Part 8

“Who was he?” thought August; “the buyer, of course, of Hirschvogel.” The slow passage across the Wurm-See was accomplished at length: the lake was placid; there was a sweet calm in the air and on the water; there was a great deal of snow in the sky, though the sun was shining and gave a solemn hush to the atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer were going up and down; in the clear frosty light the distant mountains of Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were visible; market-people, cloaked and furred, went by on the water or on the banks; the deep woods of the shores were black and gray and brown. Poor August could see nothing of a scene that would have delighted him; as the stove was now set, he could only see the old worm eaten wood of the huge barge.

Presently they touched the pier at Leoni.

“Now men, for a stout mile and half! You shall drink your reward at Christmas-time,” said one of the dealers to his porters, who, stout, strong men as they were, showed a disposition to grumble at their task. Encouraged by large promises, they shouldered sullenly the Nürnberg stove, grumbling again at its preposterous weight, but little dreaming that they carried within it a small, panting, trembling boy; for August began to tremble now that he was about to see the future owner of Hirschvogel.

“If he look a good, kind man,” he thought, “I will beg him to let me stay with it.”

The porters began their toilsome journey, and moved off from the village pier. He could see nothing, for the brass door was over his head, and all that gleamed through it was the clear gray sky. He had been tilted on to his back, and if he had not been a little mountaineer, used to hanging head-downwards over crevasses, and, moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the hunters and guides of the hills and the salt-workers in the town, he would have been made ill and sick by the bruising and shaking and many changes of position to which he had been subjected.

The way the men took was a mile and a half in length, but the road was heavy with snow, and the burden they bore was heavier still. The dealers cheered them on, swore at them and praised them in one breath; besought them and reiterated their splendid promises, for a clock was striking eleven, and they had been ordered to reach their destination at that hour, and, though the air was so cold, the heat-drops rolled off their foreheads as they walked, they were so frightened at being late. But the porters would not budge a foot quicker than they chose, and as they were not poor four-footed carriers their employers dared not thrash them, though most willingly would they have done so.

The road seemed terribly long to the anxious tradesmen, to the plodding porters, to the poor little man inside the stove, as he kept sinking and rising, sinking and rising, with each of their steps.

Where they were going he had no idea, only after a very long time he lost the sense of the fresh icy wind blowing on his face through the brass-work above, and felt by their movements beneath him that they were mounting steps or stairs. Then he heard a great many different voices, but he could not understand what was being said. He felt that his bearers paused some time, then moved on and on again. Their feet went so softly he thought they must be moving on carpet, and as he felt a warm air come to him he concluded that he was in some heated chambers, for he was a clever little fellow, and could put two and two together, though he was so hungry and so thirsty and his empty stomach felt so strangely. They must have gone, he thought, through some very great number of rooms, for they walked so long on and on, on and on. At last the stove was set down again, and, happily for him, set so that his feet were downward.

What he fancied was that he was in some museum, like that which he had seen in the city of Innspruck.

The voices he heard were very hushed, and the steps seemed to go away, far away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not look out, but he peeped through the brass-work, and all he could see was a big carved lion’s head in ivory, with a gold crown atop. It belonged to a velvet fauteuil, but he could not see the chair, only the ivory lion.

There was a delicious fragrance in the air,—a fragrance as of flowers. “Only how can it be flowers?” thought August. “It is November!”

From afar off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet as the spinnet’s had been, but so much fuller, so much richer, seeming as though a chorus of angels were singing all together. August ceased to think of the museum: he thought of heaven. “Are we gone to the Master?” he thought, remembering the words of Hirschvogel.

All was so still around him; there was no sound anywhere except the sound of the far-off choral music.

He did not know it, but he was in the royal castle of Berg, and the music he heard was the music of Wagner, who was playing in a distant room some of the motives of “Parsival.”

Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and he heard a low voice say, close behind him, “So!” An exclamation no doubt, he thought, of admiration and wonder at the beauty of Hirschvogel.

Then the same voice said, after a long pause, during which no doubt, as August thought, this new-comer was examining all the details of the wondrous fire-tower, “It was well bought; it is exceedingly beautiful! It is most undoubtedly the work of Augustin Hirschvogel.”

Then the hand of the speaker turned the round handle of the brass door, and the fainting soul of the poor little prisoner within grew sick with fear.

The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn open, some one bent down and looked in, and the same voice that he had heard in praise of its beauty called aloud, in surprise, “What is this in it? A live child!”

Then August, terrified beyond all self-control, and dominated by one master-passion, sprang out of the body of the stove and fell at the feet of the speaker.

“Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr, let me stay!” he sobbed. “I have come all the way with Hirschvogel!”

Some gentlemen’s hands seized him, not gently by any means, and their lips angrily muttered in his ear, “Little knave, peace! be quiet! hold your tongue! It is the king!”

