Sheila, sitting at a distance, saw and heard, and could not help recalling many an evening in the far North when Lavender used to fascinate every one around him by the infection of his warm and poetic enthusiasm. How he talked, too--telling the stories of these quaint and pathetic ballads in his own rough and ready translations--while there was no self-consciousness in his face, but a thorough warmth of earnestness; and sometimes, too, she would notice a quiver of the under lip that she knew of old, when some pathetic point or phrase had to be indicated rather than described. He was drawing pictures for them as well as telling stories--of the three students entering the room in which the landlady’s daughter lay dead--of Barbarossa in his cave--of the child who used to look up at Heine as he passed her in the street, awe-stricken by his pale and strange face--of the last of the band of companions who sat in the solitary room in which they had sat, and drank to their memory--of the King of Thule, and the deserter from Strasburg, and a thousand others.
“But is there any of them--is there anything in the world--more pitiable than that pilgrimage to Kevlaar?” he said. “You know it, of course. No? Oh, you must, surely. Don’t you remember the mother who stood by the bedside of her sick son, and asked him whether he would not rise to see the great procession go by the window; and he tells her that he cannot, he is so ill; his heart is breaking for thinking of his dead Gretchen? _You_ know the story, Sheila. The mother begs him to rise and come with her, and they will join the band of pilgrims going to Kevlaar, to be healed there of their wounds by the Mother of God. Then you find them at Kevlaar, and all the maimed and the lame people have come to the shrine; and whichever limb is diseased, they make a waxen image of that and lay it on the altar, and then they are healed. Well, the mother of this poor lad takes wax and forms a heart out of it, and says to her son, ‘Take that to the Mother of God, and she will heal your pain.’ Sighing, he takes the wax heart in his hand, and, sighing, he goes to the shrine; and there, with tears running down his face, he says: ‘O beautiful Queen of Heaven, I am come to tell you my grief. I lived with my mother in Cologne; near us lived Gretchen, who is dead now. Blessed Mary, I bring you this wax heart, heal the wound in my heart.’ And then--and then--”