OLD FRIENDS.
“Hush! I hear music. Do not you, Kaspar?”
“No, master.”
“It is coming this way,” and the mathematician bends his head attently.
The boy lies stretched at Dasipodius’ feet, in their favourite haunt
by the stalactite cavern’s mouth. It is early June now; and for miles
round there is no such blessed refuge from the burden and heat of
midday as this green turf, sloping downwards to the lake’s silent
shores. Not a ripple stirs the water, for there is hardly a breath of
air, and the heat is at its sultriest. Seemingly the very birds in the
leafy branches overhead are indulging in a siesta, for they are silent,
and not so much as the fluttering of a wing breaks the stillness. There
has been hardly a sound for a good hour past, save the sweet tones of
Kaspar Habrecht, who has been dipping hap-hazard into a new edition of
Euclid, just issued from the famous new Amsterdam printing press, and
is reading aloud fragments of it for the blind man’s contentment. Not
much for his own, excepting in so far as Dasipodius’ pleasure is always
his; but from a selfish point of view, Kaspar would undoubtedly rather
have been delighting his soul with the gay, daintily-illustrated volume
of Gudrun with all its sea kings, and its vikings, and storm waves,
which had come to hand in the self-same package, cheek by jowl with the
sober, leathern-bound Euclid.
“_Rectilineal figures which are similar to the same rectilineal figure
are also similar to each other_,” reads Kaspar, with a suspicion of
weariness, not to say of contempt in his tones; did one, thought he,
need Euclid to tell one that?
“Turn over,” nodded Dasipodius.
“_If_,” reads Kaspar again, this time suppressing a veritable yawn,
“_from the greater of two unequal magnitudes there be taken more than
its half and_——”
“Never mind about that,” says the mathematician.
“_Next let E coincide with D_,” continued the boy, making another
chance dip, “_then of the two angles ADC and BDC one must be obtuse
and one acute. Suppose the angle ADC obtuse_——”
“Shut the book, Kaspar,” smiled the mathematician, laying his hand on
the boy’s, and helping him to the act; “it is you who are ADC this
morning. You are yawning; ay, but I heard you; shut the book, I say.”
“Nay,” faintly protested Kaspar.
“Hush! and there, I hear that music again. Listen!” And now as Kaspar
sat up, and also caught its faint strains, a joyful animation flashed
into his dulled eyes; and heedlessly flinging aside “the elements
of all true worldly wisdom,” he sprang to his feet, and listened
breathlessly.
“It’s some water party landing down at Schaffhausen yonder; that’s
what it is. Holy Mary! if they would but come up our way! what luck it
would be, wouldn’t it, master? We never so much as hear the squeak of a
fife, excepting at mass on Sundays, and when we were at Strassburg—” he
stopped abruptly with a sigh.
“Sighing for the fleshpots, Kaspar?” said Dasipodius. “Is life growing
so wearisome to you here already?”
“Nay,” said the boy blushingly; “but somehow a little music does so
help one over the stones.”
“Ay,” and it was the master’s turn to sigh; “it is rough riding when
all the music has died out of one’s life. And so—tell me, Kaspar, you
want to be back in Strassburg again?”
“Yes,” sturdily answered Kaspar; “do not you, master?”
And next instant, seeing the shadow of pain which passed over the
mathematician’s face, he would have given his deft right hand to have
those words unspoken. “I never shall return to Strassburg, Kaspar,” he
said with assumed calmness; “you know that.”
“Never?” cried the boy, opening wide his blue eyes.
“I think not; my place there is gone. If I cannot be as I have been
there,” said the mathematician proudly, “I will not be there at all. I
must seek out some new field for work; some place, if such there be,
where a man’s word is taken for his bond, and his infirmity is not
his crime. And by Saint Laurence,” he added more briskly, “I must be
finding it quickly too. It will never do to stay rusticating away the
days in this delightful way much longer. Yes, you and I will have to
bid each other a ‘God be with you’ soon, Kaspar, and go our separate
ways; we must part, lad.”
“Part?” echoed the boy, wrinkling his smooth white brow in saddened
perplexity.
“Yes, listen. In Strassburg I have but to speak for you to find you
work. The hands that carved the Horologe, interest or no interest
indeed, would not hold themselves out idle long for want of something
to do, and find a rich reward for it too. Are you listening, Kaspar? do
you understand?”
“I am listening, master.”
“And when will you like to be going?”
“Going!” mechanically ejaculated the boy; “where?”
“Did not I say now you were gone wool-gathering this morning? Back to
Strassburg.”
“I will never again set foot in Strassburg,” said Kaspar, a crimson
flush kindling in his cheeks, and a fiery light to his eyes, “excepting
it is by your side, master.”
“Then never again, I take it, will your foot be set there; for I am
going—nay, as yet I do not know where.”
“But where you go, there I shall go too. Do not shake your head, do
not—master, if you send me away from you, I—no—you shall not—master
dear—” a burst of tears choked his pleading, and he flung himself on
the blind man’s neck, and sobbed bitterly.
