Niels bent over her quickly, and she caught his hand.
“Is it death?” she asked, lowering her weak voice as if she could not bear to speak the words.
He could only look at her, while his breath came in a deep, moaning sigh.
Gerda clutched his hand and threw herself over to him in her fear. “I don’t dare to,” she said.
He slid down on his knees by the bed and put his arm under the pillow so that he almost held her to his breast. He could hardly see her for the tears that blinded him as they coursed down his cheeks one after another, and he lifted her hand with a corner of the sheet to his eyes. Then he mastered his voice. “Tell me everything, Gerda dear; never mind me. Is it the pastor?” He could hardly believe it was that, and there was a note of doubt in his voice.
She did not answer, but closed her eyes and drew her head back a little as if to be alone with her thoughts.
A few minutes passed. The soft, long-drawn whistle of a blackbird sounded underneath the windows; then another whistled and another; a whole series of flute-like notes shot through the silence of the room.
Then she looked up again. “If you were with me,” she said, and she leaned more heavily on the pillow that he supported. There was a caress in her movement, and he felt it. “If you were with me! But alone!”
She drew his hand toward her feebly and dropped it again. “I don’t dare to.“ Her eyes were full of fear. “You must fetch him, Niels, I don’t dare to come up there alone like this. We had never thought that I should die first; it was always you who went before. Yes, I know—but suppose, after all, we have been mistaken; we might have been mistaken, Niels, mightn’t we? You don’t think so, but it would be strange if everybody should be wrong, and if there wasn’t anything at all—those big churches and the bells when they bury people—I have always been so fond of the bells.” She lay quite still as if she were listening for them and could hear them.
“It is impossible, Niels, that it should all be over when we die. You don’t feel it, you who are well, you think it must kill us quite, because we are so weak, and everything seems to pass away, but it is only the world outside, within us there is as much soul as before. It is there, Niels; I have it all within me, everything that has been given me, the same infinite world, but more quiet, more alone with myself, as when you close your eyes. It is just like a candle, Niels, that is being carried away from you into the darkness, into the darkness, and it seems to you fainter and fainter and fainter, and you can’t see it, but still it is shining over there where it is—far away. I always thought I should live to be such an old, old woman, and that I should stay here with you all, and now they won’t let me, they are taking me away from house and home and making me go all alone. I am afraid, Niels, that where I am going it is God who rules, and He cares nothing for our cleverness here on earth. He wants His own way and nothing else, but somehow everything of His is so far away from me. I have not done anything very wicked, have I? But it isn’t that.... Go and get the pastor, I want him so much.“