So she kissed him once more, and clambered down the hillslope, whilst Jerome straightway took out the scourge as antidote for earthly imaginings.
But Agnes found all the groves and hills one kingdom of delight; for what bad sprites dared dwell so near a saint? Upon the boughs grave thrushes winked down at her; little green snakes shot in and out the grass. Once she pushed back a bush, and came face to face with two bright, gentle eyes,—a cow? what cow had ever horns like these? A snort, a stamping—away scampered the deer, and she heard him leaping through thicket on thicket. She followed the stream past tiny pool and waterfall till she halted at the mouth of the Dragon’s Dale; for here she was sure the holy spell of the great saint ended, and gnomes and goblins ruled in that serpent-like ravine. So she turned back, with pleasures enough in the forest, until suddenly she came on a human being,—a quaint little woman, seated on a log, with two ravens croaking on her shoulders. The little woman (despite her round waist) dropped Agnes a very deep courtesy, called her “my gracious lady,” and seemed as much a gentle-woman as the Abbess herself, notwithstanding strange costume and stranger resting-place.
“And are you a holy woman too?” asked Agnes, when the first edge was off her wonder; “for you are not at all like to Jerome?”
Here the little woman rocked with laughter till the woods reëchoed, and a redbreast whirled out of a beech in fright.
“Who are you, then?”
“Call me Witch Martha.”
Agnes began to grow pale about her lips; but the new friend assured her that hers was only “white magic,” that she was as good a Christian as any in the Thuringerwald, and that all her elves and dwarfs were second cousins to the angels, only they could not live up in heaven because of a little swarthiness of their skins. Then Witch Martha drew Agnes down upon her log, and before long the brown head was in the little woman’s lap, and soon Martha had heard all of Agnes’s brief life-story,—how her mother had died when she was a baby, and how she had always lived at the great Abbey of Bamberg, under the special eye of the noble Abbess, who was the Prince Bishop’s own sister. As for her father, Graf Ludwig, all Germany knew that he was a great prince in the North Country, rising every day in favour with the Landgraf of Thuringia, and with the new Emperor, Rudolf of Hapsburg, and with them trying to end the “stirrup law” of Ulrich and his kind. Agnes had never been far from the convent; she knew rather less of the world than Martha’s winking ravens; she could embroider, sing, read a little Latin, and illuminate a missal. She had seen her father only twice. He was a grand, tall man, very fierce, but magnificent; something about him reminded her of Jerome the Saint. But he was no saint,—Our Lady pity him!—he was too fond of forays and tourneys, for that! Nevertheless, Agnes was very proud of him; and at Goslar—whither he had summoned her—no doubt she was to live in state like an Elector’s daughter.
Witch Martha only nodded her wise head, seemed to ask few questions, really asked many, and found out all she wished to know.
“Has your father always lived in the North Country?”
Agnes thought not. The nuns at Bamberg had never told her much about his early life, because, forsooth, they did not know themselves. But old Sister Barbara had once said that the Graf had surely been in Italy and even in the Holy Land, and Sister Elizabeth, the faultfinder of the nunnery, had added that much travel amongst the paynims had surely brought him into perilous disregard for his soul. But the Abbess had ordered “silence, and no chattering of things whereof few save the Recording Angel knew certainly.”