Hyperion Part 30

"And yet as angels, in some brighter dreams,

Call to the soul, when man doth sleep,

So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,

And into glory peep!"

Such were Flemming's thoughts, as he stood among the tombs at evening in the churchyard of Saint Gilgen. A holy calm stole over him. The fever of his heart was allayed. He had a moment's rest from pain; and went back to his chamber in peace. Whence came this holy calm, this long-desired tranquillity? He knew not; yet the place seemed consecrated. He resolved to linger there, beside the lake, which was a Pool of Bethesda for him; and let Berkley go on alone to the baths of Ischel. He would wait for him there in the solitude of Saint Gilgen. Long after they had parted for the night, he sat in his chamber, and thought of what he had suffered, and enjoyedthe silence within and without. Hour after hour, slipped by unheeded, as he sat lost in his reverie. At length, his candle sank in its socket, gave one flickering gleam, and expired with a sob. This aroused him.

He went to the window, and peered out into the dark night. It was very late. Twice already since midnight had the great pulpit-orator Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-gla.s.s on his high pulpit, the church belfry, and still went on with his sermon, thundering downward to the congregation in the churchyard and in the village. But they heard him not. They were all asleep in their narrow pews, namely, in their beds and in their graves. Soon afterward the c.o.c.k crew; and the cloudy heaven, like the apostle, who denied his Lord, wept bitterly.

CHAPTER VI. SAINT WOLFGANG.

The morning is lovely beyond expression. The heat of the sun is great; but a gentle wind cools the air. Birds never sang more loud and clear. The flowers, too, on the window-sill, and on the table, rose, geranium, and the delicate crimson cactus, are all so beautiful, that we think the German poet right, when he calls the flowers "stars in the firmament of the earth." Out of doors all is quiet. Opposite the window stands the village schoolhouse. There are two parasite trees, with their outspread branches nailed against the white walls, like the wings of culprit kites. There the rods grow.

Under them, on a bench at the door, sit school-girls; and barefoot urchins in breeches are spelling out their lessons. The clock strikestwelve, and one by one they disappear, and go into the hive, like bees at the sound of a bra.s.s pan. At the door of the next house sits a poor woman, knitting in the shade; and in front of her is an aqueduct pouring its cool, clear water into a rough wooden trough. A travelling carriage without horses, stands at the inn-door, and a postilion in red jacket is talking with a blacksmith, who wears blue woollen stockings and a leather ap.r.o.n. Beyond is a stable, and still further a cl.u.s.ter of houses and the village church. They are repairing the belfry and the bulbous steeple. A little farther, over the roofs of the houses, you can see Saint Wolfgang's Lake. Water so bright and beautiful hardly flows elsewhere. Green, and blue, and silver-white run into each other, with almost imperceptible change, like the streaks on the sides of a mackerel. And above are the pinnacles of the mountains; some bald, and rocky, and cone-shaped, and others bold, and broad, and dark with pines.

Such was the scene, which Paul Flemming beheldfrom his window a few mornings after Berkley's departure. The quiet of the place had soothed him. He had become more calm. His heart complained less loudly in the holy village silence, as we are wont to lower our voices when those around us speak in whispers. He began to feel at times an interest in the lowly things around him. The face of the landscape pleased him, but more than this the face of the poor woman who sat knitting in the shade. It was a pale, meek countenance, with more delicacy in its features than is usual among peasantry. It wore also an expression of patient suffering. As he was looking at her, a deformed child came out of the door and hung upon her knees. She caressed him affectionately. It was her child; in whom she beheld her own fair features distorted and hardly to be recognised, as one sometimes sees his face reflected from the bowl of a spoon.

The child's deformity and the mother's tenderness interested the feelings of Flemming. The landlady told him something of the poor woman's history. She was the widow of a blacksmith, who had died soon after their marriage. But she survived to become a mother, just as, in oaks, immediately after fecundation, the male flower fades and falls, while the female continues and ripens into perfect fruit.

