WHEN Maid Agnes passed from dreams to the first slow waking, she did not open her eyes. Beneath her head was something soft and fragrant,—balmy furze and the sweet boughs of pine. Outside and all about was a crooning, witching sound,—the great pines and beeches talking. Memory throbbed back; but memory without a pang. Journey, fray, blood and slaughter, the Wartburg and its godless crew, all seemed an hundred years away. She could look back on them calmly, gladly, as do the saints on high upon the distant pains of the little, fading earth. Where was she? She did not know; still less did she care. Outside the pines kept at their sighing and talking. She could almost catch the words. Far, far away, as from a distant world, pealed out a bell,—the matin-bell of Eisenach; she stirred and opened her eyes. The little hut was dark, but athwart the doorway streamed a golden sunbeam enticing her. Short was the toilet; she was outside the hut. The great trees were bending overhead. Through the rifts in the boughs peered down the blue of clearest heaven. No human form was in sight, but before the hut a noble flame crackled; trees before, behind, to right, to left. But all was peace, and every tree seemed as a friend. Now her ears caught the noise of rushing water. A step down the slope brought her to a rill, where leaped a streamlet clear and cold from its fountain. She bathed hands and face in the little pool, and saw the buttercups drifting as tiny boats across the water. In the twinkling mirror she saw her own softly moulded face, and bound back the flying gold-brown hair. Then at last she knew she was hungry, even in heaven, and looked about her.
Feet were crunching the dead leaves of the forest. Out of the coppice came a man,—her deliverer of the night before. She ran to him with beaming face, and held out her hands.
“Oh! It is you who saved me from Baron Ulrich; and I know now who you are. My wits were straying last night, but to-day it is all plain! We are near Eisenach, and you are Saint Jerome of the Dragon’s Dale.”
“Who declared that?” and poor Jerome was wondering whether to open his arms and welcome the vision into them, or to flee as from the embrace of Satan arrayed like an angel of light.
“The Abbess at Bamberg; and My Lord the Prince Bishop has written concerning you to Rome, to the Holy Father. Ah! saint you must be, that Baron Ulrich should thus dread you! I remember all now!”
Jerome did not answer. So his fame had spread to Rome! Well that Witch Martha had not told all this, or his visit to the Wartburg would have cost yet sorer mental wrestlings than it surely did! Agnes came very close to him, and still with both arms wide.
“Ah! my father Graf Ludwig is a strong, rich man, and will reward you,—but what do I say! Are you not a saint, and what would be gold or lands or vassals, when the dear God is giving you a great fief up in heaven! Yet I must do something.”
They stood eyeing one another—those twain—like two champions in the lists. Then the maid, reckless through youth and love, caused Jerome to be tempted of the Devil.
“Oh! it will not be so very wrong! even if angels come each night to kiss you! I must kiss you too.”
And so she did, putting her arms about him, and kissing his shaggy lips, and saying all the cooing tender things which spring from the heart of a child. Jerome did not thrust her back. He told himself that here was a last test sent from heaven, to see if he could endure the kiss of a maid, and never yearn for worldly joys thrust by. But he did not return the kiss, and she added, a little grieved:
“You are not angry with me?”
“No, daughter, no; but are you not hungry?”
“That I am.”
Jerome took from the wicker basket which he bore six speckled trout, his morning booty, cleaned dexterously, and soon, spitted on twigs, they hung above the fire. An instant later Harun burst through the thicket, in his mouth a partridge. But Agnes gave a little shriek, and made to fly.
“A wolf!”
Jerome assured her with a nod.
“He never harms.”
“But wolves are evil beasts;” and Agnes still shrank, as Harun laid his trophy at his master’s feet.
“The only evil beasts are men.”
“I forget that he is a saint,” said Agnes, under breath, “and all things of the forest must obey him.”
So the partridge broiled beside the trout, whilst Harun dutifully waited for the bones. Jerome brought forth bread and cheese,—the simplest meal in Agnes’s life. What would my Lady Abbess at Bamberg think to have a beech leaf in her lap, in lieu of a fair white napkin from Flanders? But was it hunger which made all taste so good, or was it that a real saint had asked God’s blessing?
After the feast was over, Harun shambled away into the wood, and Agnes looked at the hermit, questioning.
“What am I to do?”
“Go where you will; follow down the stream, but stop when you come to the close gorge of the Dragon’s Dale. If you never quit the brook, you can never get lost. When you are weary, come back.”
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.”
Then Agnes had her own question. Who was Jerome? Had he always dwelt by the Dragon’s Dale? Was he not of all men very holy?
Witch Martha answered with all seeming candour that there was no man from Pomerania to Swabia more loved of God than he, so that Saint Gabriel had lately assured Saint Raphael how he had heard our Father say that when Jerome went to heaven he was to be His archchancellor, just as the Bishop of Köln was to Kaiser Rudolf. Nevertheless Jerome had only been by the Dragon’s Dale these seven years, but since coming he had charmed the wolves, the foxes, and the red deer so that they all served him like so many varlets.
“Yet who is he?” would ask Agnes; “was he never young? For I can never think how he looked when once a child, as I can think of you, Witch Martha.”
The little woman seemed to shiver and to sigh, as if she, too, had a war with memory, but answered:—
“Only Heaven knows his age, and Heaven will not tell! Yet I think this,—that once he was a man of strong deeds and of blood, like Graf Ludwig; that he has been in many distant lands, for he speaks the paynim tongue even better than the German. And I think that once he had a son.”
“A son? A little lad?”
“No; for his son had grown to be a tall knight, and though Jerome keeps all hid, I think that father and son had a bitter quarrel,—they parted in anger, and soon after the son died, still cursed of his father. Therefore Jerome has God’s anger weighing upon him heavily, and he fears for his son’s salvation.”
“And on this account did Jerome turn saint?”
“I think so.”
Agnes sighed and looked wise.
“It must be hard to learn to be a saint; yet now he must enjoy it. Still, I have not seen him smile. Surely they must smile up in heaven. Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Saint Lorenz and Saint Sebastian,—Sister Rosala said that because they had toil and martyrdom on earth, they never lacked good wine and merry minne-lays in their great castles in the Golden City.”
“No doubt she is right,” quoth Martha, laughing now, though strangely enough her laugh seemed close to tears; “but our Saint of the Dragon’s Dale is not raised to heaven yet.”