The sun had just then set. There was a lingering glow upon the water, a slender moon had risen above a distant chain of pine-clothed hills, the slow, soft twilight of the German Alps was bathing the grandeur of the scene with tenderest, faintest colours and mists ethereal. The Ave Maria was ringing from the chapel, and presently the deep bells of the monastery chimed a Laus Deus.
'Do you believe in fate?' said Sabran abruptly to his companion Greswold.
The old physician gave a little gesture of doubt.
'Sometimes there seems something stronger than ourselves and our will, but maybe it is only our own weakness that has risen up and stands in another shape like a giant before us, as our shadow will do on a glacier in certain seasons and states of the atmosphere.'
'Perhaps that is all,' said Sabran. But he laid his head back on his pillow with a deep breath that had in it an equal share of contentment and regret, and lay still, looking eastward, while the peaceful night came down upon land and water unbroken by any sound except that of a gentle wind stirring amidst the willows or the plunge of an otter in the lake.
That deep stillness was strange to him who had lived so long in all the gayest cities of the world; but it was welcome: it seemed like a silent blessing: his life seemed to stand still while holy men prayed for him and the ramparts of the mountains shut out the mad and headlong world.
With these fancies he fell asleep and dreamed of pathless steppes, which in the winter snows were so vast and vague, stretching away, away, away to the frozen sea and the ice that no suns can melt, and ceaseless silence, where sleep is death.
In the monastic quiet of the isle he soon recovered sufficient strength to leave his bed and move about slowly, though he was still stiff and sprained from the fall on the Umbal; he could take his dinner in the refectory, could get out and sit under the great willows of the bank, and could touch their organ as the monks never had heard it played.
It was a monotonous and perfectly simple life; but either because his health was not yet strong, or because he had been surfeited with excitement, it was not disagreeable or irksome to him; he bore it with a serenity and cheerfulness which the monks attributed to religious patience, and Herr Joachim to philosophy. It was not one nor the other: it was partly from such willingness as an overtaxed racer feels to lie down in the repose of the stall for a while to recruit his courage and speed: it was partly due to the certainty which he felt that now, sooner or later, he must see face to face once more the woman who had forbade him to shoot the vulture.
The face which had looked on him in the pale sunlight of the pine-woods, and made him think of the Nibelungen queen, had been always present to his thoughts, even during the semi-stupor of sedative-lulled rest in his dull chamber by the lonely Isel stream.