Hammer and Anvil Part 26

A pause, and then a frightened little voice that I had so often heard laughing, and with which I had sung so many a duet in parties by land and water, piped feebly out:

"What do you want?"

"Tell your father, Fraulein Emilie, that if he does not at once stop calling the watch, and does not immediately come into his study, I shall go away and not come back."

I said this in a tone in which resolution and politeness were so blended, that I was sure it could hardly fail of its effect. I could hear a whispered discussion within. The women seemed to be adjuring the husband and father not to adventure his precious life in so manifest a peril, while the husband and father sought to calm their terrors by heroic phrases, such as, "But it is my duty," or, "It might cost me my place!"

At last, a.s.sisted by these weighty considerations, duty triumphed. The door slowly opened, and by the side of the flowered dressing-gown I caught a glimpse of the cap of the Frau Justizrath, and of the curl-papers of Fraulein Emilie, whose golden ringlets I had always supposed a beautiful work of nature. But so many great illusions of mine had been dissipated in the last few days, that this small one might well go with the rest.

Hesitatingly the justizrath closed the door behind him, hesitatingly he came a few paces nearer, stopped and tried to fix me firmly with his eye, in which, after some difficulty, he almost succeeded.

"Young man," he began, "you are alone?"

"As you see, Herr Justizrath."

"And without weapons?"

"Without weapons."

"Without any weapon?"

"Without any weapon."

I unb.u.t.toned my sailor jacket to convince my questioner of the truth of my statement. The justizrath evidently breathed more freely.

"And you have come----?"

"To surrender myself to justice."

"Why did you not tell me so at once?"

"I do not think you gave me time."

The justizrath cast a confused glance at his broken pipe on the floor, cleared his throat, and seemed not to know exactly what was to be done in such an extraordinary case. There was a pause of silence.

The ladies must have inferred from this pause that I was engaged in cutting the throat of the husband and father; at least at this moment the door was flung open, and the Frau Justizrath, in night-gown and night-cap, came rus.h.i.+ng in and fell upon the neck of her spouse in the flowered dressing-gown, whom she embraced with every mark of mortal fear, while Emilie, who had followed close behind her, turned to me, and with a tragic gesture of supplication, raised both her hands as high as her curl-papers.

"Heckepfennig, he will murder you!" sobbed the nightgown.

"Spare, oh spare my aged father!" moaned the curl-papers.

And now the door leading into the pa.s.sage opened. Jette and the cook were curious to see what was going on, though at the peril of peris.h.i.+ng in the general ma.s.sacre, and appeared upon the threshold wailing aloud.

This mark of courageous devotion so touched the night-gown that it burst into a flood of hysterical tears, and the curl-papers tottered to the sofa with the apparent intention of swooning upon it.

Here the justizrath showed, for the second time, how great emergencies bring out the strength of great characters. With gentle firmness he freed the flowered dressing-gown from the embrace of the night-gown, and said in a voice that announced his resolve to do and dare the worst: "Jette, bring me my coat!"

This was the signal for a scene of indescribable confusion, out of which, in about five minutes, the victim of his devotion to duty emerged victorious with coat, hat, and stick: a sublime sight, only the effect was a little damaged by the hero's feet being still covered with embroidered slippers, a fact of which he was not aware until it was too late, when we were standing on the pavement of the market-place.

"Never mind, Herr Justizrath," I said, as he was about to turn back.

"You would not get away again, and we have but a few steps to go."

In fact the little old _Rathhaus_ was at the other side of the by no means wide square, and the pavement was perfectly dry, so that the victim of fidelity had not even to fear a cold in the head.

"Herr Justizrath," I said, as we crossed the market-place, "you will tell my father, will you not, that I gave myself up voluntarily, and without any compulsion; and I will never mention to any one a word about the broken pipe."

I have spoken many foolish and inconsiderate words in my life, but few that were more foolish and more inconsiderate than this. Just as I was touching the point which I might say was the only thing in the whole affair to which I attached importance, namely, to show my pride to the father who had disowned me, I failed to perceive that I gave mortal offence to a man who would never forgive, and had never forgiven me.

Who can tell what other turn the affair might have taken, if, instead of my unpardonable stupidity, I had intoned a paean to the heroic man who knew how to guard himself from a possible and indeed probable attack, and then did his duty, happen what might. But how could I know that, young fool that I was?

So we reached the open hall of the _Rathhaus_, where in the day time an old cake-woman used to sit in a chair sawed out of a barrel, before a table where plum-buns and candies lay upon a cloth not always clean, that was constantly fluttering in the wind that blew through the hall.

