CHAPTER XXII
REST
'Memories that make the heart a tomb.'
There is solace to the mourner in the sound of rushing waters; most of all can the stricken soul find a short oblivion in the ceaseless chant of the ocean's mighty surging; and by the tumult of a great river human unrest is soothed ineffably.
At Schaffhausen the Rhine falls in giant cascades, roaring and dashing against those rocks which, legend says, Wotan flung into the river in his mighty rage against a poor husbandman who had drowned himself and his lowly wife because her mortal beauty had excited the desire of the amorous wanderer.
White, whirling foam, and above a thin, glistening, veil-like mist made of the myriad drops flung up from the water's impact; but here too the eternal poet, Legend, has wrought a delicate phantasy: this mist he calls the breath from the lips of the Rhine-maidens who sing for ever beneath the foam.
An enchanted place this Schaffhausen, guarded by the great white Alps whose pure crests rise in awful majesty to high Heaven. And here it was that the Grävenitz dwelt after she left Wirtemberg, and here Time the consoler healed her bruised heart and her crushed pride. She dwelt in the small castle which Zollern had given her and where her marriage with Würben had been solemnised. Her soul rested from pain, but there were torturing ghosts of the past around her: Eberhard Ludwig, Madame de Ruth, Zollern, her unkind brother, even the fraudulent attorney Schütz, and the ridiculous figure of her name-husband, Nepomuk Würben. Yes, all her life's denizens had vanished. Death or absence had swallowed them; only she, the central figure, remained.
She was memory-haunted, who herself was but a memory.