“He did really say so,” replied the major; “but it did not occur last summer. The danneman was saying that all this happened twenty years ago.”
“No matter,” replied Christian, “you see that I understood almost everything. How do you explain that, Osmund?”
“I do not know. But I am not so much surprised as you; it is the result of your incredible facility in learning all languages, in constructing them, and explaining them in your own mind, according to analogies that exist between them.”
“No, that was not the process through which my mind passed; it came to me like a reminiscence.”
“That, again, is possible. You probably studied, in your childhood, a quantity of things of which you retain a confused recollection. Come, try it again; listen to what those young girls are saying: do you understand?”
“No,” said Christian, “it is over; the phenomenon has ceased; I cannot understand, now, a single word they say.”
He returned to the window to listen to his host, and try to catch once more, in the same mysterious way, the meaning of what was said; but his efforts were useless. His confused revery was dissipated, and, in spite of himself, reason and real impressions resumed their habitual empire over his mind.
Soon, however, he entered into another train of thought. It was no longer a fantastic past that appeared to him, but a dream of the future logically deduced from the resolutions he had formed, and with which he had entertained the major only an hour before. He saw himself dressed like the danneman, in a blouse without sleeves, worn over a vest with long and narrow sleeves, in two pairs of stockings, the inner ones of wool and those outside of yellow leather, and with his hair cut square on his forehead. He saw himself seated near his comfortable stove, relating to some rare visitor stories of his expeditions on fields of floating ice, or in the currents of the terrible Maelstrom, and in the obscure recesses of Syltfield.
In this peaceful and primitive scene, which he was imagining as the frugal recompense of his travels and labors, he naturally tried to form an idea of the companion who would be associated with him in the rustic occupations of his maturity. Christian looked attentively at the daughters of the danneman, but these masculine and severe creatures were not sufficiently beautiful to make the idea of being the husband of one of them very delightful. Unless he could sympathize intellectually with the companion of his life, he would have preferred to remain a bachelor. In spite of himself, the phantom of Margaret fluttered into his dream in the form of a blond little fée, disguised like a young mountaineer, and prettier in her white chemise and green bodice than in her fine hooped skirt, and her satin slippers. But this fantastic toilet was only a transient masquerade: Margaret was a figure detached from another frame; she could only cross the threshold of the chalet with a smile, and disappear in the blue and silver sleigh, where Christian would never be allowed to seat himself by her side.
“Go, Margaret!” he said. “What are you doing here? An abyss separates us, and for me you are only a vision hovering in the moonlight. My wife will be a dull reality—or rather, I shall have no wife; I will be a miner, a laborer, or a wandering merchant, like my host; and will work for twenty years, so as to be able at last to build my nest upon the point of one of these rocks. Very well, when I am fifty years old I will settle on some magnificent site, and, living there like a hermit, will bring up some abandoned child, who will love me as I loved Goffredi! Why not? And if, in the meanwhile, I have discovered something useful to my fellow men, shall I not be happy?”