"No, no, I will go with you. I am not so hard hearted as your mother told you."
"My mother never said anything of the kind: all her life long she spoke well of her fellow creatures, and especially of relations; and she never could endure to hear illnatured gossip about them, from first one and then another: indeed she always quoted the proverb, 'Don't bite off your nose to spite your face.'"
"Yes, yes, she had a great store of proverbs; in the whole neighbourhood it is said—'Marie Lenz said so-and-so;' we should always speak well of the dead, and I'm sure no one could possibly speak ill of her."
The young man looked sadly at his old uncle; even if he said a civil thing, it always left an impression as if he had given you a pinch.
"Yes, uncle," continued the young man, "how oft enduring the last few days of her life, did she say (and it went to my heart to hear her), 'Lenz, I ought to have died six years ago for your sake; at five and twenty you ought to have been married, and you will find it hard to marry, for you have become so accustomed to me, and now that must end.' I could not persuade her to the contrary, and that was the only thing that made her unwilling to die."
"And she was right," said the old man, still crunching his sugar, "she was good and kind, though somewhat self willed, but that is no one's business; but her kindness tended to ruin you; you are sadly spoiled. I did not intend to tell you of it just at this moment, there will be time enough for me to talk to you further on the subject some other time, but I hope you will come with me now, and not be so childish; you really seem scarcely to know whether you are standing on your head or your heels. It is the law of nature that your mother should die before you, and at all events you have no cause to reproach yourself for ever having behaved unkindly to her."
"No, thank God! I have not."
"Very well, then, show that you are a man, and give over crying and sobbing. In all my life I never saw anything like the way you cried in the churchyard."
"Indeed, uncle, I really cannot say all I felt. I wept for my mother, but for myself also. When our choir sung those hymns, which I usually sung with them myself, and there was I, dumb and desolate, I felt as if I were also a corpse, and they were singing me into my grave, and that I could not raise my voice."
"You are—" said the old man, but he gulped down what he was on the point of saying, and strode on in front; his little dog, who trotted along before him, looked into the old man's face, and shook his head; he had never seen such an expression before in his master's face.