Chapter Eight.
The “Little Fat Man.”
“Hullo! What fails with the well-born and most worthy lady, her to make in such pitiable plight?” inquired Burgher Jans, poking his little round face into the parlour of the house in the Gulden Strasse, just as Lorischen, bending over her mistress, was endeavouring to raise her on to the sofa, where she would be better enabled to apply restoratives in order to bring her to.
The old nurse was glad of any assistance in the emergency; and, even the fat little Burgher, disliked as he was by her, as a rule, with an inveterate hatred, was better than nobody!
“Madame has fainted,” she said. “Help me to lift her up, and I’ll be obliged to you, worshipful Herr.”
“Yes, so, right gladly will I do it, dearest maiden,” replied Burgher Jans politely, with his usual sweeping bow, taking off his hat and depositing it on an adjacent chair, while he lent a hand to raise the poor lady and place her on the couch.
This done, he espied the letter that had caused the commotion, which Madame Dort still held tightly clutched in her hand when she fell; and he tried to pull it away from her rigid fingers. “Ha, what have we here?” he said.
“You just leave that alone!” snapped out Lorischen. “Pray take yourself off, with your wanting to spy into other people’s business! If I were a man I’d be ashamed of being so curious, I would. Burgher Jans, I’ll thank you to withdraw; I wish to attend to my mistress.”
“I will obey your behests, dearest maiden,” blandly replied the little man, taking his hat from the chair and backing towards the door, although casting the while most covetous eyes on the mysterious letter, which he would have cheerfully given a thaler to have been allowed to peruse. “I will return anon to inquire how the gracious lady is after her indisposition, and—”
“If you are not out of the room before I count five,” exclaimed the old nurse, angrily interrupting him, “I declare I’ll pitch this footstool at your little round turnip-top of a head, that I will. One—two—three—”
“Why, whatever is the matter, Lorischen?” interposed Madame Dort, opening her eyes at this juncture, while the old nurse yet stood with the footstool raised in her uplifted hands facing the door, half in and half out of which peered the tortoise-shell spectacles of the little fat burgher. “Who is there?”
The poor lady spoke very faintly, and did not seem to know where she was at first, her gaze wandering round the room.
Lorischen quickly put down the heavy missile with which she was threatening Burgher Jans; and he, taking advantage of this suspension of hostilities, at once advanced again within the apartment, although still keeping his hand on the door so as to be ready to beat a retreat in a fresh emergency, should the old nurse attempt to renew the interrupted fray.
“High, well-born, and most gracious madame,” said he obsequiously. “It is me, only me!”
“Hein!” grunted Lorischen. “A nice ‘me’ it is—a little, inquisitive, meddlesome morsel of a man!”
“Oh, Meinherr Burgher Jans,” said Madame Dort, rising up from the sofa. “I’m glad to see you; I wanted to ask you something. I—”
Just at that moment she caught sight of the letter she held between her fingers, when she recollected all at once the news she had received, of which she had been for the time oblivious.
“Ah, poor Fritz!” she exclaimed, bursting into a fit of weeping. “My son, my firstborn, I shall never see him more!”
“Why, what have you heard, gracious lady?” said Burgher Jans, abandoning his refuge by the door, and coming forwards into the centre of the room. “No bad news, I trust, from the young and well-born Herr?”
“Read,” said the widow, extending the letter in her hand towards him; “read for yourself and see.”
His owlish eyes all expanded with delight through the tortoise-shell spectacles, the fat little man eagerly took hold of the rustling piece of paper and unfolded it, his hands trembling with nervous anxiety to know what the missive contained—and which he had been all along burning with curiosity to find out.
Lorischen actually snorted with indignation.
“There, just see that!” she grumbled through her set teeth, opening and clenching her fingers together convulsively, as if she would like to snatch the letter away from him—when, perhaps, she would have expressed her feelings pretty forcibly in the way of scratches on the Burgher’s beaming face: “there, I wouldn’t have let him see it if he had gone down on his bended knees for it—no, not if I had died first!”
The widow continued to sob in her handkerchief; while the Burgher appeared to gloat over the delicate angular handwriting of the letter, as if he were learning it by heart and spelling out every word—he took so long over it.
“Ah, it is bad, gracious lady,” he said at length; “but, still, not so bad as it might otherwise be.”
Madame Dort raised her tear-stained face, looking at the little roan questioningly; while Lorischen, who in her longing to hear about Fritz had not quitted the apartment, according to her usual custom when Burgher Jans was in it, drew nearer, resting her impulsive fingers on the table, so as not to alarm that worthy unnecessarily and make him stop speaking.
