CHAPTER XV.

DR. WOLKENBERG.

Bruno Wolkenberg lived in a comfortable roomy house, whose exterior well befitted the position which he had won for himself in the city’s estimation. If anyone had the mischance to break his head or dislocate his knee-joint, or otherwise damage himself, or if his body suffered from any of those thousand and one “ills that flesh is heir to,” there was not one who could set him on his legs again like Bruno the surgeon. Only two objections were ever brought against the clever, well-looking doctor: he was young, that is, he was still some years from forty, and—he was a bachelor! but Bruno was wont to laugh down the first of these two objections, saying it was a fault which was daily mending itself; and to sigh down the second, declaring that, at all events, it was an error for which he was not responsible, although there were damsels in Strassburg who thought differently; but surely so clever a disciple of Æsculapius might have been allowed to know best where the wound in his own heart was. There was no doubt at all that Radegund von Steinbach had made that wound; and she alone, the surgeon felt, could cure it. Honest, brave, loyal-hearted, and generous to a fault was Bruno: a friend to the poor, well beloved by all, naturally of a bright, cheery temperament, and something moreover of a poet. He had even been crowned by the _Meister-singer’s_ wreath, but the _Meister-singer_ philosophy was far less to his taste than those glorious romantic old _Minne-lieder_ of his country, and he knew by heart pretty nearly all the wild sagas and legends of Germany, and of other lands too; and many a sufferer’s weariness he had beguiled, and many a little one forgot its pain when Bruno had time to sit down and sing, or say, in his clear, gentle voice how Sigfrid the Horny slew the fearsome dragon, or how Knight Roland fought so bravely with death in the terrible valley; or to tell the tale to the little ones of the Cid’s good faithful horse Babieça, or best of all, how Walther von der Vogelweide so dearly loved the birds, that in death he did not forget them, but ordered holes to be scooped out in his tombstone, away up there in quaint old Wurtzburg city, and left money for crumbs to be put in them twice each day for ever, for the pretty creatures; and how (no greedy wretches, calling themselves Christians, having as yet stolen and appropriated the legacy) they came hop, hop, chirp, chirp there, and sang to the kind old Poet lying peacefully in his grave. Altogether, Doctor Bruno Wolkenberg was a very clever man, and a very good one, and people said he ought to be a happy one; but—well, had the surgeon lived but a century or two later, he might have found a dismal consolation in that aphorism his brother poet has sung:

“There’s something in this world amiss, Shall be unriddled by and by.”

There was something very much amiss with Bruno’s world, and had been for a long time past; and often when this riddle worried him more than usual, he would sit before his lonely hearth, and vex himself almost into a fever trying to unriddle it, and yet it was soon told—nothing more than a hopeless love for Radegund von Steinbach.

Hardly so much can be said for the inside of the surgeon’s house as for its outside. Two years previously, he had bought it in the full hope and confidence that he should succeed in prevailing on Radegund von Steinbach, the beautiful artist, to come there and be its queen and _châtelaine_, and better still, his own well-beloved wife; but the great desolate place stood a dreary wholesome witness to the folly of lovers who reckon without their host. Bruno Wolkenberg believed, indeed, that he had good reason to hope, but the lady had proved far more difficult than he had expected. It is true, she did not immediately consign him to despair—that would have savoured too much of mercy to please Radegund von Steinbach; she had had experience in despairing lovers, and knew how very soon they were apt to find sweet consolation, and it by no means suited her to lose from her shrine a devotee whom it enhanced her glory to retain. At the same time, she told him she was wedded to her art, or at least cared for it too well to dream of sacrificing her love to it for the sake of a mere man; and yet withal, she would so smile or frown upon this mere man as the humour took her, that at the end of two years, he found his chains binding him more tightly than ever, but the ordeal had done him no good. Truly he did not moon about all ungartered and unshaven, or visit his wretchedness on his patients—the gold of his nature was too pure for that; and it was only said, that each day seemed to make Doctor Bruno the gentler and fuller of compassionate endurance for sickness and suffering of every kind whatsoever; but the healthful bloom faded from his cheek, and the joyous light in his eyes grew dimmer, and the footstep, which once had seemed to bring with it hope and health, was slower and more measured than of yore, and those brave stories of fighting Goth and Hun were all changed into sweet sad ditties, like that of the hapless lovers of Rolandseck, or of such patient obedience, faithful unto death, as the gruesome romance of Count Alarcos.

Then, too, that unworldliness and self-forgetfulness grew upon the surgeon, until the rare virtues almost fell into a weakness, for the so-called poor would take advantage and extract from him gratuitous service, when they could very well have paid for it; while the rich, after their kind, worried him, calling him out at unearthly hours to attend to fidgety little ailments, which would have been none the worse for waiting till morning. But Bruno had a kind of feeling that the world might do as it liked with him now, and whether he lived or died, could be of small consequence to anybody—least, perhaps, to himself. And all this to arise out of his ill-starred adoration for the woman who was so well able to turn him round her little white finger, that she was no more than justified in calling him, as she had called him, her spaniel! for Bruno would have sold his soul for Radegund, and at her imperious bidding, would fetch and carry, coming in, to boot, for his full share of kicks and blows.

