“It was a mistake, I own,” said the other; “but still, if I had, there was Simon in the secret.”
“Simon is a fool, and nothing of this would have occurred to him.”
“I doubt about his being a fool; at any rate, he is a dangerous one.
“He is a fool in such matters as these, though dangerous enough in his way, as you say. Now, our Greek friend has just left the house, I see, and there is nothing to detain me here just now. You take the transport business in your hands? Well and good; while I attend to any foolish charge made in the city. I expect I shall see old Mother Colette before dark to-night.”
There is no need to go through the details of the few days that followed. In one word, Peter was more powerful than Jan’s four protectors put together, but only because he had Conrad Schön at his back, and behind him a greater “presence” yet—no less a person than the Count of Flanders, who had lately taken a mania about witchcraft. It was easy to play upon his vanity and tickle his supposed superior sense of discovery, and Conrad had reasons for diverting to the young artist the opprobrium which even he, with all his power, could not fail to have brought upon himself in such an independent and proud burgher-city as Bruges for the wrong done to the orphan daughter of one of her citizens and an attendant of his wife; for there was still a lingering in Flanders of the old knightly feeling of the earlier days of chivalry, which made it the duty of a knight to consider every house-maiden within his walls as his own daughter or sister, and protect, and even defend, her as such.
The dark accusations of Conrad and his informant against the defenceless painter were but too readily listened to, and, before his friends could conceal him, the sovereign had already sent to demand his person. We will pass over the mock examination which the count held, more with a view to satisfy his own curiosity than to assure himself of the prisoner’s guilt; over the honest but bitter malignity with which old Mother Colette, an unconscious tool sought out by Jan’s enemies, testified against the man who, to make such a startling and mysterious likeness of her lost granddaughter, must have been intimately acquainted with her; and, lastly, over Jan’s strange apathy and silence, his refusal to deny the charges brought against him, and his seeming relief at being condemned to die.
He never told any one the reason of all this, and the secret would have died with him, if Peter, years afterwards, when the picture again came to light and became famous, had not made known the hallucination of the painter, to which was really due the success others had stupidly attributed to forbidden practices. The last thing that concerns us is the strange sentence and fanciful doom pronounced by the Count of Flanders, the carrying out of which will take us up into the belfry of the Guildhall, just above the market-place where the unlucky picture had first roused the ignorant suspicions of the mob.
Here, where swings the largest bell of the famous carillon, we find the artist once more. The great dark mass hangs dumb beside him; very little light is here, but enough to see by dimly, and make out some of the maze of beams and iron-braced stays that uphold the old bell. Even some of the inscription is visible; its gilt letters in relief gleam out of the dimness and naturally fix the eye in that kind of magnetic gaze which some say is favorable to sleep. Jan was half crouched in one corner, wondering why he was there and how long it was intended he should stay; the two men who had brought him had simply told him that the count had sent him up there to see if he could rival the penance of St. Simeon Stylites, for a few hours at least. Presently the bell began to stir and sway softly, slowly; one dull, muffled tone came out as the tongue touched the outbent lips of the mighty bell; the next stroke came louder, the next swing was wider, and Jan’s head already throbbed with the unwelcome noise. Now the monster was alive in earnest. Warming to its work, it swung further and further; it tossed its base upwards, till the beams groaned and creaked, and all kinds of hideous minor noises seemed to be embroidered on the constant dull echo between each stroke. A strange wind blew in Jan’s face; it was the breath of the bell, whose relentless beat grew more and more regular, more and more monotonous, as it went on. The artist dared not move; one hair’s breadth nearer the terrific engine would be his death, one blow of its lips would be more effectual than any stroke of axe or pile of faggots. He shrank close to the wall, but, as his body just cleared the bell in its mad flingings and tossings, his mind seemed to be struck by it at every toll, almost absorbed in it, drawn to it with fatal curiosity. Was that the bell whose sound had been so majestic, so solemn, so beautiful in his ears as a child, so grand when it rang out above the others—eighty of them—that chimed on the great church holidays and welcomed the victorious sovereign when he came back from war? Was this the heart of the great angel that poetry and popular belief had endowed the belfry with—this terrible, maddening, brazen-tongued, relentless engine? It only just missed touching him each time it flung itself on his side of the beam-chamber; if it were to swing only a little more fiercely, as it seemed easy for it to do, one blow would crush him. Already the air seemed to suck him in under the bell, into some dark vault, no doubt—some