There
were flickering torches and many people, and loud cries around the
church, as there had been four hundred years before, when the last
sacrament had been said in the valley for the hunter-king in peril
above.
His mother, being sleepless and anxious, had risen long before it
was dawn, and had gone to the children's chamber, and had found
the bed of Findelkind empty once more.
He came into the midst of the people with the two little lambs in
his arms, and he heeded neither the outcries of neighbors nor the
frenzied joy of his mother: his eyes looked straight before him,
and his face was white like the snow.
"I killed them," he said, and then two great tears rolled down his
cheeks and fell on the little cold bodies of the two little dead
brothers.
Findelkind was very ill for many nights and many days after that.
Whenever he spoke in his fever he always said, "I killed them!"
Never anything else.
So the dreary winter months went by, while the deep snow filled up
lands and meadows, and covered the great mountains from summit to
base, and all around Martinswand was quite still, and now and then
the post went by to Zirl, and on the holy-days the bells tolled;
that was all. His mother sat between the stove and his bed with a
sore heart; and his father, as he went to and fro between the
walls of beaten snow, from the wood shed to the cattle byre, was
sorrowful, thinking to himself the child would die, and join that
earlier Findelkind whose home was with the saints,
But the child did not die.
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