“Yes; I see you have made the carvings a sort of history of your mind: I see the venerable prophet and the device he bears; the rose-hedge with the prominent and unnaturally-multiplied thorns; the haunting imps of dreams, your own face and mine, and so on. It is only a year and a few months now to the time when our contract ends, and hitherto we have kept it well. I think it likely we shall not meet again till the day is over. Nothing but silence now will be your burden. If you speak of or hint at anything of our transactions, remember the bond is cancelled; but, of course, after the expiration of the ten years you are free to publish the whole.”
He smiled scornfully, and, with another expression of admiration as to the work, left the tribune. It was now that Nicholas put in just over the key-board the groups of our Saviour and the twelve apostles (Judas, with the bag of money, bore Lemoinne’s likeness), but, instead of being, as they are at present, immovable, the figures went in and out by a spring hidden among the stops, so that at the Consecration they could be brought forward, and after the Communion return to the interior of the organ, in the same way as some of the famous figures of the clock in Strassburg Cathedral. The day of the public opening of the completed organ came, the tenth anniversary of the day of the contract, and the reader may imagine all the paraphernalia of a great mediæval fête, half-religious and half-secular.
Lemoinne sat among the guests at Count Stromwael’s banquet; it was the first time Nicholas had met him in public. The strange man seemed utterly unconscious that they had ever met before, and his eyes met the organist’s fully as he complimented him in set phrases and handed him a golden gift with a small roll of parchment attached. Stromwael laughed as he remarked:
“Is that the title-deed to a mortgaged estate, or a share in one of your ships?” Nicholas clutched it in silence and tried to smile; the talk around him seemed to point to his strange master being a banker, but he held to his first suspicions. As soon as he was alone he looked hastily at the hateful bond and thrust it into the fire. It seemed odd to him that he did not yet feel free; he had expected the release to be instantaneous. Weeks passed, and still the same old watchfulness and uneasiness went on. Brederode’s face came to him more constantly; all his faculties were centred in horrible recollections and vague and still more horrible expectations. All Flanders raved about the wonderful organ, and requests for similar ones made under his directions and supervision poured in from distant parts. He vowed to himself never to touch such a thing again, or even give directions for it; it was to his fancy an accursed thing, associated with all the horror and despair of his life. He refused all offers; and this grew to be even more of a mania with him than the making of the instrument had been before. Now that his dream had been fulfilled, he only longed to die; his servitude was still unbroken, though the letter of the bond was now a dead letter; he felt himself miserably fettered, haunted, paralyzed. To the rather imperious demand of Count Stromwael’s cousin, himself a powerful personage, for an organ with the same group of the twelve apostles, he returned a flat denial, and neither threats nor promises could shake him. At last the power of the two nobles combined threw him into prison; they made sure of reducing him to obedience by violence and temporary ill-treatment. The prison was what all mediæval dungeons were—damp, filthy, unhealthy, dark. His food was bread and water, and a very scanty measure of both. For a month he was treated as a criminal, but nothing made any impression on the moody, prematurely-aged man. He had made up his mind that only death would make him free, only death would make him able to explain and excuse himself to his dead friend. He cared for no bodily tortures; for ten years he had suffered a mental hell. His friends and his patrons came alternately to coax and tempt or to threaten and abuse him; he would not yield.
Neither wealth, marriage, nor a patent of nobility tempted him; neither the wheel, the rack, nor the block frightened him. He grew weaker and weaker. His eyes saw Lemoinne and Brederode all over the narrow cell; the one seemed like a fiend, and the other always like a corpse, with the head half-severed, yet still conscious with a kind of ghastly life. Physicians examined him and confidently pronounced him sane, and priests visited him and pronounced him certainly not possessed, but both agreed that something unusually terrible must be preying on his mind. He never told what he saw or felt, and answered all questions evasively. At last Stromwael, furious at his vassal’s obstinacy, threatened to put his eyes out and prevent him from ever taking pleasure in work again. He only said:
“You cannot take away my sight, even if you put out my eyes; would to God you could!”
Before this last measure was resorted to he received a visit from Lemoinne, who, in the calm tone of a cynic and a man of the world, begged him to reconsider his decision.
“Nothing could tempt me!” said Nicholas. “Not even you could compel me; it is not in the bond, and I am free.”
“Of course,” said the other, smiling. “I only ask you to yield for your own good. Why should you object?”
“Because the thing is accursed; it has wrecked my life, and I will have no more to do with it,” said Nicholas violently.