Project Gutenberg's The Nürnberg Stove, by Louisa de la Ramé (AKA Ouida)
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Title: The Nürnberg Stove
Author: Louisa de la Ramé (AKA Ouida)
Illustrator: Maria L. Kirk
Release Date: April 6, 2007 [EBook #20997]
Language: English
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THE NÜRNBERG STOVE
EIGHTH EDITION
[Illustration: FOR WHAT HE SAW WAS NOTHING LESS THAN ALL THE
BRIC-À-BRAC IN MOTION _Page 64_]
THE NÜRNBERG STOVE
BY
LOUISA DE LA RAMÉ
(OUIDA)
_ILLUSTRATED IN COLOR BY_
MARIA L. KIRK
[Illustration]
PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
PHILADELPHIA. U. S. A.
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
FOR WHAT HE SAW WAS NOTHING LESS THAN ALL THE BRIC-À-BRAC
IN MOTION _Frontispiece_
HE WENT ON THROUGH THE STREETS, PAST THE STONE MAN-AT-ARMS
OF THE GUARD-HOUSE 9
"IT IS A SIN, IT IS A THEFT, IT IS AN INFAMY," HE SAID 34
AUGUST OPENED THE WINDOW, CRAMMED THE SNOW INTO HIS MOUTH
AGAIN AND AGAIN 55
THE NÜRNBERG STOVE
I
August lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favorite
name for several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one
especial little Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most
charming Old-World places that I know, and August for his part
did not know any other. It has the green meadows and the great
mountains all about it, and the gray-green glacier-fed water
rushes by it. It has paved streets and enchanting little shops
that have all latticed panes and iron gratings to them; it has a
very grand old Gothic church, that has the noblest blendings of
light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead knights, and a look of
infinite strength and repose as a church should have. Then there
is the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out of greenery and
looking down on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid river;
and there is an old schloss which has been made into a guard-house,
with battlements and frescos and heraldic devices in gold and
colors, and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size in
his niche and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but
close at hand, is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and
tombs, and a colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a
small and very rich chapel: indeed, so full is the little town of
the undisturbed past, that to walk in it is like opening a missal
of the Middle Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated with saints
and warriors, and it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, by
reason of its monuments and its historic color, that I marvel
much no one has ever cared to sing its praises. The old pious
heroic life of an age at once more restful and more brave than
ours still leaves its spirit there, and then there is the girdle
of the mountains all around, and that alone means strength,
peace, majesty.
In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
people in the stone-paved irregular square where the grand church
stands.
He was a small boy of nine years at that time,--a chubby-faced
little man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of
curls the brown of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was
poor, and there were many mouths at home to feed. In this country
the winters are long and very cold, the whole land lies wrapped
in snow for many months, and this night that he was trotting
home, with a jug of beer in his numb red hands, was terribly
cold and dreary. The good burghers of Hall had shut their double
shutters, and the few lamps there were flickered dully behind
their quaint, old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains indeed
were beautiful, all snow-white under the stars that are so big in
frost. Hardly any one was astir; a few good souls wending home
from vespers, a tired post-boy who blew a shrill blast from his
tasselled horn as he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and
little August hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin
coat, were all who were abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the
good folks of Hall go early to their beds. He could not run, or
he would have spilled the beer; he was half frozen and a little
frightened, but he kept up his courage by saying over and over
again to himself, "I shall soon be at home with dear Hirschvogel."
[Illustration: HE WENT ON THROUGH THE STREETS, PAST THE STONE
MAN-AT-ARMS OF THE GUARD-HOUSE]
He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the
guard-house, and so into the place where the great church was,
and where near it stood his father, Karl Strehla's house, with a
sculptured Bethlehem over the door-way, and the Pilgrimage of the
Three Kings painted on its wall. He had been sent on a long
errand outside the gates in the afternoon, over the frozen
fields and the broad white snow, and had been belated, and had
thought he had heard the wolves behind him at every step, and had
reached the town in a great state of terror, thankful with all
his little panting heart to see the oil-lamp burning under the
first house-shrine. But he had not forgotten to call for the
beer, and he carried it carefully now, though his hands were so
numb that he was afraid they would let the jug down every moment.
The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice of the
beautiful old wooden houses; the moonlight shone on the gilded
signs, the lambs, the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint
devices that hung before the doors; covered lamps burned before
the Nativities and Crucifixions painted on the walls or let into
the wood-work; here and there, where a shutter had not been
closed, a ruddy fire-light lit up a homely interior, with the
noisy band of children clustering round the house-mother and a
big brown loaf, or some gossips spinning and listening to the
cobbler's or the barber's story of a neighbor, while the
oil-wicks glimmered, and the hearth-logs blazed, and the
chestnuts sputtered in their iron roasting-pot. Little August saw
all these things, as he saw everything with his two big bright
eyes that had such curious lights and shadows in them; but he
went heedfully on his way for the sake of the beer which a single
slip of the foot would make him spill. At his knock and call the
solid oak door, four centuries old if one, flew open, and the boy
darted in with his beer, and shouted, with all the force of
mirthful lungs, "Oh, dear Hirschvogel, but for the thought of you
I should have died!"
It was a large barren room into which he rushed with so much
pleasure, and the bricks were bare and uneven. It had a
walnut-wood press, handsome and very old, a broad deal table, and
several wooden stools for all its furniture; but at the top of
the chamber, sending out warmth and color together as the lamp
shed its rays upon it, was a tower of porcelain, burnished with
all the hues of a king's peacock and a queen's jewels, and
surmounted with armed figures, and shields, and flowers of
heraldry, and a great golden crown upon the highest summit of
all.
II
It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the letters H. R. H., for
it was in every portion the handwork of the great potter of
Nürnberg, Augustin Hirschvogel, who put his mark thus, as all the
world knows.
The stove no doubt had stood in palaces and been made for
princes, had warmed the crimson stockings of cardinals and the
gold-broidered shoes of archduchesses, had glowed in presence-chambers
and lent its carbon to help kindle sharp brains in anxious
councils of state; no one knew what it had seen or done or been
fashioned for; but it was a right royal thing. Yet perhaps it had
never been more useful than it was now in this poor desolate
room, sending down heat and comfort into the troop of children
tumbled together on a wolf-skin at its feet, who received frozen
August among them with loud shouts of joy.
"Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold!" said August,
kissing its gilded lion's claws. "Is father not in, Dorothea?"
"No, dear. He is late."
Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark-haired and serious, and
with a sweet sad face, for she had had many cares laid on her
shoulders, even whilst still a mere baby. She was the eldest of
the Strehla family, and there were ten of them in all. Next to
her there came Jan and Karl and Otho, big lads, gaining a little
for their own living; and then came August, who went up in the
summer to the high Alps with the farmers' cattle, but in winter
could do nothing to fill his own little platter and pot; and then
all the little ones, who could only open their mouths to be fed
like young birds,--Albrecht and Hilda, and Waldo and Christof,
and last of all little three-year-old Ermengilda, with eyes like
forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them the life of their
mother.
They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, half Italian, so
common in the Tyrol; some of the children were white and golden
as lilies, others were brown and brilliant as fresh-fallen
chestnuts. The father was a good man, but weak and weary with so
many to find for and so little to do it with. He worked at the
salt-furnaces, and by that gained a few florins; people said he
would have worked better and kept his family more easily if he
had not loved his pipe and a draught of ale too well; but this
had only been said of him after his wife's death, when trouble
and perplexity had begun to dull a brain never too vigorous, and
to enfeeble further a character already too yielding. As it was,
the wolf often bayed at the door of the Strehla household,
without a wolf from the mountains coming down. Dorothea was one
of those maidens who almost work miracles, so far can their
industry and care and intelligence make a home sweet and
wholesome and a single loaf seem to swell into twenty. The
children were always clean and happy, and the table was seldom
without its big pot of soup once a day. Still, very poor they
were, and Dorothea's heart ached with shame, for she knew that
their father's debts were many for flour and meat and clothing.
Of fuel to feed the big stove they had always enough without
cost, for their mother's father was alive, and sold wood and fir
cones and coke, and never grudged them to his grandchildren,
though he grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and hapless, dreamy
ways.
"Father says we are never to wait for him: we will have supper,
now you have come home, dear," said Dorothea, who, however she
might fret her soul in secret as she knitted their hose and
mended their shirts, never let her anxieties cast a gloom on the
children; only to August she did speak a little sometimes,
because he was so thoughtful and so tender of her always, and
knew as well as she did that there were troubles about money,--though,
these troubles were vague to them both, and the debtors were
patient and kindly, being neighbors all in the old twisting
streets between the guard-house and the river.
Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big slices of brown bread
swimming in it and some onions bobbing up and down: the bowl was
soon emptied by ten wooden spoons, and then the three eldest boys
slipped off to bed, being tired with their rough bodily labor in
the snow all day, and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel by the
stove and set it whirring, and the little ones got August down
upon the old worn wolf-skin and clamored to him for a picture or
a story. For August was the artist of the family.
He had a piece of planed deal that his father had given him, and
some sticks of charcoal, and he would draw a hundred things he
had seen in the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when the
children had seen enough of it and sketching another in its
stead,--faces and dogs' heads, and men in sledges, and old women
in their furs, and pine-trees, and cocks and hens, and all sorts
of animals, and now and then--very reverently--a Madonna and
Child. It was all very rough, for there was no one to teach him
anything. But it was all life-like, and kept the whole troop of
children shrieking with laughter, or watching breathless, with
wide open, wondering, awed eyes.
They were all so happy: what did they care for the snow outside?
Their little bodies were warm, and their hearts merry; even
Dorothea, troubled about the bread for the morrow, laughed as she
spun; and August, with all his soul in his work, and little rosy
Ermengilda's cheek on his shoulder, glowing after his frozen
afternoon, cried out loud, smiling, as he looked up at the stove
that was shedding its heat down on them all,--
"Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as great and good as the
sun! No; you are greater and better, I think, because he goes
away nobody knows where all these long, dark, cold hours, and
does not care how people die for want of him; but you--you are
always ready: just a little bit of wood to feed you, and you will
make a summer for us all the winter through!"
The grand old stove seemed to smile through all its iridescent
surface at the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though
it had known three centuries and more, had known but very little
gratitude.
It was one of those magnificent stoves in enamelled faïence which
so excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nürnberg that in
a body they demanded of the magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel
should be forbidden to make any more of them,--the magistracy,
happily, proving of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with
the wish of the artisans to cripple their greater fellow.
It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica lustre
which Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was
making love to the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards
married. There was the statue of a king at each corner, modelled
with as much force and splendor as his friend Albrecht Dürer
could have given unto them on copperplate or canvas. The body of
the stove itself was divided into panels, which had the Ages of
Man painted on them in polychrome; the borders of the panels had
roses and holly and laurel and other foliage, and German mottoes
in black letter of odd Old-World moralizing, such as the old
Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to have on their
chimney-places and their drinking-cups, their dishes and flagons.
The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was
radiant everywhere with that brilliant coloring of which the
Hirschvogel family, painters on glass and great in chemistry as
they were, were all masters.
The stove was a very grand thing, as I say: possibly Hirschvogel
had made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when
he was an imperial guest at Innspruck and fashioned so many
things for the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the
burgher's daughter, who gained an archduke's heart by her beauty
and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of
the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla,
who had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins
where he was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken
it home, and only thought it worth finding because it was such a
good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since
then the stove had stood in the big desolate empty room, warming
three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen nothing
prettier perhaps in all its many years than the children tumbled
now in a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the
Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born with
beauty: white or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon,
and when they went into the church to mass, with their curling
locks and their clasped hands, they stood under the grim statues
like cherubs flown down off some fresco.
III
"Tell us a story, August," they cried, in chorus, when they had
seen charcoal pictures till they were tired; and August did as he
did every night pretty nearly,--looked up at the stove and told
them what he imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows
of the human being who figured on the panels from his cradle to
his grave.
To the children the stove was a household god. In summer they
laid a mat of fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up with
green boughs and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the
Tyrol country. In winter all their joys centred in it, and
scampering home from school over the ice and snow they were
happy, knowing that they would soon be cracking nuts or roasting
chestnuts in the broad ardent glow of its noble tower, which rose
eight feet high above them with all its spires and pinnacles and
crowns.
Once a travelling peddler had told them that the letters on it
meant Augustin Hirschvogel, and that Hirschvogel had been a great
German potter and painter, like his father before him, in the
art-sanctified city of Nürnberg, and had made many such stoves,
that were all miracles of beauty and of workmanship, putting all
his heart and his soul and his faith into his labors, as the men
of those earlier ages did, and thinking but little of gold or
praise.
An old trader, too, who sold curiosities not far from the church
had told August a little more about the brave family of
Hirschvogel, whose houses can be seen in Nürnberg to this day; of
old Veit, the first of them, who painted the Gothic windows of
St. Sebald with the marriage of the Margravine; of his sons and
of his grandsons, potters, painters, engravers all, and chief of
them great Augustin, the Luca della Robbia of the North. And
August's imagination, always quick, had made a living personage
out of these few records, and saw Hirschvogel as though he were
in the flesh walking up and down the Maximilian-Strass in his
visit to Innspruck, and maturing beautiful things in his brain as
he stood on the bridge and gazed on the emerald-green flood of
the Inn.
So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel in the family, as
if it were a living creature, and little August was very proud
because he had been named after that famous old dead German who
had had the genius to make so glorious a thing. All the children
loved the stove, but with August the love of it was a passion;
and in his secret heart he used to say to himself, "When I am a
man, I will make just such things too, and then I will set
Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house that I will build
myself in Innspruck just outside the gates, where the chestnuts
are, by the river: that is what I will do when I am a man."
For August, a salt-baker's son and a little cow-keeper when he
was anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the
high Alps with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around
him, was quite certain that he would live for greater things than
driving the herds up when the spring-tide came among the blue sea
of gentians, or toiling down in the town with wood and with
timber as his father and grandfather did every day of their
lives. He was a strong and healthy little fellow, fed on the free
mountain-air, and he was very happy, and loved his family
devotedly, and was as active as a squirrel and as playful as a
hare; but he kept his thoughts to himself, and some of them went
a very long way for a little boy who was only one among many, and
to whom nobody had ever paid any attention except to teach him
his letters and tell him to fear God. August in winter was only a
little, hungry school-boy, trotting to be catechised by the
priest, or to bring the loaves from the bake-house, or to carry
his father's boots to the cobbler; and in summer he was only one
of hundreds of cow-boys, who drove the poor, half-blind,
blinking, stumbling cattle, ringing their throat-bells, out into
the sweet intoxication of the sudden sunlight, and lived up with
them in the heights among the Alpine roses, with only the clouds
and the snow-summits near. But he was always thinking, thinking,
thinking, for all that; and under his little sheepskin winter
coat and his rough hempen summer shirt his heart had and much
courage in it as Hofer's ever had,--great Hofer, who is a
household word in all the Innthal, and whom August always
reverently remembered when he went to the city of Innspruck and
ran out by the foaming water-mill and under the wooded height of
Berg Isel.
August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children
stories, his own little brown face growing red with excitement as
his imagination glowed to fever-heat. That human being on the
panels, who was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy
playing among flowers, as a lover sighing under a casement, as a
soldier in the midst of strife, as a father with children round
him, as a weary, old, blind man on crutches, and, lastly, as a
ransomed soul raised up by angels, had always had the most
intense interest for August, and he had made, not one history for
him, but a thousand; he seldom told them the same tale twice. He
had never seen a story-book in his life; his primer and his
mass-book were all the volumes he had. But nature had given him
Fancy, and she is a good fairy that makes up for the want of very
many things! only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor
thing, and then she is of no use at all.
"It is time for you all to go to bed, children," said Dorothea,
looking up from her spinning. "Father is very late to-night; you
must not sit up for him."
"Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea!" they pleaded; and little
rosy and golden Ermengilda climbed up into her lap. "Hirschvogel
is so warm, the beds are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell us
another tale, August?"
"No," cried August, whose face had lost its light, now that his
story had come to an end, and who sat serious, with his hands
clasped on his knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the
stove.
"It is only a week to Christmas," he said, suddenly.
"Grandmother's big cakes!" chuckled little Christof, who was five
years old, and thought Christmas meant a big cake and nothing
else.
"What will Santa Claus find for 'Gilda if she be good?" murmured
Dorothea over the child's sunny head; for, however hard poverty
might pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that Dorothea would
not find some wooden toy and some rosy apples to put in her
little sister's socks.
"Father Max has promised me a big goose, because I saved the
calf's life in June," said August; it was the twentieth time he
had told them so that month, he was so proud of it.
"And Aunt Maïla will be sure to send us wine and honey and a
barrel of flour; she always does," said Albrecht. Their aunt
Maïla had a chalet and a little farm over on the green slopes
towards Dorp Ampas.
"I shall go up into the woods and get Hirschvogel's crown," said
August; they always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine
boughs and ivy and mountain-berries. The heat soon withered the
crown; but it was part of the religion of the day to them, as
much so as it was to cross themselves in church and raise their
voices in the "O Salutaris Hostia."
