And then Hans returned to his violated chest, and found that the dread which had assailed his soul was founded in substantial truth—the recipe was gone! In itself the loss of the recipe was no very great matter, for he knew it by heart; but that Gottlieb—who had also a cellar full of rich old honey-cake—should have gained possession of it was a desperate matter indeed. Here instantly was an end to the hope of successful rivalry that Hans had cherished; and with the wreck of his luck in trade, as it seemed to him in the first shock of his misfortune, away in fragments to the four winds of heaven was scattered every vestige of probability that he would have luck in love. Being so suddenly confronted with a compound catastrophe so overwhelming, even a bolder baker than Hans Kuhn very well might have been for a time aghast.
But as his wits slowly came together again Hans perceived that the game was not by any means lost, after all; on the contrary, it looked very much as though he had it pretty well in his own hands. Gottlieb was a thief, and all that was needed to complete the chain of evidence against him was his first baking of lebkuchen; for that as clearly would prove him to be in possession of the stolen recipe as what the widow could tell would prove that he had created for himself an opportunity to steal it. The most agreeable way of winning a father-in-law is not by force of threatening to hale him to a police court, but it is better to win him that way than not to win him at all, Hans thought; and he thought also that this was one of the occasions when it was quite justifiable to fight the devil with fire. So his spirits rose, and now he longed for, as eagerly as in the first moments of his loss he had dreaded, the production of such lebkuchen at the Café Nürnberg as would prove the proprietor of that highly respectable establishment to be neither more nor less than a robber.
Hans was both annoyed and surprised as time passed on and the "cakes succulent but damnatory" were not forthcoming from Gottlieb's oven. He himself went on making unsatisfactory lebkuchen of bad materials by a good formula, and Gottlieb continued to make unsatisfactory lebkuchen by a bad formula of the best materials. Orthodox German palates found nothing to commend and much to reprobate in both results. This was the situation for several weeks. Hans could not understand it at all. The subject was a delicate one to broach to Minna during their short but blissful interviews about dusk in the central fastnesses of Tompkins Square, at which interviews Aunt Hedwig winked and Herr Sohnstein openly connived by keeping watch for them against Gottlieb's possible appearance; for Hans had determined that until he had positive proof to go upon he would keep secret, and most of all from Minna, the dreadful fact of her father's crime. Therefore did he remain in a state of very harrowing uncertainty, with his plan of campaign completely brought to a stand.
During this period a heavy cloud hung over the Café Nürnberg. Gottlieb came fitfully to his meals; and when he did come, he ate almost nothing. Each day he grew more and more morose; each night, when poor Aunt Hedwig was not kept awake by her own sorrowful thoughts, her slumbers were, broken by hearing her brother pacing heavily the floor of the adjoining room. In some sort he made up for his loss of sleep at night by sleeping of an evening in the little room back of the shop, falling into restless naps (when he should have been restfully smoking his long pipe), from which he would wake with a start and sometimes with a cry of alarm, and would dart furtive horrified glances at Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein: who were doing nothing of a horrifying nature, only sitting cozily close together, more or less enfolded in each other's arms. It was a little inconsiderate on the part of the lovers, and very-hard on Minna, this extremely open love-making; for Minna's love-making necessarily was by fitful snatches amid the bleak desolations of Tompkins Square. They would try to comfort each other, she and Hans, as they stood cheerlessly under the chill lee of the music stand; but their outlook was a dreary one, and their efforts in this direction were not crowned with any great success. Sometimes as Minna came home again along the west side of the square, and saw in Spengler's window the wreaths of highly-artificial immortelles with the word "Ruhe" upon them in vivid purple letters, she fairly would fall to crying over the thought that until she should become a fit subject for such a wreath there was small chance that any real rest would be hers.
However, all this is aside from Gottlieb's horrified looks as he waked from his troubled slumbers—looks which would disappear as he became thoroughly aroused, but only to return again after his next uneasy nap. One day he startled Aunt Hedwig by asking her if she believed in ghosts. Remembering his severe words in condemnation of her casual reference to these supernatural beings, it was with some hesitation that she replied that she did. Still more to her surprise, Gottlieb turned away from her hurriedly, yet not so hurriedly but that she saw a strange, scared look upon his face, and in a low and trembling voice replied: "And so do I!"
