The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano Part 3

Have you ever seen spirits with your own eyes, as I have? Have you ever held conversations with goblins, with the little creatures that go into and come out of the mountain-lord's great house there? Have you ever seen metals and precious stones a-growing? or gold and silver trees waving and tossing about, all alive and vegetating?"

"Do you believe then," asked the stranger, "that stones grow and decay, that metals shoot up and propagate their species? Do you fancy that the beds under the earth sprout up just like a potatoe-field?"

"I know nothing about potatoes and all such vermin!" cried Conrad in a pa.s.sion,--it being something new to him to have an unknown, and, as it seemed, an insignificant person lord it over him: "But that metals and rocks have life and motion in them every body is aware, that they grow up and die away, and that, as there is suns.h.i.+ne and moons.h.i.+ne here above, rain and mist, frost and heat, so there are vapours and blasts there below, which burst in and rush out, and boil invisibly in the dark there, and mould themselves into shape. One of these blasts will curdle into a mist, and then it trickles down, and intermarries with the essences of the hills and of the regions under the earth; and according to the course and form the steam takes then, it begets metals or stones, it quickens into silver or gold, or runs along as iron and copper branching out or cleft asunder in veins that strike far and near."

"What then, are you so far behind all the rest of the world here!"

asked the stranger with every mark of astonishment. "O my good friend, with your leave, ever since the creation, or at all events ever since the deluge, the mountains, and stones, and rocks, and metals, and gems, have been lockt up in their houses and never gadded abroad. We dig and delve in here at top, and hardly get even at deepest below the upper skin of the warts, as the mountains are in comparison to the whole earth, much such a part as a nail-paring is of a man. Wherever we can set foot, we grub up these primeval stores, so far as we need them; and nothing ever shoots forth again, neither coal nor diamond, neither copper nor lead; and your notion of the matter is a mere superst.i.tion. In Africa, they tell us a story, people used from time to time to find little grains of gold in a sandpit, which they had to deliver up to the poor black king as his property. With the help of these he would then buy all sorts of things from foreiners. One day going a little deeper they fell in with two good-sized lumps of ma.s.sy solid gold. The slaves in great delight carried the fruit of their labours to their black master, it being more than they had found for ten years past, and they thought how overjoyed the poor man would be at becoming rich thus all at once. But they were mistaken. The wise old king said: 'Look ye, my friends, these pieces are the father and mother of that little brood of gold grains which we have constantly been finding for ages: carry them back immediately and set them in the very same place, that they may be able to go on producing fresh ones.

Unless you do so, we should get a vast gain for the moment, but should lose a lasting source of profit for ever hereafter.' The moor was a goosecap, was not he?"

"Very far from it," cried Conrad, growing more and more enraged; "he was quite right not to meddle with that which goes on in secret; although we, as miners, cannot see the matter exactly in the same light as he did. Solid ma.s.ses have grown like the rest of us; and who can say whether they may not enliven and further the shooting and coalescing of the metallic particles round about them?"

"I tell you however," replied the stranger, "that sprouting and growing, and spreading out into the regions of the air, or in the form of roots underground, are the properties of plants only. Stones rest in themselves; vegetables feed on light and warmth and moisture, and transform the particles of the earth they stand on into means of growth and enlargement. Then animals start off and break loose from the elements; but they move within them, and carry their roots about with them in their entrails."

"No! no!" screamed Conrad, still more violently: "In this way the whole world, and above all my glorious mountains, with their glittering subterraneous chambers, will be hocus-pocust into mere store-houses, wretcheder ones than if they were made of wood, into miserable wareshops and stalls. What then would the dwarfish sprites, and the mighty mountain-spirit, and all the goblins and elvish imps, and the swarm of gnomes there below have to do? and yet they are always, some of them cleverly, some of them clumsily, putting their hands to the wheel. And the waters! and the vapours! O thou blind and deaf generation, that wilt not see and understand, what is yet much more easily comprehensible than your dead, lifeless world! If life and growth, and the workings by which life is propagated and multiplied, can ever come to a standstill, then in your own realm too, in the places where you fancy you see life, it is a sheer illusion and cheat.