The table was now bare, and presented a very forlorn appearance, as if old Mother Moller, and not only she, but all the cakes, plum-buns, and candies of the world, had departed forever.

A desolate feeling came over me; for the first and only time this night, the thought occurred to me that perhaps after all I had better make my escape. Who was to prevent me? a.s.suredly not the slippered hero at my side; and as little the old night-watchman Ruterbusch, who was shuffling up and down the hall, in front of his sentry-box, in the dim light of a lantern that swung from the vaulted roof. But I thought of my father, and wondered if his conscience would not smite him when he heard the next morning that I was in prison; and so I stood quietly by and heard the night-watchman Ruterbusch explaining to Justizrath Heckepfennig that the matter would be very hard to manage, since the last few days so many arrests had been made, that the guard-house was completely full.

The guard-house was a forbidding-looking appendage to the _Rathhaus_, and fronted on an extremely narrow alley in which footsteps always made a peculiar echo. No townsman who could avoid it ever went through this echoing alley; for that gloomy appendage to the _Rathhaus_ had no door, but a row of small square windows secured with iron bars and half-closed with wooden screens, and behind them here and there might be seen a pale, woe-begone face.

A quarter of an hour after the conversation between Herr Justizrath Heckepfennig and night-watchman Ruterbusch had come to a satisfactory conclusion, I was sitting behind one of these grated windows.

PART SECOND.

CHAPTER I.

This little alley by the _Rathhaus_, in which footsteps gave such a singular echo, had never, even within the recollection of the most ancient crow on the neighboring steeple of St. Nicholas's church, enjoyed such a reputation for uncanniness as in the last two months of this year, and the first two of the next. It was also observed that in no previous winter had the snow lain so deep in it, and it grew dark much earlier in the evening than had ever before been known. And Mother Moller, the old cake-woman in the _Rathhaus_ hall, who always. .h.i.therto, in the winter season, packed up her wares at the stroke of five, now did it regularly at half-past four, because, as she affirmed, just as it grew dark there was "what you might call a kind of corpsy smell about," and her old table-cloth flapped about in a way no natural table-cloth would do. On the other hand Father Ruterbusch, the night-watchman, a.s.severated that for his part he had not observed either in the hall or the alley anything out of the common, not even between twelve and one o'clock, which was the fas.h.i.+onable hour with ghosts, let alone at other times. Yet people were more disposed to accept the views of the old cake-woman than those of the still older night-watchman; as the first, though she took a nap now and then, still on the whole was more awake than asleep; while in regard to the other, the regular customers of the _Rathhaus_ cellar, who had to pa.s.s his post at night, maintained precisely the contrary. By these a.s.sertions they deeply wounded the good heart of Father Ruterbusch, but did not confute him. "For, d'ye see," he would argue, "you must know that a sworn night-watchman never goes to sleep, on any account; but it may happen that he pretends to be asleep, in order not to mortify certain gentlemen who would be ashamed if they knew the old man had his eye on their doings. And mark you, I am willing to be qualified to what I say, upon my oath of office; and none of them can say that. And even if many of them, for instance Rathscarpenter Karl Bobbin, come and go the same way every evening, that is to say every night, for nigh on to twenty years now, a habit is not an office, mark you; and I for my part have never heard, for example, that the customers of the cellar ever took any oath or were qualified in any manner, shape, or form; and yet it was only last Easter I celebrated my jubilee, for it was then fifty years I had held this place, and I went to school with Karl Bobbin's father, who was never of any account, for that matter."

However, be that as it might, during the winter of '33-'34, there was but one opinion of the matter in Uselin; and that was, that if there _was_ anything queer about the Rathhaus alley, n.o.body need wonder at it, as things were.

Things were certainly bad enough, and worse for no one than for me, who, as was admitted on all hands, was by far the chief figure in the great smuggling case; for into such proportions, thanks to the inquisitorial genius of the justizrath who had charge of the investigation, a thing which to my eyes was of extreme simplicity had now been developed.

As if it was of the least importance how the case looked in _my_ eyes!

As if anybody gave himself the trouble to inquire what _my_ thoughts or wishes were! But no; I will do Justizrath Heckepfennig and co-referent Justizrath Bostelmann no injustice. They gave themselves the very greatest trouble; but they had no desire to find out where the truth lay, and where I told them it might be found.

"Why had I left my father?" they asked.

"Because he ordered me out of his house!"

"A fine reason, truly! Angry fathers often tell their sons to be gone, without the idea ever seizing the sons to start off into the wide world. There must be something more behind. Perhaps you wanted to be sent off?"

"To a certain extent I admit it."

"Perhaps you admit it unqualifiedly?"