Timar's Two Worlds Part 33

Frau Therese threw up her hands when she saw the green tree-frog there.

"Look how it blinks at me with its beautiful eyes!" cried Noemi, beaming with delight. "We are going to put him in a gla.s.s, catch flies for him, and he will foretell the weather for us. Oh, the dear little thing!" And she held the frog caressingly to her cheek.

Therese turned to Timar in astonishment. "Sir, you are a magician! Only yesterday you could have driven this girl out of her senses with such a creature as that."

But Noemi was quite enthusiastic about the frog. While she laid the table on the veranda for supper, she delivered a complete batrachian lecture to her mother on what she had heard from Timar: how useful, as well as wise, amusing, and interesting frogs were. It was not true that they spat venom, as people said, that they crept into sleepers' mouths, sucked the milk of cows, nor that they burst with poison if you held a spider to them--all this was pure calumny and stupid superst.i.tion. They are our best friends, which guard us at night; those little soft foot-prints which are visible on the smooth sand round the house, are the consoling sign of their nightly patrol: it would be ungrateful to fear them. Timar had meanwhile prepared a small ladder of willow-twigs for the little meteorologist. He put it in a wide-mouthed bottle, which he half filled with water, and covered with a pierced paper, through which the imprisoned prophet was to receive its provision of flies. It of course went down to the bottom, and declined either to eat or to talk. Noemi welcomed this as a sign that the weather would remain fine.

"Yes, sir," said Frau Therese, as she brought out the supper to the little table at which they all sat down; "you have not only worked a miracle on Noemi, but have really done her a great benefit. Our island would have been a paradise if Noemi had not been so afraid of frogs. As soon as ever she saw one she grew quite white and got a fit of shivering. No human power would have induced her to go across the fence to where the innumerable frogs croak in the marsh. You have made a new creature of her, and reconciled her with her home."

"A sweet home!" sighed Timar. Therese sighed aloud.

"Why do you sigh?" Noemi asked.

"You know well enough."

And Timar too knew to whom the sigh was due.

Noemi tried to give a cheerful turn to the conversation. "I took my aversion to frogs from the time when a naughty boy played me a trick, and threw a great big toad, as brown as a crust, at me. He said it was a bull-frog, and that if he struck it with a nettle it would roar like a bull. He did strike the poor thing, and then it began to moan piteously, so that I can never forget it, as if it would call for vengeance against our whole race; and its body was covered with white froth. The bad boy laughed when he heard the uncanny voice of the poor beast."

"Who was that wicked boy?" asked Michael.

Noemi was silent, and only made an expressively contemptuous movement of the hand. Timar guessed the name; he looked at Frau Therese, and she nodded a.s.sent--already they can guess each other's thoughts.

"Has he never been here since?"

"Oh, yes; he comes every year, and never ceases tormenting us. He has found a new way of laying us under contribution. He brings a large boat with him, and as I can not give him any money, he loads it with honey, wax, and wool, which he sells. I give him what he wants, that he may leave us in peace."

"He has not been here lately," said Noemi.

"Oh, nothing has happened to him, I expect his arrival any day."

"If only he would come now!" said the girl.

"Why, you little goose?"

Noemi grew crimson. "Only because I should prefer it."

Timar, however, thought to himself how happy he could make these two people with a single word. But he gloated over the thought, like a child which had some sweets given to it, and begins by eating the crumbs first. He felt an inward impulse to share the joys and sorrows of these islanders.

Supper was over, the sun had set, and a splendid, still, warm night sunk on to the fields; the whole sky looked like a transparent silver veil--no leaf stirred on the trees. The two women went with their visitor to the top of the great bowlder; from there one had a wide view over the trees and the reed-beds far across the Danube. The island lay at their feet like an enchanted lake with variegated waves. The apple-trees swam in a rosy, and the pomegranates in a dark-red, sea of blossom; the poplars looked golden-yellow, and the pear-trees white with snowy bloom, and the waving tips of the plum-trees were radiant in brazen green. In the midst rose the rock like a lighted cupola, wreathed with fiery roses, on whose top old lavender bushes formed a thicket.

"Superb!" cried Timar, enchanted with the landscape outspread before him.

"You should see the rock in summer, when the yellow stonecrop is in bloom," exclaimed Noemi, eagerly; "it looks as if it had on a golden robe. The lavender blossom makes a great blue crown for its head."

"I will come and see it," said Timar.

