"You were not aware of the danger, but will not be so rash again."
"Will you not accept of my apology, but treat it as you did my thanks?" asked Cecilia reproachfully. "You have saved my life at the risk of your own--but at this moment you actually look as if you bitterly repent of it."
"I?" exclaimed Egbert vehemently.
"Yes, you! You stand there with an air that seems to say, you must defend yourself against an enemy in deadly fray. Against whom, pray? Only I am here!"
Again there was that roaring and rushing in the woods. It drew on above the hills like the waving of invisible giant-wings, and fuller and stronger sounded the church-bells from below. The whole air was instinct with sound, it seemed to soar on the sunbeams, and to swim and to shape themselves into a marvelous song, that at first sounded only in single detached chords, and then gradually changed to a melody that seemed mysterious but infinitely sweet, and both to shout and to lament.
True, those two up yonder, on that solitary, sunlit mountain-meadow, belonged to two different worlds,--it is true that a deep chasm parted them in all their thoughts and feelings. But the vain, spoiled child of fashionable society, who hitherto had only lived in a whirl of gayety, in an eternal chase after pleasure, to whom, heretofore, solitude had been synonymous with unbearable ennui--she now listened to that sweet, strange dream, like one lost in reverie. And the man, too, to whom hard work had never allowed time for meditation and dreams, in vain resisted the magical influence. He was wont to stand firm on the soil of reality, in the broad daylight, and to look into life with cool and penetrating vision--into a life full of toil and strife, full of hard, irreconcilable contrasts. He was made for this. What to him were the fantastic dreams of the world of the imagination? And yet now they held him fast within their toils, and through the midst of it all, with captivating sweetness, echoed a human voice:
"Against whom are you defending yourself? Only I am here."
Egbert drew his hand across his forehead, as though he would arouse himself forcibly from this dreamy state.
"I beg your pardon, Baroness Wildenrod," said he. "I was thinking of unpleasantnesses that I had had with my men at Radefeld. One like me, who has his work forever on his mind, is but poor company, as you see."
"Have I asked to be entertained by you?" asked Cecilia, with slight reproof in her accent. "Eric is right, you are as hard as your native rocks, rugged and inaccessible as the Whitestone itself. If one believes, that at last the magical word has been found, if the deep opens for one brief instant, the very next it closes, and a sealed surface of cold stone confronts the seeker."