They were about to drag him out of the august atmosphere as if he had been some venomous, dangerous beast come there to slay, but the voice he had heard speak of the stove said, in kind accents, “Poor little child! he is very young. Let him go: let him speak to me.”

The word of a king is law to his courtiers: so, sorely against their wish, the angry and astonished chamberlains let August slide out of their grasp, and he stood there in his little rough sheepskin coat and his thick, mud-covered boots, with his curling hair all in a tangle, in the midst of the most beautiful chamber he had ever dreamed of, and in the presence of a young man with a beautiful dark face, and eyes full of dreams and fire; and the young man said to him,—

“My child, how came you here, hidden in this stove? Be not afraid: tell me the truth. I am the king.”

August in an instinct of homage cast his great battered black hat with the tarnished gold tassels down on the floor of the room, and folded his little brown hands in supplication. He was too intensely in earnest to be in any way abashed; he was too lifted out of himself by his love for Hirschvogel to be conscious of any awe before any earthly majesty. He was only so glad—so glad it was the king. Kings were always kind; so the Tyrolese think, who love their lords.

“Oh, dear king!” he said, with trembling entreaty in his faint little voice, “Hirschvogel was ours, and we have loved it all our lives; and father sold it. And when I saw that it did really go from us, then I said to myself I would go with it; and I have come all the way inside it. And last night it spoke and said beautiful things. And I do pray you to let me live with it, and I will go out every morning and cut wood for it and you, if only you will let me stay beside it. No one ever has fed it with fuel but me since I grew big enough, and it loves me;—it does indeed; it said so last night; and it said that it had been happier with us than if it were in any palace——”

And then his breath failed him, and, as he lifted his little, eager, pale face to the young king’s, great tears were falling down his cheeks.

Now, the king likes all poetic and uncommon things, and there was that in the child’s face which pleased and touched him. He motioned to his gentlemen to leave the little boy alone.

“What is your name?” he asked him.

“I am August Strehla. My father is Hans Strehla. We live in Hall in the Innthal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so long,—so long!”

His lips quivered with a broken sob.

“And have you truly travelled inside this stove all the way from Tyrol?”

“Yes,” said August; “no one thought to look inside till you did.”

The king laughed; then another view of the matter occurred to him.

“Who bought the stove of your father?” he inquired.

“Traders of Munich,” said August, who did not know that he ought not to have spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, and whose little brain was whirling and spinning dizzily round its one central idea.

“What sum did they pay your father, do you know?” asked the sovereign.

“Two hundred florins,” said August, with a great sigh of shame. “It was so much money, and he is so poor, and there are so many of us.”

The king turned to his gentlemen-in-waiting. “Did these dealers of Munich come with the stove.”

He was answered in the affirmative. He desired them to be sought for and brought before him. As one of his chamberlains hastened on the errand, the monarch looked at August with compassion.

“You are very pale, little fellow: when did you eat last?”

“I had some bread and sausage with me; yesterday afternoon I finished it.”

“You would like to eat now?”

“If I might have a little water I would be glad; my throat is very dry.”

The king had water and wine brought for him, and cake also; but August, though he drank eagerly, could not swallow anything. His mind was in too great a tumult.

“May I stay with Hirschvogel?—may I stay?” he said, with feverish agitation.

“Wait a little,” said the king, and asked, abruptly, “What do you wish to be when you are a man?”

“A painter. I wish to be what Hirschvogel was,—I mean the master that made my Hirschvogel.”

“I understand,” said the king.

Then the two dealers were brought into their sovereign’s presence. They were so terribly alarmed, not being either so innocent or so ignorant as August was, that they were trembling as though they were being led to the slaughter, and they were so utterly astonished too at a child having come all the way from Tyrol in the stove, as a gentleman of the court had just told them this child had done, that they could not tell what to say or where to look, and presented a very foolish aspect indeed.

“Did you buy this Nürnberg stove of this little boy’s father for two hundred florins?” the king asked them; and his voice was no longer soft and kind as it had been when addressing the child, but very stern.

“Yes, your majesty,” murmured the trembling traders.

“And how much did the gentleman who purchased it for me give to you?”

“Two thousand ducats, your majesty,” muttered the dealers, frightened out of their wits, and telling the truth in their fright.

The gentleman was not present: he was a trusted counsellor in art matters of the king’s, and often made purchases for him.

The king smiled a little, and said nothing. The gentleman had made out the price to him as eleven thousand ducats.

“You will give at once to this boy’s father the two thousand gold ducats that you received, less the two hundred Austrian florins that you paid him,” said the king to his humiliated and abject subjects. “You are great rogues. Be thankful you are not more greatly punished.”

He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, and to one of these gave the mission of making the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge their ill-gotten gains.