"Really?" The girl stretched out her hand to him joyously, and Michael fell a warm pressure such as no woman's hand had ever given him in his life. And then Noemi leaned her head on Therese's shoulder, and threw her arm round her mother's neck. All nature was under the spell of deep repose undisturbed by any human sound. Only the monotonous chorus of the frogs enlivened the deep shadows of the night. The sky offered a curious spectacle; half was blue, and the other opal green. There are two sides even to happiness.

"Do you hear what the frogs are saying?" whispered Noemi to her mother--"'Oh, how dear you are, how sweet!' They say that all night long--'Oh, you darling, you sweet!'" and she kissed Therese at every word.

Michael, forgetful of himself and of the whole world, stood on the rock with folded arms. The young crescent glittered between the quivering foliage of the poplars, now shining like pure silver; a wonderful new feeling crept into the man's breast. Was it fear or longing?--memory aroused or dawning hope?--awakening joy or dying grief?--instinct or warning?--madness, or that breath of spring which seizes on tree and gra.s.s, and every cold or warm-blooded animal?

Just so had he gazed at the waning moon, which threw its long reflection on the waves as far as the sinking ship. His involuntary thoughts talked with the ghostly magnetic rays, and they with him.

"Do you not understand? I will return to-morrow, and then you will know."

CHAPTER IV.

A SPIDER AMONG THE ROSES.

People who live by their labor have no time to admire the moonlight from mountain-tops, or to waste in observation on the beauties of nature: the flocks of sheep and goats already waited to be relieved of their milky tribute by their mistress. Milking was the office of Frau Therese, and it was Noemi's duty to cut gra.s.s enough for the herd. Timar continued the conversation meanwhile with his back leaning against the stable-door, and lighting his pipe just as the countryman does when he is courting the peasant girl.

The great boiler must be refilled with fresh rose-infusion, and then they can all go to bed. Timar begged for the bee-house to sleep in, where Frau Therese spread him a couch of fresh hay, and Noemi arranged his pillow. Very little was needed to woo him to slumber. Hardly had he lain down before sleep closed his eyes; he dreamed all night that he had become a gardener's boy, and was making endless rose-water.

When he awoke the sun was already high in the heavens. The bees buzzed round him busily; he had overslept himself. That some one had already been here he guessed, because near his couch lay all the toilet necessaries he had brought in his knapsack. A poor traveler who is used to shaving every day feels very uncomfortable when unable to go through that operation; his mind is as much disturbed by that confounded stubble as if it were a p.r.i.c.k of conscience. When he was ready, the women already awaited him at breakfast, which consisted of bread and milk, and then they went to the day's work of rose-gathering.

Michael was, as he desired, set to rose-crushing. Noemi picked off the petals, and Frau Therese was busy with the boiler. Timar told Noemi all about roses. Not that they were like her cheeks, at which she would have burst out laughing, but he imparted to her what he had learned about them in his travels: learned things which Noemi listened to with attention, and which instilled into her a still greater respect for Timar. With young and innocent maidens a clever, intelligent man has a great advantage.

"In Turkey they use rose-water in eating and drinking. There, too, whole groves of roses are planted; there beads are made of roses pressed into the form of b.a.l.l.s and strung together: that is why they are called rosaries. In the East there is one lovely kind of rose from which attar is made; it is the balsam rose, and grows on trees of ten feet high, whose branches are bent to the ground by their snow-white burden. Their scent surpa.s.ses that of any other kind; if you throw the petals into water and set them in the sun, in a very short time the surface is rainbow-colored with the oil that the petals exude. It is the same with the evergreen rose, which does not shed its leaves in winter. The Ceylon and Rio roses dye the hair and beard light, and so fast that they do not lose their color for years; for this purpose alone there is a considerable trade in them. The leaves of the Moggor rose stupefy; you are intoxicated by their scent as if with beer. The Vilmorin rose has the property that, it if is bitten by a certain insect which is obnoxious to it, it throws out great tubers, which are said to send a crying child to sleep if put under its pillow."

"Have you been everywhere where roses grow?" asked Noemi.

"Well, I have been a good deal about in the world. I have been to Vienna, Paris, and Constantinople."

"Is that far from here?"

"If one traveled on foot one would get to Vienna in thirty days from here, and to Constantinople in forty days."

"But you went in a ship."

"That takes longer still; for I should have to take in cargo on the way."

"For whom?"

"For the owner I was traveling for."

"Is Herr Brazovics still your princ.i.p.al?"

"Who told you about him?"

"The steersman who came with you."

"No longer now--Herr Brazovics is dead."