We had never till now even heard of a mother of Dees! so stern a silence must have been imposed by the burg upon the mountain.

"Yes," said the woman to us, "they watched me and the little Undine in my cottage, dreading that I should bespeak the two foreigners, for I fear neither them nor anything—the world knows it." We stood now with her within a hÜtte, or cowshed, which let in the drizzle, and we had lightning glimpses of a Roman face, and black locks, and proud rags, and of a child whom she called Undine hugged in her powerful arms to her bosom.

"Tell us, if you can, about your son," Langler said to her, "but not if that pains you, for our hearts bleed for you; we tried our best for him, and our best has turned to your utter sorrow, but you will forgive us, if you can, since we meant well."

"But I do not sorrow!" she cried. "I am only glad and proud! There he hangs nailed up like a bat; dead, sirs; with the wind of where he was born blowing his hair. Is it Max? Is it the lad? It was for this, after all, that you were born that Rosenkranz Sunday night. I said to you, 'take care, mind your steps, do not always fly on horses of wind,' but you wouldn't hear, you wouldn't heed, and this is what it was to come to. But better this than rotting in the dungeon—a grand death for a grand lad! Yes, he defied them all, the lad! he thought himself the equal of the baron's self, or of any prince of them. That lad! it is strange, too, where I had the stuff about me to make the lad; his father had nothing in the lad; none knew that lad but me, for a mother knows. He came as a surprise, the lad: he set himself above them all! But now you hang there, Max, for the eagles——" She was interrupted in this species of raving by someone who, after peering near at us, suddenly cried out: "now, Mother Dees, you know that you should be at home, get you gone from this!" "I defy you all, Hans Richter!" shouted the mother of Dees in answer. "You can do to me nothing worse than has been done to him, and it is that which would be sweet to me." "Yes, yes, but you know that I have caught you blabbing to the foreigners," said the man, "come, come—" And at this I, understanding that he had laid hands upon her, landed him a hit on the chest, whereat, without saying more, he took to his heels.

I suspected that he had run to report to the castle what he had seen, so I pressed the woman to talk, and within some minutes we had from her the tale of Dees' life.

Max Dees was born of peasant parents thirty-two years before, within two miles of Schweinstein burg. From his tenderest years the boy began to notify a genius to whose nimbleness there appeared to be no end: he took to painting and to playing the zither; he would make figures of wood and stone and engines out of fragments of metal; he could cut out and make his mother's clothes; at the age of eight he vested himself as a bishop, and went preaching at every doorway of Jonah in the whale's belly and of Lazarus raised out of the grave: everything he managed with ease and mastery. However, he had tempests of passion, a craze for the other sex, and no government over himself.

The fame of his gifts came early to the baron's ears, and Max was early established a pet in the castle. He was sent to the University of Gratz, where he highly distinguished himself. As in Austria most of the priests are of peasant birth, the baron decided to make of the genius a churchman; and in due course Dees came to be the priest of St Photini's in the castle-court. At that time Baron KolÁr was a widower, with one child, the joy of his eye, a little maid of sixteen named Undine.

"But Max strung his chords all too high for the folk," his mother told us; "I said to him: 'do not always fly on horses of wind,' but he would not hear, he would not heed." The head of Dees, in fact, seems to have gone half-mad with churchman's-pride; if anyone was lax in religion he raged, he warned, he launched fines and penances. But no man is a prophet in his own piggery; the alp men kicked against this rigour; and there came a time when St Photini's was left almost empty of worshippers. During all which Max Dees was the tutor of the little Undine.

It was in this state of things, when matters at the church had turned from bad to worse, that a wonder happened: one Sunday night the handful of worshippers in St Photini's beheld a vision hung in mid-air in the nave—a lamb nailed to a cross: a real lamb to a real cross; they marked the dripping blood, there could be no mistake. It chanced that the baron was just then in residence, and present in the church: he, too, saw, and was almost as awed as anyone. Wild was the effect: St Photini's was thereafter the holy of holies, and Max Dees more the lord of the alp than the lord himself.