The Burgher felt himself a person of importance, on account of his opinion being consulted; so he drew himself up to his full height—just five feet one inch!
“The letter only says, most worthy and gracious lady,—and you, dearest maiden,” he proceeded—with a special bow to Lorischen, which the latter, sad to relate, only received with a grimace from her tightly drawn spinster lips—“that the young and well-born Herr is merely grievously wounded, and not, thanks be to Providence, that he is—he is—he is—”
“Why don’t you say ‘dead’ at once, and not beat about the bush in that stupid way?” interposed the old nurse, who detested the little man’s hemming and hawing over matters which she was in the habit of blurting out roughly without demur.
“No, I like not the ugly word,” suavely expostulated the Burgher. “The great-to-come-for-all-of-us can be better expressed than that! But, to resume my argument, dearest maiden and most gracious lady, this document does not state that the dear son of the house has shaken off this mortal coil entirely as yet.”
“I’d like to shake off yours, and you with it!” said Lorischen angrily, under her breath—“for a word-weaving, pedantic little fool!”
“You mean that there is hope?” asked Madame Dort, looking a bit less tearful, her grief having nearly exhausted itself.
“Most decidedly, dear lady,” said the Burgher. “Does not the letter say so in plain and very-much-nicely-written characters?”
“But, all such painful communications are generally worded, if the writers have a tender heart, so as to break bad news as gently as possible,” answered the widow, wishing to have the faint sanguine suspicion of hope that was stealing over her confirmed by the other’s opinion.
“Just so,” said Burgher Jans authoritatively. “You have reason in your statement; still, dear lady, by what I can gather from this letter, I should think that the Frau or Fraulein Vogelstein who signs it wishes to prepare you for the worst, but yet intimates at the same time that there is room to hope for the best.”
“Ah, I’m glad you say so,” exclaimed the widow joyfully. “Now I read it over, I believe the same; but at first, I thought, in my hurried glance over it, that Fritz was slain, the writer only pretending he was still alive, in order to prepare me for his loss. He is not dead, thank God! That is everything; for, whilst there is life, there’s hope, eh?”
“Most decidedly, gracious lady,” responded the little man with effusion. “If ever I under the down-pressing weight of despondency lie, so I unto myself much comfort make by that happy consolation!”
Madame Dort experienced such relief from the cheering aspect in which the Burgher’s explanation had enabled her now to look upon the news of Fritz’s wound, that her natural feelings of hospitality, which had been dormant for the while, asserted themselves in favour of her timely visitor, who in spite of his curiosity had certainly done her much good in banishing all the ill effects of her fainting fit.
“Will you not have a glass of lager, Herr Jans?” said she.
“Mein Gott, yes,” promptly returned the little man. “Much talking makes one dry, and beer is good for the stomach.”
“Lorischen, get the Burgher some lager bier,” ordered Madame Dort, on her invitation being accepted, the old nurse proceeding to execute the command with very ill grace.
“The Lord only knows when he’ll leave now, once he starts guzzling beer in the parlour! That Burgher Jans is getting to be a positive nuisance to us; and I shall be glad when our poor wounded Fritz comes home, if only to stop his coming here so frequently—the gossipping little time-server, with his bowing and scraping and calling me his ‘dearest maiden,’ indeed—I’d ‘maiden’ him if I had the chance!”
Lorischen was much exasperated, and so she grumbled to herself as she sallied out of the room.
However, much to her relief, the “fat little man” did not make a long stay on this occasion, for he took his leave soon after swallowing the beer. He was anxious to make a round of visits amongst his acquaintances, to retail the news that Fritz was wounded and lying in a hospital at Mézières, near Metz, for he had read it himself in the letter, you know! He likewise informed his hearers, although he had not so impressed the widow, that they would probably never see the young clerk of Herr Grosschnapper again in Lubeck, as his case was so desperate that he was not expected to live! His story otherwise, probably, would have been far less interesting to scandal-mongers, as they would have thus lost the opportunity of settling all the affairs of the widow and considering whom she would marry again. Of course, they now decided, that, as she had as good as lost both her sons and had a nice little property of her own, besides being comparatively not old, so to speak, and not very plain, she would naturally seek another partner to console herself in her solitude—Burgher Jans getting much quizzed on this point, with sly allusions as to his being the widow’s best friend!
Some days after Madaleine Vogelstein’s first letter, Madame Dort received a second, telling her that the ball had been extracted from her son’s wound, but fever had come on, making him very weak and prostrate; although, as his good constitution had enabled him to survive the painful operation, he would probably pull through this second ordeal.