The solid earth is alive, but in a different manner; and when it happens to draw in its breath, when the old giant yawns and stretches his tired limbs, and tries to arrange them more comfortably, you are all aghast, and set up a howl about earthquakes, while your walled hovels are running after you for variety's sake, and your towers are tumbling into your pockets and slippers."

"You are a strange man," said the other, "and much too hot-headed to listen to reason. Surely we ought to love truth above our puerile prejudices. We do not make nature, but she is already such as she is, spread out before us, for us to watch her ways and learn from her teaching."

"Nature!" exclaimed the old miner; "that is just another of their stupid words! My mountain has nothing to do with nature; it is my mountain. About that I know everything; of your nature I know nothing at all. Just as if a tailor, who had a coat to make, were to keep on prating about nothing but wool, and merino sheep! To such a pitch have people already brought matters, that they can't look at anything as what it is, but search out some great big generality to which they may tie it and slay it and embowel it. What say you to this? I once talked to a man out of Hungary, a fellow-countryman of yours, but he had his wits more about him; and he told me of a vine, I believe not far from Tokay, which must have stood upon a vein of gold, and in which a stream of gold brancht out and ran through all the wood. He shewed me a bit of this vine, and I could clearly see and distinguish the gleaming of the gold that had grown up with it. He gave me his word that in some of the biggest and juiciest grapes seeds had been found at times which were of pure gold."

"Now only look!" rejoined the stranger; "Can one wish for more than this? Gold not only grows as a mineral, but even as a plant. However I know a still better story. Once upon a time, when the weather was very damp, a man dropt some ducats in the rocky ground at a short distance from Cremnitz. In spite of every search they were not to be found.

They must have fallen down among the stones, and have been buried in the rubbish. What came of it? Some years after, when no human being, not even the owner himself, thought any more of the loss, a strange sort of shrub was seen, which not a soul in the country had over met with. It flowered with wonderful beauty, and then formed a number of little pods. The pods soon after split like the fruit of the winter-cherry; and, when people went to look at it closelier, every skin contained a bright new Cremnitz ducat. Some fifty came to perfection; a good many, that had been nipt by the frost, were mere thin gold leaf. The oddest thing of all was that the ducats were always markt--for they took good care not to root up the beautiful weed--with the date of the year in which they ripened. Of late a wish has been entertained, if it were but possible, to graft a branch of a tree which peradventure might bear doubloons, on this lucrative bush, with a view of enn.o.bling the fruit."

The very peasants laught at this; for they fancied they saw the jest: Conrad, however, though he perceived it, misunderstood it so far that he did not answer a single word, but drunk with beer and rage only lifted up his fist, and thrust it so violently into the storyteller's face, that he instantly tumbled from his stool to the ground, and a stream of blood gusht out from his mouth and nostrils. On getting up again the stranger, though evidently the weaker, wanted to take his revenge; but the peasants rusht in between, and brought about a peace at least for the moment. This was the easier, as some travelling musicians were just come with their instruments into the inn, where Conrad in his drunkenness immediately took them into his pay.

Notwithstanding the remonstrances of the host and hostess, he made them first play some songs, then some dances, and gave no ear to those who admonisht and reminded him that the music might be heard up in the great house.

"Why should I trouble myself," he cried, "about the old man of the mountain? He may for once let his evil conscience be sung to sleep a little."

He now began dancing, first alone, then with the hostess; and as the noise soon got abroad, several men and girls walkt in, who were glad to take part in this unexpected public ball. When the younger peasants however also stood up, Conrad rusht suddenly upon them, shoved them violently back, and imperiously commanded the musicians to be silent.

"When clod-hoppers and such sc.u.m mingle with their betters," he bawled out, "one of us must retire from the foul contamination. But this I tell you, the first of you that budges, or even growls, I'll break every bone in his skin."