To-night the surgeon is sitting before his hearth, elbows on knees, and his fingers clutching his crumpled locks, pondering over his problem. In all that wide experience of his amid mortal man’s accidents and diseases, he has come upon no such complication of disorders as this web of hopes and fears tangling about him now; and again and again he gazes wildly up at his surgery walls, as though hoping to find written there something which should help him.

Bruno always lived in that laboratory; the rest of his house had for him a weird indescribably desolate look. He possessed no kith nor kin; and excepting old Trudel, a woman who had received him in her arms on the day when he first came into this troublesome world, and was now his housekeeper, and sole attendant to his few wants, he liked to tell himself that there was not a creature to care whether he went tagless and buttonless, dinnerless and supperless. Wolkenberg himself was not a man to be concerned much about such mere details, but he was Trudel’s one thought by day and by night, and while the faithful soul lived, there was indeed one woman who loved him from her heart’s core. Truly her despotism almost matched her love; but then, as she would always tell you, if she, who had had him in her arms when he was scarce an ell long, did not know what was best for him, who did? As for taking care of himself, there—he was just every bit as much of a baby about it as on the day he was born.

Bruno let Trudel have her way pretty well entirely with himself and his belongings; but all her persuasions could not induce him to live, as she phrased it, “like a Christian,” and inhabit his handsome house, instead of keeping it shut up almost air-tight, and made a hunting-ground for the rats and mice and ghosts; but the surgeon was obstinate in passing his existence, day and night, in the great gloomy chamber, which was his surgery and parlour all in one, while a small recess in the wall contained the narrow bier-like construction he called his bed. Where was the use, he would rejoin to Trudel’s representations that Doctor Bruno Wolkenberg should live surrounded by at least some of the magnificence his repute and means commanded—if his bed were of silk and eider down, he would be more loath perhaps to come out of it, than he was to leave the board and rug, whence one could jump up in an instant on a sudden summons. As to his meals, upon the self-same principle, it was handier to take them sitting on his little three-legged stool by the surgery hearth, than in the fine, vast, chill guest-chamber; because, when called away, as nine times out of ten he was, just as Trudel had brought him some nice, hot, savoury dish, it could be popped down by the fire and kept hot there, you know, even if you didn’t come back till midnight.

Then, too, those rugged, old smoke-embrowned walls seemed to the lonely man more sociable and friendly of aspect than the smooth-shining wainscot and rich Flanders hangings, with their brand new smartness, which only reminded him of hope deferred—nay, well-nigh crushed, and made him unendurably wretched.

Notwithstanding, in a lonely subdued sort of fashion, the surgeon contrived to make his life happy, when once he had got himself into his rusty old frieze gown, and could indulge in the luxury of an hour or two’s uninterrupted experimentalizing or research into that great art, his devotion to which no love for woman could deaden. And well indeed for Bruno that this was so, for he was made of that sensitive stuff from which so frequently spring madness and self-murder, when hope is disappointed; thus work was his guardian genius.

To-night, however, he has laid work aside, and is sitting wearily down to look at Tantalus pictures in the fire. Outside it is blustering and stormy, and Bruno’s dog Balder pricks his ears askance at the hurly-burly, and cowers closer to the blaze. Old Trudel is dozing away in her sanctum, which years ago the surgeon caused to be made a model of snugness for her, and in a hazy sort of way, hopes that no one will come fetching her master out on such a night. “Though it’s more likely than not, of course,” soliloquizes she; “for sick folks haven’t a spark of conscience, and would worry you out of bed though you may be dreaming of the dear Heaven itself! And it’s now here, now there—I’d as lief be the church weathercock as a doctor. There now! didn’t I say so?” she cried, starting from her comfortable posture at the sound of a knocking at the outer door. “Never leave anybody in peace, that they don’t,” she added mutteringly, as she rose and proceeded to unfasten the heavy bolts. As, however, she flashed her lamp in the visitant’s face, her ruffled old brow relaxed at recognising the Professor Dasipodius.

“Ah! You is it, Master Dasipodius?” she cried. “Come in, come in then, out of the rain. Have a care of the lintel; you’ll be knocking your head. Holy Virgin! It is cold comfort outside to-night. To my thinking, a thaw’s always crueller cold than the blackest frost ever made; for all the world like death-damps——”

“Your master is alone, Trudel?” asked Dasipodius, shaking the rain from his cloak.

“Lone, poor dear, as the church weathercock,” sighed the old woman, availing herself of her pet comparison. “A deal more alone than is good for him. But there’s none so welcome to him as you, Herr Professor.” And then Trudel fairly pushed Dasipodius into the laboratory, and returned to her own sanctum, where she folded her hands with a contented air on her lap. Her poor Bruno would be happy now, chatting with his friend of friends. Well, and you would go a good long summer day’s journey before you’d find a pleasanter spoken or a nobler looking gentleman than the Herr Professor; hardly excepting Bruno himself.