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 passing 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!--God save great George the King! Damn 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 workmanship 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. God 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.' "