The peasants, whether alarmed by his drunken fury, or perhaps only unwilling to incense him still more, drew back to their table. Conrad seated himself, after all the victories he had achieved, majestically in his armchair again, and rolled his eyes round with a look of defiance. As n.o.body uttered a word, he said with a loud voice: "Look ye, fellow miners, I am one of the oldest men about the works here above; see here, comrades, and ye ragam.u.f.fins there, host and peasants I mean, these dollars my prince and lord has gained from our pit."

He threw a handful of silver on the table.

"And old as I am, fellows, I was born and bred here in the mountains, and I never yet crawled down into the vallies and the plain. I can boast (and very few can say as much) I never yet saw any grain in the field, never yet saw corn growing or ripe atop of its pitiful straw.

We work in gold and silver, are expert in mysteries and deep lore, hew blocks, amalgamate metals, fuse ores,--and the miserable louts there have to go about, as people have told me, hand and glove with rank dung, and to carry the stinking stuff into the fields and spread it out; and therefore I have a right to look upon their foul frocks as scandalous and vile; at all events no miner should ever shake hands with 'em, or drink out of the same mug. I am determined too to die a man of honour, as I have grown old, without ever setting foot under their thatch roofs, or on their thres.h.i.+ng-floors; I have preserved myself four and fifty years from this disgrace, and heaven will continue to guard me from it while I live."

Thus he went on prating, till at length he was so stupefied and exhausted that he fell asleep. The peasants, who now felt still sorelier affronted than before, had more than once cast significant looks on their cudgels. With these feelings they listened the more readily to the advice of the stranger, who had been was.h.i.+ng himself in the meanwhile, to lift their insolent enemy, as he was fast asleep and seemed quite senseless, upon the top of one of their waggons, and to lay him, when they got to the bottom, in a corn field, that he might find himself there when he awoke from his fit. There was no difficulty in doing this, as the musicians had been paid and were gone, and the landlord was busied in the kitchen.

In the depths of the forest, where the iron forges were at work, and where in the midst of dark rocks by the side of a waterfall the shouts and the hammering of the workmen resounded far and wide in rivalry with the roar of the torrent, Edward the next evening met the inspector of the mines, to talk over some business of importance with him, and to give him some instructions from Herr Balthasar. The fire in the vast furnace glared wildly through the dusk: the brighter glow of the half-molten iron, the myriads of dazzling sparks that spurted up from the anvil beneath the sledges of the st.u.r.dy smiths, the dark forms moving through the large boarded shed, into which the trunk of a tree in full leaf had forced its way, overshadowing the bellows in the corner with its branches--this singular night piece attracted all Edward's attention, when loud talking and laughter arose among the workmen. Some one had just been telling them how Conrad, when he was drunk, had been treated by the peasants the day before, and how to his extreme annoyance he had awaked that morning in the midst of a corn field. The story seemed to interest everybody so much, that their work was suffered to stand still for a while.

"It serves him right," cried one of the broad-shouldered journeymen, "the vapouring c.o.xcomb! He is the most insufferable and rudest miner in the whole country for miles round; and fancies he knows everything better than his neighbours, and is the cleverest fellow in the world."

"They say he is running about like a madman, and as if the fiend had got hold of him," continued the narrator; "for now the very thing of which he has bragged from morning to night, is at an end: he has not only been forced to see corn growing in the field, he has lain in the midst of it."

Edward turned to the speaker and askt: "Michael, are you quite well again already, that you come out thus into the open air?"

"Yes, Sir," answered the smith; "thanks to you and our old master. My eye is gone of course; but how many of us have to work with but one!

The spark of iron that burnt it out might have been still bigger. It was great pain, to be sure: that could not be otherwise; but with G.o.d's help I am become quite stout again after all. Herr Balthasar indeed has also done much toward helping me, and I owe a world of thanks to his care, his kindness, and his charity. And so we do all, everybody that belongs to him."

