Chapter XVII

My lord, I braid my hair; I braid it with salt tears because you
leave me alone, and because you go hence into the hills.--_The
Count’s Lady_ (_Old Romance_).

Ethel, meantime, had already reckoned four long and weary days since she was left to wander alone in the dark garden of Schleswig tower; alone in the oratory, the witness of so many tears, the confidant of so many longings; alone in the long gallery, where once upon a time she had failed to hear the midnight bell. Her aged father sometimes accompanied her, but she was none the less alone, for the true companion of her life was absent.

Unfortunate young girl! What had that pure young soul done that it should be thus early given over to so much sorrow? Taken from the world, from honors, riches, youthful delights, and from the triumphs of beauty, she was still in the cradle when she was already in a prison cell; a captive with her captive father, she had grown up watching his decay; and to complete her misery, that she might not be ignorant of any form of bondage, love had sought her out in prison.

Even then, could she but have kept her Ordener at her side, would liberty have tempted her? Would she ever have known that a world existed from which she was cut off? Moreover, would not her world, her heaven, have been with her in that narrow keep, within those gloomy towers bristling with soldiers, toward which the passer-by would still have cast a pitying glance?

But, alas! for the second time her Ordener was absent; and instead of spending all too brief but ever recurring hours with him in holy caresses and chaste embraces, she passed days and nights in bewailing his absence, and praying that he might be shielded from danger. For a maiden has only her prayers and her tears.

Sometimes she longed for the wings of the free swallow which came to her to be fed through her prison bars. Sometimes her thought escaped upon the cloud which a swift breeze drove northward through the sky; then suddenly she would turn away her head and cover her eyes, as if she dreaded to see a gigantic brigand appear and begin the unequal contest upon one of the distant mountains whose blue peaks hung on the horizon like a stationary cloud.

Oh, it is cruel to live when we are parted from the object of our love! Few hearts have known this pang in all its extent, because few hearts have known love in all its depth. Then, in some sort a stranger to our ordinary existence, we create for ourselves a melancholy waste, a vast solitude, and for the absent one some terrible world of peril, of monsters, and of deceit; the various faculties which make up our being are changed into and lost in an infinite longing for the missing one; everything about us seems utterly indifferent to us. And yet we still breathe, and move, and act, but without our own volition. Like a wandering planet which has lost its sun, the body moves at random; the soul is elsewhere.