"On Conrad's account I should remain here," said Catherine to herself as she cleared away the dinner-dishes. "He must learn to see in me his sister, and he will, when we show our confidence in him and have no secrets before him. Ah, could I only yesterday have greeted him as a brother! However, that will follow. It must follow yet to-day, when he returns. Then we will live together in peace, and the wild man will find that it is not a bad thing to have a female friend who takes care of him until he himself loves a girl, and establishes a home and builds a house for himself here near us, or at the edge of the woods he so much loves. That will be a joyful, happy life. We will be good neighbors. I shall love his wife and she me."
Catherine had sat down on the hearth and, with her head supported by her hand, looked before her with half-closed eyes, thinking. The fire on the hearth gently crackled; the wall-clock said "tick-tack." In the meadow outside the birds sang. Through the open door the sun shone clear into the cool, shaded room; and in the bright sunbeams, which reached as far as her knees, dust atoms danced, lighted up, and twinkling like golden stars seemed to be waving and playing and catching one another. Then they were no longer golden stars, but children's laughing faces, which emerged out of the partial darkness of the background, came up to her knees, and again disappeared in the dark corners, and from them looked out with bright, blue, happy eyes. Then the vision vanished. The sun still shone into the silent room. The fire crackled. The wall-clock said "tick-tack," and out in the meadows sang the birds.
The young maiden arose and commenced her labor anew, but there was a different expression in her mild, innocent countenance; and other thoughts, which came to her like a revelation, filled her soul. The bridal feeling which now happified her, had acquired another phase, for which she knew not how to account. It was a deeper, more earnest feeling--distinguished from the former like the light of noon now lying on field and forest, from that of the morning. Those were the same bending grass-stems and the same swaying tree-tops. It was the same clear creek and they were the same waving rushes, and yet all was changed as by a gentle, mighty, magic hand, and spoke another speech--moving and dissolving in mystery. Now she understood why the beloved man, who was truth and openness itself, so anxiously concealed from her for weeks that she must live alone with him in his house. "Alone! Would it not have been the same had he told the truth? told me that he loved me? that he did not want me as a maid-servant? Would it not have come out just the same? Did I not also love him from the first moment on? and have I not followed him through peopled cities, through the pathless wilderness, on a journey of weeks, through rain and sunshine, day and night, in unknown regions? What is so different now? Did I not devote myself to him as we left the ship hand in hand? 'You shall be my lord!' And is it not said in the church when the minister lays the hands of lovers together: 'He shall be thy lord.' Yes, he shall be my lord, now and always. He shall be my lord."
So spoke Catherine to herself to banish the occasional shudders that passed through her heart and often took away her breath, while she completed the arrangements in her room which had been temporarily made last evening, and put away her few belongings in a closet that had been contrived in the thick wall. Then, as there was nothing more to do here, she for the first time ascended the stairs to the upper story, and walked around the gallery which encircled the house and projected beyond the lower story, and was surrounded by well-joined planks and provided with port-holes. With the exception of a place poorly enough partitioned off in which the brothers had slept the previous night, the room, used in winter as a store-room, was empty, or served for the storage of that for which there was no room below. Catherine acquired a clearer notion of the plan, which she and Lambert had formed in the morning, to prepare a small, pleasant room for them both here where everything was more airy and free. However, without Lambert she did not succeed very well in planning.
So she again went downstairs, and to her surprise saw by the clock that since Lambert had left but one hour had elapsed. She took some work and seated herself with it on a bench before the door in the shade of the gallery.
It was in the stillness of the day. There was so little wind that the grass-stems in the meadow, and the rushes at the edge of the creek, scarcely bent. The butterflies passed from flower to flower on languid wing. The hum of the bees and the chirping of the crickets had a sleepy sound. All around, everything was still. However, out of the forest there frequently came the hoarse cry of the tree-falcon, or the call of a bird which Catherine did not recognize. In the blue sky there hung single white clouds whose shadows moved, slowly--very slowly--over the sunny prairie.
At first Catherine was pleased with this quietude, which seemed an image of sabbath stillness, filling her soul. But she had scarcely thus sat an hour before the monotony of the scene about her filled her heart with a strange fear. How entirely different it was this morning. Then heaven and earth and tree and bush and every flower and every grass-stem smiled and bowed their welcome to her. Everything had spoken to her in persuasive language. Now that the beloved one was at a distance everything was dumb, except that heaven and earth and tree and bush and every flower and every grass-stem breathed out one word with ever-increasing sadness: Alone! alone!
Catherine let her work sink into her lap. An image, that had been for many years as if blotted from her memory, suddenly came before her in pale colors, but very distinct--the image of her dead mother, who, adorned with flowers, lay in her coffin--and she a little girl, ten years old, stood beside it; and her father had come up and taken her hand and said: "We two are now alone."
"Alone!"
Her heart was filled with increasing fear. Again taking up her work she tried to sing a song that always occurred to her when everything was so quiet: "Were I a wild Falcon I would soar aloft." But she commenced so gently that she did not complete the first measure. Her voice sounded strange. She was frightened at her own voice.