Another man with one eye chimed in with these praises, and added: "It will fall out now and then that one or other of us gets maimed in this way; for fire is not a thing to be jested with: but G.o.d has blest us in giving us our old master; for even if a fellow were to become stark blind, he would never let him starve or want."

The workmen were gone back to the anvil, and Edward then first observed that Eleazar had come into the hut, and was talking to a stranger. This was the travelling miner, the planner of the disgrace inflicted upon old Conrad, which of all mortifications he could have endured was the bitterest. Eleazar was scolding vehemently, and said it was quite impious to drive an old man by such tricks into a pa.s.sion, nay to the brink of despair; for he had heard that Conrad was running franticly about the mountains, utterly deaf to all advice and consolation.

The stranger excused and defended himself as well as he could; and as the sledges had now begun hammering again, while the roar of the bellows mingled with that of the waters, the quarrel was lost sound of, and only grew somewhat more audible, when Conrad himself in a fury rusht howling with swollen face and red starting eyes up to the disputants.

"My honour!" he screamed, "my honour as a n.o.ble miner! my glory and my pride! all are gone, irrevocably and for ever! And by a pack of base boors, by a puny, cream-faced, chicken-breasted, outlandish starveling, have I been robbed of it. Amid all the mountains round, and doubtless in many others likewise, there was not a miner nor a mine-surveyor who could boast that he had never in his life been down in the beggarly plain. I awoke in the straw, in the corn, such was the rascals plot to ruin me. The ears were sticking in my nose and eyes when I came to myself, the sorry, brittle, bristly stuff, that I had never yet seen except in the pallet of my bed. Scandal and shame!

Murder and house-breaking are not so detestable! and no law against it, no remedy, no mortal skill in the whole wide world."

The others had enough to do to tear the strong old man away from the weakly stranger, on whom he wanted to take personal vengeance.

As Conrad could not get satisfaction in this way, he sat down on the ground in a corner of the hut; and it being a holiday evening, the journeymen lay down round about him, some trying to comfort him, others jeering him. "Be pacified," said the man with one eye, "the whole affair is mere child's play. Had the fire burnt out your eye, had you had to endure unspeakable torments in your brain, and to toss through sleepless feverish nights, then indeed you would have something to complain of. But as it is, the whole matter is a sheer trifle, and all fancy."

"That is your notion!" cried Conrad: "there never was a fool that could not talk and chatter like one. Your having lost your eye in your vocation is an honour to you, and you may be proud of it, and glory in it. But their sticking me down in the middle of their dung, where I was forced to lie like a tumble-down sheaf, or a truss of hay,--it has knockt half a dozen nails into my coffin. 'Conrad! Conrad! ninnyhammer!

sack of straw!' so it seemed that everything was shouting in my ears.

I have now seen the miserable, dirty ploughed land, in which the scurvy clowns have to breed up their bread. It's so flat down there, you can see nothing, far as eye can reach; and one hears no sledgehammers, no rush of waters, not even a boy pounding. It looks just like the end of the world; and I could never have fancied that the corn country and the plains, where more than half the world have to live, were so utterly mean and despicable."

Thus they went on talking and squabbling, till some one for the sake of starting another subject began telling about the robberies, which their master, the old man of the mountain, was so incomprehensibly allowing to go on, doing next to nothing to find out the offender, although his losses, rich as he might be, must have amounted to very large sums. The stranger miner again spoke of his contrivances for making sure of catching the thief; and Conrad, who recollected the former conversation, shook his fist at him in silence.

Eleazar seemed to enter into these strange schemes, and exulted with vulgar glee at the thought of thus at length getting hold of the rascal. As Edward eyed him in the dusky glare of the hut, and saw his face with its brown and yellow features unsteadily lit by the flickering flames, he thought that this disgusting and to him hateful monster had never lookt so hideous before: a secret shudder crept over him when he thought of Rose, and that this was the confident and bosom friend of a man whom he could not but honour, although his weaknesses and caprices formed so strong a contrast with his virtues.