Alas! her child was deformed. Yet she looked upon him with eyes of maternal fondness and pity, loving him still more for his deformity.

And in her heart she said, as the Mexicans say to their new-born offspring, "Child, thou art come into the world to suffer. Endure, and hold thy peace." Though poor, she was not entirely dest.i.tute; for her husband had left her, beside the deformed child, a life estate in a tomb in the churchyard of Saint Gilgen. During the week she labored for other people, and on Sundays for herself, by going to church and reading the Bible. On one of the blank leaves she had recorded the day of her birth, and that of her child's, likewise her marriage and her husband's death. Thus she lived, poor, patient and resigned. Her heart was a pa.s.sion-flower, bearing within it the crown of thorns and the cross of Christ. Her ideas of Heaven were few and simple. She rejected the doctrine that it was a place of constant activity, and not of repose, and believed, that, when she at length reached it, she should work no more, but sit always in a clean white ap.r.o.n, and sing psalms.

As Flemming sat meditating on these things, he paid new homage in his heart to the beauty and excellence of the female character. He thought of the absent and the dead; and said, with tears in his eyes;

"Shall I thank G.o.d for the green Summer, and the mild air, and the flowers, and the stars, and all that makes this world so beautiful, and not for the good and beautiful beings I have known in it? Has not their presence been sweeter to me than flowers? Are they not higher and holier than the stars? Are they not more to me than all things else?"

Thus the morning pa.s.sed away in musings; andin the afternoon, when Flemming was preparing to go down to the lake, as his custom was, a carriage drew up before the door, and, to his great astonishment, out jumped Berkley. The first thing he did was to give the Postmaster, who stood near the door, a smart cut with his whip.

The sufferer gently expostulated, saying,

"Pray, Sir, don't; I am lame."

Whereupon Berkley desisted, and began instead to shake the Postmaster's wife by the shoulders, and order his dinner in English.

But all this was done so good-naturedly, and with such a rosy, laughing face, that no offence was taken.

"So you have returned much sooner than you intended;" said Flemming, after the first friendly salutations.

"Yes," replied Berkley; "I got tired of Ischel,--very tired. I did not find the friends there, whom I expected. Now I am going back to Salzburg, and then to Gastein. There I shall certainly find them.

You must go with me."

Flemming declined the invitation; and proposedto Berkley, that he should join him in his excursion on the lake.

"You shall hear the grand echo of the Falkenstein," said he, "and behold the scene of the Bridal Tragedy; and then we will go on as far as the village of Saint Wolfgang, which you have not yet seen, except across the lake."

"Well, this afternoon I devote to you; for to-morrow we part once more, and who knows when we shall meet again?"

They went down to the water's side without farther delay; and, taking a boat with two oars, struck across an elbow of the lake towards a barren rock by the eastern sh.o.r.e, from which a small white monument shone in the sun.

"That monument," said one of the boatmen, a stout young lad in leather breeches, "was built by a butcher, to the glory of Saint Wolfgang, who saved him from drowning. He was one day riding an ox to market along the opposite bank; when the animal taking fright, sprang into the water, and swam over to this place, with the butcher on his back."

"And do you think he could have done this," asked Berkley; "if Saint Wolfgang had not helped him?"

"Of course not!" answered leather-breeches; and the Englishman laughed.

From this point they rowed along under the sh.o.r.e to a low promontory, upon which stood another monument, commemorating a more tragical event.

"This is the place I was speaking of," said Flemming, as the boatmen rested on their oars. "The melancholy and singular event it commemorates happened more than two centuries ago. There was a bridal party here upon the ice one winter; and in the midst of the dance the ice broke, and the whole merry company were drowned together, except the fiddlers, who were sitting on the sh.o.r.e."