And they fell chatting of all they would do on the Christ-night,
and one little voice piped loud against another's, and they were
as happy as though their stockings would be full of golden purses
and jewelled toys, and the big goose in the soup-pot seemed to
them such a meal as kings would envy.
IV
In the midst of their chatter and laughter a blast of frozen air
and a spray of driven snow struck like ice through the room, and
reached them even in the warmth of the old wolf-skins and the
great stove. It was the door which had opened and let in the
cold; it was their father who had come home.
The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the
one wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove, and August flew to
set the jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay
pipe; for their father was good to them all, and seldom raised
his voice in anger, and they had been trained by the mother they
had loved to dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.
To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones'
welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat
down heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.
"Are you not well, dear father?" his daughter asked him.
"I am well enough," he answered, dully, and sat there with his
head bent, letting the lighted pipe grow cold.
He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with
labor.
"Take the children to bed," he said, suddenly, at last, and
Dorothea obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove;
at nine years old, and when one earns money in the summer from
the farmers, one is not altogether a child any more, at least in
one's own estimation.
August did not heed his father's silence: he was used to it. Karl
Strehla was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was
usually too tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his
beer and sleep. August lay on the wolf-skin, dreamy and
comfortable, looking up through his drooping eyelids at the
golden coronets on the crest of the great stove, and wondering
for the millionth time whom it had been made for, and what grand
places and scenes it had known.
Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds;
the cuckoo-clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her
father and the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning,
saying nothing. She thought he had been drinking in some tavern;
it had been often so with him of late.
There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice;
August dropped asleep, his curls falling over his face;
Dorothea's wheel hummed like a cat.
Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the
pipe on the ground.
"I have sold Hirschvogel," he said; and his voice was husky and
ashamed in his throat. The spinning-wheel stopped. August sprang
erect out of his sleep.
"Sold Hirschvogel!" If their father had dashed the holy crucifix
on the floor at their feet and spat on it, they could not have
shuddered under the horror of a greater blasphemy.
"I have sold Hirschvogel!" said Karl Strehla, in the same husky,
dogged voice. "I have sold it to a travelling trader in such
things for two hundred florins. What would you?--I owe double
that. He saw it this morning when you were all out. He will pack
it and take it to Munich to-morrow."
Dorothea gave a low shrill cry:
"Oh, father!--the children--in mid-winter!"
She turned white as the snow without; her words died away in her
throat.
August stood, half blind with sleep, staring with dazed eyes as
his cattle stared at the sun when they came out from their
winter's prison.
"It is not true! It is not true!" he muttered. "You are jesting,
father?"
Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.
"It is true. Would you like to know what is true too?--that the
bread you eat, and the meat you put in this pot, and the roof you
have over your heads, are none of them paid for, have been none
of them paid for for months and months: if it had not been for
your grandfather I should have been in prison all summer and
autumn, and he is out of patience and will do no more now. There
is no work to be had; the masters go to younger men: they say I
work ill; it may be so. Who can keep his head above water with
ten hungry children dragging him down? When your mother lived, it
was different. Boy, you stare at me as if I were a mad dog! You
have made a god of yon china thing. Well--it goes: goes
to-morrow. Two hundred florins, that is something. It will keep
me out of prison for a little, and with the spring things may
turn----"
August stood like a creature paralyzed. His eyes were wide open,
fastened on his father's with terror and incredulous horror; his
face had grown as white as his sister's; his chest heaved with
tearless sobs.
"It is not true! It is not true!" he echoed, stupidly. It seemed
to him that the very skies must fall, and the earth perish, if
they could take away Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of
tearing down God's sun out of the heavens.
"You will find it true," said his father, doggedly, and angered
because he was in his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered
away the heirloom and treasure of his race and the comfort and
health-giver of his young children. "You will find it true. The
dealer has paid me half the money to-night, and will pay me the
other half to-morrow when he packs it up and takes it away to
Munich. No doubt it is worth a great deal more,--at least I
suppose so, as he gives that,--but beggars cannot be choosers.
The little black stove in the kitchen will warm you all just as
well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor house like
this, when one can make two hundred florins by it? Dorothea, you
never sobbed more when your mother died. What is it, when all is
said?--a bit of hardware much too grand-looking for such a room
as this. If all the Strehlas had not been born fools it would
have been sold a century ago, when it was dug up out of the
ground. 'It is a stove for a museum,' the trader said when he saw
it. To a museum let it go."
August gave a shrill shriek like a hare's when it is caught for
its death, and threw himself on his knees at his father's feet.
"Oh, father, father!" he cried, convulsively, his hands closing
on Strehla's knees, and his uplifted face blanched and distorted
with terror. "Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what you
say? Send _it_ away--our life, our sun, our joy, our comfort? We
shall all die in the dark and cold. Sell _me_ rather. Sell me to
any trade or any pain you like; I will not mind. But Hirschvogel!--it
is like selling the very cross off the altar! You must be in
jest. You could not do such a thing--you could not!--you who have
always been gentle and good, and who have sat in the warmth here
year after year with our mother. It is not a piece of hardware,
as you say; it is a living thing, for a great man's thoughts and
fancies have put life into it, and it loves us though we are only
poor little children, and we love it with all our hearts and
souls, and up in heaven I am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows! Oh,
listen; I will go and try and get work to-morrow! I will ask them
to let me cut ice or make the paths through the snow. There must
be something I could do, and I will beg the people we owe money
to to wait; they are all neighbors, they will be patient. But
sell Hirschvogel!--oh, never! never! never! Give the florins back
to the vile man. Tell him it would be like selling the shroud out
of mother's coffin, or the golden curls off Ermengilda's head!
Oh, father, dear father! do hear me, for pity's sake!"
Strehla was moved by the boy's anguish. He loved his children,
though he was often weary of them, and their pain was pain to
him. But besides emotion, and stronger than emotion, was the
anger that August roused in him: he hated and despised himself
for the barter of the heirloom of his race, and every word of the
child stung him with a stinging sense of shame.
And he spoke in his wrath rather than in his sorrow.
"You are a little fool," he said, harshly, as they had never
heard him speak. "You rave like a play-actor. Get up and go to
bed. The stove is sold. There is no more to be said. Children
like you have nothing to do with such matters. The stove is sold,
and goes to Munich to-morrow. What is it to you? Be thankful I
can get bread for you. Get on your legs, I say, and go to bed."
Strehla took up the jug of ale as he paused, and drained it
slowly as a man who had no cares.
August sprang to his feet and threw his hair back off his face;
the blood rushed into his cheeks, making them scarlet; his great
soft eyes flamed alight with furious passion.
"You _dare_ not!" he cried, aloud, "you dare not sell it, I say!
It is not yours alone; it is ours----"
Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks with a force that
shivered it to atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his son a
blow that felled him to the floor. It was the first time in all
his life that he had ever raised his hand against any one of his
children.
Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at his elbow and stumbled
off to his own chamber with a cloud before his eyes.
"What has happened?" said August, a little while later, as he
opened his eyes and saw Dorothea weeping above him on the
wolf-skin before the stove. He had been struck backward, and his
head had fallen on the hard bricks where the wolf-skin did not
reach. He sat up a moment, with his face bent upon his hands.
"I remember now," he said, very low, under his breath.
Dorothea showered kisses on him, while her tears fell like rain.
"But, oh, dear, how could you speak so to father?" she murmured.
"It was very wrong."
"No, I was right," said August, and his little mouth, that
hitherto had only curled in laughter, curved downward with a
fixed and bitter seriousness. "How dare he? How dare he?" he
muttered, with his head sunk in his hands. "It is not his alone.
It belongs to us all. It is as much yours and mine as it is his."
Dorothea could only sob in answer. She was too frightened to
speak. The authority of their parents in the house had never in
her remembrance been questioned.
"Are you hurt by the fall, dear August?" she murmured, at length,
for he looked to her so pale and strange.
"Yes--no. I do not know. What does it matter?"
He sat up upon the wolf-skin with passionate pain upon his face;
all his soul was in rebellion, and he was only a child and was
powerless.
"It is a sin; it is a theft; it is an infamy," he said, slowly,
his eyes fastened on the gilded feet of Hirschvogel.
"Oh, August, do not say such things of father!" sobbed his
sister. "Whatever he does, _we_ ought to think it right."
[Illustration: "IT IS A SIN, IT IS A THEFT, IT IS AN INFAMY," HE SAID]
August laughed aloud.
