"Woe is me! was that the seed of sin in my heart? was my dream a future life, whose string must be snapped for my salvation? Miserable me!"
She sat wailing in the gloomy, dark night. In the deep stillness she thought that Rudy's words sounded again, the last he had uttered: "Earth has nothing more to give me!" They had been said in the abundance of happiness, they came back to her in the depth of her grief.
The Ice-Maiden stood there, majestic, pale blue, shining, and at her feet lay Rudy.—[Page 102].
A couple of years have elapsed. The lake smiles, the banks smile; the vines put forth swelling grapes; steamboats with waving flags hurry past, pleasure-boats with both their sails set fly like white butterflies over the expanse of water; the railway above Chillon has been opened, and leads deep into the Rhone valley. At every station visitors get out, they come with their red guide-books and read to themselves what remarkable things they have to see. They visit Chillon, they see from thence in the lake the little island with the three acacias, and read in the book of a bridal pair who, in the year 1856, sailed thither one evening, of the bridegroom's death and: "next morning the bride's despairing cry was first heard on the shore."
But the guide-books make no mention of Babette's quiet life with her father, not in the mill—strangers live there—but in the pretty house near the railway station, where from the windows she often looks out in the afternoon over the chestnut trees to the snow mountains where Rudy used to disport himself; she sees in the evenings the Alpine glow, the Children of the Sun encamping above and repeating the song of the traveler whose mantle the whirlwind carried away; it took the covering, but not the man himself.
There is a rosy luster on the snow of the mountains, there is a rosy luster in every heart where the thought is: "God lets that which is best come to pass!" but that is not always revealed to us as it was to Babette in her dream.