The smiths listened to the conversation with great earnestness: they believed the stranger; yet every one of them brought forward some superst.i.tious device of his own, in which the speaker himself always put still greater reliance. Edward, in spite of the disgust this gossiping excited in him, was almost unconsciously held fast within the circle. Ghost stories were told; the wild huntsman was talkt of, and several said they had seen him; others had met with mountain sprites and goblins; then they got to forebodings and omens; and the conversation kept on growing livelier, the storytellers more eager, and the hearers more attentive.

"Goblins," said Michael, "there are a.s.suredly: for I myself ten years ago was well acquainted with one; and he was a very pa.s.sable fellow to have to do with. The urchin foretold too in those days that I should lose my right eye about this very time."

"What sort of a chap was that?" cried one of his comrades; "and why have you never told us this story before?"

"When I had got through my apprentices.h.i.+p," said Michael, "at the mountain-town twenty miles from here, and was now come to work at old master Berenger's forge, I used to be plagued at first and quizzed by the other journeymen, as every younker is when he is fresh. When I grew tired of laughing and grumbled, we came to blows; I gave and got my share, as in such cases always must happen. Among the rest there was a grizzly-bearded journeyman who worried and annoyed me most of all, a giant of a fellow, and all along with it so cunning, with such a sharp sting in his tongue, that one could not possibly help being vext, however stedfastly one might have made up ones mind and determined with oneself at morning prayers, not to allow the gall to mount into ones throat. In my distress I often cried with anger; for in the town I had fancied myself a clever fellow, and my unruly tongue had made many a one tremble. One night when I was thoroughly harast and woebegone, I was lying over there on the jutting crag all alone in a little bit of a room--the only other person in the house was a woman as old as the mountains--on the sudden I heard something stirring and sc.r.a.ping near me. I opened the window shutter at my head a little, and as the half moon peept into the room, I saw a tiny creature brus.h.i.+ng away at my shoes. 'Who are you?' I askt the mite; for he lookt much like a boy of eleven years old.--'Hus.h.!.+' said the little thing, and brusht away busily. 'I am Silly, the good comrade.'--'Silly?' askt I; 'he's one whom I know nothing of.'--'Dame knows him, Ursul knows him,'

said the little one, and put my shoes on the floor.--'Leave my things alone,' cried I.--'Make 'em clean, dust 'em, brush 'em neat,' answered the creature, and set to work at my Sunday hat.--'Is this farce never to end?' I called out to him; 'brush your own nose.'--He laught, and seemed to have no notion that I had any right to give orders in my own room. 'Art afraid, he then giggled out, of big Ulric? Need not be afraid. Ask him to morrow, when he sets at you again, where he got the brown fire scar atop of his head over the right eyebrow; he'll soon be meek as a lamb.' The creature was gone. I listened; there was nothing.

I closed the window shutter again and fell asleep. In the morning it seemed to me as if the whole had been merely a dream. My shoes however were clean, my hat brusht. At length I askt old Ursul about the unknown boy. She was very deaf; and it was long before I could make her understand what I meant. 'Ah! she at last cried, has the little boy been with thee? Well, well, good betide thee, my tall lad. The tiny thing harms n.o.body, and brings luck to everyone he takes notice of. I have known him now well-nigh these forty years. He goes round to the houses where he likes the folks, and helps them in their housekeeping, now in one thing, now in another. Cleaning everything is his darling employment. He can't bear dust; dirty sooty pots and other kitchenware are his aversion; and he will often scrub at 'em with all his might. Bright bra.s.s vessels, s.h.i.+ning copper pans, are things he is quite bewitcht with; pewter plates too he likes very well. Many a time has he brought me a groschen, bright and new, as if it had come from the mint.'--'But where does the imp live?' I cried.--'Where does the child live?' she said: 'people choose to call it goblin, or manikin; he himself signs himself Silly; that is his christen-name. But he is a kind good-natured sprite; and so thou must do nothing to hurt him, that he may not fall out with thee.' I had heard of such fellows, but before this could never believe in them. In the smithy the baiting began as usual; old Ulric put me quite in a fury; for they had remarkt my soreness, and this made them think it the better sport to badger me. I was just going to dash a redhot iron at the grizzly-bearded lubber's snow-white head, when Silly came across my thoughts. 'And the brown fire scar up there!' I said; 'you know, Ulric!' Thus I cried, without thinking there was anything in it, when on the sudden the old giant became so quiet, timid, and meek, that it made me stare my eyes out. From that moment forward the fierce fellow became my friend. Nay he was so humble in his behaviour to me, that I rose mightily in everybody's opinion, and thenceforth stood near the top of the board.