"Is it right that he should spend his money in drink?--that he
should let orders lie unexecuted?--that he should do his work so
ill that no one cares to employ him?--that he should live on
grandfather's charity, and then dare sell a thing that is ours
every whit as much as it is his? To sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear
God! I would sooner sell my soul!"
"August!" cried Dorothea, with piteous entreaty. He terrified
her, she could not recognize her little, gay, gentle brother in
those fierce and blasphemous words.
August laughed aloud again; then all at once his laughter broke
down into bitterest weeping. He threw himself forward on the
stove, covering it with kisses, and sobbing as though his heart
would burst from his bosom.
What could he do? Nothing, nothing, nothing!
"August, dear August," whispered Dorothea, piteously, and
trembling all over,--for she was a very gentle girl, and fierce
feeling terrified her,--"August, do not lie there. Come to bed:
it is quite late. In the morning you will be calmer. It is
horrible indeed, and we shall die of cold, at least the little
ones; but if it be father's will----"
"Let me alone," said August, through his teeth, striving to still
the storm of sobs that shook him from head to foot. "Let me
alone. In the morning!--how can you speak of the morning?"
"Come to bed, dear," sighed his sister. "Oh, August, do not lie
and look like that! you frighten me. Do come to bed."
"I shall stay here."
"Here! all night!"
"They might take it in the night. Besides, to leave it _now_!"
"But it is cold! the fire is out."
"It will never be warm any more, nor shall we."
All his childhood had gone out of him, all his gleeful, careless,
sunny temper had gone with it; he spoke sullenly and wearily,
choking down the great sobs in his chest. To him it was as if the
end of the world had come.
His sister lingered by him while striving to persuade him to go
to his place in the little crowded bedchamber with Albrecht and
Waldo and Christof. But it was in vain. "I shall stay here," was
all he answered her. And he stayed,--all the night long.
V
The lamps went out; the rats came and ran across the floor; as
the hours crept on through midnight and past, the cold intensified
and the air of the room grew like ice. August did not move; he
lay with his face downward on the golden and rainbow-hued
pedestal of the household treasure, which henceforth was to be
cold for evermore, an exiled thing in a foreign city in a far-off
land.
Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers came down the
stairs and let themselves out, each bearing his lantern and going
to his work in stone-yard and timber-yard and at the salt-works.
They did not notice him; they did not know what had happened.
A little later his sister came down with a light in her hand to
make ready the house ere morning should break.
She stole up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder timidly.
"Dear August, you must be frozen. August, do look up! do speak!"
August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sullen look in them
that she had never seen there. His face was ashen white: his lips
were like fire. He had not slept all night; but his passionate
sobs had given way to delirious waking dreams and numb senseless
trances, which had alternated one on another all through the
freezing, lonely, horrible hours.
"It will never be warm again," he muttered, "never again!"
Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands.
"August! do you not know me?" she cried, in an agony. "I am
Dorothea. Wake up, dear--wake up! It is morning, only so dark!"
August shuddered all over.
"The morning!" he echoed.
He slowly rose up on to his feet.
"I will go to grandfather," he said, very low. "He is always
good: perhaps he could save it."
Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of the house-door drowned
his words. A strange voice called aloud through the keyhole,--
"Let me in! Quick!--there is no time to lose! More snow like
this, and the roads will all be blocked. Let me in! Do you hear?
I am come to take the great stove."
August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his eyes blazing.
"You shall never touch it!" he screamed; "you shall never touch
it!"
"Who shall prevent us?" laughed a big man, who was a Bavarian,
amused at the fierce little figure fronting him.
"I!" said August. "You shall never have it! you shall kill me
first!"
"Strehla," said the big man, as August's father entered the room,
"you have got a little mad dog here: muzzle him."
One way and another they did muzzle him. He fought like a little
demon, and hit out right and left, and one of his blows gave the
Bavarian a black eye. But he was soon mastered by four grown men,
and his father flung him with no light hand out from the door of
the back entrance, and the buyers of the stately and beautiful
stove set to work to pack it heedfully and carry it away.
When Dorothea stole out to look for August, he was nowhere in
sight. She went back to little 'Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbed
over the child, whilst the others stood looking on, dimly
understanding that with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth of
their bodies, all the light of their hearth.
Even their father now was sorry and ashamed; but two hundred
florins seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought the
children could warm themselves quite as well at the black iron
stove in the kitchen. Besides, whether he regretted it now or
not, the work of the Nürnberg potter was sold irrevocably, and he
had to stand still and see the men from Munich wrap it in
manifold wrappings and bear it out into the snowy air to where an
ox-cart stood in waiting for it.
In another moment Hirschvogel was gone,--gone forever and aye.
August had stood still for a time, leaning, sick and faint from
the violence that had been used to him, against the back wall of
the house. The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the
backs of other houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze
Tower and the peaks of the mountains.
Into the court an old neighbor hobbled for water, and, seeing the
boy, said to him,--
"Child, is it true your father is selling the big painted stove?"
August nodded his head, then burst into a passion of tears.
"Well, for sure he is a fool," said the neighbor. "Heaven forgive
me for calling him so before his own child! but the stove was
worth a mint of money. I do remember in my young days, in old
Anton's time (that was your great-grandfather, my lad), a
stranger from Vienna saw it, and said that it was worth its
weight in gold."
August's sobs went on their broken, impetuous course.
"I loved it! I loved it!" he moaned. "I do not care what its
value was. I loved it! _I loved it!_"
"You little simpleton!" said the old man, kindly. "But you are
wiser than your father, when all's said. If sell it he must, he
should have taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Sprüz, who
would have given him honest value. But no doubt they took him
over his beer,--ay, ay! but if I were you I would do better than
cry. I would go after it."
August raised his head, the tears raining down his cheeks.
"Go after it when you are bigger," said the neighbor, with a
good-natured wish to cheer him up a little. "The world is a small
thing after all: I was a travelling clockmaker once upon a time,
and I know that your stove will be safe enough whoever gets it;
anything that can be sold for a round sum is always wrapped up in
cotton wool by everybody. Ay, ay, don't cry so much; you will see
your stove again some day."
Then the old man hobbled away to draw his brazen pail full of
water at the well.
August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzing
and his heart fluttering with the new idea which had presented
itself to his mind. "Go after it," had said the old man. He
thought, "Why not go with it?" He loved it better than any one,
even better than Dorothea; and he shrank from the thought of
meeting his father again, his father who had sold Hirschvogel.
He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the
impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were
still wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran
out of the court-yard by a little gate, and across to the huge
Gothic porch of the church. From there he could watch unseen his
father's house-door, at which were always hanging some blue-and-gray
pitchers, such as are common and so picturesque in Austria, for a
part of the house was let to a man who dealt in pottery.
He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passed
through to go to mass or compline within, and presently his heart
gave a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought
out and laid with infinite care on the bullock-dray. Two of the
Bavarian men mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowly
crept over the snow of the place,--snow crisp and hard as stone.
The noble old minster looked its grandest and most solemn, with
its dark-gray stone and its vast archways, and its porch that was
itself as big as many a church, and its strange gargoyles and
lamp-irons black against the snow on its roof and on the
pavement; but for once August had no eyes for it: he only watched
for his old friend. Then he, a little unnoticeable figure enough,
like a score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen by any of his
brothers or sisters, out of the porch and over the shelving
uneven square, and followed in the wake of the dray.
Its course lay towards the station of the railway, which is close
to the salt-works, whose smoke at times sullies this part of
clean little Hall, though it does not do very much damage. From
Hall the iron road runs northward through glorious country to
Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, Buda, and southward over the Brenner
into Italy. Was Hirschvogel going north or south? This at least
he would soon know.
VI
August had often hung about the little station, watching the
trains come and go and dive into the heart of the hills and
vanish. No one said anything to him for idling about; people are
kind-hearted and easy of temper in this pleasant land, and
children and dogs are both happy there. He heard the Bavarians
arguing and vociferating a great deal, and learned that they
meant to go too and wanted to go with the great stove itself. But
this they could not do, for neither could the stove go by a
passenger-train nor they themselves go in a goods-train. So at
length they insured their precious burden for a large sum, and
consented to send it by a luggage-train which was to pass through
Hall in half an hour. The swift trains seldom deign to notice the
existence of Hall at all.
August heard, and a desperate resolve made itself up in his
little mind. Where Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave one
terrible thought to Dorothea--poor, gentle Dorothea!--sitting in
the cold at home, then set to work to execute his project. How he
managed it he never knew very clearly himself, but certain it is
that when the goods-train from the north, that had come all the
way from Linz on the Danube, moved out of Hall, August was hidden
behind the stove in the great covered truck, and wedged, unseen
and undreamt of by any human creature, amidst the cases of
wood-carving, of clocks and clock-work, of Vienna toys, of
Turkish carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian wines, which
shared the same abode as did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel.
