Something seemed to be lurking behind that large pine--was a gamekeeper not standing there aiming at him, ready to shoot an arrow through his heart? The silence terrified him. This deep silence was awful. True, the blows of the chopper resounded, he could hear the echo across the lake, and nothing deterred Cilia from doing her work--he admired the girl's calmness--but the menace that lay in the silence did not grow any less.
The distracted man shuddered again and again: no, he knew it now--oh, how distinctly he felt it--nobody could do anything against that invisible power. Everything was in vain.
He was filled with a great grief. He seized hold of the pieces of ice the girl had chopped off with both hands, and put them into the pail; he tore his clothes, he cut himself on the jagged edges that were as sharp as glass, but he did not feel any physical pain. The blood dripped down from his fingers.
And now something began to flow from his eyes, to drip down his cheeks, heavy and clammy--slow, almost reluctant tears. But still the hot tears of a father who is weeping for his child.
CHAPTER XI
"Dear me, how big you've grown!" said Frau Lämke. "I suppose we shall soon have to treat you as a grown-up gentleman and say 'sir' to you?"
"Never!" Wolfgang threw his arms round her neck.
The woman was quite taken aback: was that Wolfgang? He was hardly to be recognised after his illness so approachable. And although he had always been a good boy, he had never been so affectionate as he was now. And how merry he was, he laughed, his eyes positively sparkled as if they had been polished.
Wolfgang was full of animal spirits and a never-ending, indomitable joyousness. He did not know what to do with himself. He could not sit still for a moment, his arms twitched, his feet scraped the ground.
His master stood in terror of him. He alone, the one boy, made the whole of the fourth form that had always been so exemplary run wild. And still one could not really be downright angry with him. When the tired man, who had had to give the same lessons year after year, sit at the same desk, give the same dictations, set the same tasks, hear the same pieces read, repeat the same things, had to reprove the boy, something like a gentle sadness was mingled with the reproof, which softened it: yes, that was delight in existence, health, liveliness, unconsumed force--that was youth.