Part 2

Rudolf gazed silently a few moments in admiration of that fair and sovereign face; then, seeing that her cold blue eyes did not turn toward him, he ventured to steal softly up behind her and to throw over that regal head the magic veil.

For a moment there was no change; then, as the prince gazed eagerly yet half regretfully at the proud, handsome face beneath the folds, and wondered if his search was over, a slight shudder passed through that motionless form; the faint rose tinge faded utterly from the cheek and lip; the pale blue eyes lost all color; the hair became white as the brow it surrounded, and, where Rudolf had found a stately queen, he now beheld only a marble statue.

As he gazed horror stricken, the veil, stiffening as if frozen, broke in two pieces, and with a light, tinkling sound fell upon the marble floor.

Already a death chill ran through the veins of the young prince, and he was on the point of sinking down lifeless at the feet of the marble lily queen, when with a strong effort he snatched the veil from the floor, and hastened as quickly as his torpid limbs would allow from that icy throne. Pursuing again the windings of the brook, he soon reached the side of his good horse, and, mounting hastily, put him to his speed. For a considerable time he continued his journey without meeting with any adventure of importance; but it so happened one day, as he was dreaming of his father’s court and of what they would say to his adventures, that he seemed suddenly enveloped in a soft and fragrant air, while his ears were greeted with the warblings of hundreds of merry little birds.

Turning suddenly, he perceived a wide and gently ascending path leading off from the main road. Down this path came the soft gush of perfume and music which had aroused him.

Again did the prince find himself overshadowed with festooning vines; but this time they were roses, which peeped and nodded to him at every turn, roses whose soft petals fluttered down upon his head and carpeted his path, while their delicate fragrance filled the air. Roses of every hue and degree; white, blush pink and deepest crimson, single roses and double roses, climbing roses and tree roses, moss roses and thornless roses; every rose that ever bloomed on this round earth clustered along that pathway, each crowding before its neighbor to look at the handsome prince, and nod a joyous welcome to him.

Dismounting from his horse and holding his plumed cap in his hand, Rudolf walked slowly along the path, hoping, at every turn, to find the divinity of this rose Eden. Nor had he long to look, for as the path, making a sudden turn, came to an end, Rudolf saw before him a bower formed by two graceful birches, which, arching toward each other, supported, the one a white, the other a crimson climbing rose, which, in their riotous luxuriance, having clothed every twig of the bending birches with their blossoms, and interlaced above, waved exultingly in the air their graceful, verdant limbs, as if to boast triumphantly of having overcome every obstacle.

Upon a gently sloping bank beneath this odorous canopy reclined a graceful maiden, clothed in a pure white robe, her golden hair curling loosely about her snow-white shoulders, and her blue eyes gently beaming with love and purity. A few moss-rose buds nestling at her bosom, and a slender garland of wild roses about her head, were her only ornaments. Upon her finger sat a ring-dove, to whose plaintive cooing the maiden replied with soft caresses. A pair of humming-birds buzzed about her head, plunging their dagger-like bills into the roses of her garland, while a honey-bee loaded himself with sweets from the buds at her bosom. All about her feet bloomed the wild roses, and a tall bush of sweetbriar nodded caressingly over her fair head.

Prince Rudolf gazed eagerly at the beautiful picture for a moment, then threw himself at the feet of the rose sylph.

“O flower of my dream!” murmured he, “have I at last found you? Art thou the rose I sought? Wilt thou leave thy bower to bloom for me only? Shall thy perfume and thy sweets be for my home and my people?”

The maiden said never a word, only her fair head drooped lower and lower, and she hid her blushing face in her slender hands.

Gently and carefully the prince threw over that sunny head the magic veil, which again was fair and whole as the day he received it, but, oh sad and disappointing result! beneath the gauzy folds no longer was visible the graceful form of a blushing maid, but only a slender bush crowned with one lovely blush rose, its yellow stamens the color of the maiden’s hair.

Grieved and disappointed, Rudolf stood regarding the transformation. Suddenly he remembered the words of the wise Althoso: “If the veil remains white and whole, leave it there till you have slept, then pluck the flower and bring it home.”

White and whole the veil certainly was; and throwing himself upon the ground, Rudolf resolutely closed his eyes, nor did he open them till the hum of the birds and bees, the warmth of the summer morning, and the stillness of the spot, had granted him the sleep he so longed for.

It was not, however, long, and the sun had not yet reached his height, when Rudolf opening his eyes, started eagerly to his feet, and turned to look at the rose.

There it stood as he had left it;--a lovely rose, yet nothing but a rose.

Rudolf stood sadly before it, half resolved to pluck the flower from its tree and try to rest content with that, when a sudden thought flashed across his mind, and seizing his diamond spear, with its point he gently touched the rose-bush.

