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Page 12
"If you are not really there, if you are merely gambolling round me
like a mist, may I, too, bid farewell to life, and become a shadow
like you, dear, dear Undine!" Thus calling aloud, he again moved
deeper into the stream. "Look round you--ah, pray look round you,
beautiful young stranger! why rush on death so madly?" cried the
voice a second time close by him; and looking on one side he
perceived, by the light of the moon, again cloudless, a little island
formed by the flood; and crouching upon its flowery turf, beneath the
branches of embowering trees, he saw the smiling and lovely Undine.
O how much more gladly than before the young man now plied his sturdy
staff! A few steps, and he had crossed the flood that was rushing
between himself and the maiden; and he stood near her on the little
spot of greensward in security, protected by the old trees. Undine
half rose, and she threw her arms around his neck to draw him gently
down upon the soft seat by her side.
"Here you shall tell me your story, my beautiful friend," she
breathed in a low whisper; "here the cross old people cannot disturb
us; and, besides, our roof of leaves here will make quite as good a
shelter as their poor cottage."
"It is heaven itself," cried Huldbrand; and folding her in his arms,
he kissed the lovely girl with fervour.
The old fisherman, meantime, had come to the margin of the stream,
and he shouted across, "Why, how is this, sir knight! I received you
with the welcome which one true-hearted man gives to another; and now
you sit there caressing my foster-child in secret, while you suffer
me in my anxiety to wander through the night in quest of her."
"Not till this moment did I find her myself, old father," cried the
knight across the water.
"So much the better," said the fisherman, "but now make haste, and
bring her over to me upon firm ground."
To this, however, Undine would by no means consent. She declared
that she would rather enter the wild forest itself with the beautiful
stranger, than return to the cottage where she was so thwarted in her
wishes, and from which the knight would soon or late go away. Then,
throwing her arms round Huldbrand, she sang the following verse with
the warbling sweetness of a bird:
"A rill would leave its misty vale,
And fortunes wild explore,
Weary at length it reached the main,
And sought its vale no more."
The old fisherman wept bitterly at her song, but his emotion seemed
to awaken little or no sympathy in her. She kissed and caressed her
new friend, who at last said to her: "Undine, if the distress of the
old man does not touch your heart, it cannot but move mine. We ought
to return to him."
She opened her large blue eyes upon him in amazement, and spoke at
last with a slow and doubtful accent, "If you think so, it is well,
all is right to me which you think right. But the old man over there
must first give me his promise that he will allow you, without
objection, to relate what you saw in the wood, and--well, other
things will settle themselves."
"Come--only come!" cried the fisherman to her, unable to utter
another word. At the same time he stretched his arms wide over the
current towards her, and to give her assurance that he would do what
she required, nodded his head. This motion caused his white hair to
fall strangely over his face, and Huldbrand could not but remember
the nodding white man of the forest. Without allowing anything,
however, to produce in him the least confusion, the young knight took
the beautiful girl in his arms, and bore her across the narrow
channel which the stream had torn away between her little island and
the solid shore. The old man fell upon Undine's neck, and found it
impossible either to express his joy or to kiss her enough; even the
ancient dame came up and embraced the recovered girl most cordially.
Every word of censure was carefully avoided; the more so, indeed, as
even Undine, forgetting her waywardness, almost overwhelmed her
foster-parents with caresses and the prattle of tenderness.
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