Suddenly a cry of pain broke from the lips of the sick woman; the old man rose and went to the bed-side. She lay there quite changed, almost unconscious, her eyes sunken, her lips blue; the hand of death had passed over her face. She was seized with a violent trembling, and the bed quaked under her.
"What is the matter?" asked the brother in alarm. "Will you have a little food? It is standing here by the fire--or shall I make you a drink of warming herbs?" and he hastily threw some more wood on to the embers.
"Good brother," she replied, and her white teeth showed below her upper lip like those of a corpse, "neither food nor drink can help me any more. As it must come, let it come--I am dying; and when I tell you that I walked with my unborn child from Görz as far as this, and that the boy was born on the heath where I was all alone and helpless, you cannot wonder at it. Hear my confession, and grant me extreme unction."
The old man's eyes overflowed with tears. "Alas, poor flower, who can so pitilessly have plucked you, and flung you away to wither, and fall to pieces in the winter-storm. And we are so unskilled in all medical knowledge, and must see you die so miserably when we would so willingly rescue you!"
"Do not weep for me, reverend father," she said calmly; "all is well with me, I am going to rest in the lap of our Blessed Mother. But my poor child--he loses his mother just as I am finding mine. Take charge of him, I beseech you, he has no one in the world--he is wholly forlorn!"
"It shall be as you wish," said the old man. "You may rely on that in perfect confidence--you may die in peace on that score."
"Then take my boy without delay to the venerable Abbot Conrad of Amatia at Marienberg. Tell him that the outcast wife of Swyker of Reichenberg sends the child to him as her last bequest, that she dedicated him to the church in a sorrowful hour, and the venerable man will help a poor soul to keep her vow."
"In the name of all the saints!" cried the monk. "You, the most noble lady of Reichenberg? You, the guardian spirit and good angel of all the country round! Married only nine months since, if we were rightly informed? How, tell me, how come you here in this wild spot without one of your friends, cast out like the poorest beggar or like some criminal!"
"You say rightly, reverend father," she said quietly, and a gleam of the reviving fire fell like a glory on her pale brow, "I was banished like a criminal, and thrust out to be a prey to the fowls of the air, I and the child, the son of a noble house. And yet I am not guilty of that of which I was accused, although God himself was pleased to bear witness against me." A fresh shivering fit came over her, and shook her as the autumn wind shakes the faded leaves from the trees.
"My time is short--I will make a short story," she said in a failing voice. "It is nine months to-day since the noble Lord of Reichenberg, as you know, married me from the house of Ramüss, and soon after we went to Görz, the gay court of Albert, the count of Tyrol and Görz.--Egno of Amatia, the companion of my childhood, went with us. Oh! would we had never gone there--I have never had an hour of happiness since! The countess of Eppan, a beautiful woman of courtly manners and accomplishments, stole my husband's heart and with it his confidence in me; I had to look on while it happened, helpless and with no one to counsel me, a simple woman, having grown up in a quiet town in the Lower Engadine--ignorant of the world and of its wickedness. And then--how can I say it--she whispered to my husband that I and Egno of Amatia--! Oh! reverend Brother, spare me, spare me--If death had not already frozen my blood with his cold breath I should blush purple with shame!"