The widow again grew down-hearted at this intelligence, and it was as much as Burgher Jans could do, with all his plausibility, to make her hopeful; while Lorischen, her old superstitious fears and belief in Mouser’s prophetic miaow-wowing again revived, did all her best to negative the fat little man’s praiseworthy efforts at cheering. Ever since the Burgher had been elected a confidant of Madaleine’s original communication, he had made a point of calling every day in the Gulden Strasse, with his, to the old nurse, sickening and stereotyped inquiry—“Any news yet?” until the field post brought the next despatch, when, as he now naturally expected and wished, the letter was given him to read.
“He seems bent on hanging up his hat in our lobby here!” Lorischen would say spitefully, on the widow seeking to excuse the little man’s pertinacity in visiting her. “Much he cares whether poor Master Fritz gets well or ill; he takes more interest in somebody else, I think!”
“Oh, Lorischen!” Madame Dort would remonstrate. “How can you say such things?”
“It is ‘Oh, mistress!’ it strikes me,” the other would retort. “I wish the young master were only here!”
“And so do I heartily,” said Madame Dort, at the end of one of these daily skirmishes between the two on the same subject. “We agree on that point, at all events!” and she sighed heavily. The old servant was so privileged a person that she did not like to speak harshly to her, although she did not at all relish Lorischen’s frequent allusions as to the real object of the Burgher’s visits, and her surmises as to what the neighbours would think about them. Madame Dort put up with Lorischen’s innuendoes in silence, but still, she did not look pleased.
“Ach Himmel, dear mistress!” pleaded the offender, “never mind my waspish old tongue. I am always saying what I shouldn’t; but that little fat man does irritate me with his hypocritical, oily smile and smooth way—calling me his ‘dearest maiden,’ indeed!”
“Why, don’t you see, Lorischen, that it is you really whom he comes here after, although you treat him so cruelly!” said the widow, smiling.
This was more than the old spinster could bear.
“What, me!” she exclaimed, with withering scorn. “Himmel, if I thought that, I would soon scratch his chubby face for him—me, indeed!” and she retreated from the room in high dudgeon.
Bye-and-bye, there came another letter from the now familiar correspondent, saying that Fritz was really recovering at last; and, oh what happiness! the mother’s heart was rejoiced by the sight of a few awkwardly scrawled lines at the end. It was a postscript from her son himself!
The almost indecipherable words were only “Love to Mutterchen, from her own Fritz,” but they were more precious to her than the lengthiest epistle from any one else.
“Any news?” asked Burgher Jans of Lorischen soon afterwards, when he came to the house to make his stereotyped inquiry.
“Yes,” said the old nurse, instead of replying with her usual negative.
“Indeed!” exclaimed the little man. “The noble, well-born young Herr is not worse, I hope?” and he tried to hide his abnormally bland expression with a sympathetic look of deep concern; but he failed miserably in the attempt. His full-moon face could not help beaming with a self-satisfied complacency which it was impossible to subdue; indeed, he would have been unable to disguise this appearance of smiling, even if he had been at a funeral and was, mentally, plunged in the deepest woe—if that were possible for him to be!
“No, not worse,” answered Lorischen. “He is—”
“Not dead, I trust?” said Burgher Jans, interrupting her before she could finish her sentence, and using in his hurry the very word to which he had objected before.
“No, he is not dead,” retorted the old nurse, with a triumphant ring in her voice. “And, if you were expecting that, I only hope you are disappointed, that’s all! He is getting better, for he has written to the mistress himself; and, what is more, he’s coming home to send you to the right-about, Burgher Jans, and stop your coming here any more. Do you hear that, eh?”
“My dearest maiden,” commenced to stammer out the little fat man, woefully taken aback by this outburst, “I—I—don’t know what you mean.”
“Ah, but I do,” returned Lorischen, not feeling any the more amiably disposed towards him by his addressing her in that way after what Madame Dort had said about his calling especially to see her. “I know what I mean; and what I mean to say now, is, that my mistress told me to say she was engaged when you came, should you call to-day, and that she is unable to see you, there! Good-morning, Burgher Jans; good-morning, most worshipful Herr!”
So saying, she slammed the door in the poor little man’s face, leaving him without, cogitating the reason for this summary dismissal of him by the widow; albeit Lorischen, in order to indulge her own feelings of dislike, had somewhat exaggerated a casual remark made by her mistress—that she did not wish to be interrupted after the receipt of the good news about Fritz, as she wanted to answer the letter at once!