No doubt he was very naughty, but it never occurred to him that
he was so: his whole mind and soul were absorbed in the one
entrancing idea, to follow his beloved friend and fire-king.
It was very dark in the closed truck, which had only a little
window above the door; and it was crowded, and had a strong smell
in it from the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. But
August was not frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, and
presently he meant to be closer still; for he meant to do nothing
less than get inside Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd little
boy, and having had by great luck two silver groschen in his
breeches-pocket, which he had earned the day before by chopping
wood, he had bought some bread and sausage at the station of a
woman there who knew him, and who thought he was going out to his
uncle Joachim's chalet above Jenbach. This he had with him, and
this he ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pounding,
thundering noise which made him giddy, as never had he been in a
train of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast,
and being a child, and half a German, and not knowing at all how
or when he ever would eat again.
When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, but as much as he
thought was prudent (for who could say when he would be able to
buy anything more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make a
hole in the withes of straw and hay which enveloped the stove. If
it had been put in a packing-case he would have been defeated at
the onset. As it was, he gnawed, and nibbled, and pulled, and
pushed, just as a mouse would have done, making his hole where he
guessed that the opening of the stove was,--the opening through
which he had so often thrust the big oak logs to feed it. No one
disturbed him; the heavy train went lumbering on and on, and he
saw nothing at all of the beautiful mountains, and shining
waters, and great forests through which he was being carried. He
was hard at work getting through the straw and hay and twisted
ropes; and get through them at last he did, and found the door of
the stove, which he knew so well, and which was quite large
enough for a child of his age to slip through, and it was this
which he had counted upon doing. Slip through he did, as he had
often done at home for fun, and curled himself up there to see if
he could anyhow remain during many hours. He found that he could;
air came in through the brass fret-work of the stove; and with
admirable caution in such a little fellow he leaned out, drew the
hay and straw together, and rearranged the ropes, so that no one
could ever have dreamed a little mouse had been at them. Then he
curled himself up again, this time more like a dormouse than
anything else; and, being safe inside his dear Hirschvogel and
intensely cold, he went fast asleep as if he were in his own bed
at home with Albrecht and Christof on either side of him. The
train lumbered on, stopping often and long, as the habit of
goods-trains is, sweeping the snow away with its cow-switcher,
and rumbling through the deep heart of the mountains, with its
lamps aglow like the eyes of a dog in a night of frost.
The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the child
slept soundly for a long while. When he did awake, it was quite
dark outside in the land; he could not see, and of course he was
in absolute darkness; and for a while he was sorely frightened,
and trembled terribly, and sobbed in a quiet heart-broken
fashion, thinking of them all at home. Poor Dorothea! how anxious
she would be! How she would run over the town and walk up to
grandfather's at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even send over to
Jenbach, thinking he had taken refuge with Uncle Joachim! His
conscience smote him for the sorrow he must be even then causing
to his gentle sister; but it never occurred to him to try and go
back. If he once were to lose sight of Hirschvogel how could he
ever hope to find it again? how could he ever know whither it had
gone,--north, south, east, or west? The old neighbor had said
that the world was small; but August knew at least that it must
have a great many places in it: that he had seen himself on the
maps on his schoolhouse walls. Almost any other little boy would,
I think, have been frightened out of his wits at the position in
which he found himself; but August was brave, and he had a firm
belief that God and Hirschvogel would take care of him. The
master-potter of Nürnberg was always present to his mind, a
kindly, benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling manifestly in that
porcelain tower whereof he had been the maker.
A droll fancy, you say? But every child with a soul in him has
quite as quaint fancies as this one was of August's.
So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was so
utterly in the dark. He did not feel cramped at all, because the
stove was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came through
the fret-work running round the top. He was hungry again, and
again nibbled with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He could
not at all tell the hour. Every time the train stopped and he
heard the banging, stamping, shouting, and jangling of chains
that went on, his heart seemed to jump up into his mouth. If they
should find him out! Sometimes porters came and took away this
case and the other, a sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, now
a dead chamois. Every time the men trampled near him, and swore
at each other, and banged this and that to and fro, he was so
frightened that his very breath seemed to stop. When they came to
lift the stove out, would they find him? and if they did find
him, would they kill him? That was what he kept thinking of all
the way, all through the dark hours, which seemed without end.
The goods-trains are usually very slow, and are many days doing
what a quick train does in a few hours. This one was quicker than
most, because it was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria;
still, it took all the short winter's day and the long winter's
night and half another day to go over ground that the mail-trains
cover in a forenoon. It passed great armored Kuffstein standing
across the beautiful and solemn gorge, denying the right of way
to all the foes of Austria. It passed twelve hours later, after
lying by in out-of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks
the border of Bavaria. And here the Nürnberg stove, with August
inside it, was lifted out heedfully and set under a covered way.
When it was lifted out, the boy had hard work to keep in his
screams; he was tossed to and fro as the men lifted the huge
thing, and the earthenware walls of his beloved fire-king were
not cushions of down. However, though they swore and grumbled at
the weight of it, they never suspected that a living child was
inside it, and they carried it out on to the platform and set it
down under the roof of the goods-shed. There it passed the rest
of the night and all the next morning, and August was all the
while within it.
VII
The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all
the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had
not been whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron
rails of the snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily
for August, the thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped
and the stoutness of its own make screened him from the cold, of
which, else, he must have died,--frozen. He had still some of his
loaf, and a little--a very little--of his sausage. What he did
begin to suffer from was thirst; and this frightened him almost
more than anything else, for Dorothea had read aloud to them one
night a story of the tortures some wrecked men had endured
because they could not find any water but the salt sea. It was
many hours since he had last taken a drink from the wooden spout
of their old pump, which brought them the sparkling, ice-cold
water of the hills.
But, fortunately for him, the stove, having been marked and
registered as "fragile and valuable," was not treated quite like
a mere bale of goods, and the Rosenheim station-master, who knew
its consignees, resolved to send it on by a passenger-train that
would leave there at daybreak. And when this train went out, in
it, among piles of luggage belonging to other travellers, to
Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pesth, Salzburg, was August, still
undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the winter under
the grass. Those words, "fragile and valuable," had made the men
lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He had begun to get used
to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and
jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is
always accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so
mightily clever. All in the dark he was, and he was terribly
thirsty; but he kept feeling the earthenware sides of the
Nürnberg giant and saying, softly, "Take care of me; oh, take
care of me, dear Hirschvogel!"
He did not say, "Take me back;" for, now that he was fairly out
in the world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think
that they must have been all over the world in all this time that
the rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about
his ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales
that had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather's
good house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors,
and the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and--and--and
he began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream
outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no
one, had there been any one nigh, would have heard him; and in
another minute or so the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and
he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, "München! München!"
Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart
of Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by
the Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a
black bear he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.
That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois-hunter who had
taught him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very
name of Bavaria a terror to August.
"It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!" he sobbed to the stove; but the
stove said nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no
more speak without fire than a man can see without light. Give it
fire, and it will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in
return all the sympathy you ask.
"It is Bavaria!" sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread
augury to the Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter struggles and
midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings
of jäger and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But the train
stopped; Munich was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns,
and shaking like a little aspen-leaf, felt himself once more
carried out on the shoulders of men, rolled along on a truck, and
finally set down, where he knew not, only he knew he was
thirsty,--so thirsty! If only he could have reached his hand out
and scooped up a little snow!
He thought he had been moved on this truck many miles, but in
truth the stove had been only taken from the railway-station to a
shop in the Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was always set
upright on its four gilded feet, an injunction to that effect
having been affixed to its written label, and on its gilded feet
it stood now in the small dark curiosity-shop of one Hans
Rhilfer.
"I shall not unpack it till Anton comes," he heard a man's voice
say; and then he heard a key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken
stillness that ensued he concluded he was alone, and ventured to
peep through the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square
room filled with pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue
jugs, old steel armor, shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna
china, Turkish rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated
rubbish of a _bric-à-brac_ dealer's. It seemed a wonderful place
to him; but, oh! was there one drop of water in it all? That was
his single thought; for his tongue was parching, and his throat
felt on fire, and his chest began to be dry and choked as with
dust. There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice
window grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge
covered with snow. August cast one look at the locked door,
darted out of his hiding-place, ran and opened the window,
crammed the snow into his mouth again and again, and then flew
back into the stove, drew the hay and straw over the place he
entered by, tied the cords, and shut the brass door down on
himself. He had brought some big icicles in with him, and by them
his thirst was finally, if only temporarily, quenched. Then he
sat still in the bottom of the stove, listening intently, wide
awake, and once more recovering his natural boldness.
