For a few minutes longer the wretched man listened, his face bathed in a sweat of anguish; then he threw up his arms to heaven as if to ask, "What can be left to me to suffer more?" then he felt his way back into the hut.
"Spare me your boy," he said to the smelter, "that he may guide me to Marienberg."
"Do you want to go on again?" asked the man. "Where is the girl that was leading you?"
"She--she must stay here, take care of her; you are a good man. Take care of the child as the apple of your eye; oh! Angels of Heaven will guard your hut so long as she is in it." He hid his face in his hands and burst into loud sobs.
"If it troubles you so why do you leave her?" asked the man.
"Do not ask, do not talk, give me your son and let me go. When I have got back to the Abbey, I will send you a rich reward by your son." The boy sprang forward when he heard of a reward; Donatus took his rough hand, his heart tightened as he took it; it was not Beata's soft and loving touch.
"Farewell!" he called out to the man, and the rocks dismally echoed, "Farewell."
His foot had crossed the threshold, and he set forth without delay towards Marienberg.
For the ninth time since he first had set out the sun was setting behind the cliffs of Mals and Burgeis when the weary wanderer returned from his dreary and fruitless pilgrimage. Poor and wretched as if the wind and waves had tossed him on shore after a shipwreck; scorched and desolate in spirit as if in some pilgrimage in the Holy Land the burning sun of the Desert had consumed him heart and brain, and he had fled without earning his title to Salvation.
He laboriously climbed the mountain, led by his clumsy guide; the boy had heedlessly brought him by the lonely and little used 'Goats'-steps,' so called because only goats and goat-herds could climb it without turning giddy; at every step the blind man was in danger of falling into the yawning depth below.