But this success must have been too much for the arrogant, weak head of Dees. He now dared to let his eye rest on Undine. The baron was often away at the Court in Vienna or elsewhere; often he had his Undine with him; but once for five months he left her at home. He appears to have had a fond confidence in Dees, though all this while he well knew that Dees was an impostor; or perhaps his confidence was in his own coronet and height above Dees, upon whom, moreover, he had lavished so many bounties: for powerful men are but moderately precautious. At any rate, on a certain Sunday morning when the baron returned to the burg after this term of absence, he returned to learn that his girl had been hurt by Dees. The people of the burg afterwards reported that he took it all very patiently; went down to the church that morning, and, seated in his easy-chair, enjoyed the oratory of Dees, sneering with his teeth at the corpse who preached. Only, before this, he had locked Undine into the chamber, from which she was never to come forth living.

During that same afternoon the baron had a talk with Dees in the burg: and it was rumoured about the mountain that he then made to Dees an offer of the chance of marrying Undine—a marvellous offer on the part of a German nobleman, if it be a fact; but the impudence of Dees was even more marvellous than the father's meekness: the priest demurred to disfrock himself by marriage: he trembled, and said no.

That Sunday night the folk flocked as usual to the church in the castle-court, and the bell ceased to ring, the people waited, but no Max Dees appeared. The hour for the beginning of the office was long past, and the congregation was murmuring, when all eyes were caught by a vision hung in mid-air: but a disgusting one this time—one worthy of Baron KolÁr—a pig nailed to a cross, a real pig to a real cross. And while they gaped at it, the head of the baron came up through the trap-door of the vaults; he walked to the pulpit, went up into it. His hands were red with blood. The people declared that in that one day the man's hair had turned grey and his back had bent. And from the pulpit he spoke to them.

He told them that they would never see their friend, the Pater Dees, any more, since he had proved ungrateful to his patron, and had that afternoon been imprisoned in the burg, where he would probably be kept for some years, till the time should be ripe for a still worse thing to come upon him. He, the baron, had been sorry to shock them with the vision of the pig, but he had ordained it so in order to clear their minds completely of the effect of the vision of the lamb which they had seen. That vision of the lamb had been contrived by the mechanical genius of their friend, the Pater Dees. On the Sunday night, a year before, when it had appeared the baron had locked Dees into a room with him for three hours, and had compelled Dees to tell by what means the vision had been produced. Dees had confessed that he had nailed a lamb to a cross in the vaults, and by means of a dark lantern, some limelight, and some plates of glass—a contrivance not new, yet new in its perfection—had thrown, as it were, the ghost of the lamb into the nave of the church. He, the baron, had successfully repeated the same thing with the pig that evening for them to see. He believed now that none of them would ever wish for any more church; if they should, he made them an offer: let any six of them come to him and say so, and he would supply them with a new priest. He would watch with interest to see how they would act. Meantime he hoped that they would continue to be good Christians in their homes; Christianity was the highest sign of man, and could never be destroyed or abolished, but it was an affair of aspiration and conduct, not of dogma: they might take it from him that there was no truth in any one of its dogmas, and for some years he had been casting about for an easy method of destroying the institution which persisted in embarrassing the world with those dogmas. Perhaps their friend, the Pater Dees, had now supplied him with such a method. He would watch and see. But, meantime, they must never repeat to a soul what had passed on the alp or what they heard him say that night; he set up a secret between them and himself, because they were his, and he loved them, and knew that they truly feared and loved him: but if ever anyone should recount or imply aught to outsiders that would incur his displeasure.

So much Langler and I were able to gather from the Mother Dees' gabble. As for the ill-starred Undine, she seems to have died in, or soon after, giving birth to the five-year-old Undine of whom I had lightning glimpses on the breast of the Mother Dees. This child, the granddaughter of a nobleman, was in rags, and had never been seen by Baron KolÁr: a fact which chilled me with a sense of the changelessness of this man's resentments.