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Theodoric seemed to look down on him with benignant eyes from under the raised visor, and Findelkind, weeping, threw his small arms closer and closer round the bronzed knees of the heroic figure and sobbed aloud, "Help me! help me! Oh, turn the hearts of the people to me, and help me to do good!" But Theodoric answered nothing.
The other boys laughed and chattered; but Findelkind sat very quietly, thinking of his namesake, all the day after, and for many days and weeks and months this story haunted him. A little boy had done all that; and this little boy had been called Findelkind; Findelkind, just like himself. It was beautiful, and yet it tortured him.
There were lights moving about his house, his brothers and sisters were still up, his mother ran out into the road, weeping and laughing with fear and joy. Findelkind himself said nothing. He hung his head. They were too fond of him to scold him or to jeer at him; they made him go quickly to his bed, and his mother made him a warm milk posset, and kissed him.
Christopher, and going out night and day to the sound of the Angelus, seeking the lost and weary. This is really what Findelkind of Arlberg did five centuries ago, and did so quickly that his fraternity of St.
Findelkind ran to the robed singing-folk, quite sure that he saw the people of God. "Oh, take me, take me!" he cried to them; "do take me with you to do heaven's work." But they pushed him aside for a crazy little boy that spoiled their rehearsing. "It is only for Hotting folk," said a lad older than himself. "Get out of the way with you, Liebchen."
By and by, when he could not see Martinswand by turning his head back ever so, he came to an inn that used to be a posthouse in the old days when men traveled only by road. A woman was feeding chickens in the bright clear red of the cold daybreak. Findelkind timidly held out his hand. "For the poor!" he murmured, and doffed his cap. The old woman looked at him sharply.
One day three years before, when he had been only six years old, the priest in Zirl, who was a very kindly and cheerful man, and amused the children as much as he taught them, had not allowed Findelkind to leave school to go home, because the storm of snow and wind was so violent, but had kept him until the worst should pass, with one or two other little lads who lived some way off, and had let the boys roast a meal of apples and chestnuts by the stove in his little room, and, while the wind howled and the blinding snow fell without, had told the children the story of another Findelkind an earlier Findelkind, who had lived in the flesh on Arlberg as far back as 1381, and had been a little shepherd lad, "just like you," said the good man, looking at the little boys munching their roast crabs, and whose country had been over there, above Stuben, where Danube and Rhine meet and part.
Even if still living, the little lambs would die, out on such a night without the mother or food and shelter of any sort. Findelkind, whose vivid brain always saw everything that he imagined as if it were being acted before his eyes, in fancy saw his two dear lambs floating dead down the swollen tide, entangled in rushes on the flooded shore, or fallen with broken limbs upon a crest of rocks.
Findelkind believed the priest; still, all alone on the side of the mountain, with the snowflakes flying round him, he felt a nervous thrill that made him tremble and almost turn backward. Almost, but not quite; for he thought of Katte and the poor little lambs lost and perhaps dead through his fault.
"The chase you have led me! and your mother thinking you were drowned! and all the working day lost, running after old women's tales of where they had seen you! Oh, little fool, little fool! what was amiss with Martinswand, that you must leave it?" Findelkind slowly and feebly rose, and sat up on the pavement, and looked up, not at his father, but at the knight Theodoric.
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