August heard, and felt dazzled yet miserable. Two thousand gold Bavarian ducats for his father! Why, his father would never need to go any more to the salt-baking! And yet, whether for ducats or for florins, Hirschvogel was sold just the same, and would the king let him stay with it?—would he?

“Oh, do! oh, please do!” he murmured, joining his little brown weather-stained hands, and kneeling down before the young monarch, who himself stood absorbed in painful thought, for the deception so basely practised for the greedy sake of gain on him by a trusted counsellor was bitter to him.

He looked down on the child, and as he did so smiled once more.

“Rise up, my little man,” he said, in a kind voice; “kneel only to your God. Will I let you stay with your Hirschvogel? Yes, I will; you shall stay at my court, and you shall be taught to be a painter,—in oils or on porcelain as you will,—and you must grow up worthily, and win all the laurels at our Schools of Art, and if when you are twenty-one years old you have done well and bravely, then I will give you your Nürnberg stove, or, if I am no more living, then those who reign after me shall do so. And now go away with this gentleman, and be not afraid, and you shall light a fire every morning in Hirschvogel, but you will not need to go out and cut the wood.”

Then he smiled and stretched out his hand; the courtiers tried to make August understand that he ought to bow and touch it with his lips, but August could not understand that anyhow; he was too happy. He threw his two arms about the king’s knees, and kissed his feet passionately; then he lost all sense of where he was, and fainted away from hunger, and tire, and emotion, and wondrous joy.

As the darkness of his swoon closed in on him, he heard in his fancy the voice from Hirschvogel saying,—

“Let us be worthy our maker!”

He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy scholar, and promises to be a great man. Sometimes he goes back for a few days to Hall, where the gold ducats have made his father prosperous. In the old house-room there is a large white porcelain stove of Munich, the king’s gift to Dorothea and ’Gilda.

And August never goes home without going into the great church and saying his thanks to God, who blessed his strange winter’s journey in the Nürnberg stove. As for his dream in the dealers’ room that night, he will never admit that he did dream it; he still declares that he saw it all, and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. And who shall say that he did not? for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

FOOTNOTE:

[A] Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 1610, master-potter of Delft and Haarlem.

IN THE APPLE-COUNTRY

IT was in one of the green lanes of South Devonshire that Gemma, being quite tired out, threw herself down on the daisied grass and said to her grandfather,—

“Nonno, let us rest a little and eat.” Her grandfather said to her,—

“_Carina mia_, I would eat gladly, but we have nothing to eat. The satchel is empty.”

Gemma, lying chest downward on the turf, sighed, and buried her hands in her abundant curls and cooled her forehead on the damp grass. She was just thirteen years old, and she was so pretty that she made the heart of the old grandfather ache often when he looked at her and thought that she would most likely soon be left alone in the world, for her little brother Bindo could not be said to count for anything, being only ten years old. Gemma was very lovely indeed, being tall and lithe and gay, and full of grace, and having a beautiful changeable face, all light and color. But she was only thirteen, and all she could do to get her livelihood was to dance the _saltarello_ and the _tarantella_. She and her brother danced, which they did very prettily, and the old man whom they called Nonno told fortunes and performed some simple conjuring tricks, and these were all bad trades as times went, for nowadays nobody amuses himself with simple things, and the rural folk have grown as sharp and as serious as the city people, which to my thinking is a very great loss to the world, for merry people are generally kind people, and contented people are easily governed, and have no appetites for politics and philosophies and the like indigestible things.

Nonno and Gemma and Bindo were merry enough even on empty stomachs. The old man was as simple as a duck, and as gentle as a rabbit, and was rather more of a child than either of the children. Bindo was a little, round, playful, gleeful thing, like a little field-mouse, and Gemma was as gay as a lark, though she had to bear the burden of the only brains that there were in the family.

They were little Neapolitans; they had been born in a little cabin on the sunny shore facing Ischia, and in their infancy had tumbled about naked and glad as young dolphins in the bright blue waters. Then their parents had died,—their father at sea, their mother of fever,—and left them to the care of Nonno; Nonno, who was very old, so old that they thought he must have been made almost before the world itself, and who, after having been a showman of puppets to divert the poorest classes all his life, was so very poor himself then that he could hardly scrape enough together to get a little drink of thin wine and an inch or two of polenta. Being so very poor, he was seduced into accepting an engagement for himself and the children with a wicked man whose business it was in life to decoy poor little Italians and make money out of them in foreign lands. Nonno was so good and simple himself that he thought everybody was as harmless as he was, and his grief and amazement were very great when on reaching the English shores with this wicked man he found that the wicked man meant to give him the slip altogether and go off with the two children. By a mere hazard, Nonno, whose name was Epifania Santo (a droll name, but he himself had been a foundling), was able to defeat the wicked man so far that he got out of his clutches and took his grandchildren with him. But there they all three were in England, with no money at all, and nothing on earth but a few puppets, and a conjurer’s box of playthings, and the stilts on which the wicked man had had the children taught to walk. And in England they had now been four years, remaining there chiefly because they had no notion how to get home again, and partly because Nonno had such a great terror of the sea. He had suffered so much on the long voyage into which he had been entrapped from Naples, round by the Bay of Biscay up the Bristol Channel, that he would sooner have died there and then than have set foot again on board a sea-going vessel. So in England they had stayed, wandering about and picking up a few pence in villages and towns, and clinging together tenderly, and being very often hungry, cold, tired, roofless, but yet being all the while happy.

