They looked in silence at the monument, and at the blue quiet water,
under which the bones of the dancers lay buried, hand in hand. The
monument is of stone, painted white, with an over-hangingroof to
shelter it from storms. In a niche in front is a small image of the
Saviour, in a sitting posture; and an inscription, upon a marble tablet
below, says that it was placed there by Longinus Walther and his wife
Barbara Juliana von Hainberg; themselves long since peacefully crumbled
to dust, side by side in some churchyard.
"That was breaking the ice with a vengeance!" said Berkley, as they
pushed out into the lake again; and ere long they were floating beneath
the mighty precipice of Falkenstein; a steep wall of rock, crowned with
a chapel and a hermitage, where in days of old lived the holy Saint
Wolfgang. It is now haunted only by an echo, so distinct and loud, that
one might imagine the ghost of the departed saint to be sitting there,
and repeating the voices from below, not word by word, but sentence by
sentence, as if he were passing them up to the recording angel.
"Ho! ho! ho!" shouted Berkley; and the sound seemed to strike the wall
of stone, like the flapping of steel plates; "Ho! ho! ho! How areyou
to-day, Saint Wolfgang! You infernal old rascal! How is the Frau von
Wolfgang!--God save great George the King! Damn your eyes! Hold your
tongue! Ho! ho! ha! ha! hi!"
And the words were recorded above; and a voice repeated them with awful
distinctness in the blue depths overhead, and Flemming felt in his
inmost soul the contrast between the holy heavens, and the mockery of
laughter, and the idle words, which fall back from the sky above us and
soil not its purity.
In half an hour they were at the village of Saint Wolfgang, threading a
narrow street, above which the roofs of quaint, picturesque old houses
almost met. It led them to a Gothic church; a magnificent one for a
village;--in front of which was a small court, shut in by
Italian-looking houses, with balconies, and flowers at the windows.
Here a bronze fountain of elaborate workmanship was playing in the
shade. On its summit stood an image of the patron Saint of the village;
and, running round the under lip of the water-basin below, they read
this inscription in old German rhymes;
"I am in the honor of Saint Wolfgang raised. Abbot Wolfgang Habel of
Emensee, he hath made me for the use and delight of poor pilgrim wight.
Neither gold nor wine hath he; at this water shall he merry be. In the
year of the Lord fifteen hundred and fifteen, hath the work completed
been. God be praised!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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