[Illustration: AUGUST OPENED THE WINDOW, CRAMMED THE SNOW INTO
HIS MOUTH AGAIN AND AGAIN]
The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his heart and his conscience
with a hard squeeze now and then; but he thought to himself, "If
I can take her back Hirschvogel, then how pleased she will be,
and how little 'Gilda will clap her hands!" He was not at all
selfish in his love for Hirschvogel: he wanted it for them all at
home quite as much as for himself. There was at the bottom of his
mind a kind of ache of shame that his father--his own father--should
have stripped their hearth and sold their honor thus.
A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin sculptured on a
house-eave near. August had felt for the crumbs of his loaf in
his pocket, and had thrown them to the little bird sitting so
easily on the frozen snow.
In the darkness where he was he now heard a little song, made
faint by the stove-wall and the window-glass that was between him
and it, but still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was the
robin, singing after feeding on the crumbs. August, as he heard,
burst into tears. He thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw
out some grain or some bread on the snow before the church. "What
use is it going _there_," she said, "if we forget the sweetest
creatures God has made?" Poor Dorothea! Poor, good, tender,
much-burdened little soul! He thought of her till his tears ran
like rain.
Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home.
Hirschvogel was here.
VIII
Presently the key turned in the lock of the door, he heard heavy
footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father,
"You have a little mad dog; muzzle him!" The voice said, "Ay, ay,
you have called me a fool many times. Now you shall see what I
have gotten for two hundred dirty florins. _Potztausend!_ never
did _you_ do such a stroke of work."
Then the other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two
men approached more closely, and the heart of the child went
pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse's does when it is on the top of
a cheese and hears a housemaid's broom sweeping near. They began
to strip the stove of its wrappings: that he could tell by the
noise they made with the hay and the straw. Soon they had
stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew by the oaths and
exclamations of wonder and surprise and rapture which broke from
the man who had not seen it before.
"A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivalled thing!
Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime!
magnificent! matchless!"
So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a
smell of lager-beer so strong as they spoke that it reached
August crouching in his stronghold. If they should open the door
of the stove! That was his frantic fear. If they should open it,
it would be all over with him. They would drag him out; most
likely they would kill him, he thought, as his mother's young
brother had been killed in the Wald.
The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had
control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by
the Nürnberg master's work for nigh an hour, praising, marvelling,
expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved to a
little distance and began talking of sums of money and divided
profits, of which discourse he could make out no meaning. All he
could make out was that the name of the king--the king--the king
came over very often in their arguments. He fancied at times they
quarrelled, for they swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse
and high; but after a while they seemed to pacify each other and
agree to something, and were in great glee, and so in these merry
spirits came and slapped the luminous sides of stately Hirschvogel,
and shouted to it,--
"Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck! To think you
were smoking in a silly fool of a salt-baker's kitchen all these
years!"
Then inside the stove August jumped up, with flaming cheeks and
clinching hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to
them that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his
father, when he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word
or make a sound was to bring ruin on himself and sever him
forever from Hirschvogel. So he kept still, and the men barred
the shutters of the little lattice and went out by the door,
double-locking it after them. He had made out from their talk
that they were going to show Hirschvogel to some great person:
therefore he kept quite still and dared not move.
Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters from the streets
below,--the rolling of wheels, the clanging of church-bells, and
bursts of that military music which is so seldom silent in the
streets of Munich. An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of steps on
the stairs kept him in perpetual apprehension. In the intensity
of his anxiety, he forgot that he was hungry and many miles away
from cheerful, Old World little Hall, lying by the clear gray
river-water, with the ramparts of the mountains all around.
Presently the door opened again sharply. He could hear the two
dealers' voices murmuring unctuous words, in which, "honor,"
"gratitude," and many fine long noble titles played the chief
parts. The voice of another person, more clear and refined than
theirs, answered them curtly, and then, close by the Nürnberg
stove and the boy's ear, ejaculated a single "_Wunderschön!_"
August almost lost his terror for himself in his thrill of pride
at his beloved Hirschvogel being thus admired in the great city.
He thought the master-potter must be glad too.
"_Wunderschön!_" ejaculated the stranger a second time, and then
examined the stove in all its parts, read all its mottoes, gazed
long on all its devices.
"It must have been made for the Emperor Maximilian," he said at
last; and the poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was "hugged up
into nothing," as you children say, dreading that every moment he
would open the stove. And open it truly he did, and examined the
brass-work of the door; but inside it was so dark that crouching
August passed unnoticed, screwed up into a ball like a hedgehog
as he was. The gentleman shut to the door at length, without
having seen anything strange inside it; and then he talked long
and low with the tradesmen, and, as his accent was different
from that which August was used to, the child could distinguish
little that he said, except the name of the king and the word
"gulden" again and again. After awhile he went away, one of the
dealers accompanying him, one of them lingering behind to bar up
the shutters. Then this one also withdrew again, double-locking
the door.
The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself and dared to breathe
aloud.
What time was it?
Late in the day, he thought, for to accompany the stranger they
had lighted a lamp; he had heard the scratch of the match, and
through the brass fret-work had seen the lines of light.
He would have to pass the night here, that was certain. He and
Hirschvogel were locked in, but at least they were together. If
only he could have had something to eat! He thought with a pang
of how at this hour at home they ate the sweet soup, sometimes
with apples in it from Aunt Maïla's farm orchard, and sang
together, and listened to Dorothea's reading of little tales, and
basked in the glow and delight that had beamed on them from the
great Nürnberg fire-king.
"Oh, poor, poor little 'Gilda! What is she doing without the
dear Hirschvogel?" he thought. Poor little 'Gilda! she had only
now the black iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how
cruel of father!
August could not bear to hear the dealers blame or laugh at his
father, but he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell
Hirschvogel. The mere memory of all those long winter evenings,
when they had all closed round it, and roasted chestnuts or
crab-apples in it, and listened to the howling of the wind and
the deep sound of the church-bells, and tried very much to make
each other believe that the wolves still came down from the
mountains into the streets of Hall, and were that very minute
growling at the house-door,--all this memory coming on him with
the sound of the city bells, and the knowledge that night drew
near upon him so completely, being added to his hunger and his
fear, so overcame him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth
time since he had been inside the stove, and felt that he would
starve to death, and wondered dreamily if Hirschvogel would care.
Yes, he was sure Hirschvogel would care. Had he not decked it all
summer long with Alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and made
it sweet with thyme and honeysuckle and great garden-lilies? Had
he ever forgotten when Santa Claus came to make it its crown of
holly and ivy and wreathe it all around?
"Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of me!" he prayed to the old
fire-king, and forgot, poor little man, that he had come on this
wild-goose chase northward to save and take care of Hirschvogel!
After a time he dropped asleep, as children can do when they
weep, and little robust hill-born boys most surely do, be they
where they may. It was not very cold in this lumber-room; it was
tightly shut up, and very full of things, and at the back of it
were the hot pipes of an adjacent house, where a great deal of
fuel was burnt. Moreover, August's clothes were warm ones, and
his blood was young. So he was not cold, though Munich is
terribly cold in the nights of December; and he slept on and
on,--which was a comfort to him, for he forgot his woes, and his
perils, and his hunger, for a time.
IX
Midnight was once more chiming from all the brazen tongues of the
city when he awoke, and, all being still around him, ventured to
put his head out of the brass door of the stove to see why such a
strange bright light was round him.
It was a very strange and brilliant light indeed; and yet, what
is perhaps still stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, nor
did what he saw alarm him either, and yet I think it would have
done you or me. For what he saw was nothing less than all the
_bric-à-brac_ in motion.
A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, was solemnly dancing a
minuet with a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going
through a gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a very
droll porcelain figure of Littenhausen was bowing to a very stiff
soldier in _terre cuite_ of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was
playing itself, and a queer little shrill plaintive music that
thought itself merry came from a painted spinet covered with
faded roses; some gilt Spanish leather had got up on the wall and
laughed; a Dresden mirror was tripping about, crowned with
flowers, and a Japanese bonze was riding along on a griffin; a
slim Venetian rapier had come to blows with a stout Ferrara
sabre, all about a little pale-faced chit of a damsel in white
Nymphenburg china; and a portly Franconian pitcher in _grès gris_
was calling aloud, "Oh, these Italians! always at feud!" But
nobody listened to him at all. A great number of little Dresden
cups and saucers were all skipping and waltzing; the teapots,
with their broad round faces, were spinning their own lids like
teetotums; the high-backed gilded chairs were having a game of
cards together; and a little Saxe poodle, with a blue ribbon at
its throat, was running from one to another, whilst a yellow cat
of Cornelis Lachtleven's rode about on a Delft horse in blue
pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the brilliant light shed on the scene
came from three silver candelabra, though they had no candles set
up in them; and, what is the greatest miracle of all, August
looked on at these mad freaks and felt no sensation of wonder! He
only, as he heard the violin and the spinet playing, felt an
irresistible desire to dance too.
