CHAPTER I.
Just at the end of the village of Dosenheim, in Alsace, about fiftyyards from the gravelly road that leads into the wood, is a prettycottage surrounded with an orchard, the flat roof loaded withboulder-stones, the gable-end looking down the valley.
Flights of pigeons wheel around it, hens are scratching and picking upwhat they can under the fences, the cock takes his stand majestically onthe low garden wall, and sounds the _reveillee_, or the retreat, for theechoes of Falberg to repeat; an outside staircase, with its woodenbanisters, the linen of the little household hanging over it, leads tothe first story, and a vine climbs up the front, and spreads its leafybranches from side to side.
If you will only go up these steps you will see at the end of the narrowentry the kitchen, with its dresser and its pewter plates and dishes, itssoup-tureens puffing out like balloons; open the door to the right andyou are in the parlour with its dark oak furniture, a ceiling crossed bybrown smoke-stained rafters, and its old Nuremberg clock click-clackingmonotonously.
Here sits a woman of five-and-thirty, spinning and dreaming, her waistencircled with a long black taffety bodice, and her head covered with avelvet headdress, with long ribbons.
A man in broad-skirted velveteen coat, with breeches of the same, andwith a fine open brow, looking calm and thoughtful, is dandling on hisknee a fine stout boy, whistling the call to "boot and saddle."
There lies the quiet village at the end of the valley, framed, as yousit, in the little cottage window; the river is leaping over the mill-damand crossing the winding street; the old houses, with their deep andgloomy eaves, their barns, their gabled windows, their nets drying in thesun; the young girls, kneeling by the river-side on the stones, washinglinen; the cattle lazily lounging down to drink, and gravely lowingamidst the willows; the young herdsmen cracking their whips; the mountainsummit, jagged like a saw by the pointed fir-tree tops--all these ruralobjects lie reflected in the flowing blue stream, only broken by thefleets of ducks sailing down or the occasional passage of an old treerooted up on the mountain-side.
Looking quietly on these things, you are impressed with a sense of theease and comfort of which they speak, and you are moved with gratitude tothe Giver of all good.
Well, my dear friends and neighbours, such was the cottage of the Bremersin 1820, such were Bremer himself, his wife Catherine, and their son,little Fritz.
To my own mind they come back exactly as I have described them to you.
Christian Bremer had served in the chasseurs of the Imperial Guard. After1815 he had married Catherine, his old sweetheart, grown a little older,but quite fresh and fair, and full of grace. With his own littleproperty, his house, and his four or five acres of vineyard, andCatherine's added to it, Bremer had become one of the most substantialbourgeois of Dosenheim; he might have been mayor, or adjoint, ormunicipal councillor, but these honours had no attractions for him; andwhat pleased him best was, after work was over, to take down his old gun,whistle for Friedland, and take him a turn in the woods.
Now it fell out one day that this worthy man, coming home after a day'sshooting, brought in his bag a little gipsy girl two or three years old,as lively as a squirrel, and as brown as a hazel-nut. He had found her inthe bundle of an unhappy gipsy woman who had died of fatigue or hunger,or both, at the foot of a tree.
You may well imagine what an outcry Catherine raised against this newuninvited member of her family. But as Bremer was master in his ownhouse, he simply announced to his wife that the child should bechristened by the name of Susanna Frederica Myrtle, and that she shouldbe brought up with little Fritz.
As a matter of course, all the women in the place, old and young, cameto pass their observations upon the little gipsy, whose serious andthoughtful expression of countenance surprised them.
"This is not a child like others," said they; "she is a heathen--quite aheathen! You may see by her eyes that she understands every word! She islistening now! Mind what I say, Maitre Christian! Gipsies have claws atthe ends of their fingers. If you will rear young ferrets and weasels youmust not expect your poultry to be safe. They will have the run of allthe farm-yard!"
"Go and mind your own business!" shouted Bremer. "I have seen Russiansand Spaniards, I have seen Italians, and Germans, and Jews; some werebrown, and some were black, some white, and others red; some had longnoses, and others had turned-down noses, but I found good fellows amongstthem all."
"Very likely," said the ladies, "but those people lived in houses, andgipsies live in the open air."