The effect was instantaneous. In the spot where a moment before had stood only a silent plant, Rudolf beheld with delight the slender figure of his rose maiden, her yellow hair circled with a garland of white moss buds, beneath which flowed the silvery folds of the veil, shading but not concealing the faint blush of her cheeks and the deep blue of her starry eyes, which timidly sought the ground.

“O my rose! O my lovely, long-sought flower!” cried the prince, seizing her soft, white hand.

“Come, my Rose, my Rosa Munda, my flower of the whole earth! come to bloom forever in my garden; to be cherished forever in my heart.”

The Rose drooped gently forward. The prince, taking her in his arms, placed her upon Sunbeam’s back, mounted behind her, and with joyous, loving hearts, they journeyed back to his father’s court, where, for very many long and happy years, the beauty of the gentle Rose made all around her happy and contented.

[Illustration]

KÖNIG TOLV’S BRIDE

[Illustration]

Far in the depths of the wild and gloomy forests of the Hartz mountains stood a little hut, where dwelt the charcoal-burner, Karl Gatz and his daughter Mabel.

Alone they dwelt for years before Mabel’s gentle mother had faded from earth, chilled to death perhaps by the stern, morose husband, to whom her parents had given her. She died, and one summer morning Gatz made a grave for her, beneath the huge blasted pine which towered above his cabin, and then returned to his charcoal burning with no difference except, perhaps, an added gloom and silence in his wayward manner.

Little Mabel was never a joyous child; how should she be, when the tall blasted pine brooded over her home, and her father, who seemed the embodied spirit of the tree, threw as gloomy and baleful a shade over her young heart.

From whence rose the cloud which shadowed all the life of these two, no one knew; but the few poor peasants and mountain dwellers, who alone had heard or cared to talk of so obscure a person, whispered strange stories of a man with whom Karl Gatz had quarrelled, and who had gone up the mountain to claim some money which the charcoal-burner owed him, and never returned. There were no friends or relatives to make inquiries into his fate, and the few who knew of the circumstance shrugged their shoulders and said, “It is no concern of ours. If a fool puts his head under the bear’s paw, must we run to pull him away?” So no one ever asked what had become of Johan Brenner, but all agreed that from that day the black and never lifting cloud had settled close and thick upon the brow and heart of Karl Gatz.

One would have thought that under this dark and poison-dripping shade all pure and lovely things must have withered and died as had the charcoal-burner’s wife, but never in sunniest _parterre_ or most lovingly cared for flower plot had bloomed a fairer, sweeter, more sky-like flower than the dreamy Mabel. Light and gracefully moulded as the fawn, fair and delicate as the wild anemone, her blue eyes had gazed at heaven until they had caught its purest light, and the sun had given his own rays to sparkle in her wavy tresses.

Between the father and daughter there could be but little sympathy or love. The eyes of the silent man bent earthward, and had never marked the wondrous beauty which the slow, sad years were unfolding in his dark and lonely hut, nor had he once met the sad, appealing looks, which, in the gloomy days since her mother died, the heart of the love-longing maiden cast toward the only parent left her. He never looked up, and the thirsty, fainting heart sadly turned away and lived thereafter in its own loneliness.

Mabel had often been with her mother to the convent in the valley, where the poor woman went to confess her fancied sins, and to comfort her yearning heart by hearing of the love which is for all mankind, but is seldom truly valued save by such as, like her, are stimulated by earthly affliction.

While the mother prayed and wept, the little Mabel wandered, like a gleam of summer through the vaulted corridors, and shone by turns into all the narrow, tomblike cells.

The poor nuns, shut out from life and love, gladly welcomed this sweet, fresh presence, beaming with joy and freedom; and many a sister did penance on aching knees, for cherishing, through one wild moment, the wish that she had been an earthly bride, and clasped a child like this to a mother’s heart.

Finding how much the little maiden longed to be able to read and write, good old sister Ursula offered to teach her, and found herself amply rewarded by the warm, tearful smile with which the glad child kissed her withered hand.

An apt and eager scholar did Mabel prove; and in the year which followed, she learned to read and write with fluency and ease, and was able to repay her kind old instructress for her pains by reading in a sweet, hushed voice, those tender, loving promises and solemn, thrilling aspirations, which filled the volumes of the scanty library, and which the dim and fading eyes of sister Ursula could no longer distinguish but with pain and uncertainty.

