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But he controlled himself so well that she did not suspect his inward perturbation; and she accepted in as good faith his offer to inform the Herr Brekel of his error as she did, a day later, his assurance that the matter had been satisfactorily adjusted, and that the innocence of the apprentice had been proved.
With the plump, rosy Aunt Hedwig, who presided over the bakery, he passed the good word of the day shyly; he responded shyly to the friendly nod of the baker, Gottlieb Brekel, when that worthy chanced to be in the shop; and he shyly greeted a certain jolly Herr Sohnstein, a German lawyer of distinction, who was about the bakery a great deal and who popularly was believed to be a suitor for the plump Hedwig's plump hand.
But when Gottlieb Brekel swore roundly in his native German all the way from the south-west corner of Tompkins Square to the corner of Third Street and the Bowery; and from that point, when he had transacted his business there, all the way back to the Café Nürnberg in Avenue B, his motives could not in any wise be regarded as moral, and selfishness lay at their very root.
But Andreas was not at all alarmed by this open friendship; for Hans and the stout Minna Brekel were to be married presently, and Roschen's feeling obviously was no more than hearty good-will towards the lover of her dear sister-friend.
It was rather dashing to Gottlieb's enthusiasm, however, that his assistant thereby manifesting a shrewd worldly wisdom declined immediately to impart his secret. He would make all the lebkuchen that was required, he said, but for the present he need not tell how it was made possibly the Herr Brekel might not be satisfied with it, after all.
But the Herr Brekel was satisfied with it, and so was all the neighborhood when the first batch of lebkuchen was baked and placed on sale. Indeed, as the fame of this delicious lebkuchen went abroad, the coming of the new baker was accepted by all Germans with discriminating palates as one of the most important events that ever had occurred on the East Side.
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.
That the Recording Angel blotted out with his tears the fines which he was compelled on this occasion to record against Gottlieb Brekel in Heaven's high chancery is highly improbable. In the only known case of such lachrymic erasure the provocation to profanity was a commendable moral motive that was eminently unselfish.
As a matter of course no well-set-up, right-thinking young fellow of three-and-twenty could go on baking lebkuchen in the same bakery with Minna Brekel for any length of time without falling in love with her.
And so, whether the toothsome result be Nürnberger lebkuchen, or Brunsscheiger peppernotte, or Basler leckerly, the making of it is a mystery from first to last. It was because of this mystery that the life of Gottlieb Brekel had been imbittered for nearly twenty years ever since, in fact, his first essay in the compounding of Nürnberger lebkuchen had been made.
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