He vouchsafed no reply to this argument, but with all possible politenesshe put them out by the shoulders.
"Go away," he cried; "I don't want your advice. It is time to air therooms, and then I have to go and attend to the stables."
But, after all, the rejected counsels were not so bad, as the eventunhappily showed a dozen or fourteen years afterwards.
Fritz was always delighted to feed the cattle, and take the horses to thepond, and follow his father and learn to plough and sow, to reap and mow,to tie up the sheaves and bring them home. But Myrtle had no wish to milkthe cows, churn the butter, shell peas, or peel potatoes.
When the maidens of Dosenheim, going out to wash clothes in the morningat the river, called her the _heathen_, she mirrored herself complacentlyin the fountain, and when she had admired her own long dark tresses, herviolet lips, her white teeth, her necklace of red berries, she wouldsmile and murmur to herself--
"Ah! they only call me a heathen because I am prettier than they are,"and she would dip the tip of her little foot in the fountain and laugh.
But Catherine could not approve of such conduct, and said--
"Myrtle is not the least good to us. She won't do a single thing that isuseful. It is no use for me to preach, and advise, and scold, she doeseverything the wrong way. The other day, when we were stowing away applesin the closet, she took bites out of the best to see if they were ripe!She has no pleasure but in gobbling up the best of everything."
Bremer himself could not help admitting that there was a very heathenishspirit in her when he heard his wife crying from morning till night,"Myrtle, Myrtle! where are you now? Ah, naughty, bad girl! she has runaway into the woods again to gather blackberries." But still he laughedto himself, and pitied poor Catherine, whom he compared to a hen with abrood of ducklings.
Every year after harvest-time Fritz and Myrtle spent whole days far awayfrom the farm, pasturing the cattle, singing, and whistling, and bakingpotatoes under the ashes, and coming down the rocky hill in the eveningblowing the shepherd's horn.
These were some of Myrtle's happiest days. Seated before the burninghemp-stalks, with her pretty brown face between her hands, she lostherself in endless reveries.
The long strings of wild ducks and geese which traverse, about the end ofautumn, the boundless heavens spread from the mountains on the east tothe western hills, seemed to have a depressing effect upon her mind. Sheused to follow them with longing eyes, straining them as if to overtakethe wild birds in the immeasurable distance; and suddenly she would rise,spread out her arms, and cry--
"I must go! I must go! I can't stay!"
Then she would weep with her head bowed down, and Fritz, seeing her intears, would cry too, asking--
"Why do you cry, Myrtle? Has anybody hurt you? Is it any of the boys inthe village?--Kasper, Wilhelm, Heinrich? Only tell me, and I will knockhim down at once! Do tell!"
"No; it is not that."
"Well, why are you crying?"
"I don't know."
"Do you want to run as far as the Falberg?"
"No; that is not far enough."
"Where do you want to go?"
"Down there! down there! ever so far! where the birds are going."
This made Fritz open his eyes and his mouth very wide.
One day in September, when they were idling along by the woods, aboutnoon, the heat was so great and the air so still that the smoke of theirlittle fire, instead of rising straight
into the air, fell like water andcrept among the briars. The grasshopper had ceased its dull monotonouschirp, not the buzzing of a fly was to be heard, nor the warbling of abird. The oxen and the cows, with sleepy eyes half-closed, their kneesbent under them, were resting together under a spreading oak in themeadow, now and then lowing in a slow, protracted way as if in idleprotest against such hot weather.
Fritz had begun by plaiting the strands of his whip, but he soon lay downin the long grass with his hat over his eyes, and Friedland came to lienear him, gaping from ear to ear.
Myrtle alone suffered no inconvenience from the overwhelming heat;sitting on the ground near the fire, with her arms wreathed around herknees, full in the sun, her large dark eyes slowly surveyed the darkarches formed by the branches of the forest.
Time passed on slowly. The distant village clock had struck twelve, thenone, and two, and the young gipsy never stirred. In the woods and jaggedmountain-tops, the crags, the forests, descending into the valleys, sheheard some mysterious call. They spoke to her in a language not unknownto her.
"Yes," she said to herself, "yes; I have seen all that before--longago--a long time ago."