Sometimes, too, they fared well: the children’s brilliant uncommon beauty and pretty foreign accent often touched country-people’s hearts, and sometimes they would get bed and board at homely farm-houses high on lonely hills, or be made welcome without payment in little wayside inns. They had kept to the southwest part of the kingdom, never being able to afford other means of locomotion than their own feet, and the farthest distance they had ever compassed had been this far-south country-side, where the green woods and pastures roll down to the broad estuaries of Exe and Dart. This green, wet, shadowy country always seemed strange to the children; for a long while they thought it was always evening in England. They could remember the long sunshiny years at home, and the radiant air, and the blue, clear sky, and the sea that seemed always laughing. They could never forget it indeed, and when they were together they never talked of anything else: only the cactus-fruit and the green and black figs, the red tomatoes and the rough pomegranates, and the big balls of gold to be had in the orange woods just for the plucking; the boats with the pretty striped sails, and the villas with the marbles and the palms, and the islands all aglow in the sunset, and the distance you could see looking away, away, away into the immeasurable azure of the air. Oh, yes, they remembered it all, and at night they would weep for it, the old man’s slow salt tears mingling with the passionate rain of the childish eyes. Here it was green and pretty in its own way, but all so dark, so wet, so misty!

“When I try to see, there is a white wall of shadow,—I think it is shadow; perhaps it is fog, but it is always there,” said Gemma. “At home one looks, and looks, and looks; there is no end to it.”

Gemma longed sorely to go home; she had not minded the sea at all. Bindo, like Nonno, had been very ill on the voyage and cried even now whenever he saw a ship, for fear he should be going in it. Bindo was sadly babyish for ten years old; to make amends, his sister was almost a woman at thirteen.

They ought now to have been all three serious and alarmed, for Nonno’s satchel had not a penny in it, nor a crust, and they were all hungry, for it was noonday. But instead of being miserable they joked, and laughed, and kissed each other, as thousands of their country-folks at home with equally empty stomachs were doing, lying on sunny moles, or marble-strewn benches, or thymy turf under ilex shadows. But then in our dear Italy there is always the sun, the light, the air that kisses and feeds and sends to soft sleep her children, and Gemma and her brother and grandfather were in a wet English lane, with the clouds hurrying up over the distant hills by Dartmoor, and the raindrops still hanging to the great elm-boughs overhead.

Yet they were merry, and sang snatches of Neapolitan songs, and took no thought for the morrow. They were not far off Dartmouth, and they meant to go into the quaint old town by market-day, and the Dart fisher- and boating-folk were always kind to them. If they were hungry now they would eat to-morrow.

Suddenly, however, Nonno grew thoughtful as he looked at Gemma, lying face downward on the wet grass, her sandalled feet in air, a dragon-fly fluttering above her head.

“What would you do if I were to die, my _piccicotta_?” said the poor old man, all at once remembering he was nigh eighty years old. Gemma raised herself, and said nothing. Her eyes, which were very beautiful eyes, grew sad and moist.

“I would take care of Bindo, Nonno,” she answered, at last. “Do not be afraid of that.”

“But how? It is easy to say. But how?”

“I suppose I could dance at theatres,” said Gemma after reflection. Nonno shook his head.

“For the theatres you would need to dance differently: it is all spinning, craning, drilling there; you dance, my child, as a flower in the wind. The theatres do not care for that.”

“Then I do not know,” said Gemma. “But something I would do. Bindo should not suffer.”

“You are a good child,” said the old man, tenderly. She sank down again on the grass.

“Do not think of dying, Nonno,” she said. “It is all so dark where death is.”

“Not when one gets to the saints,” said the simple old man. He always fancied Paradise just like Amalfi,—his own Amalfi, where long ago, so long ago, he had run and leaped, a merry naked boy, in the azure waves, and caught the glittering sea-mouse and the pink column of the gemmia in his hands. Paradise would be just like Amalfi; the promise of it consoled him as he trotted on tired limbs along the wet gravel of English market-roads, or meekly bore the noisy horse-play of English village crowds.