bottomless pit; had his conductors known, when they put him there, that it was time for the bell to toll, or had they forgotten him? How long would this go on? His brain could not stand it much longer, he felt, but to scream was useless; the great, dread voice hushed all other sound. It seemed presently as if the gilt lettering got brighter; it took the shape of a glaring yellow eye; now redder, like fire, now alive, now like the eyes in his “Judith,” that the woman had said were the “eyes of a corpse just come back to life.” But had bells eyes as well as tongues? he asked himself helplessly. He remembered learning about the Cyclops and their single eyes in the middle of their foreheads; now he really saw a worse monster, with an eye of flame set in its huge, black, bulging lip. Was that the gold the Greek had offered him? Surely it was that, and no eye. Of course his fancy had betrayed him. But how could the gold have got there and got stuck to the rim of the accursed bell? How long had he been there, and when were they coming to fetch him? But they could not get in while that fiend was tossing and bellowing in these narrow walls. What was that other noise now?—a whirring of a thousand wheels! Where? It seemed all round; and now the bell appeared to him in a network of wheels, all going round faster than the eye could follow—a mass of moving air formed of many hazy circles intertwined; he knew they were wheels, but could not actually see them. He dared not hold his ears and head with his hands, for between each fling of the bell there was not time to lift his hands; and if they were caught—Some one was there now—come to bring him away. How did he get in? But it was not a man; it had long, fair hair and a misty sort of covering. He knew the face. Was there an angel of the bell, after all, who was going to stop the great tongue and deliver him? No; that face was a dead face—Judith just as he had painted her, just as he saw her in the corner of his room; and this was his room, and he had been dreaming of the bell. Scarcely—he could not dream of such a noise; then the devil must have got into his room and changed everything. But the clangor never stopped, and never spoke either louder or softer—one eternal, dreary, vexing, maddening ring. He would go mad, no doubt, if he stayed there another quarter of an hour; how long had he been there? Now he was fascinated by the unerring accuracy of the strokes, and, in a trance, expected feverishly the next dull boom, and mechanically counted on his fingers till the next was due again, and so on for five minutes. Suppose he should hang on to the tongue; would it make a feather’s weight of difference in the time or the sound of the stroke? He wondered how the bell sounded to those in the Place; they did not heed it at all, most likely, or some thought it must be getting near their time for dinner, while pious women were reminded to say a prayer, and some gleeful child would clap its hands and count the strokes. He could count the beats of his heart and the throbs in his head. He was not mad yet, he hoped, and his thoughts came regularly, and he saw pictures burned into the air one minute and gone the next; if he could have put them on canvas, they would have made his name and fortune. He was sure he could catch their shading; they looked as if fire had been made liquid and colored. It was better than any of the windows in the cathedral, famous as they were through the art-world for their undiscoverable secret of vivid, jewel-like coloring. But one picture followed the other so soon that, had he painted them all, it would have taken him twice the threescore years and ten of an ordinary life, and they would have filled every Church in Flanders fuller than twenty chapels in each could require. What was the coloring of “Judith,” with the pitiful chemical combination for which he had risked so much, to these rich, mellow, miraculous tones, with a thousand new, unnamable shades, and shadows that looked more like the depths of a dark-blue Italian lake than the darkness of common air? But through all these meditations of a second’s length, though they seemed like the reveries of hours, the boom of the pitiless bell went on, crashing through the brain of the prisoner, shattering each new picture which the last interval had stamped on his fancy, sounding to him now like a roaring fall of water, now a ploughing avalanche, now a thunder-clap, now the fall of a burning house, now the thud of earth upon a coffin, now the blow of a massive cudgel on his own head. Instinctively he cowered lower, and a beam struck him on the back with a sudden violent blow that made him stand upright and remember that the bell was there, but no cudgel; but as he rose he had stretched out his hand, blindly feeling for support, and touched the great rocking monster. A thrill went through his frame; he looked upward and vaguely wondered if this was the end, and he saw his “Judith” again, a shadowy form among the rafters. The next feeling of consciousness was that of lying flat on his back and a strong, cold wind wafting across his feet; he put up his hand to lift his head a little and press his left temple, and then— The bell had only tolled for a quarter of an hour. As soon as it stopped the same men who had taken Jan up came again and found him dead, lying in a cramped position on his side, and one leg still stretched out beneath the now silent bell.[[51]]
WILD ROSES BY THE SEA.
Untrimmed, uncared for, filling all the ways