"I shall be waiting for you, Katje," he said. "And I shall be knowing all of your life, its joys, its happy toil and its sweet rest, its lights and its passing shadows. I shall love your children with all my whole heart. And I shall be their grandfather just as though I were here. I shall be everywhere about you and yours, Katje. Always. In the stockings at Christmas, in the big, busy, teeming world of shadows, just outside your threshold; or whispering to you in the stillness of the night. And, as the years drift on, you can never know what pride I shall take in your middle life—the very best age of all! After the luxuries and the eager gaieties and the vanities and the possessions and the hot strife for gain cease to be important, we return to very simple things. For then, sunset is at hand, and the peace of Home calls to us far more clearly than the roar of the outer world. The evening of life comes bearing its own lamp."
Her face had grown graver, but still was radiant. The Dead Man smiled as he said:
"Then, as a little old grandmother—a little old child whose bedtime is drawing near, I shall still see you; happy to sit out in the sunlight of another day; asking no more of life than a few hours still to be spent with those you love;—telling your grandchildren how much more brightly the flowers used to blossom when you were young.—All that happens, happens again.
"And then, one glad day, glorified, radiant, young once more—divinely young,—you will come to us. And your mother and I shall take you in our arms again. Oh, what a meeting it will be! To you, many happy years away. To us, only a brief hour of waiting. We shall meet so perfectly then—the flight of Love to Love. And now," bending down once more and kissing her, "good-night, my own little girl."
She rose, half-dazzled by the brightness that filled her soul. Pausing to bury her face for a moment in the bowl of roses, she murmured:
"Dear, dear Oom Peter!"
Then, slowly, smilingly, she made her way up the stairs to her own room. The Dead Man's eyes followed her every light step. The Dead Man's hand was raised in unspoken benediction. Marta bustled in from the kitchen on her nightly round of window-locking and door-barring. As she passed the big wall clock, she stopped, sighed right lugubriously, and proceeded to wind the ancient timepiece by the simple old-time process of drawing down its pulley chain.
"Poor old Marta!" said Peter Grimm quizzically, as she departed. "Every time she thinks of me, she winds my clock. We're not quite forgotten after all, it seems. Good-night, old friend! There are a few tears ahead of you. But there is plenty of sunshine beyond them."
He glanced about the room, his eyes resting at last on Willem's door in the gallery above. The door swung open, and Dr. McPherson appeared on the threshold. In one hand he held a candle-stick. In the hollow of his right arm lay Willem, a Dutch patchwork bedquilt wrapped around him.
"All right, laddie," McPherson was saying in a voice whose softness would have amazed the Batholommeys. "Since you want so badly to sleep downstairs, you shall. The sofa by the fire is just as snug as your own bed. What Mistress Batholommey will say to my giving in to a sick little boy's whim, I don't know. But we don't care. Do we, Willem? And," he added, reaching the living-room and carrying the child across to the sofa, "if you want to be down here, and if you won't be happy anywhere else, here you shall be."