Before Ekkehard could offer his thanks, she had disappeared in the subterranean pa.s.sage.

"Dark-brown are the hazel-nuts, And brown like they, am I And he who would my lover be, Must be the same as I!"

she sang archly, whilst going away.

A melancholy smile rose to Ekkehard's lips.

The tempest in his heart had not yet been quite appeased. Faint murmurs were yet reverberating within; like the thunderclaps of an Alpine storm, which are repeated by innumerable echoes from the mountains.

A huge, flat piece of rock had fallen down beside his cavern. Melting snow had undermined it in the spring. It resembled a grave-stone, and he christened it inwardly, the grave of his love. There he often sat.

Sometimes, he fancied the d.u.c.h.ess and himself lying under it; sleeping the calm sleep of the dead; and he sat down on it, and looked over the pine-clad mountains far away towards the Bodensee,--dreaming. It was not well that he could see the lake from his cell, as the sight called up continual painful recollections. Often, his heart was brimful with bitter, angry pain; often again he would strain his eyes in the direction of the Untersee of an evening, and whisper soft messages to the pa.s.sing winds. For whom were they meant?

His dreams at night were generally wild and confused. He would find himself in the castle-chapel, and the everlasting lamp was rocking over the d.u.c.h.ess's head as it did then; but when he rushed towards her, she had the face of the woman of the wood, and grinned at him scoffingly.

When he awoke from his uneasy slumbers in the early morning, his heart would often beat wildly, and the words of Dame Hadwig, "oh, schoolmaster, why didst thou not become a warrior?" persecuted him, till the sun had risen high in the sky, or the appearance of Benedicta would banish them.

Often again, he would throw himself down on the short, soft gra.s.s on the slope, and ponder over the last months of his life. In the pure, keen Alpine air, figures and events a.s.sumed clearer and more objective outlines before his inward eye, and he was tormented by the thought that he had behaved shyly and foolishly, and had not even succeeded in fulfilling his task by telling a story like Praxedis and Master Spazzo.

"Ekkehard thou hast made thyself ridiculous," muttered he to himself; and then he felt, as if he must break his head against the rocks.

A melancholy mind broods long over a wrong it has undergone; quite forgetting that a blameworthy action is only blotted out in the memory of others, by better ones following.

Therefore, Ekkehard was as yet not ripe for the healing delights of solitude. The ever-present recollection of past suffering had a strange effect on him. Whenever he sat all alone in his silent cavern, he fancied he heard voices that mockingly talked to him of foolish hopes, and the deceits of this world. The flight, and calls of the birds in the air, seemed to him the shrieks of demons, and all his praying would avail nothing against these fantastic delusions.

When the terrors of the wilderness have once taken hold of a mind, eye and ear are easily deceived and apt to believe all the old legends and tales, which a.s.sert that the air, as well as water and earth, is inhabited by legions of immortal spirits.

It was a soft, fragrant midsummer night. Ekkehard was just about to lay himself down on his simple couch, when the moon-beams fell right into the cavern. Two white clouds were sailing along the sky, one behind the other, and he overheard how they were talking together. One of them was Dame Hadwig, and the other Praxedis.

"I should really like to see, what the asylum of a wandering fool looks like," said the first white cloud, and swiftly hurrying down the steep rocky walls, she stood still on the Kamor, right opposite the cavern, and then floating down to the fir-trees which grew in great numbers in the valley below, she cried out: "It is he! Go and seize the blasphemer."

Then, the fir-trees sprang into life and became monks; thousands and thousands, and chaunting psalms and swinging rods in their hands, they began to climb up the rock towards the Wildkirchlein.

Trembling with terror, Ekkehard jumped up and seized his spear,--but now it was as if a host of will-o'-the-wisps, started out from the recesses of the cavern. "Away with you, out from the Alps!" cried they threateningly. All his pulses throbbed in the heat of fever, and so he ran away over the narrow path, along the frightful precipice, into the dark night, like a madman.

The second cloud was still standing beside the moon: "I cannot help thee," said she with Praxedis's voice, "I do not know the way."

Downhill he ran, as fast as his feet would carry him. Life had become a mere torture to him, and yet he caught hold of projecting parts of the rocks, and used his spear as a staff, not to fall down and thus get into the hands of the approaching spectres.

The nightly descent from the Hohentwiel was mere child's play, compared to this. Unconscious of all danger, he darted past precipices, and at last came down to level ground, beside the lake. The goats often fell down there, when they turned their eyes away from the gra.s.s, and gazed into the neck-breaking depth below.

At last he stood still beside the mysteriously beckoning, green Seealpsee, over which the silvery moon-beams danced and trembled. The rotten trunks, lying about on the sh.o.r.es, gave forth a spectral light.

Ekkehard's eyes grew dim and filmy.

"Take me into thy arms," cried he, "for my heart is panting for rest."

He ran into the cool, silent flood, but his feet still touched ground, and the cooling waters of the mountain-lake, sent a delicious freshness through his feverish limbs. The water already reached to his breast, when he stopped and looked up confusedly. The white clouds had disappeared; the moon-beams having dissolved them into transparent vapours. Magnificently, and yet sadly withal, the stars were glittering high over his head.

In bold, fantastic lines the Moglisalp stretched out its gra.s.s-covered horns towards the moon. On its left, stood calm and serious, the furrowed head of the "old man" and to the right, towering above its double belt of glaciers, the stern, grey pyramid of the Santis, surrounded by innumerable crags and pinnacles; looking like dark spectres of night.

