Zigzag Journeys in Northern Lands Part 33

He is a great deal of his time at Erlangen's, and is an enthusiast about fine bells. Ah! we are great friends, and I am going to him after supper."

"People say he is crazy," said his mother.

"Crazy!" indignantly. "People say that of everybody who has ideas they can't understand. They say _I_ am crazy when I talk of my chime of bells. If I stay with Erlangen, he gets the credit of my work; but my chime must be mine,--mine alone, mother." His eyes lighted with a kind of wild enthusiasm whenever he talked on this subject.

His mother's cheerful face grew sad, as she laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Why, Otto, thou art not thyself when thou speakest of those bells."

"More my real self, mother, than at any other time!" he cried. "I only truly live when I think of how my idea is to be carried out. It is to be my life's work; I know it, I feel it. It is upon me that my fate is woven inextricably in that ideal chime. It is G.o.d-sent. No great work, but the maker is possessed wholly by it. Don't shake your head, mother. Wait till my 'Harmony Chime' sounds from the great cathedral belfry, and then shake it if you can."

His mother smiled faintly.

"Thou art a boy,--a mere child, Otto, though a wonderful genius, I must confess. Thy hopes delude thee, for it would take a lifetime to carry out thine idea."

"Then let it take a lifetime!" he cried out vehemently. "Let me accomplish it when I am too old to hear it distinctly, and I will be content that its first sounds toll my dirge. I must go now to Monsieur Dayrolles. Wish me good luck, dearest mother." And he stooped and kissed her tenderly.

Otto did not fail. The strange old man in his visits to the foundry had noticed the germs of genius in the boy, and grown very fond of him. He was so frank, so honest, so devoted to his work, and had accomplished so much at his early age, that Monsieur Dayrolles saw a brilliant future before him. Besides, the old gentleman, with a Frenchman's vanity, felt that if the "Harmony Chime" _could_ be made, the name of the munificent patron would go down to posterity with that of the maker. He believed firmly that the boy would some day accomplish his purpose. So, although the revolt of the Netherlands had begun and he was preparing to return to his own country, he advanced the necessary funds, and saw Otto established in business before he quitted Ghent.

In a very short time work poured in upon Otto. During that long and terrible war the manufacture of cannon alone made the fortunes of the workers in iron. So five years from the time he left Von Erlangen we find Otto Holstein a rich man at twenty-four years of age. But the idea for which he labored had never for a moment left his mind. Sleeping or waking, toiling or resting, his thoughts were busy perfecting the details of the great work.

"Thou art twenty-four to-day, Otto," said his good mother, "and rich beyond our hopes. When wilt thou bring Gertrude home to me?

Thou hast been betrothed now for three years, and I want a daughter to comfort my declining years. Thou doest thy betrothed maiden a grievous wrong to delay without cause. The gossips are talking already."

"Let them talk," laughed Otto. "Little do Gertrude or I care for their silly tongues. She and I have agreed that the 'Harmony Chime'

is to usher in our marriage-day. Why, good mother, no man can serve two mistresses, and my chime has the oldest claim. Let me accomplish it, and then the remainder of my life belongs to Gertrude, and thou, too, best of mothers."

"Still that dream! still that dream!" sighed his mother. "Thou hast cast bell after bell, and until to-day I have heard nothing more of the wild idea."

"No, because I needed money. I needed time, and thought, too, to make experiments. All is matured now. I have received an order to make a new set of bells for the great cathedral that was sacked last week by the 'Iconoclasts,' and I begin to-morrow."

[Ill.u.s.tration: BELL-TOWER, GHENT.]

As Otto had said, his life's work began the next day. He loved his mother, but he seemed now to forget her in the feverish eagerness with which he threw himself into his labors. He had been a devoted lover to Gertrude, but he now never had a spare moment to give to her,--in fact, he only seemed to remember her existence in connection with the peal which would ring in their wedding-day. His labors were prolonged far over the appointed time, and meanwhile the internal war raged more furiously, and the Netherlands were one vast battle-field. No interest did Otto seem to take in the stirring events around him. The bells held his whole existence captive.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BELL TOWER OF HEIDELBERG.]

At last the moulds were broken, and the bells came out of their husks perfect in form, and s.h.i.+ning as stars in Otto's happy eyes.

They were mounted in the great belfry, and for the test-chime Otto had employed the best bell-ringers in the city.

It was a lovely May morning; and, almost crazed with excitement and anxiety, Otto, accompanied by a few chosen friends, waited outside the city for the first notes of the Harmony Chime. At some distance he thought he could better judge of the merits of his work.

