Zigzag Journeys in Northern Lands by Hezekiah Butterworth (fiction books to read .txt) 📕

At last the moulds were broken, and the bells came out of their husks perfect in form, and shining as stars in Otto’s happy eyes. They were mounted in the great belfry, and for the test-chime Otto had employed the best bell-ringers in the city.

It was a lovely May morning; and, almost crazed with excitement and anxiety, Otto, accompanied by a few chosen friends, waited outside the city for the first notes of the Harmony Chime. At some distance he thought he could better judge of the merits of his work.

At last the first notes were struck, clear, sonorous, and so melodious that his friends cried aloud with delight. But with finger upraised for silence, and eyes full of ecstatic delight, Otto stood like a statue until the last note died away. Then his friends caught him as he fell forward in a swoon,—a swoon so like death that no one thought he would recover.

But it was not death, and he came out of it with a look of serene peace on his face that it had not worn since boyhood. He was married to Gertrude that very day, but every one noticed that the ecstasy which transfigured his face seemed to be drawn more from the sound of the bells than the sweet face beside him.

“Don’t you see a spell is cast on him as soon as they begin to ring?” said one, after the bells had ceased to be a wonder. “If he is walking, he stops short, and if he is working, the work drops and a strange fire comes in his eyes; and I have seen him shudder all over as it he had an ague.”

In good truth, the bells seemed to have drawn a portion of Otto’s life to them. When the incursions of the war forced him to fly from Ghent with his family, his regrets were not for his injured property, but that he could not hear the bells.

He was absent two years, and when he returned it was to find the cathedral almost a ruin, and the bells gone no one knew where. From that moment a settled melancholy took possession of Otto. He made no attempt to retrieve his losses; in fact, he gave up work altogether, and would sit all day with his eyes fixed on the ruined belfry.

People said he was melancholy mad, and I suppose it was the truth; but he was mad with a kind of gentle patience very sad to see. His mother had died during their exile, and now his wife, unable with all her love to rouse him from his torpor, faded slowly away. He did not notice her sickness, and his poor numbed brain seemed imperfectly to comprehend her death. But he followed her to the grave, and turning from it moved slowly down the city, passed the door of his old home without looking at it, and went out of the city gates.

After that he was seen in every city in Europe at different intervals. Charitable people gave him alms, but he never begged. He would enter a town, take his station near a church and wait until the bells rang for matins or vespers, then take up his staff and, sighing deeply, move off. People noting the wistful look in his eyes would ask him what he wanted.

“I am seeking,—I am seeking,” was his only reply; and those were almost the only words any one ever heard from him, and he muttered them often to himself. Years rolled over the head of the wanderer, but still his slow march from town to town continued. His hair had grown white, and his strength had failed him so much that he only tottered instead of walked, but still that wistful seeking look was in his eyes.

He heard the old bells on the Rhine in his wanderings. He lingered long near the belfries of the sweetest voices; but their melodious tongues only spoke to him of his lost hope.

He left the river of sweet bells, and made a pilgrimage to England. It was the days of cathedrals in their beauty and glory, and here he again heard the tones that he loved, but which failed to realize his own ideal.

When a person fails to fulfil his ideal, his whole life seems a failure,—like something glorious and beautiful one meets and loses, and never again finds.

“Be true to the dreams of thy youth,” says a German author; and every soul is unhappy until the dreams of youth prove true.

One glorious evening in midsummer Otto was crossing a river in Ireland. The kind-hearted boatman had been moved by the old man’s imploring gestures to cross him. “He’s mighty nigh his end, anyhow,” he muttered, looking at the feeble movements of the old pilgrim as he stumbled to his seat.

Suddenly through the still evening air came the distant sound of a melodious chime. At the first note the pilgrim leaped to his feet and threw up his arms.

“O my God,” he cried, “found at last!”

“It’s the bells of the Convent,” said the wondering man, not understanding Otto’s words spoken in a foreign tongue, but answering his gesture. “They was brought from somewhere in Holland when they were fighting there. Moighty fine bells they are, anyhow. But he isn’t listening to me.”

No, he heard nothing but the bells. He merely whispered, “Come back to me after so many years,—O love of my soul, O thought of my life! Peal on, for your voices tell me of Paradise.”

The last note floated through the air, and as it died away something else soared aloft forever, free from the clouds and struggles of life.