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A troupe of rope dancers had given an exhibition in the city, and it was generally suspected that they had abducted the child. The people of Eschenbach were still convinced of their suspicion after the police had rounded up the dancers without finding a trace of the child. A general alarm had been sent out, and investigations were being made even at the time of Daniel’s arrival.
They made him a great number of presents, and gave him a dinner in the inn at the Sign of the Ox. One of his pupils, an extremely handsome young fellow for whose future Daniel had the highest of hopes, presented him with a huge bouquet of orange lilies, wild natives of the woods around Eschenbach. He had gathered them himself, and arranged them in a costly vase.
At Christmas they were married, and left the country at once. Marian was glad of it: the child now belonged entirely to her. Though the people soon became accustomed to the existence of their diminutive fellow-townswoman, Eva was and remained the mysterious child of Eschenbach.
The doctor in Eschenbach, who had subscribed to the Fränkischer Herold, had read it one morning, and had given her the paper with considerable hesitation, calling her attention to the death notice. She was not present at the funeral. But she went out to the cemetery and prayed by Eleanore’s grave. She appreciated Daniel’s loss. When she met him he was precisely as she thought he would be.
Eleanore made her own white dress and her veil. Gisela Degen, a younger sister of Martha Rübsam, and Elsa Schneider, the daughter of the rector of the Church of St. Ægydius, were to be her bridesmaids. Marian Nothafft and Eva were also to come over from Eschenbach; Eleanore had already sent them the money for the tickets.
Even the crusaders, who travelled so far and saw so much, are not recognizable as such in their poems. The epic poetry, which describes amour and costumes so fully, does not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature; and even the great Wolfram von Eschenbach scarcely anywhere gives us an adequate picture of the scene on which his heroes move.
Around the many weirs the grass grows higher, so high often that you can see only the beaks of the droves of geese, and were it not for their cackle you might take these beaks to be strangely mobile flowers. The little town of Eschenbach lies quite flat on the plain. In it a fragment of the Middle Ages has survived, but no strangers know it, since hours of travel divide it from any railway.
It is not a narrative, but a vague mooning; a knight illiterate, not merely like his fellow minnesingers, in the way of reading and writing, but in the sense of complete absence of all habit of literary form; extremely noble and pure of mind, chaste, gentle, with a funny, puzzled sense of humour, reminding one distantly of Jean Paul in his drowsy moments; a hanger-on of courts, but perfectly simple-hearted and childlike; very poor and easily pleased: such is, for good and for bad, Herr Wolfram von Eschenbach, the only real personality in his poem.
Six weeks later he received a letter that had followed him all over south Europe informing him of the death of his mother. The school teacher at Eschenbach had written the letter, saying, among other things, that the aged woman had died during the night, suddenly and peacefully. A second letter followed, requesting him to state what disposition should be made of his mother’s property.
These, however, were seized upon by certain poets of the time, probably Henry of Ofterdingen, Wolfram of Eschenbach, and others, and reduced to the epic form, in which they have come down to us under the titles of the Heldenbuch and the Nibelungen Lied. They contain many singular traits of a warlike age, and we have proof of their great antiquity in the morals and manners which they describe.
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