"If thou goest back amongst men we will dash Joseph to pieces, and throw thee and him into the abyss," threatened the phantom maidens; "for no one may live among men who has seen us."
"Throw me into the abyss, but leave me my heart to love. All, anything I will bear, but I will not part from my love," and with the strength of despair Wally seized one of the damsels round the waist and wrestled with her; and behold! the tender form was shattered in her arms, and she held in her hand only dripping snow. The daylight was extinguished; suddenly all was veiled in grey twilight. She stood on the bare rock; a sharp wind drove needles of ice in her face, and instead of the "phantom maidens" white mists whirled round her in a wild dance. High above, Murzoll's pale countenance looked darkly down upon her through the clouds, and his voice of thunder said,
"Dost thou rebel against Men and Gods?--Heaven and earth will be thy enemies. Woe is thee!" And all had vanished--Wally awoke. The chill evening wind whistled through the window-slits on the girl. She rubbed her eyes; her heart still trembled at the weird dream; she thought long before she knew where she was, or could separate the images of her dream from the reality; an inexplicable sense of horror remained in her mind and mingled itself with all she saw. She rose from her bed and involuntarily called loudly for the servant. She went out of the hut to seek him; it was a clear and beautiful evening; the mists were scattered, but the sun was low and the breeze blew keenly from the heights. Wally hastened hither and thither in search of the deaf man; she found only the pile of firewood that he had made for her. Then it occurred to her that he had said he would go away while she was asleep. It was so; he had not waited for her awakening. It was not right of him to abandon her while she slept. To wake thus and find no one; it was hard! All was so silent around her, so deserted and empty. It must be six o'clock and milking time. The confiding cattle would look at the stable door, where no mistress would come in with bread and salt for them--she was sitting up here with her hands in her lap, and around her far and wide stirred no living thing. Oh! the deathly stillness and inaction--she knew not how she felt--alone, so terribly alone! She climbed higher still, on to an overhanging point, that she might look down upon the wide world. A vast unknown picture was spread before her eyes in the purple of the setting sun. There lay before her to the very verge of the horizon the great range of the Tyrol, in the distance growing fainter and fainter, close at hand crushing and overpowering her with their great silent sublimity; between them, like children in their father's arms, slept the blooming valleys. A nameless longing seized her for the beloved fields of home, that even now lay reposing peacefully before her eyes in the evening shadows. The sun had set, and on the horizon lay violet clouds shot with streaks of ruddy gold; little by little, the pale full moon began to shine, contesting the victory with the last flickering gleams of day. Down in the valleys it was already night; here and there, scarcely visible in the distance, a light glimmered from afar--a star of earth. Now they were going to rest, her weary companions down yonder. With them all was well; a friendly roof was above their heads; they rested securely in the bosom of a sheltered home--perhaps, already half-asleep, they still listened behind the coloured curtain of the little window to the beloved one's song--only she was alone, thrust forth and banished, exposed defenceless to every terror, her only shelter the inhospitable hut, where the wind whistled through the empty window-slits. "Father, father, how could thou have the heart to do it?" she cried aloud, but near and far nothing answered but the rush of the night-wind. Higher and higher rose the moon, the streaks of light in the west lost their gold, and glimmered only a pale yellow in the darkness of the evening sky. The outlines of the mountains seemed to shift and grow larger in the twilight; threatening, overpowering, her nearest neighbour, the mighty Similaun, looked down upon her. All the giant peaks around seemed to stare at her frowningly, because she had dared to spy out their nightly aspect. It was as though only since Wally's arrival, they had all become so still and quiet--as a company that confers of private affairs is suddenly dumb when a stranger enters. There she stood, the helpless human form, so lonely in the midst of this silent, motionless world of ice, so inaccessibly high above all living things, so strange in the weird company of clouds and glaciers, in the terrible, mysterious silence. "Now art thou all alone in the world!" cried an inner voice, and an unspeakable anguish, the anguish of the forsaken ones, swept over her. It seemed to her all at once as though she were doomed to go on, for ever lost, through vast immeasurable space, and as though seeking help she clung to the steep wall of rock, pressing her wildly-beating heart against the cold stone.
What passed within her in that hour, she herself did not know, but it seemed as though the stone against which she pressed her young, warm, trembling heart, had exercised some mysterious power over her, for that hour left her hard and rough as if she had been in very truth Murzoll's child.
[CHAPTER V.]
Old Luckard.
When about a week later the herdsman came up the mountain with the flocks, Wally almost frightened him, she looked so wasted away; but when he said to her, "Thy father bids me ask thee if thou'st had enough of being up here, and if thou'll do thy duty?"--she set her teeth and answered, "Tell my father, I'd sooner let myself be eaten piecemeal by the vultures, than do anything to please them that drove me up here!"
This was for the present the last message that passed between her and her father.
When Wally had her little flock around her, which consisted only of sheep and goats, for larger animals could not find sufficient food on these heights, then her old spirit revived and the mountain lost its terrors for her. In the midst of her helpless charges she was no longer alone, she had again some one to work for, something to care about. For though the vulture had been a faithful companion, yet he could not do away with the inactivity that had driven her almost to despair, and allowed dark thoughts to gain the mastery over her.
So little by little she became accustomed to the solitude, and it grew dear and sweet to her. Life with its daily claims, small and great, narrows and confines every great nature: up here Wally's untameable spirit could expand without constraint; up here was freedom--no human being to gainsay her, no alien will to oppose itself to hers--and standing there, the only soul-gifted being far and wide, by degrees she felt herself a queen on her solitary, lofty throne, a sovereign in the unmeasurable, silent realm that lay beneath her eyes. And she looked down at last from her heights with a mixture of pity and scorn on the miserable race below, who, wrapped in earth-born clouds, spent their lives in longing and grasping, in haggling and hoarding, and a secret aversion took the place of her first home-sickness. There, far below, were strife and anguish and crime. Murzoll had spoken truly in her dream--up here among the pure elements of ice and snow, in the clear atmosphere, free from all smoke, or pestilential taint of death--here was peace, here was innocence; here among the mighty tranquil mountain forms, which in the beginning had terrified her, the sentiment of the sublime had flooded her soul and had raised it far above the common measure of mankind. One only of all those low earthly inhabitants remained to her dear and beautiful and great as before. It was Joseph the bear-slayer, the Saint George of her dreams. But he, like herself, dwelt more on the heights than in the valleys, he had climbed all the sky-piercing peaks on which no other foot would venture, he brought down the chamois from the steepest rocks, and for him nor height nor depth had any terror; he was the strongest, the bravest of men, as she was the strongest, the bravest of maidens. In all the Tyrol no maiden was worthy of him but herself; in all the Tyrol no man was worthy of her but he. They belonged to one another, they were the giants of the mountains; with the puny race of the valleys they had nothing in common.