"None but me! none but me! And if the earth should open now and swallow us both--none but me?"
"None, none!"
Again came a flash illuminating everything for a moment with the brightness of day, and she laughed and rejoiced aloud and threw herself into my arms crying:
"Now I see you: now I can look at you! Oh how lovely this is! How beautiful you are! Now carry me down the hill as far as the stones. Now let me go, my strong one, my hero, everything to me!"
"Let me carry you further; I can do it easily."
"I know you can: else would I love you so much? But now let me go; you must not think me a weakling."
I let her glide from my arms upon one of the great stones: she laid her hands upon my shoulders, and I saw for a moment her sweet defiant face and her eyes that flashed as if with indignation, as she said in a firm voice:
"Never forget that I am not weak like other women; and if you had not come to look for me here--yes, if you had not found me, I would have drowned myself here in the morass; and I will drown myself the moment you cease to love me. And now come!"
She threw herself on my breast and glided from my arms to the ground, and we went hand in hand over the heath, the incessant lightnings showing us the pathless way, while the thunder rolled, and the rain which had been delaying so long came down first in heavy warm drops, and then in torrents. What cared we for the storm and the rain? What cared we that we were alone upon the heath?
This was, indeed, our crowning joy: for me, to know that I had both the right and power to protect her, and that I had in truth the strength, had there been need, to carry my beloved to Trantowitz and to Zehrendorf; for her, to be thus protected by him she had loved so long, who now was all her own, and all had happened just as her wayward heart and romantic fancy desired. And now all came from her lips, in broken confused phrases, in thoughts and fancies that gleamed and vanished like the lightnings around us, now awakening one memory and now another, just as the objects around us momently flashed out the darkness and vanished into it again; the brown heath, the glimmering moor-water, and in the forest the bushes to the right and left and the gigantic trunks of the trees whose great boughs were wildly tossed hither and thither by the blast, with a crashing and groaning and roaring as if the world were coming to an end. But the wilder the uproar about us, the more she exulted, and laughed with delight when in the noise we could no longer understand each other's words. She even grew angry when after we had nearly traversed the woods, two lanterns appeared moving rapidly in our direction.