No doubt his face said what he wished; for a lovely little lady,
all in pink and gold and white, with powdered hair, and
high-heeled shoes, and all made of the very finest and fairest
Meissen china, tripped up to him, and smiled, and gave him her
hand, and led him out to a minuet. And he danced it perfectly,--poor
little August in his thick, clumsy shoes, and his thick, clumsy
sheepskin jacket, and his rough homespun linen, and his broad
Tyrolean hat! He must have danced it perfectly, this dance of
kings and queens in days when crowns were duly honored, for the
lovely lady always smiled benignly and never scolded him at all,
and danced so divinely herself to the stately measures the spinet
was playing that August could not take his eyes off her till,
their minuet ended, she sat down on her own white-and-gold
bracket.
"I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale," she said to him, with a
benignant smile; "and you have got through that minuet very
fairly."
Then he ventured to say to her,--
"Madame my princess, could you tell me kindly why some of the
figures and furniture dance and speak, and some lie up in a
corner like lumber? It does make me curious. Is it rude to ask?"
For it greatly puzzled him why, when some of the _bric-à-brac_
was all full of life and motion, some was quite still and had not
a single thrill in it.
"My dear child," said the powdered lady, "is it possible that you
do not know the reason? Why, those silent, dull things are
_imitation_!"
This she said with so much decision that she evidently considered
it a condensed but complete answer.
"Imitation?" repeated August, timidly, not understanding.
"Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrications!" said the princess in
pink shoes, very vivaciously. "They only _pretend_ to be what we
_are_! They never wake up: how can they? No imitation ever had
any soul in it yet."
"Oh!" said August, humbly, not even sure that he understood
entirely yet. He looked at Hirschvogel: surely it had a royal
soul within it: would it not wake up and speak? Oh dear! how he
longed to hear the voice of his fire-king! And he began to forget
that he stood by a lady who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white
china, with the year 1746 cut on it, and the Meissen mark.
"What will you be when you are a man?" said the little lady,
sharply, for her black eyes were quick though her red lips were
smiling. "Will you work for the _Königliche Porcellan-Manufactur_,
like my great dead Kandler?"
"I have never thought," said August, stammering; "at least--that
is--I do wish--I do hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin
Hirschvogel at Nürnberg."
"Bravo!" said all the real _bric-à-brac_ in one breath, and the
two Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, "_Benone!_" For
there is not a bit of true _bric-à-brac_ in all Europe that does
not know the names of the mighty masters.
August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew
as red as the lady's shoes with bashful contentment.
"I knew all the Hirschvögel, from old Veit downwards," said a fat
_grès de Flandre_ beer-jug: "I myself was made at Nürnberg." And
he bowed to the great stove very politely, taking off his own
silver hat--I mean lid--with a courtly sweep that he could
scarcely have learned from burgomasters. The stove, however, was
silent, and a sickening suspicion (for what is such heart-break
as a suspicion of what we love?) came through the mind of August:
_Was Hirschvogel only imitation_?
"No, no, no, no!" he said to himself, stoutly: though Hirschvogel
never stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it!
After all their happy years together, after all the nights of
warmth and joy he owed it, should he doubt his own friend and
hero, whose gilt lion's feet he had kissed in his babyhood? "No,
no, no, no!" he said, again, with so much emphasis that the Lady
of Meissen looked sharply again at him.
"No," she said, with pretty disdain; "no, believe me, they may
'pretend' forever. They can never look like us! They imitate even
our marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can
they _chassent de race_."
"How should they?" said a bronze statuette of Vischer's. "They
daub themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to
get rusted; but green and rust are not _patina_; only the ages
can give that!"
"And _my_ imitations are all in primary colors, staring colors,
hot as the colors of a hostelry's sign-board!" said the Lady of
Meissen, with a shiver.
"Well, there is a _grès de Flandre_ over there, who pretends to
be a Hans Kraut, as I am," said the jug with the silver hat,
pointing with his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a
corner. "He has copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to
copy us. Almost he might be mistaken for me. But yet what a
difference there is! How crude are his blues! how evidently done
over the glaze are his black letters! He has tried to give
himself my very twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of that
playful deviation in my lines which in his becomes actual
deformity!"
"And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a
contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out
on a table. "They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give
him my name; but look! _I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin
as a film and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de
las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed
reign of Ferdinand the Most Christian. _His_ gilding is one part
gold to eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been
laid on him with a brush--_a brush!_--pah! of course he will be
as black as a crock in a few years' time, whilst I am as bright
as when I first was made, and, unless I am burnt as my Cordova
burnt its heretics, I shall shine on forever."
"They carve pear-wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown,
and call it _me_!" said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.
"That is not so painful; it does not vulgarize you so much as the
cups they paint to-day and christen after _me_!" said a Carl
Theodor cup subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel.
"Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping
_me_!" interposed the princess in the pink shoes.
"They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture," said a
_Trauerkrug_ of Regensburg in black-and-white.
"And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!"
sighed the little white maid of Nymphenburg.
"And they sell hundreds and thousands of common china plates,
calling them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a
muffle of to-day; it is blasphemy!" said a stout plate of Gubbio,
which in its year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.
"That is what is so terrible in these _bric-à-brac_ places," said
the princess of Meissen. "It brings one in contact with such low,
imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless
under glass at the Louvre or South Kensington."
"And they get even there," sighed the _grès de Flandre_. "A
terrible thing happened to a dear friend of mine, a _terre cuite_
of Blasius (you know the _terres cuites_ of Blasius date from
1560). Well, he was put under glass in a museum that shall be
nameless, and he found himself set next to his own imitation born
and baked yesterday at Frankfort, and what think you the
miserable creature said to him, with a grin? 'Old Pipe-clay,'--that
is what he called my friend,--'the fellow that bought _me_ got
just as much commission on me as the fellow that bought _you_,
and that was all that _he_ thought about. You know it is only the
public money that goes!' And the horrid creature grinned again
till he actually cracked himself. There is a Providence above all
things, even museums."
"Providence might have interfered before, and saved the public
money," said the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes.
"After all, does it matter?" said a Dutch jar of Haarlem. "All
the shamming in the world will not _make_ them us!"
"One does not like to be vulgarized," said the Lady of Meissen,
angrily.
"My maker, the Krabbetje,[A] did not trouble his head about
that," said the Haarlem jar, proudly. "The Krabbetje made me for
the kitchen, the bright, clean, snow-white Dutch kitchen,
wellnigh three centuries ago, and now I am thought worthy the
palace; yet I wish I were at home; yes, I wish I could see the
good Dutch vrouw, and the shining canals, and the great green
meadows dotted with the kine."
[Footnote A: Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born
1610, master-potter of Delft and Haarlem.]
"Ah! if we could all go back to our makers!" sighed the Gubbio
plate, thinking of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious
days of the Renaissance: and somehow the words touched the
frolicsome souls of the dancing jars, the spinning teapots, the
chairs that were playing cards; and the violin stopped its merry
music with a sob, and the spinet sighed,--thinking of dead hands.
Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a master forever lost; and
only the swords went on quarrelling, and made such a clattering
noise that the Japanese bonze rode at them on his monster and
knocked them both right over, and they lay straight and still,
looking foolish, and the little Nymphenburg maid, though she was
crying, smiled and almost laughed.
Then from where the great stove stood there came a solemn voice.
All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and the heart of its little
human comrade gave a great jump of joy.
"My friends," said that clear voice from the turret of Nürnberg
faïence, "I have listened to all you have said. There is too much
talking among the Mortalities whom one of themselves has called
the Windbags. Let not us be like them. I hear among men so much
vain speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in
empty boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant
argument, ignoble mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a
curse, laid on man to weaken and envenom all his undertakings.
