Frau Huett: A Legend of Tyrol.
The Austro-Bavarian Alps are perhaps unsurpassed in number and average
height by any group of mountains in the world. There is always more or
less snow on their summits, and as they are continually attracting the
clouds and causing a changeable, capricious climate in their
neighborhood, they may be said, like fashionable ladies, to have a
different dress for every day in the week, and to look beautiful in
whichever dress they choose to wear. They are beautiful when they stand
out clear and sublime in the perfect sunlight of a cloudless day. They
are beautiful in the night when the moonlight grows even more silvery
from its contact with the snow upon their tops, or when there is no moon
and the stars are rivalled by the bonfires which merry climbers have
kindled upon their well-wooded sides. They were beautiful in the only
thunder-storm I have seen during my residence among them,--their tops
hidden by the clouds and the lightning flashing furiously down their
sides, as if the thunderer of Olympus himself were hurling his bolts
into the valley, while "a million, horrible, bellowing echoes" bounded
and rebounded from mountain to mountain. And they were very beautiful on
the day when I first heard this little legend which I am about to put
into writing. It was raining in the valley, but yet it was possible to
see more or less of all the mountains, and the summit of one of them was
perfectly visible above the clouds that covered its sides. This was Frau
Huett, a peak whose shape bears a remarkable resemblance to that of a
monstrous woman on horseback; and this is its legend as it was told to
me by a very obliging _kellnerin_ in the cosey little inn where I was
sitting:
"Frau Huett was a beautiful young maiden who lived in this very valley a
great many hundreds of years ago, and one morning she determined to have
her favorite palfrey saddled and take a canter up the mountain-side. It
was a lovely morning and she was soon glowing with exercise and
pleasure. She had passed over the lower part of the mountain, and was
enjoying the merry, upward rush through the cool, fresh air, when she
suddenly perceived a beggar standing in the road before her, with head
uncovered and hands outstretched for alms. Now, Frau Huett was a selfish,
cold-hearted woman, and instead of checking her steed or turning him
aside, she rode straight upon the helpless beggar, and in a very few
seconds he was being trampled beneath her horse's feet and was spending
his dying breath, not in praying for his soul, but in cursing hers.
"His curse took immediate effect. Frau Huett was at once struck by
remorse. The glow of exercise fled from her cheeks, and she began to
feel chilly and faint, and to think of returning home; but she shuddered
at the thought of repassing the beggar's mangled corpse. And when at
last she attempted to check her steed and head him for the valley, she
found with horror that the brute had acquired a will of his own and
would no longer obey the bit; and when she tried to hurl herself from
the saddle, it was only to discover that she was firmly fastened to her
seat and could not move from it. So horse and rider rushed upward higher
and higher, upward through the frosty mountain air and over the frozen
mountain snow, and all the time Frau Huett grew colder and colder, and
felt the very blood in her veins ceasing to circulate, and her muscles
becoming so stiffened that she could not even shiver. And when they had
reached the summit of the mountain where people in the valley might best
see her and be best warned by her fate, the palfrey rested, and Frau
Huett's whole body became what her heart always was,--stone.
"And even unto this day, once every year at a certain midnight, when the
air is silent except for here and there the crowing of a cock, and the
continuous gurgle of our rivers rushing to the sea, a mist arises from
the muddy waters of the river Inn and thickens into a cloud and floats
northward; and when it approaches Frau Huett, it slowly takes the form of
a beggar with head uncovered and hands outstretched as if for alms; and
then the upper part of the mountain trembles visibly, just for all the
world like a mortal shuddering in the presence of some ghastly horror.
"And have I seen this myself?" repeated our kind informant. "No, indeed;
and I suppose if I were to ask the same question of the person who told
me the story, he would reply, after the fashion of all ghost-story
tellers, that his mother's first husband knew a gentleman whose aunt's
next-door neighbor was reported to have seen it often. At any rate, one
cannot easily watch for the spectre, because nobody knows the date of
its annual appearance. 'And how in the world could a woman and her horse
ever become so monstrously large as to form the peak of that great, big
mountain?' Oh, that is easily answered. They did not become so. They
always were so, for it all happened in the days of the giants."