"It is said of us women that we are not able to analyse those whom we love, but only worship them in the abstract. But he had a friend, his best friend; he could analyse him; the poet. He was present at Karl Mander's last meeting, and he came to me from it when your father was dead. We talked together of everything as much as I then could. He wrote about him the most beautiful things that have ever been written. I know them by heart; I know everything by heart that has been worthily written about your father."
"Do you know what it was he wrote?"
"'If the landscape I see around me could speak like a human being; if the dark lofty ridge could find speech to answer the river, and those two began to talk across the underwood, then you would know the impression made when Karl Mander had spoken so long that the vibration of his deep voice and the thoughts it uttered had melted into one.
"'Halting and with difficulty, as though from inward depths clumsily fumbling for words, he always arrived at the same goal. The thought was at last as clear and lucid as a birch leaf held against the sunlight.'"
"Was it then——"
"No, don't interrupt me! 'Karl Mander often seemed to me as unlike all other people as though he belonged to a different order of things. He was not like an individual, he represented a race. He swept by like a mighty river: at the mercy of chance and natural obstacles, perhaps, but ever rolling on. So was he, both in life and in speech. Neither was his voice merely individual, it had in it the reverberation of a torrent—a melancholy, captivating harmony, but monotonous, unceasing.'"
"That surely is what the sea sounds like, mother?"
The mother was as much carried away by her memories as animated in her movements, as eager in her glance as a young girl. Now she stopped.
"Like the sea, do you say? No, no, no, not like the sea. The sea is only an eye. No, dear, not like the sea; there were warm depths and hiding-places in his nature such as the sea has not. One had a sense of intimate security and comfort with him. He was capable of the most self-forgetting devotion. Listen further. 'Karl Mander was chosen,' he wrote, 'chosen as a forerunner before the people's own time should come—chosen because he was good and blameless; his message to futurity was not soiled in his soul.'"
"That is beautiful."