THE DOVE AT THE DRAGON’S DALE
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.”
[Illustration]