... When Ekkehard awoke the next morning, he lay in his cavern, shaken with feverish cold. His knees felt as if they were broken.
The sun stood at his zenith, when Benedicta flitted past the cavern, and saw him lying there trembling, and wrapped in his wolf's skin mantle. His habit hung heavy and dripping over a piece of rock.
"When you again are going to fish for trout in the Seealpsee," said she, "you had better let me know, so that I can lead you. The goat-boy who met you before sunrise, told us that you had staggered up the hill like a man walking in his sleep."
She went and rang the midday bell for him.
CHAPTER XXIII.
[On the Ebenalp.]
For six days Ekkehard was ill. The herdsmen nursed him, and a decoction of the blue gentian took away the fever. The Alpine air too, helped his recovery. A great shock had been necessary to restore his bodily as well as mental equilibrium. Now he was all right again, and heard neither voices, nor saw phantoms. A delicious feeling of repose and recovering health ran through his veins. It was that state of indolent, pleasant weakness, so beneficial to persons recovering from melancholy. His thoughts were serious, but had no longer any bitterness about them.
"I have learnt something from the mountains," said he to himself. "Storming and raging will avail nothing, though the most enchanting of maidens were sitting before us; but we must become hard and stony outside like the Säntis, and put a cooling armour of ice round the heart; and sable night herself must scarcely know, how it burns and glows within."
By degrees, all the sufferings of the past months, were shrouded and seen through a soft haze. He could think of the Duchess and all that had happened on the Hohentwiel, without giving himself a heartache. And such is the influence of all grand and beautiful nature, that it not only delights and softens the heart of the looker-on, but that it widens the mind in general, and conjures back the days, which have long since, become part and parcel of the inexorable Past.
Ekkehard, had never before cast a retrospective glance on the days of his youth, but he now loved to fly there in his thoughts, as if it had been a paradise, out of which the storm of life had driven him. He had spent several years in the cloister-school at Lorsch on the Rhine. In those days he had no idea what heart-and-soul-consuming fire could be hidden in a woman's dark eyes. Then, the old parchments were his world.