Before Langler could answer the wicket opened, Herr Tschudi stepped out, and, peering at us, cried jauntily: "kiss the hand, sirs! What, still waiting to see the good Pater Dees come out?"
Neither of us answered him.
"You are only losing your time," he went on: "Pater Max, is it? the blessed Max? But no saintly Max will come out here again, by Gott, no. Look you"—his voice sank secretly—"I'll bite into the sour apple, and give you a hint, just to satisfy you two men. You have been eager to see the lovely saint—eager, eager: well, he is not a thousand metres off, up yonder by the right river-bank, waiting now for you; you go, you will find him, you were eager to see him"—and at once the man dashed inward from us, chuckling, and slamming the wicket after him.
"But what a fury!" said Langler.
"Let me go up the river as he says, and see," said I, "and you wait here till I come back."
"But if you can go I will, too," he answered in a strained voice.
We went by a path which, after skirting the castle-back, followed the line of the cliffs a few feet from their edge. Occasionally, in a flash, the river appeared at flood thirty to forty feet below; but mostly it was so murky that we kept on missing the path; our minds, too, were crowded full of gloom, for all that night seemed to us haunted with ghosts and meanings of awe and fear. Some little distance from the burg the river and cliffs had a sudden bend from east to north, thenceforth the cliffs being clad to their foot in fir-forest, and we had gone past this bend, and were going on northward, I holding Langler's arm, when, at a lighting up of the scene of river and forest, we both stood still in a fright. At one place at the base of the opposite cliffs was a patch of sward some inches above the water, a very lonely little spot, and just there, in the cut of the lightning, our eyes seemed to catch sight of a crucifix. It was about twenty feet below us, perhaps fifty yards beyond us.
What stopped my breath was the fact that that was an uncommon place for one of the wooden crucifixes common in Styria, and that I had never chanced to notice a crucifix just there before, though I knew the cliffs well; but we were still standing uncertain as to what we had actually beheld, when somewhere someone was heard to say: "yes, it is my son Max that you see nailed to that wood."
The tone was like a woman's, and not remote, though our eyes could make out no form in the dark; I seemed to find myself with the world of the departed, and while I shrank there from the presence that was with us, I remember hearing in the silence a roaring of waters against the arches of the bridge and the banks of slime below; for the tide was turned, the flood had convened, had teemed, had lasted, and was over now, and the brimming river was streaming back down, as when hosts stream back homeward from some supremeness and ritual, when all's over now and done, and the mourners stream about the streets.