He Was A German Count, If I Remember Rightly, And, Like Most German
Counts, Had Not Much Money; And Her Father, As Fathers Will When
Proposed To By Impecunious Would-Be Sons-In-Law, Refused His
Consent.
The Count then went abroad to try and make, or at all
events improve, his fortune.
He went to America, and there he
prospered. In a year or two he came back, tolerably rich - to find,
however, that he was too late. His lady, persuaded of his death,
had been urged into a marriage with a rich somebody else. In
ordinary life, of course, the man would have contented himself with
continuing to make love to the lady, leaving the rich somebody else
to pay for her keep. This young couple, however, a little lighter
headed, or a little deeper hearted than the most of us, whichever it
may have been, and angry at the mocking laughter with which the air
around them seemed filled, went down one stormy night together to
the lake, and sobered droll Fate for an instant by turning her grim
comedy into a somewhat grimmer tragedy.
Soon after losing sight of Starnberg's placid waters, we plunged
into the gloom of the mountains, and began a long, winding climb
among their hidden recesses. At times, shrieking as if in terror,
we passed some ghostly hamlet, standing out white and silent in the
moonlight against the shadowy hills; and, now and then, a dark,
still lake, or mountain torrent whose foaming waters fell in a long
white streak across the blackness of the night.
We passed by Murnau in the valley of the Dragon, a little town which
possessed a Passion Play of its own in the olden times, and which,
until a few years ago, when the railway-line was pushed forward to
Partenkirchen, was the nearest station to Ober-Ammergau. It was a
tolerably steep climb up the road from Murnau, over Mount Ettal, to
Ammergau - so steep, indeed, that one stout pilgrim not many years
ago, died from the exertion while walking up. Sturdy-legged
mountaineer and pulpy citizen both had to clamber up side by side,
for no horses could do more than drag behind them the empty vehicle.
Every season, however, sees the European tourist more and more
pampered, and the difficulties and consequent pleasure and interest
of his journey more and more curtailed and spoilt. In a few years'
time, he will be packed in cotton-wool in his own back-parlour,
labelled for the place he wants to go to, and unpacked and taken out
when he gets there. The railway now carries him round Mount Ettal
to Oberau, from which little village a tolerably easy road, as
mountain roadways go, of about four or five English miles takes him
up to the valley of the Ammer.
It was midnight when our train landed us at Oberau station; but the
place was far more busy and stirring than on ordinary occasions it
is at mid-day.
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