The man-servant rushed off, but oh! before he could reach the shop, awake somebody and return, the flame upstairs might have burnt so fiercely that there was nothing left of the poor little candle. The man looked round, almost out of his mind with anxiety, and he saw Cilia with a chopper and pail running to the back-door.
"I'm going to fetch some ice."
"But where?"
"Down there." She laughed and raised her arm so that the chopper glittered. "There's plenty of ice in the lake. I'm going to chop some."
She was already out of the kitchen; he ran after her without a hat, without a cap, with only the thin coat on he wore in the house.
The terrors of the night gave way before the faint hope, and he did not feel the cold at first. But when the villas were lost sight of behind the pines, when he stood quit alone on the banks of the frozen lake that shone like a hard shield of metal, surrounded by silent black giants, he felt so cold that he thought he should freeze to death. And he was filled with a terror he had never felt the like to before a--deadly fear.
Was not that a voice he heard? Hallo! Did it not come from the wood that had the appearance of a thicket in the blue, confusing glitter of the moonlight? And it mocked and bantered, half laughed, half moaned. Terrible. Who was shrieking so?
"The owl's screeching," said Cilia, and she raised the chopper over her shoulder with both hands and let it whiz down with all her might. The ice at the edge splintered, It cracked and broke; the sound was heard far out on the lake, a growling, a grumbling, a voice out of the deep.
Would the boy die--would he live?
The man gazed around him with a distraught look. O God! Yes, that was also in vain--would also be in vain. Despite all his courage he felt weak as he stood there. Here was night and loneliness and the wood and the water--he had seen it all before, it was familiar to him--but it had never been like this, so quiet and still, so alive with terrors. The trees had never been so high before, the lake never so large, the world in which they lived never so far away.