“Treuer Kamerad!” murmured Dasipodius; and the firm, beautiful lips
quivered, and the blind eyes grew unwontedly lustrous as he stroked
the boy’s sunny hair. “My faithful Kaspar! I think among those same
stars we talked of once, which rose for me when my sun set, and I
thought all my life was to be midnight blackness, that you are the
brightest. And shall I repay you so? Let your unselfish heart profit
mine, and teach me to think what is best—and right for you. Listen here
now, Kaspar—hush, hush,” for still the boy clung fast to him, crying
bitterly: “Come, be reasonable.”
“And so he is—reasonable,” growled the voice of Isaac Habrecht. “It is
you who are unreasonable, Master Dasipodius.”
“Isaac?”
“Ay. Yes it’s Isaac; and Isaac—and Kaspar too, seemingly, it’s to be
the end of the chapter for you. Come, Kaspar, don’t go weeping your
soul out like that, dear boy,” continued Isaac, gently disengaging
Kaspar’s arms from Dasipodius.
“The master was but jesting.”
“Nothing of the kind,” began Dasipodius.
“He never really meant to be sending you away.”
“But I did,” protested Dasipodius. “I have been thinking.”
“Then for shame!” indignantly cried Isaac. “Do you hear, Master
Dasipodius, for shame!”
“It is best; it must be,” gravely urged Dasipodius. “Reflect for an
instant how utterly my lot is changed from what it was. Once I might
have lifted him as I rose, and you too, Isaac; I might have served you
both; but now——”
“Now our turn has come to serve you; or at least it’s fair of you,
master, to let us try; but with such a proud, independent, obstinate——”
“Have done!” smiled Dasipodius. “Am I to sit here and be called names?
_Et tu Brute!_ You, Isaac, of all others; in whose hands I am just a
piece of clay, to be moulded as you will. Who was it, I wonder, bade me
say like any parrot, ‘Take the drawings, Isaac Habrecht, and carry them
to the Chancellery!’ and I said it, by heaven, I said it—I!”
“And I,” returned Isaac, a grim smile of satisfaction relaxing his
massive features, which bore a marvellous family likeness to some of
Kaspar’s wooden saints and heroes, “I obeyed, and took them, and—there
they are now.”
“How?” asked Dasipodius, turning his head quickly. “You say——”
“There they are now.”
“But Otto von Steinbach——”
“Ah! von Steinbach. Yes, he fetched them away,” said Isaac, in tones
of careless contempt, “of course; and he kept them—till they burnt his
fingers. Then he took them back again, and there they are, safe and
sound. So Syndic Klausewitz has just been telling me.”
“Syndic Klausewitz!” echoed Kaspar, passing his hand over his still
wet eyes, and staring in amazement at his brother, and then in utter
bewilderment at the apparition of Dr. Bruno Wolkenberg, who availing
himself of his intimate acquaintance with the by-paths to their haunt,
has suddenly appeared upon the scene, and is silently stretching his
length upon the grass, within a few feet of Dasipodius. “And what
brings him here?”
“What brings them all,” said the sententious Switzer. “Duty. There’s
some two score,” he continued, jerking his head in the direction of
a confused sound of tramping feet and many voices growing louder each
moment, “of the Town Council, and ever so many old friends of yours
besides, master, coming here to have a word with you; if they’re not
grilled to death before they get as far. My last batzen to a florin,
they’re rueing the day now, if they haven’t done it before, that they
meddled with our Horologe. Ho! ho! ho! ha! ha! ha!” and the cavernous
recesses behind them resounded again and again with the deep bass of
Isaac’s laughter, grave stolid Isaac Habrecht. “I thought maybe,”
he continued, “that you’d like me to step on and tell you they were
coming; but they won’t be here yet awhile. It is no joke,” and Isaac
lifted his hat and wiped the heat drops from his massive forehead,
“tramping up yonder road; every inch of it in a white heat as it is;
and a pig’s nothing to the way Syndic Hackernagel pulls backward.”
And once more Isaac’s sonorous ha! ha! echoed through the cave as if
all the gnomes of the Venusberg were gathered there, and sharing his
enjoyment. “Well, well, patience! They’ll get him here in time. And
there’s Burgomaster von Steinbach, and Dr. Bruno Wolk——”
“Dr. Bruno is welcome,” said Dasipodius, stretching out his hand to his
friend. “Welcome as unexpected. But how about your large retinue, Dr.
Wolkenberg? Have you been appointed Imperial Physician since last you
came to Schaffhausen? or how else may your planet be in the ascendant?”
“Nay,” returned the surgeon; “if only you will have it so, it is yours
which is in the fortunate house, Conrad.”
“Come! come! if we must have metaphor, minstrel mine, that same planet
is far too cloud-covered ever to show again. Only a miracle could
unveil it.”
“And lo! a miracle is here!” flourished Bruno. “A horse, a horse,
Conrad! brought to the water, and made to drink. That’s what is going
to happen.”
“The Sphinx’s riddle was child’s play to yours,” said Dasipodius, with
a half-provoked smile. “What on earth do you mean?”
“Hush! hark!” said Bruno; “they’re here.”
“They? and must your horse then be drinking to such a clarion blast as
that?” demanded the mystified mathematician.
“The Strassburgers would have it so,” shrugged Bruno.
“And the horse?”
“Stands before you,” answered Bruno, stepping back, and leaving
Dasipodius to face his deputation alone.