A strange herd-boy had led him up whom he had met with that night at Marienberg, and who had taken pity on him for God's sake. It was a difficult task to guide the blind man up to these heights, but guardian spirits were with him and upheld him, or he would have slipped from the boy's weak hand a hundred times and down the steep and slippery path.
It is only from those who love life that God requires it; the wretch to whom death would be release may not die!
Again and again the boy was fain to stop, but the penitent was not to be persuaded to stay where a bird's call was still to be heard--where he could still lay his hand on fruitful soil. So, after long wandering, they had reached their goal--the last for which he longed--the realm of everlasting peace, where no sound of a human voice could pierce, where no slenderest thread could reach to link man to man. Here is the first circle of hell, cold and silent, here he might atone and die, and live above for ever.
The boy had contrived an indispensable shelter against the wind and rain under an overhanging rock, and then had left him; but from time to time he came to bring bread to the hermit. He was a strange boy, he came and went without the blind man's perceiving it, noiselessly and without a word, and Donatus was grateful to him for that. He would have felt it a desecration to break the sacred silence that bathed his soul like a sea which no profane sound might pierce.
Once every week his moss-bed was freshly made, and a fragrant loaf laid by the side of it; but he who brought it vanished as he came. Often it seemed to the blind man that it could be no boy of flesh and blood, but a friendly angel of death sent by God to guide him hither, and to support his existence until he were fit to die; and as the season advanced, and it became more and more difficult for any human being to find his way up the snow-covered path, he believed this still more firmly. What could prompt a strange and lowly herd-boy to such a fearful sacrifice? For what hope of reward could he do this? And what to him was the accursed outcast--the hapless wretch who could no longer give him even a blessing? Yes, it was daily clearer to his mind that it was a messenger from the other world; daily he felt more sure that here, with the earth far below him, he was nearer to the world of spirits. In the roaring of the storm, in the thunder of the avalanche, in the freezing snow-drift, in all the terrors of the wilderness, he felt with reverent awe the nearness of Him who rides the clouds and speaks in the thunder; and that which appals most mortals and fills them with dread, uplifted his soul which had triumphed over this life, in jubilant hope of redemption and release.