At last the first notes were struck, clear, sonorous, and so melodious that his friends cried aloud with delight. But with finger upraised for silence, and eyes full of ecstatic delight, Otto stood like a statue until the last note died away. Then his friends caught him as he fell forward in a swoon,--a swoon so like death that no one thought he would recover.

But it was not death, and he came out of it with a look of serene peace on his face that it had not worn since boyhood. He was married to Gertrude that very day, but every one noticed that the ecstasy which transfigured his face seemed to be drawn more from the sound of the bells than the sweet face beside him.

"Don't you see a spell is cast on him as soon as they begin to ring?" said one, after the bells had ceased to be a wonder. "If he is walking, he stops short, and if he is working, the work drops and a strange fire comes in his eyes; and I have seen him shudder all over as it he had an ague."

In good truth, the bells seemed to have drawn a portion of Otto's life to them. When the incursions of the war forced him to fly from Ghent with his family, his regrets were not for his injured property, but that he could not hear the bells.

He was absent two years, and when he returned it was to find the cathedral almost a ruin, and the bells gone no one knew where. From that moment a settled melancholy took possession of Otto. He made no attempt to retrieve his losses; in fact, he gave up work altogether, and would sit all day with his eyes fixed on the ruined belfry.

People said he was melancholy mad, and I suppose it was the truth; but he was mad with a kind of gentle patience very sad to see. His mother had died during their exile, and now his wife, unable with all her love to rouse him from his torpor, faded slowly away. He did not notice her sickness, and his poor numbed brain seemed imperfectly to comprehend her death. But he followed her to the grave, and turning from it moved slowly down the city, pa.s.sed the door of his old home without looking at it, and went out of the city gates.

After that he was seen in every city in Europe at different intervals. Charitable people gave him alms, but he never begged. He would enter a town, take his station near a church and wait until the bells rang for matins or vespers, then take up his staff and, sighing deeply, move off. People noting the wistful look in his eyes would ask him what he wanted.

"I am seeking,--I am seeking," was his only reply; and those were almost the only words any one ever heard from him, and he muttered them often to himself. Years rolled over the head of the wanderer, but still his slow march from town to town continued. His hair had grown white, and his strength had failed him so much that he only tottered instead of walked, but still that wistful seeking look was in his eyes.

He heard the old bells on the Rhine in his wanderings. He lingered long near the belfries of the sweetest voices; but their melodious tongues only spoke to him of his lost hope.

He left the river of sweet bells, and made a pilgrimage to England.

It was the days of cathedrals in their beauty and glory, and here he again heard the tones that he loved, but which failed to realize his own ideal.

When a person fails to fulfil his ideal, his whole life seems a failure,--like something glorious and beautiful one meets and loses, and never again finds.

"Be true to the dreams of thy youth," says a German author; and every soul is unhappy until the dreams of youth prove true.

One glorious evening in midsummer Otto was crossing a river in Ireland. The kind-hearted boatman had been moved by the old man's imploring gestures to cross him. "He's mighty nigh his end, anyhow,"

he muttered, looking at the feeble movements of the old pilgrim as he stumbled to his seat.

Suddenly through the still evening air came the distant sound of a melodious chime. At the first note the pilgrim leaped to his feet and threw up his arms.

"O my G.o.d," he cried, "found at last!"

"It's the bells of the Convent," said the wondering man, not understanding Otto's words spoken in a foreign tongue, but answering his gesture. "They was brought from somewhere in Holland when they were fighting there. Moighty fine bells they are, anyhow. But he isn't listening to me."

No, he heard nothing but the bells. He merely whispered, "Come back to me after so many years,--O love of my soul, O thought of my life!

Peal on, for your voices tell me of Paradise."

The last note floated through the air, and as it died away something else soared aloft forever, free from the clouds and struggles of life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRESLAU.]

His ideal was fulfilled now. Otto lay dead, his face full of peace and joy, for the weary quest of his crazy brain was over, and the Harmony Chime had called him to his eternal rest.

And, past that change of life that men call Death, we may well believe that he heard in the ascension to the celestial atmosphere the ringing of welcoming bells more beautiful than the Harmony Chime.

"I will relate another story," said Mr. Beal. "It is like the Harmony Chime, but has a sadder ending."

THE BELL-FOUNDER OF BRESLAU.

There once lived in Breslau a famous bell-founder, the fame of whose skill caused his bells to be placed in many German towers. According to the ballad of Wilhelm Muller,--

"And all his bells they sounded So full and clear and pure: He poured his faith and love in, Of that all men were sure.

But of all bells that ever He cast, was one the crown, That was the bell for sinners At Breslau in the town."

He had an ambition to cast one bell that would surpa.s.s all others in purity of tone, and that should render his own name immortal.