When we grew better acquainted, he told me in confidence that in his youth he had once let himself be misled into engaging in an attempt to steal with the help of a servant maid. He had already crept into the room, supposing that everybody was asleep; but the smith being still awake had rusht against him with a fire brand s.n.a.t.c.ht up from the hearth; and thus his head and hair had been singed. He fancied that no mortal creature knew the story, of which he was heartily ashamed; and therefore he entreated me by all my hopes of heaven never to tell any one of it; indeed he was unable to make out how I could have learnt the affair. On this point however he was mistaken; for without his own confession I had never known a word of it. After this my life flowed along very peaceably, and the little creature came every now and then, and helpt me in what I had to do. Before long however we quarrelled.

He often came upon me so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and many a time when nothing was further from my thoughts, that I was frightened to the very core. Whenever I said a word to him about this, he grew very pettish, and told me, I was an ungrateful fellow, not to acknowledge his manifold services. Now I had heard a little before from an English traveller, that the name of my goblin in his language meant _foolish_, and that in England such a creature was called Puck, or Robin Goodfellow; and when in the openness of my heart I told all this to my little guest, and at the same time, because he had just frightened me again, wanted to hang a bell about his neck, that I might always hear him when he was coming, the urchin became angry and furious beyond all measure, prophesied that I should lose my eye about this time, and vanisht with a great rumbling. Nor have I ever seen the brat again since."

"Thou prince of all babbling braggarts!" cried Conrad, when the story was ended: "Can't you open your mouth, man, without lying? and yet you are already come to years. Folks that hold traffic for any time with spirits, grow shar-pwitted. The dealings of these creatures are with supernatural out-of-the-way things; and when they pay us a visit, the very terrour they arouse, till one grows used to them a bit, gives one something impressive and dignified."

"More especially," cried Michael somewhat angered, "when one has been sleeping a night in a potato field."

"That night," answered Conrad, "and that abominable mischance, that foul scandalous deed of a vagabond, will be the death of me; I know it as well as you. I shall not hold out much longer."

"May be so," said the pale stranger; "yet you can't tell all this while whether I too may not be one of these goblins, who has been trying to cure you of your follies. To be good friends with you, my rough-spoken, overbearing sir, it was verily requisite that you should have treated me with a little more civility. Wisdom, experience, strength of mind, may often be learnt from those in whom one is the slowest to look for them. If however, my good companions, you would like to know which of you all will die first, I have a way of telling you that in a moment."

They all seated themselves in a circle on benches and stools. The stranger pulled a plated box out of his pocket, while he continued: "When this little chip which I am going to light is burning, you must pa.s.s it quickly from hand to hand, and the person in whose hold it goes out will be the first of us to see the next world."

All lookt at the stranger in anxious expectation. He thrust a little bit of wood down into the box, while he muttered some sounds, and then he drew it out again burning and flickering. Eleazar, who sat next to him, received it, gave it to his neighbour, and thus the match went on spitting sparks from one hand to another. It had finisht the round, and come back to Eleazar, who was very loth to take it, and was hastily pa.s.sing it on, when on the sudden it flared brightly and then went out between his fingers. "Stupid stuff!" he cried sulkily, as he threw the bit of wood on the ground and jumpt up in a pa.s.sion; "Nothing but empty superst.i.tion! And we are so good-natured as to let ourselves be made the tools of such nonsense."