And then he saw the midnight ceremony in the church at New
Year, with the shining face of the _Prediger_ in the pulpit,--the
village preacher who, on the last night of the old year, saw in the
empty gallery beyond the organ loft the faces of all who were to die
in the ensuing twelve months, and who at last recognised himself among
them, and, in the very middle of his sermon, passed into a state of
rapt ecstasy and burst into a torrent of praise. Thickly the memories crowded upon him. The picture of the small village
dreaming its unselfish life on the mountain-tops, clean, wholesome,
simple, searching vigorously for its God, and training hundreds of
boys in the grand way, rose up in his mind with all the power of an
obsession. He felt once more the old mystical enthusiasm, deeper than
the sea and more wonderful than the stars; he heard again the winds
sighing from leagues of forest over the red roofs in the moonlight; he
heard the Brothers’ voices talking of the things beyond this life as
though they had actually experienced them in the body; and, as he sat
in the jolting train, a spirit of unutterable longing passed over his
seared and tired soul, stirring in the depths of him a sea of emotions
that he thought had long since frozen into immobility. And the contrast pained him,--the idealistic dreamer then, the man of
business now,--so that a spirit of unworldly peace and beauty known
only to the soul in meditation laid its feathered finger upon his
heart, moving strangely the surface of the waters. Harris shivered a little and looked out of the window of his empty
carriage. The train had long passed Hornberg, and far below the streams
tumbled in white foam down the limestone rocks. In front of him, dome
upon dome of wooded mountain stood against the sky. It was October,
and the air was cool and sharp, wood-smoke and damp moss exquisitely
mingled in it with the subtle odours of the pines. Overhead, between
the tips of the highest firs, he saw the first stars peeping, and the
sky was a clean, pale amethyst that seemed exactly the colour all these
memories clothed themselves with in his mind. He leaned back in his corner and sighed. He was a heavy man, and he had
not known sentiment for years; he was a big man, and it took much to
move him, literally and figuratively; he was a man in whom the dreams
of God that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that
gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly
died the death. He came back into this little neglected pocket of the years, where
so much fine gold had collected and lain undisturbed, with all his
semi-spiritual emotions aquiver; and, as he watched the mountain-tops
come nearer, and smelt the forgotten odours of his boyhood, something
melted on the surface of his soul and left him sensitive to a degree he
had not known since, thirty years before, he had lived here with his
dreams, his conflicts, and his youthful suffering. A thrill ran through him as the train stopped with a jolt at a tiny
station and he saw the name in large black lettering on the grey stone
building, and below it, the number of metres it stood above the level
of the sea. “The highest point on the line!” he exclaimed. “How well I remember
it--Sommerau--Summer Meadow. The very next station is mine!”

And, as the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he
put his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar
landmarks in the dusk. They stared at him like dead faces in a dream. Queer, sharp feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in his heart. “There’s the hot, white road we walked along so often with the two
Brüder always at our heels,” he thought; “and there, by Jove, is the
turn through the forest to ‘_Die Galgen_,’ the stone gallows where they
hanged the witches in olden days!”

He smiled a little as the train slid past. “And there’s the copse where the Lilies of the Valley powdered the
ground in spring; and, I swear,”--he put his head out with a sudden
impulse,--“if that’s not the very clearing where Calame, the French
boy, chased the swallow-tail with me, and Bruder Pagel gave us
half-rations for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting
in our mother tongues!” And he laughed again as the memories came back
with a rush, flooding his mind with vivid detail. The train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man
in a dream. It seemed half a century since he last waited there with
corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for Strassbourg and home
after the two years’ exile. Time dropped from him like an old garment
and he felt a boy again. Only, things looked so much smaller than his
memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances
seemed on a curiously smaller scale. He made his way across the road to the little Gasthaus, and, as he
went, faces and figures of former schoolfellows,--German, Swiss,
Italian, French, Russian,--slipped out of the shadowy woods and
silently accompanied him. They flitted by his side, raising their eyes
questioningly, sadly, to his. But their names he had forgotten. Some
of the Brothers, too, came with them, and most of these he remembered
by name--Bruder Röst, Bruder Pagel, Bruder Schliemann, and the bearded
face of the old preacher who had seen himself in the haunted gallery
of those about to die--Bruder Gysin. The dark forest lay all about
him like a sea that any moment might rush with velvet waves upon the
scene and sweep all the faces away. The air was cool and wonderfully
fragrant, but with every perfumed breath came also a pallid memory.... Yet, in spite of the underlying sadness inseparable from such an
experience, it was all very interesting, and held a pleasure peculiarly
its own, so that Harris engaged his room and ordered supper feeling
well pleased with himself, and intending to walk up to the old school
that very evening. It stood in the centre of the community’s village,
some four miles distant through the forest, and he now recollected for
the first time that this little Protestant settlement dwelt isolated
in a section of the country that was otherwise Catholic. Crucifixes
and shrines surrounded the clearing like the sentries of a beleaguring
army. Once beyond the square of the village, with its few acres of
field and orchard, the forest crowded up in solid phalanxes, and beyond
the rim of trees began the country that was ruled by the priests of
another faith. He vaguely remembered, too, that the Catholics had
showed sometimes a certain hostility towards the little Protestant
oasis that flourished so quietly and benignly in their midst. He had
quite forgotten this. How trumpery it all seemed now with his wide
experience of life and his knowledge of other countries and the great
outside world. It was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three
hundred. There were only two others besides himself at supper.