V
The lamps went out; the rats came and ran across the floor; asthe hours crept on through midnight and past, the cold intensifiedand the air of the room grew like ice. August did not move; helay with his face downward on the golden and rainbow-huedpedestal of the household treasure, which henceforth was to becold for evermore, an exiled thing in a foreign city in a far-offland.
Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers came down thestairs and let themselves out, each bearing his lantern and goingto 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 tomake 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 themthat she had never seen there. His face was ashen white: his lipswere like fire. He had not slept all night; but his passionatesobs had given way to delirious waking dreams and numb senselesstrances, which had alternated one on another all through thefreezing, 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 amDorothea. 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 alwaysgood: perhaps he could save it."
Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of the house-door drownedhis words. A strange voice called aloud through the keyhole,--
"Let me in! Quick!--there is no time to lose! More snow likethis, 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 touchit!"
"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 mefirst!"
"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 littledemon, and hit out right and left, and one of his blows gave theBavarian 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 ofthe back entrance, and the buyers of the stately and beautifulstove set to work to pack it heedfully and carry it away.
When Dorothea stole out to look for August, he was nowhere insight. She went back to little 'Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbedover the child, whilst the others stood looking on, dimlyunderstanding that with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth oftheir bodies, all the light of their hearth.
Even their father now was sorry and ashamed; but two hundredflorins seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought thechildren could warm themselves quite as well at the black ironstove in the kitchen. Besides, whether he regretted it now ornot, the work of the Nuernberg potter was sold irrevocably, and hehad to stand still and see the men from Munich wrap it inmanifold wrappings and bear it out into the snowy air to where anox-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 fromthe violence that had been used to him, against the back wall ofthe house. The wall looked on a court where a well was, and thebacks of other houses, and beyond them the spire of the MuntzeTower and the peaks of the mountains.
Into the court an old neighbor hobbled for water, and, seeing theboy, 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 forgiveme for calling him so before his own child! but the stove wasworth a mint of money. I do remember in my young days, in oldAnton's time (that was your great-grandfather, my lad), astranger from Vienna saw it, and said that it was worth itsweight in gold."
August's sobs went on their broken, impetuous course.
"I loved it! I loved it!" he moaned. "I do not care what itsvalue was. I loved it! _I loved it!_"
"You little simpleton!" said the old man, kindly. "But you arewiser than your father, when all's said. If sell it he must, heshould have taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Spruez, whowould have given him honest value. But no doubt they took himover his beer,--ay, ay! but if I were you I would do better thancry. 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 agood-natured wish to cheer him up a little. "The world is a smallthing 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 incotton wool by everybody. Ay, ay, don't cry so much; you will seeyour stove again some day."
Then the old man hobbled away to draw his brazen pail full ofwater at the well.
August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzingand his heart fluttering with the new idea which had presenteditself to his mind. "Go after it," had said the old man. Hethought, "Why not go with it?" He loved it better than any one,even better than Dorothea; and he shrank from the thought ofmeeting his father again, his father who had sold Hirschvogel.
He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which theimpossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears werestill wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ranout of the court-yard by a little gate, and across to the hugeGothic porch of the church. From there he could watch unseen hisfather's house-door, at which were always hanging some blue-and-graypitchers, such as are common and so picturesque in Austria, for apart of the house was let to a man who dealt in pottery.
He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passedthrough to go to mass or compline within, and presently his heartgave a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove broughtout and laid with infinite care on the bullock-dray. Two of theBavarian men mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowlycrept over the snow of the place,--snow crisp and hard as stone.The noble old minster looked its grandest and most solemn, withits dark-gray stone and its vast archways, and its porch that wasitself as big as many a church, and its strange gargoyles andlamp-irons black against the snow on its roof and on thepavement; but for once August had no eyes for it: he only watchedfor his old friend. Then he, a little unnoticeable figure enough,like a score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen by any of hisbrothers or sisters, out of the porch and over the shelvinguneven square, and followed in the wake of the dray.
Its course lay towards the station of the railway, which is closeto the salt-works, whose smoke at times sullies this part ofclean little Hall, though it does not do very much damage. FromHall the iron road runs northward through glorious country toSalzburg, Vienna, Prague, Buda, and southward over the Brennerinto Italy. Was Hirschvogel going north or south? This at leasthe would soon know.