For over two hundred years I have never spoken myself: you, I
hear, are not so reticent. I only speak now because one of you
said a beautiful thing that touched me. If we all might but go
back to our makers! Ah, yes! if we might! We were made in days
when even men were true creatures, and so we, the work of their
hands, were true too. We, the begotten of ancient days, derive
all the value in us from the fact that our makers wrought at us
with zeal, with piety, with integrity, with faith,--not to win
fortunes or to glut a market, but to do nobly an honest thing and
create for the honor of the Arts and God. I see amidst you a
little human thing who loves me, and in his own ignorant childish
way loves Art. Now, I want him forever to remember this night
and these words; to remember that we are what we are, and
precious in the eyes of the world, because centuries ago those
who were of single mind and of pure hand so created us, scorning
sham and haste and counterfeit. Well do I recollect my master,
Augustin Hirschvogel. He led a wise and blameless life, and
wrought in loyalty and love, and made his time beautiful thereby,
like one of his own rich, many-colored church casements, that
told holy tales as the sun streamed through them. Ah, yes, my
friends, to go back to our masters!--that would be the best that
could befall us. But they are gone, and even the perishable
labors of their lives outlive them. For many, many years I, once
honored of emperors, dwelt in a humble house and warmed in
successive winters three generations of little, cold, hungry
children. When I warmed them they forgot that they were hungry;
they laughed and told tales, and slept at last about my feet.
Then I knew that humble as had become my lot it was one that my
master would have wished for me, and I was content. Sometimes a
tired woman would creep up to me, and smile because she was near
me, and point out my golden crown or my ruddy fruit to a baby in
her arms. That was better than to stand in a great hall of a
great city, cold and empty, even though wise men came to gaze and
throngs of fools gaped, passing with flattering words. Where I go
now I know not; but since I go from that humble house where they
loved me, I shall be sad and alone. They pass so soon,--those
fleeting mortal lives! Only we endure,--we, the things that the
human brain creates. We can but bless them a little as they glide
by: if we have done that, we have done what our masters wished.
So in us our masters, being dead, yet may speak and live."
Then the voice sank away in silence, and a strange golden light
that had shone on the great stove faded away; so also the light
died down in the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic melody stole
gently through the room. It came from the old, old spinet that
was covered with the faded roses.
Then that sad, sighing music of a bygone day died too; the clocks
of the city struck six of the morning; day was rising over the
Bayerischenwald. August awoke with a great start, and found
himself lying on the bare bricks of the floor of the chamber, and
all the _bric-à-brac_ was lying quite still all around. The
pretty Lady of Meissen was motionless on her porcelain bracket,
and the little Saxe poodle was quiet at her side.
He rose slowly to his feet. He was very cold, but he was not
sensible of it or of the hunger that was gnawing his little empty
entrails. He was absorbed in the wondrous sight, in the wondrous
sounds, that he had seen and heard.
X
All was dark around him. Was it still midnight or had morning
come? Morning, surely; for against the barred shutters he heard
the tiny song of the robin.
Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step up the stair. He had but a
moment in which to scramble back into the interior of the great
stove, when the door opened and the two dealers entered, bringing
burning candles with them to see their way.
August was scarcely conscious of danger more than he was of cold
or hunger. A marvellous sense of courage, of security, of
happiness, was about him, like strong and gentle arms enfolding
him and lifting him upwards--upwards--upwards! Hirschvogel would
defend him.
The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the red-breast away, and
then tramped about in their heavy boots and chattered in
contented voices, and began to wrap up the stove once more in all
its straw and hay and cordage.
It never once occurred to them to glance inside. Why should they
look inside a stove that they had bought and were about to sell
again for all its glorious beauty of exterior?
The child still did not feel afraid. A great exaltation had come
to him: he was like one lifted up by his angels.
Presently the two traders called up their porters, and the stove,
heedfully swathed and wrapped and tended as though it were some
sick prince going on a journey, was borne on the shoulders of six
stout Bavarians down the stairs and out of the door into the
Marienplatz. Even behind all those wrappings August felt the icy
bite of the intense cold of the outer air at dawn of a winter's
day in Munich. The men moved the stove with exceeding gentleness
and care, so that he had often been far more roughly shaken in
his big brothers' arms than he was in his journey now; and though
both hunger and thirst made themselves felt, being foes that will
take no denial, he was still in that state of nervous exaltation
which deadens all physical suffering and is at once a cordial and
an opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel speak; that was enough.
The stout carriers tramped through the city, six of them, with
the Nürnberg fire-castle on their brawny shoulders, and went
right across Munich to the railway-station, and August in the
dark recognized all the ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring,
hissing railway-noises, and thought, despite his courage and
excitement, "Will it be a _very_ long journey?" For his stomach
had at times an odd sinking sensation, and his head sadly often
felt light and swimming. If it was a very, very long journey he
felt half afraid that he would be dead or something bad before
the end, and Hirschvogel would be so lonely: that was what he
thought most about; not much about himself, and not much about
Dorothea and the house at home. He was "high strung to high
emprise," and could not look behind him.
Whether for a long or a short journey, whether for weal or woe,
the stove with August still within it was once more hoisted up
into a great van; but this time it was not all alone, and the two
dealers as well as the six porters were all with it.
He in his darkness knew that; for he heard their voices. The
train glided away over the Bavarian plain southward; and he heard
the men say something of Berg and the Wurm-See, but their German
was strange to him, and he could not make out what these names
meant.
The train rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, and roar of
steam, and stench of oil and burning coal. It had to go quietly
and slowly on account of the snow which was falling, and which
had fallen all night.
"He might have waited till he came to the city," grumbled one man
to another. "What weather to stay on at Berg!"
But who he was that stayed on at Berg, August could not make out
at all.
Though the men grumbled about the state of the roads and the
season, they were hilarious and well content, for they laughed
often, and, when they swore, did so good-humoredly, and promised
their porters fine presents at New-Year; and August, like a
shrewd little boy as he was, who even in the secluded Innthal had
learned that money is the chief mover of men's mirth, thought to
himself, with a terrible pang,--
"They have sold Hirschvogel for some great sum. They have sold
him already!"
Then his heart grew faint and sick within him, for he knew very
well that he must soon die, shut up without food and water thus;
and what new owner of the great fire-palace would ever permit him
to dwell in it?
"Never mind; I _will_ die," thought he; "and Hirschvogel will
know it."
Perhaps you think him a very foolish little fellow; but I do
not.
It is always good to be loyal and ready to endure to the end.
It is but an hour and a quarter that the train usually takes to
pass from Munich to the Wurm-See or Lake of Starnberg; but this
morning the journey was much slower, because the way was
encumbered by snow. When it did reach Possenhofen and stop, and
the Nürnberg stove was lifted out once more, August could see
through the fret-work of the brass door, as the stove stood
upright facing the lake, that this Wurm-See was a calm and noble
piece of water, of great width, with low wooded banks and distant
mountains, a peaceful, serene place, full of rest.
It was now near ten o'clock. The sun had come forth; there was a
clear gray sky hereabouts; the snow was not falling, though it
lay white and smooth everywhere, down to the edge of the water,
which before long would itself be ice.
Before he had time to get more than a glimpse of the green
gliding surface, the stove was again lifted up and placed on a
large boat that was in waiting,--one of those very long and huge
boats which the women in these parts use as laundries, and the
men as timber-rafts. The stove, with much labor and much
expenditure of time and care, was hoisted into this, and August
would have grown sick and giddy with the heaving and falling if
his big brothers had not long used him to such tossing about, so
that he was as much at ease head, as feet, downward. The stove
once in it safely with its guardians, the big boat moved across
the lake to Leoni. How a little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got
that Tuscan-sounding name I cannot tell; but Leoni it is. The big
boat was a long time crossing: the lake here is about three miles
broad, and these heavy barges are unwieldy and heavy to move,
even though they are towed and tugged at from the shore.
"If we should be too late!" the two dealers muttered to each
other, in agitation and alarm. "He said eleven o'clock."
"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."
XI
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
December!"
From afar off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite
music, as sweet as the spinet'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 Karl 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?
THE CHILDREN'S CLASSICS
Each beautifully illustrated in color and tastefully bound
BY WASHINGTON IRVING
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
RIP VAN WINKLE
SELECTED
TALES OF WASHINGTON IRVING'S
ALHAMBRA
BY JOHN RUSKIN
THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES
SELECTED
HANS ANDERSEN'S FAIRY TALES
BY MISS MULOCK
THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE
THE ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE
BY EMMA GELLIBRAND
J. COLE
BY JOHANNA SPYRI
MONI THE GOAT BOY
BY OUIDA
MOUFFLOU AND OTHER STORIES
THE NÜRNBERG STOVE
A DOG OF FLANDERS
SELECTED
WONDERLAND STORIES
ALL TIME TALES
BY JONATHAN SWIFT
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
(LILLIPUT LAND)
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN
THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Nürnberg Stove, by
Louisa de la Ramé (AKA Ouida)
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