Then, Ekkehard knelt down on the pebbly ground of the lake, so that the waters closed over his head, and rising again after a while, he stood there immovably with lifted arms, as if he were praying.

The moon now sank down behind the Santis; a bluish light trembled over the old snow of the glaciers. A rocking pain darted through Ekkehard's brain. The mountains around him, began to rock and dance; a wailing sound streamed through the pine-woods, and the lake rose and stirred, and its waves were alive with thousands and thousands of black tadpoles....

But in soft, dewy beauty, the figure of a woman rose from the waters, and floated up to the top of the Moglisalp. There, she sat on the soft velvety gra.s.s, and shook the water from her long streaming tresses, and made herself a wreath of Alpine flowers.

In the depths of the mountains there arose a growling and trembling.

The Santis stretched himself out to his full height, and so did the old man to his right. Like gigantic t.i.tans of old, they stormed at each other. The Santis seized his rocks, and threw them over, and the old man tore off his head and flung it at the pyramid of the Santis. Now the Santis stood on the right side, and the old man was flying before him to the left;--but the lady of the lake, looked on in smiling composure, and from her mountain-peak, she mocked the stone combatants.

And she shook her yellow curls, out of which there fell down a pearly waterfall; and it flowed down wilder and wilder, till it whirled the maiden with the liquid eyes, back into the lake.

Upon this, the uproar and strife ceased suddenly. The old man took up his head; put it on again, and singing a sad, mournful strain, he returned to his old place. And the Santis likewise had resumed his post, and his glaciers were glittering calmly as before.

... When Ekkehard awoke the next morning, he lay in his cavern, shaken with feverish cold. His knees felt as if they were broken.

The sun stood at his zenith, when Benedicta flitted past the cavern, and saw him lying there trembling, and wrapped in his wolf's skin mantle. His habit hung heavy and dripping over a piece of rock.

"When you again are going to fish for trout in the Seealpsee," said she, "you had better let me know, so that I can lead you. The goat-boy who met you before sunrise, told us that you had staggered up the hill like a man walking in his sleep."

She went and rang the midday bell for him.

CHAPTER XXIII.

On the Ebenalp.

For six days Ekkehard was ill. The herdsmen nursed him, and a decoction of the blue gentian took away the fever. The Alpine air too, helped his recovery. A great shock had been necessary to restore his bodily as well as mental equilibrium. Now he was all right again, and heard neither voices, nor saw phantoms. A delicious feeling of repose and recovering health ran through his veins. It was that state of indolent, pleasant weakness, so beneficial to persons recovering from melancholy.

His thoughts were serious, but had no longer any bitterness about them.

"I have learnt something from the mountains," said he to himself.

"Storming and raging will avail nothing, though the most enchanting of maidens were sitting before us; but we must become hard and stony outside like the Santis, and put a cooling armour of ice round the heart; and sable night herself must scarcely know, how it burns and glows within."

By degrees, all the sufferings of the past months, were shrouded and seen through a soft haze. He could think of the d.u.c.h.ess and all that had happened on the Hohentwiel, without giving himself a heartache. And such is the influence of all grand and beautiful nature, that it not only delights and softens the heart of the looker-on, but that it widens the mind in general, and conjures back the days, which have long since, become part and parcel of the inexorable Past.

Ekkehard, had never before cast a retrospective glance on the days of his youth, but he now loved to fly there in his thoughts, as if it had been a paradise, out of which the storm of life had driven him. He had spent several years in the cloister-school at Lorsch on the Rhine. In those days he had no idea what heart-and-soul-consuming fire could be hidden in a woman's dark eyes. Then, the old parchments were his world.

One figure out of that time had, however, been faithfully kept in his heart's memory; and that was Brother Conrad of Alzey. On him, who was his senior by but a few years, Ekkehard had lavished the affection of a first friendship. Their roads in life afterwards became different; and the days of Lorsch had been forced into the background, by later events. But now, they rose warm and glowing in his thoughts, like some dark hill on a plain, when the morning-sun has cast his first rays on it.

It is with the human mind as with the crust of this old earth of ours.

On the alluvion of childhood, new strata heap themselves up, in stormy haste; rocks, ridges and high mountains, which strive to reach up to heaven itself, and the ground on which they stand, is forgotten and covered with ruins.--But like as the stern peaks of the Alps, longingly look down into the valleys, and often, overwhelmed by homesickness, plunge down into the depths from which they rose,--in the same way, memory loves to go back to youth, and digs for the treasures which were left thoughtlessly behind, beside the worthless stones.

So Ekkehard's thoughts now recurred often to his faithful companion.

Once more he stood beside him, in the arched pillar-supported hall, and prayed with him beside the mausoleums of the old kings, and the stone coffin of the blind Duke Tha.s.silo. With him, he walked through the shady lanes of the cloister-garden, listening to his words;--and all that Conrad had spoken then, was good and n.o.ble, for he looked at the world with a poet's eye, and it was as if flowers must spring up on his way, and birds carol gaily, when his lips opened to utter words, sweeter than honey.

"Look over yonder!" Conrad had once said to his young friend, when they were looking down, over the land, from the parapet of the garden.

"There, where the mounds of white sand rise from the green fields, there was once the bed of the river Neckar. Thus, the traces of past generations, run through the fields of their descendants, and 'tis well if these pay them some attention. Here, on the sh.o.r.es of the Rhine, we stand on hallowed ground, and it were time that we set to collecting that, which has grown on it, before the tedious trivium and quadrivium, has killed our appreciation of it."