A little hamlet lay, like an eagle's nest, high on the southern slope
of the Balkan mountains. The half dozen huts of which it consisted
were made of rough stones, daubed within and without thick with clay.
The roofs were of logs, overlaid with mats of brushwood woven together
by flexible withes, and plastered heavily. The inhabitants were
goatherds. Their lives were simple. If they were denied indulgence in
luxuries, they were also removed from that contact with them which
excites desire, and so were contented. They seldom saw the faces of
any from the great world, upon so large a portion of which they looked
down. Their absorbing occupation was in summer to watch the flocks
which strolled far away among the cliffs, and in winter to keep them
close to the hamlet, for then terrific storms swept the mountains and
filled the ravines with impassable snow.
Milosch and his good wife, Helena--Maika Helena, good Mother Helena,
all the hamlet called her--were blessed with two boys. Their faces
were as bright as the sky in which, from their lofty lodgings, they
might be said to have made their morning ablutions for the eleven and
twelve years of their respective lives. Yet they were not children of
the cherubic type; rather tough little knots of humanity, with big
bullet-heads thatched over with heavy growths of hair, which would
have been red, had it not been bleached to a light yellow by sunshine
and cloud-mists. Instead of the toys and indolent pastimes of the
nursery they had only the steep rocks, the thick copse, the gnarled
trees, and the wild game of the mountains for their play-things. They
thus developed compactly knit muscles, depth of lung and thickness of
frame, which gave agility and endurance. At the same time, the
associations of their daily lives, the precipitous cliff, the
trembling edge of the avalanche, the caves of strange beasts, the wild
roaring of the winds, the awful grandeur of the storms, the impressive
solitude which filled the intervals of their play like untranslatable
but mighty whispers from the unknown world taking the place of the
prattle of this,--these fostered intrepidity, self-reliance, and
balance of disposition, if not of character. For religious discipline
they had the occasional ministrations of a Greek priest or missionary
monk from the Rilo Monastir, many leagues to the west of them. They
knew the Creed of Nicæa, the names of some of the saints; but of truly
divine things they had only such impressions as they caught from the
great vault of the universal temple above them, and from the
suggestions of living nature at their feet.
By the side of Milosch's house ran--or rather climbed and tumbled, so
steep was it--that road over the Balkans, through the Pass of Slatiza,
by which Alexander the Great, nearly two thousand years before, had
burst upon the Moesians. Again, within their father's memory, Bajazet,
the "Turkish Lightning" as he was called because of the celerity of
his movements, had flashed his arms through this Pass, and sent the
bolts of death down upon Wallachia, and poured terror even to the
distant gates of Vienna. Often had Milosch rehearsed the story of the
terrible days when he himself had been a soldier in the army of the
Wallachian Prince Myrtche; and showed the scar of the cut he had
received from the cimeter of a Turkish Janizary, whom he slew not far
from the site of their home.
Their neighbor, Kabilovitsch, a man well weighted with years, not only
listened to these tales, but added marvellous ones of his own;
sometimes relating to the wars of King Sigismund of Hungary, who,
after Prince Myrtche, had tried to regain this country from the cruel
rule of the Moslems; more frequently, however, his stories were of
exploits of anonymous heroes. These were told with so much enthusiasm
as to create the belief that the narrator had himself been the actor
in most of them. For Kabilovitsch was a strange character in the
little settlement; though not the less confided in because of the
mystery of his previous life. He had come to this out-of-the-way
place, as he said, to escape with his little daughter the incessant
raids and counter-raids of Turks and Christians, which kept the
adjacent country in alarm.
Good Uncle Kabilovitsch--as all the children of the hamlet called
him--named his daughter, a lass of ten summers, Morsinia, after the
famous peasant beauty, Elizabeth Morsiney, who had so fascinated King
Sigismund.
Morsinia often braided her hair, and sat beneath her canopy of
blossoming laurel, while Constantine, the younger of Milosch's boys,
dismounted from the back of his trained goat at the mimic threshold,
and wooed her on bended knee, as the good king wooed the beautiful
peasant. Michael, the elder boy, was not less ardent, though less
poetic, in the display of his passion for Morsinia. A necklace of
bear's claws cut with his own hand from a monster beast his father had
killed; a crown made of porcupine quills which he had picked up among
the rocks; anklets of striped snake skin--these were the pledges of
his love, which he declared he would one day redeem with those made of
gems and gold--that is, when he should have become a princely warrior.
To Constantine, however, the little maiden was most gracious. It was a
custom in the Balkan villages for the young people, on the Monday
after Easter, to twist together bunches of evergreens, and for each
young swain to kiss through the loops the maid he loved the best. With
adults this was regarded as a probationary agreement to marry. If the
affection were mutually as full flamed the following Easter, the kiss
through the loop was the formal betrothal. Constantine's impatience
wreathed the evergreens almost daily, and, as every kiss stood for a
year, there was awaiting them--if the good fairies would only make it
true--some centuries of nuptial bliss.
The little lover had built for himself a booth against the steep
rocks. Into this Morsinia would enter with bread and water, and
placing them upon the stone which answered for a table, say, in
imitation of older maidens assuming the care of husbands, "So will I
always and faithfully provide for thee." Then she would touch the
sides of the miniature house with a twig, which she called her
distaff, saying, "I will weave for thee, my lord, goodly garments and
gay." She would also sit down and undress and redress her doll, which
Constantine had carved from wood, and which they said would do for the
real baby that the bride was expected to array, in the ceremony by
which she acknowledged the obligations of wifehood.[11]
But Michael was not at all disconsolate at this preference shown his
brother; for he knew that Morsinia would prefer him to all the world
when she heard what a great soldier he had become. Indeed, on some
days Michael was lord of the little booth; and more than once the fair
enchantress put the evergreen loop around both the boys in as sincere
indecision as has sometimes vexed older hearts than hers.
FOOTNOTE:
[11] These are still Servian customs.