Little Mabel took great delight in these readings, and she longed to have a book of her own, that she might pursue her studies at home. Expressing this wish one day at the convent, sister Benedicta, with the consent of the Lady Superior, gave her a copy of the mangled and corrupted edition of the Holy Book, prepared for convents and the Catholic use, while the Fraulein von Rosenberg, one of the noble young ladies who boarded and were educated at the convent, called her to the dormitory, and, producing from her trunk a little worn volume, she gave it to her saying,

“So much religion and so many pious works are truly very edifying, dear little one, but I think, for my part, it will do you no harm to read a little of something more amusing; so take this volume of fairy tales, which I have all by heart, and put it into the bosom of your frock.”

Mabel’s eyes sparkled like stars, with delight and gratitude, but pausing as she was concealing the little book as directed, she said,

“But why shall I hide your gift, dear Fraulein? If it is right that I should have it, all may see it.”

“Nonsense, little saint!” said the young lady angrily; but pausing a moment, she kissed the child’s pure brow, and said, “you are right, little one, and I am wrong,--go show the book to your mother and do as she says about keeping it.”

Mabel’s mother did not object to the child’s receiving the little book, nor did she think it necessary to mention it to any of the sisterhood, knowing that she should thereby bring the gay young Fraulein into disgrace; so Mabel kept the book, and while the sad and silent mother spun or sewed in the summer sunshine or by the winter’s fire, the child sat on a low stool by her side, reading in her clear, sweet voice, stories of the graceful little fairies, who dance through the long, bright summer nights; of the crooked, swarthy gnomes who forever pile up riches which they can never enjoy, in the gloomy mountain caverns; of the fair and graceful Undines who frolic in the mountain streams and broad, rolling rivers; of the wood-nymphs, whose slender, supple figures animate the graceful, waving trees, and whisper to each other in the evening breezes.

But chief among all these wonders was the dreamy child impressed with the story of King Tolv, who, every midsummer night, rides, at speed, with all his gallant retinue, through lonely woods and mountain gorges, and if in his wild career he should meet a pure and spotless maiden, her he seizes for his bride and queen, in his glowing, golden palace, deep in the green hill-side.

Many an hour did Mabel peer about in the wild thickets and among the grotesquely piled rocks which lay about her home, to find the entrance to that fairy palace, for the story said that it was in the Hartz Mountains that he always disappeared, and the mountain of Köningsberg, on which the charcoal-burner lived, was the highest, the wildest, and the most goblin-haunted of all the pine-clad peaks.

Either, however, Mabel did not look in the right spot, or King Tolv had so cunningly concealed the entrance to his abode that she passed without noticing it, for she never could find it; and before she had done looking for it the deep snows of winter, and then her mother’s long, fading illness and death, chased such things from her mind, and filled her heart with such deep sorrow and hopeless loneliness that she thought no more of König Tolv or her other goblin friends, but turned, with a heart thankful to the kind old nun, who had put the key of consolation in her hand, to the sublime promises and comforting words of Holy Writ, the living beauty of which not even the garbled and imperfect form in which the Catholic Church presents it to her children can wholly disguise.

Mabel read and prayed, and wept the long winter months away, making from time to time vain efforts to find the way to her father’s heart, more securely hidden than even the hill-side door to König Tolv’s golden palace.

At last she gave up the search, and contented herself with providing for her father’s comfort, as well as she could, and praying, night and morning, to the Holy Virgin and all the saints to turn toward her that stony heart, and show her the way to gain the love of the only one left on earth to whom she could turn for affection and comfort.

So passed the long, chill winter; but when the cold, deep snow had turned to fresh young grass, and trees which all winter had clashed their bare brown arms against each other as in the vain attempt to keep warm, had put on their new green dresses, and the wood-nymphs had begun to whisper again among their leaves, then Mabel once more wandered forth and found among the spring flowers her own old sadly joyous dreams and fancies. Again she took the book of fairy tales from the shelf, where it had lain undisturbed ever since the last time she had read to her mother, sitting on the little footstool by her side. Again she read, and now with a deeper and more thrilling interest than ever, the legend of König Tolv.

“To be loved,” murmured she, sitting by the leaping, laughing mountain stream, the book upon her knees, and her soft, dreamy eyes fixed upon the distant turrets of the old gray castle of Wolfsmarchen, which rose on the far horizon, “To be loved even by König Tolv--ah, what joy! Truly it would not be so hard a fate to meet him beneath the midsummer moon, and be borne away to dance and laugh and love within his golden halls! Who is there but my father for me to love on earth? and were I König Tolv’s bride I could come at night and leave gifts of gold and jewels on his pillow, which would more than make up to him for all that he would lose in me;” and as she admitted to her heart the dreary truth that gold was fairer and dearer to her father’s heart than his own child, great pearly drops rose slowly to her thoughtful eyes, and fell plashing upon the open book.