Then with a quick, sharp glance at Fritz, who was in a deep sleep, sherose to her feet and began to fly. Her light footsteps scarcely bent thegrass beneath her; she ran on and on, up the hill; Friedland turned hishead round with a careless glance, then stretched out once more hislanguid limbs, and composed himself to sleep.
Myrtle disappeared in the midst of the brambles which border the commonwood. At one bound she cleared the muddy ditch where a single frog wascroaking amongst the rushes, and twenty minutes after she reached the topof the Roche Creuse, whence you may have a wide prospect of Alsace andthe blue summits of the Vosges.
Then she turned to see if anybody was following her. She could stilldistinguish Fritz asleep in the green meadow with his hat over his eyes,and Friedland and the sleeping cattle under their tree.
Farther on she could see the village, the river, the roof of thefarm-house, with its flights of pigeons eddying round; the long, crookedstreet and red-petticoated women walking leisurely up and down; thelittle ivy-covered church where the good _cure_ Niclausse had baptisedher into the Christian faith and afterwards confirmed her.
And when she had sufficiently contemplated these objects, turning herface the other way towards the mountain, she was filled with delight tomark how the densely-crowded firs covered the hill-sides, up to theirhighest ridge, close as the grass of the fields.
At the sight of all this grandeur the young gipsy felt her heart beatingand expanding with unknown delight, and again running on she dartedthrough a rift between the rocks, lined with mosses and ferns, to reachthe beaten track through the woods.
Her whole soul--that wild, untrained soul of hers--was rushing with herand impelling her onwards, kindling her countenance with a new ardour.With her hands she clung to the ivy, with her naked feet she clung to theprojections and the crevices to push on her way.
Soon she was on the other slope, running, tripping, leaping, sometimesstopping short to gaze upon surrounding objects--a large tree, a ravine,a lonely sheet of water, or a pond full of flowers and sweet-smellingwater-plants.
Although she could not remember ever having seen those copses, thoseclearings, those heaths, at every turn in the path she would say toherself, "There, I knew it was so! I knew that tree would be there! Iwas sure of that rock! And there's the waterfall just below!" Althougha thousand strange remembrances passed with momentary flashes, likesudden visions, through her mind, she could not understand it all andcould explain nothing. She had not yet been able to say to herself, "WhatFritz and the rest of them want to make them happy is the village, andthe meadow, and the farm-house, and the fruit-trees, and the orchard, andthe milk-cows, and the laying hens; plenty in the cellar, plenty in thegranary, and a nice warm fire on the hearth in winter. But what have I todo with all these things? Wasn't I born a heathen, quite a heathen? I wasborn in the woods, just as the squirrel was born in an oak, just as ahawk was hatched on the crag and the thrush in the fir-tree!"
It is true she had never thought of these things, but she was guided byinstinct; and this mysterious force drew her unconsciously about sunsetto the bare heaths of the Kohle Platz, where the gangs of gipsies thatwander between Alsace and Lorraine are accustomed to stay the night, andhang up their kettles among the dry heath.
Here Myrtle sat down at the foot of an old oak-tree, tired, footsore, andragged; and here she long sat motionless, gazing into vacant space,listening to the rustling of the wind amongst the tall fir-trees, happy,and feeling herself quite alone in the wide solitude.
Night came. The stars broke out by thousands in the purple depths of theautumn sky. The moon rose and silvered with soft light the white stems ofthe birch-trees, which hung in graceful groups along the mountain sides.
The young gipsy was beginning to yield to sleep when cries in thedistance roused her into an impulse to fly.
Hark! She knows the voices! They are those of Bremer, Fritz, and all thepeople of the farm searching for her!
Then, without a moment's hesitation, Myrtle flew, light as a roe, fartherinto the forest, stopping only at long intervals to listen attentivelyand anxiously.
The cries died away in the distance, and soon the only sound she couldhear was the loud beating of her own heart, and she went on her way at aless rapid pace.
Very late, when the moon's rays became less brilliant, unable to standout against her fatigue any longer, she sank down on the heath and fellfast asleep.
She was four leagues from Dosenheim, near the source of the Zinzel.Bremer was not likely to come so far to look for her.