And now the fact may as well be admitted frankly that a ghost was the disturbing element that was making Gottlieb's life go wrong; that, as there seemed to be every reason to believe, was hurrying him towards the grave: for a middle-aged German who refuses to eat, whose regular sleep forsakes him, and who actually gives up smoking, naturally cannot be expected to remain long in this world.
It was the ghost of his dead wife. At first she appeared to him only in his dreams, standing beside the desk in which he had placed the stolen recipe for making lebkuchen, and holding down the lid of that desk with a firm but diaphanous white hand. Presently she appeared to him quite as clearly in his waking hours. Her face still wore an expression at once tender and reproachful; but every day the look of tenderness diminished, while the look of reproach grew stronger and more stern. Each time that he sought to open the desk that he might take thence the recipe and make his crime a practical business success, the figure assumed an air so terribly menacing that his heart failed him, and he gave over the attempt.
This, then, was the all-sufficient reason why the good lebkuchen that would have proved Gottlieb a thief was not for sale at the Café Nürenburg; and this was the reason why Gottlieb himself, broken down by loss of food and sleep and by the nervous wear and tear incident to forced companionship with an angry ghost, was drawing each day nearer and nearer to that dark portal through which bakers and all other people pass hence into the shadowy region whence there is no return.
Gottlieb Brekel never had been an especially pious man. As became a reputable German citizen, he had paid regularly the rent of a pew in the Church of the Redemptorist Fathers in Third Street; but, excepting on such high feasts as Christmas and Easter, he usually had been content to occupy it and to discharge his religious duties at large vicariously. Aunt Hed-wig's bonnet invariably was the most brilliantly conspicuous feature of the entire congregation, just as the prettiest face in the entire congregation invariably was Minna's. But now that Gottlieb was confronted with a spiritual difficulty, it occurred to him that he might advantageously resort in his extremity to spiritual aid. He had no very clear notion how the aid would be given; he was not even clear as to how he ought to set about asking for it; and he was troubled by the conviction that in order to obtain it he must not only repent of his sin, but must make atonement by restitution—a possibility (for the devil still had a good grip upon him) that made him hesitate a long while before he set about purchasing ease for his conscience at so heavy a material cost. However, his good angel at last managed to pluck up some courage—it was high time—and, strengthened by this tardily given assistance, he betook himself in search of consolation within church walls.
The Church of the Redemptorist Fathers is a very beautiful church, and at all times—save through the watches of the night and through one mid-day hour—its doors stand hospitably open, silently inviting poor sinners, weary and heavy laden with their sins, to enter into the calm of its quiet holiness and there find rest. Tall, slender pillars uphold its vaulted roof, in the groinings of which lurk mysterious shadows. Below, a warm, rich light comes through the stained-glass windows: whereon are pictured the blessed St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, founder of the Redemptorist Congregation, blessedly instructing the chubby-faced choristers; and the Venerable Clement Hofbauer, "primus in Germania" of the Redemptorists, all in his black gown, kneeling, praying no doubt for the outcast German souls for the saving of which he worked so hard and so well; and (a picture that Minna dearly loved) St. Joseph and the sweet Virgin and the little Christ-child fleeing together through the desert from the wrath of the Judean king. And ranged around the walls on perches high aloft are statues of various minor saints and of the Twelve Apostles; of which Minna's favorite was the Apostle Matthias, because this saint, with his high forehead tending towards baldness, and his long gray beard and gray hair, and his kindly face, and even the axe in his hand (that was not unlike a baker's peel), made her think always of her dear father. The pew that Gottlieb paid for so regularly, and so irregularly occupied, was just beneath the statue of this saint; which, however, gave Minna less pleasure than would have been hers had not the next saint in the row been the Apostle Simon with his dreadful saw. It must have hurt so horribly to be sawed in two, she thought. In the dusky depths of the great chancel gleamed the white marble of the beautiful altar, guarded by St. Peter with his keys and St. Paul with his naked two-edged sword; and above the altar was the dead Christ on Calvary, with His desolate mother and the despairing Magdalene and St. John the divine.