There I stood trembling, my body throwing a long shadow aslant down the
naked rock. I went to and fro along the ledge to warm myself a little,
and I prayed aloud to the holy Christchild to save me.
The moon stood high in the dark heavens.
I could no longer cry or pray, I could scarcely move any more. I
crouched down shivering on a stone and said to myself, "I shall go to
sleep now; it's all only a dream, and when I wake up I shall either be
at home or in heaven."
Then on a sudden I heard a rustling in the juniper bushes above me, and
soon after I felt that something was touching me and lifting me up. I
wanted to scream, but I couldn't--my voice was frozen within me. Fear
and anguish kept my eyes fast shut. Hands and feet, too, were as if
lamed, I could not move them. Then I felt warm, and it seemed to me as
if all the mountain rocked with me.
When I came to myself and awoke it was still night; but I was standing
at the door of my home and the house-dog was barking furiously.
Somebody had let me slip down on the hard-trodden snow, and had then
knocked loudly on the door and hurried away. I had recognised this
somebody; it was the Moss-wife.
The door opened, and grandmother threw herself upon me with the words,
"Jesus Christ, here he is!"
She carried me into the warm living-room, but from thence quickly back
again into the entrance. There she set me on the bread-trough, and
hastened outside and blew her most piercing whistle.
She was quite alone. When Sepp had come back from church and not found
me at home, and when, too, the others came and I was with none of them,
they had all gone down into the forest and through the valley and up
the other side to the high road, and in all directions. Even my mother
had gone with them, and everywhere, all the time, had called out my
name.
So soon as my grandmother believed it could no longer harm me, she
carried me back into the warm room, and when she drew off my shoes and
stockings they were quite frozen together and almost frozen to my feet.
Thereupon she again hurried out of doors, whistled again, brought some
snow in a pail, and set me barefoot down in it. Standing thus I felt
such a violent pain in my toes that I groaned; but grandmother said,
"That's all right; if it hurts, your feet aren't frozen."
Soon after that the red morning light shone in through the window, and
one by one all the farm-hands came home. At length my father, and quite
last of all--when the red disk of the sun was rising over the
Wechselalpe, and after grandmother had whistled countless times--came
my mother. She came to my little bed, where they had tucked me up, my
father sitting beside me. She was quite hoarse.
She said I ought to go to sleep now, and she covered the window with a
cloth so that the sun should not shine in my face. But my father seemed
to think I ought not to go to sleep yet: he wanted to know how I had
got away from the servant without his noticing it, and where I had been
wandering. I at once related how I had lost the path, and how I got
into the wilderness; and when I had told them about the moon and the
black forests, and about the soughing of the wind and the rocky
precipice, my father said under his breath to my mother, "Wife, let us
give God praise and thanks that he is here--he has been on the Troll's
rock!"
At these words my mother gave me a kiss on the cheek, a thing she did
but seldom, and then she put her apron before her face and went away.
"Well, you young scaramouch, and how did you get home after all?" asked
my father. I said I didn't know; that after a prolonged sleeping and
rocking, I found myself at our door, and that Moss-Maggie had stood
beside me. My father asked me yet again about this circumstance, but I
told him I hadn't got anything else to say about it.
My father then said he must be off to High Mass in the church, because
to-day was Christmas Day; and he bade me go to sleep.
I must have slept many hours after that, for when I awoke it was
twilight outside, and in the dwelling-room it was nearly dark. My
grandmother sat nodding beside my bed, and from the kitchen I heard the
crackling of the fire on the hearth.
Later, when the servants were all sitting at the evening meal,
Moss-Maggie was with them at table. During the morning service she had
been out in the churchyard, cowering on her husband's grave; and after
High Mass my father went and found her there and brought her with him
to our house.
They could get nothing out of her about the event of the night, save
that she had been searching for the Christchild in the forest. Then she
came over to my bed and looked at me, and I was scared at her eyes.
In the back part of our house was a room in which there were only old,
useless things and a lot of cobwebs. This room my father gave
Moss-Maggie for a dwelling, and put a stove and a bed and a table in it
for her.
And she stayed with us. She would still very often go rambling about in
the forest, and bring home moss, and then return and sit for hours upon
her husband's grave; from which she could never more tear herself away
to return to her own district--where, indeed, she would have been just
as lonely and homeless as everywhere else. Of her circumstances we
could learn nothing more definite: we could only conjecture that the
woman had once been happy and certainly in her right mind; and that
grief for the loss of her mate had robbed her of reason.
We all loved her, for she lived peacefully and contentedly with all and
caused nobody the least trouble. The house-dog alone, it seemed, would
never trust her, he barked and tore furiously at the chain whenever she
came across the home meadow. But the creature was meaning something
quite different than we thought, all the time; for once when the chain
broke he rushed to the woman, leapt whining into her bosom and licked
her cheeks.
At last in the late autumn, when Moss-Maggie was almost always in the
graveyard, there came a time when, instead of barking cheerily, the dog
howled by the hour together, so that my grandmother, herself very worn
and weary by then, said, "You mark my words; there'll soon be somebody
dying in our neighbourhood now, when the dog howls like that! God
comfort the poor soul!"
And a little while after that Moss-Maggie fell ill, and when winter
came she died.
* * * * *
In her last moments she held both my father and mother by the hand and
uttered the words, "May God requite you a thousand and a thousandfold,
right up into heaven itself!"