Mabel rose, and went slowly home to prepare the evening meal. That over, and the hut restored to what order was possible with its extreme poverty, the maiden bid a timid good-night to her father, who sat, as usual, smoking his evening pipe in morose silence. She received no answer, and though she expected none, she sighed heavily as she closed the door of the little closet which her mother had persuaded Karl, years before, to partition off from the common room, that her daughter might not, for want of privacy, lose the sensitive modesty which is to a woman what the dew-drop is to the rose, the bloom to the grape, as great a charm while it remains as impossible to replace, once carelessly brushed off.

Mabel dreamed that she was the loved and loving bride of King Tolv. She sat with him upon a bank thickly set with new and beautiful flowers, as is the sky with stars upon a frosty night. Before them wheeled and glided elves and fairies dancing to music which made glad the hearts of all who heard it; in her ear whispered her fairy lover words whose intoxicating sweetness still thrilled the maiden’s heart as she slowly awoke, with a vague sense of regret to find herself alone in the smoky little mountain cabin.

[Illustration]

That day she renewed her old search for the hidden door, which should open to her that joyous scene which filled her heart with such wild longing, but still the mystic gate evaded her most earnest search. The next night and the next her dream was renewed, and as she awoke on the third morning the thought flashed across her mind that midsummer night was fast approaching, and that by meeting King Tolv on his midnight ride she could learn the way to his palace home without further trouble of her own. “And if I should not like him,” whispered she to herself, “I can easily steal away and come home, and all will be as before.”

This wild thought dwelt in Mabel’s mind day after day; her father, to whom added years brought but added gloom, evidently cared nothing for her presence or absence. The only notice he had taken of her since her mother’s death was to forbid her visits to the convent since she had delivered a message from the Mother, warning him that unless he attended mass and confession his soul stood in imminent peril. When Mabel tremblingly repeated these unwelcome words, Karl Gatz turned for a moment his gloomy eyes upon her, and bid her, if she would ever see his face again, to cease from that day her visits to the good sisters, whom he designated by a word that puzzled, while it instinctively shocked, the pure and unsullied mind of his daughter.

The dreamy, balmy summer days swept on all too fast for the hesitating, irresolute girl. One day she renounced her scheme, the next it again filled all her heart. So midsummer day came, and through the long, sunny hours Mabel could not trust herself to the soft influences of her favorite haunts, but in the intervals of unaccustomed labor she knelt and wept and prayed beside her little bed.

As daylight faded, she threw herself, without undressing, upon her rude pillow, and soon slept soundly.

As her eyelids fell, the old dream sunk down on her spirit more vivid, more sweet and tempting, than ever before. She woke, and, gliding to her little window, looked out. The night had not yet reached its noon, although the round-orbed moon rode high in the heavens.

The stillness in the outer room was proof that Karl Gatz had, as was often his wont, stayed all night in the forest, where lay his employment.

Murmuring a fervent prayer, Mabel threw her mother’s bridal veil over her head and glided out into the moonlight, looking like one of the fair and gentle spirits of whom she loved to read.

Rapidly, yet with trembling steps, the maiden pursued her way to the spot where, two roads crossing each other upon the mountain side, a cross had been erected, that the devout might pause to pray and rest upon the bench at its foot.

Arriving here, the trembling girl sunk upon her knees at the foot of the cross, half resolved to fly while yet there was time, and half reluctant to lose forever the fulfilment of that fair dream.

While still she lingered, her light form swayed by each contending impulse as sways the bird upon the waving tree-top, her fate was deciding the question, for suddenly the clatter of horses’ feet, descending the mountain road, smote upon her ear, and, making a convulsive effort to rise and fly, she sunk senseless at the foot of the cross, and lay in the moonlight still and white as a wreath of new-fallen snow.

[Illustration]

When Mabel again opened her eyes a few moments after, she at first thought that she was dreaming of the beloved and familiar scene, for over her bent the earnest, handsome face of a young man, who, as her eyes opened, launched into them the look of admiration, love, and respect which had so often filled her heart.

As Mabel’s eyes fell, however, upon the horses standing beside her and the old stone cross above her head, she remembered her position, and recollected that the last sound which had met her ears was the approaching clatter of horses’ feet.

With a blush deep as guilt, she sprang to her feet, and covering her glowing face with her hands she murmured,

“Take pity, O King Tolv! Pardon and suffer me to leave you!”

She did not look up as she spoke to see the puzzled expression in the face of the fairy king giving place, suddenly, to a look of enlightenment and merry joy. He did not speak, and Mabel, her eyes still cast down, turned to depart.

“Hold, maiden!” exclaimed a rich and sonorous voice, “where wouldst thou go?”

“To my father’s hut, most noble king.”