none perhaps more
purely and ardently than in Burgomaster von Steinbach’s. Not an hour
had passed since that day when he had watched the blind man leave
the presence of his inquisitors, that Niklaus had not pondered and
planned for his reinstation; but there were many motives forbidding
Niklaus from openly declaring himself the mathematician’s champion,
dearly as he yearned to do it; though they were such as he did not
care too nearly to analyse even to himself. Simply when they arose, he
would look thoughtfully at Sabina, and the old speculations anent the
mysterious ways of womankind would begin to worry his brain.
The ends and aims, however, of creatures of his own sex were things
of altogether a different calibre, and quite, he believed, and justly
too, within his powers of disentangling; and very attentively, but
sharing his observations with no mortal creature, he had watched the
current of public opinion, quietly making it his business to feed the
growing discontent against Hackernagel, and the desire for the recall
of Dasipodius. That the people as a body should desire it was, Niklaus
believed, the one condition on which the mathematician would be induced
to resume his old duties.
“But I wouldn’t answer for it,” he sighed. “They threw away their
loaf, and if they can’t fish it up again, there’s nobody to blame but
themselves. Hey, Master Klausewitz, what do you think of it?”
Klausewitz said that only so long as they didn’t make another endless
day of it at the Chancellery, he “didn’t care how it was settled. The
place in summer was like a furnace.”
Meantime Syndic Hackernagel is striving to address his midnight
visitors as well as his chattering teeth permit.
“Good people,” he said, as the clamour for the banished horologier
rose up on all sides of him, “Master Dasipodius——”
“Ay, ay!”
“The—the Horologe, I mean,” he continued piteously. “The Horologe——”
But his weak attempts are drowned in fresh uproar, and while the
unhappy Syndic, daring neither to retreat, still less to advance by
half an inch, stands quaking with terror, amid yells and shouts, and
catcalls, and every imaginable sort of rat’s music, high above all rise
the chorused shouts for Dasipodius and the Horologe.
“_Himmelsdonnerwetter!_ What is the meaning of all this?” broke forth
a deep bass voice through the din; and never had it sounded so welcome
in the Syndic’s ears. “Does the man keep the Horologe under his pillow,
that you come disturbing the whole neighbourhood like this? See here,
comrades, if you don’t instantly disperse, and take yourselves home to
bed like decent fellows, I’ve got the watch behind me,” and Burgomaster
Niklaus jerked his finger over his shoulder to a compact dark mass
in his rear, “and they shall conduct you all to less comfortable
lodgings.”
“Ah! ah! Dear Master von Steinbach,” screeched Tobias.
“Have done, Hans,” cried Niklaus, bringing down his strong hand on
an arm just lifted to hurl some fresh missile at the white pyramidal
object now oscillating over the parapet.
“Dear Master von Steinbach! is that really you? For the Lord’s sake——”
“How can the man speak, if you go breaking his head first?” demanded
Niklaus of the surging mob.
“No, to be sure not, dear Master Niklaus. That’s what I say—what you
say, I mean. You always do put it so sensibly; and if they’ll only
listen, I’ll say anything they like—anything.”
“Time enough for that to-morrow morning, Tobias Hackernagel,”
answered Niklaus. “You see you’ve come an hour or so too soon,
comrades—hey?” continued he, turning to the ringleaders with a face
stern as Rhadamanthus, but his eyes dancing gleefully in the gleam of
their torches. “Just an hour or so too soon. In the morning I’m sure
Syndic Hackernagel will talk to you, if you’ll meet him outside the
Chancellery—eh, Master Tobias?”
“To be sure, Burgomaster, to be sure; and I’ll——”
“Ay, ay, of course he will; and tell you what will be sure to please
you all.”
“Yes, yes,” protested the grateful Tobias. “It shall be just what they
like. Tell them, will you, dear Master von Steinbach, anything.”
“It’s deeds we want, not words,” growled an angry voice. “We’ve had
enough of them and to spare. And if he don’t fetch Dasipodius back, and
look pretty sharp about it too——”
“Oh, but I will! I will. I will indeed.”
“Good,” said Niklaus.
“Good,” chorused Tobias’ visitors. “Tell us that again to-morrow
morning. Good-night. Sweet dreams to you, Master Hackernagel.”
“Good-night,” piped the Syndic, of whom not a vestige was now visible.
“Good-night, good people.”
“Oh! but that won’t do at all,” shouted up his tormentors. “We must
see you again once more before we go. We shouldn’t sleep a bit if we
didn’t. Here! Hi! Look out!”
And Tobias looked out. “Now tell us if you’ve been glad to see us,”
exhorted their fugleman. “Too much for words to express? Is that it?
Smile then. We shall understand.”
And Tobias smiled, a smile so ghastly, so abjectly wretched, than even
his tormentors were satisfied; and with a parting yell which brought
the last sleepiest heads in the street to their windows, they went
quietly home.