They looked in silence at the monument, and at the blue quiet water, under which the bones of the dancers lay buried, hand in hand. The monument is of stone, painted white, with an over-hangingroof to shelter it from storms. In a niche in front is a small image of the Saviour, in a sitting posture; and an inscription, upon a marble tablet below, says that it was placed there by Longinus Walther and his wife Barbara Juliana von Hainberg; themselves long since peacefully crumbled to dust, side by side in some churchyard.

"That was breaking the ice with a vengeance!" said Berkley, as they pushed out into the lake again; and ere long they were floating beneath the mighty precipice of Falkenstein; a steep wall of rock, crowned with a chapel and a hermitage, where in days of old lived the holy Saint Wolfgang. It is now haunted only by an echo, so distinct and loud, that one might imagine the ghost of the departed saint to be sitting there, and repeating the voices from below, not word by word, but sentence by sentence, as if he were pa.s.sing them up to the recording angel.

"Ho! ho! ho!" shouted Berkley; and the sound seemed to strike the wall of stone, like the flapping of steel plates; "Ho! ho! ho! How areyou to-day, Saint Wolfgang! You infernal old rascal! How is the Frau von Wolfgang!--G.o.d save great George the King! d.a.m.n your eyes!

Hold your tongue! Ho! ho! ha! ha! hi!"

And the words were recorded above; and a voice repeated them with awful distinctness in the blue depths overhead, and Flemming felt in his inmost soul the contrast between the holy heavens, and the mockery of laughter, and the idle words, which fall back from the sky above us and soil not its purity.

In half an hour they were at the village of Saint Wolfgang, threading a narrow street, above which the roofs of quaint, picturesque old houses almost met. It led them to a Gothic church; a magnificent one for a village;--in front of which was a small court, shut in by Italian-looking houses, with balconies, and flowers at the windows. Here a bronze fountain of elaborate workmans.h.i.+p was playing in the shade. On its summit stood an image of the patron Saint of the village; and, running round the under lip of the water-basin below, they read this inscription in old German rhymes;

"I am in the honor of Saint Wolfgang raised. Abbot Wolfgang Habel of Emensee, he hath made me for the use and delight of poor pilgrim wight. Neither gold nor wine hath he; at this water shall he merry be. In the year of the Lord fifteen hundred and fifteen, hath the work completed been. G.o.d be praised!"

As they were deciphering the rude characters of this pious inscription, a village priest came down a high flight of steps from the parsonage near the church, and courteously saluted the strangers. After returning the salutation, the mad Englishman, without preface, asked him how many natural children were annually born in the parish. The question seemed to astonish the good father, but he answered it civilly, as he did several other questions, which Flemming thought rather indiscreet, to say the least.

"You will excuse our curiosity," said he to the priest, by way of apology. "We are strangersfrom distant countries. My friend is an Englishman and I an American."

Berkley, however, was not so easily silenced. After a few moments' conversation he broke out into most audacious Latin, in which the only words clearly intelligible were;

"Plurimum reverende, in Christo religiosissime, ac clarissime Domine, necnon et amice observandissime! Petrus sic est locutus; 'Nec argentum mihi, nec aurum est; sed quod habeo, hoc tibi do; surge et ambula.'"

He seemed to be speaking of the fountain. The priest answered meekly,

"Non intellexi, Domine!"

But Berkley continued with great volubility to speak of his being a stranger in the land, and all men being strangers upon earth, and hoping to meet the good priest hereafter in the kingdom of Heaven.

The priest seemed confounded, and abashed. Through the mist of a strange p.r.o.nunciation he could recognise only here and there afamiliar word. He took out his snuff-box; and tried to quote a pa.s.sage from Saint Paul;

"Ut dixit Sanctus Paulus; qui bene facit--"

Here his memory failed him, or, as the French say, he was at the end of his Latin, and, stretching forth his long forefinger, he concluded in German;

"Yes;--I don't--so clearly remember--what he did say."

The Englishman helped him through with a moral phrase; and then pulling off his hat, exclaimed very solemnly;

"Vale, domine doctissime et reverendissime!"