"You need not be in any hurry, sir," the attentive headwaiter called after me; "you will reach the place in half an hour."
My little guide ran on ahead, and I followed him along the main street of the little town, planted with lindens, with groups of travellers seated here and there before the doors, and reached the fields upon which still lay the golden evening light, and then entered the cool twilight of the woods. We pursued the wide road which ascended the mountains by a steep acclivity for the most part, but occasionally ran along small level glades, and was elsewhere inclosed on both sides by the tall forest trees. It was wonderfully quiet in the cool pines: no breeze stirred, scarcely was the silence broken at rare intervals by the chirp of a bird: the blue sky looked down from above, and I felt as if the path climbed up to heaven.
No one met us on the way; only when we were almost at the summit and had turned to the right from the main road into the wood and reached an open space where stood a sort of hunting-lodge, I saw a couple of men who were sitting upon benches with mugs of beer in their hands. Out of the wood, directly opposite the spot at which we had entered the clearing, came a man followed by a boy carrying an easel and other painter's apparatus. I recognized the sergeant at once; and my little guide said that the boy who was carrying the things was his brother Hans, and that they were coming from the place where the lady used to paint. This place was only five minutes walk distant, and we had only to follow the way by which the sergeant and Hans had just come.
My old friend, who was talking in a rather animated manner to the boy, who probably was not carrying the things carefully enough to please him, had not observed me, and I was glad of it, for I felt that I was not in a frame of mind to talk with him. So I gave my guide a sign to wait for me; and crossed the clearing towards the path he had pointed out.
It was a broad path, overgrown with short green grass upon which the foot fell noiselessly, and the pines on both sides were of such growth that their branches almost entirely roofed it in, so that only here and there the red sunset glow pierced to the green twilight. It gradually but continually ascended, and I walked on, not even conscious that I was walking or moving my limbs, as one ascends heights in a dream. A breathless expectation, a joyful fear possessed me wholly. Thus might an immortal spirit feel which is about to enter the presence of its judge, and with all its timid hesitation, knows still that this judge is mercy itself.
And now it grew lighter and more open with every step, and I passed out of the forest upon the crest of the mountain, which to my right hand rose to a mighty height, while westwardly, to the left, it sloped away to a deep valley, over which I could see far-distant mountain terraces rising slope above purple slope, against the evening sky. The sun had set, but its radiance still lay calm upon the light clouds which floated over the mountain, and a few paces from me, bathed in the roseate light reflected from the clouds, stood a female figure by a mossy rock upon which she leaned her right arm, while her left hand with her broad straw hat hung idly by her side. She was looking fixedly at the sunset sky, and her features were clearly defined against the bright background. Thus I saw her once more.
But she neither saw me nor heard me, for the soft grass muffled my steps. I wished to call her by name, but could not; and now she slowly turned her face towards me and looked at me with wide fixed eyes and unmoving features, as though I were an apparition which she had long yearned to behold, and which the might of her longings had summoned before her. But as I spread my arms, saying, "Paula, dearest Paula!" a heavenly light flashed into her lovely face, a faint cry broke from her lips, and she lay upon my breast with a storm of passionate tears, as if all the sorrows she had borne all these long years had burst forth in one moment.
What I said, what she said, while we stood on the mountain ridge, while streak after streak of the rosy light faded out of the sky, I cannot now recall.
And then we went back hand in hand through the silent wood, by another way than that by which I had come; a way that at first led over a grassy slope directly down the mountain, so that we could still see the valley in the faint evening light, and then under high beeches where it was quite dark, so that Paula held firmly to my hand until we came upon open spaces and the valley lay before us again, now dim in gray twilight, so that I thought the descent must be longer than the ascent, and yet it was so short--so short! What did it matter? I knew that with her who was leading me down the dim mountain path I would walk henceforth hand-in-hand so long as we both lived upon earth; and an inward prayer rose in my soul that her last day might be mine also.
And now I see ourselves--that is our mother, Paula, Oscar and myself--seated at a table in one of the arbors in front of the inn, and the light of the lamp in its glass shade falls mildly on the gentle features of the blind lady who from time to time lays her soft hand upon mine, and on Paula's dear face that beams with a lovely radiance from her inward happiness, and upon the beautiful young features of Oscar, whose dark eyes glow while he tells how a young English nobleman whose acquaintance he made at Rome has given him a grand commission to paint a series of frescoes in his castle in the Highlands, and how before he sets out there, he had to come after his sister to get some advice from her; and then the youth tosses back his long hair, and lifts a full glass and drinks it off to our health, and the mother smiles gently upon us, and as our glasses clink together there appears in an opening in the trellis that head with the gray moustache and white hair which played so important a part in the history of art.