"It has all happened just as I said and prophesied," said Correntian. "All the mischief comes of the child. It is the child of a curse, and it will bring the curse under our roof."
Then Eusebius rose, his voice sounded sharp and stern as it never had before, and his eyes flashed round upon the assembly with an eagle-like glance.
"I will tell you," said he, "the cause of the curse that clings to the child. All the conditions of its life are unnatural. Its father's rage was unnatural that made the child an outcast before it was born; your demands on the nurse were unnatural, and the husband, wife, and child have come to ruin in consequence; and the child's life here in the convent is unnatural. That is the seed of hell of which you spoke, Correntian, which you have cherished, and which you will reap--the revenge of outraged nature."
BOOK II.
MARTYRDOM.
CHAPTER I.
Joy, joy in all the fields! for it is harvest-time. In all the fields up hill and down dale; down in the valley and up on the heights they are cutting the last swathes, the last Rodnerinnenlocken are sounding--so they call the old traditional cry with which the hay-maker calls upon the blessed phantom-maidens to come and help him. He strikes three times on his scythe with his whet-stone, so that it rings over hill and valley; the phantom-maidens hear it, and hasten down from their cliffs to help the mowers, so that they may get in the harvest in dry weather. For they are kind-hearted and well-disposed to the peasant who contentedly tills his field, and many old folks are still living who have seen with their own eyes that they were not too proud to work in peasant's dress, helping those who were industrious. But since a rude lad once seized upon one of the "good women," and kissed her by force, they no longer show themselves to mortal eyes; only their kind handiwork can be traced. The more industrious a man is, the more they help him, for they never come to any but the industrious; the idle call on them in vain. But this year there must have been more of them than ever, for it is a splendid harvest, and has been got in quicker than usual. Singing and shouting resound on all the meadows, and the long lines of hay-waggons with their intractable teams of spanned oxen seem endless. Children are romping among the odorous hay-cocks in the meadows, or lie on the top of the soft piled up heaps stretching their weary limbs luxuriously; lads and lasses together teazing and joking each other in exuberant merriment.
Up at the window of the eastern tower of Marienberg a pair of large melancholy eyes were gazing longingly down on this glorious, smiling scene. A pair of wonderful eyes they were; deep, dark, and yet full of light as though glowing with some inward fire, so that even the white seemed to take a ruddy tint, like an opal held against the light. They gazed down from the tower with a fixed regard, drinking in all the splendour in one long look.
The gay, social doings of men--the silent, all-powerful day-star that was riding at its noon-tide height and shedding its rays over all the wide landscape, so that every roof and turret of the thirteen hamlets that lay strewn around were distinctly visible up to the very edge of the gleaming snow-fields and glaciers, which were the only limits set to the roving eye--the wide verdant plain, like a garden with softly swelling hills and tufted woods, and traversed by the silvery streak of the murmuring Etsch--all this was mirrored in those hungry, dreamy, far-gazing eyes. They followed the course of the wild, swift rivulet that tosses itself so impatiently over rapids and falls as it leaves the lonely mountain-tarn on the moor, rushing on to the all-engulfing sea. And those eyes sent forth a message of enquiry up to the blue sky, down to the smiling plain, beyond the majestic heads of the great Ortler-chain--a dumb, burning question.
But no answer came back to him; it vanished, wafted away by the winds, like broken gossamer-threads.