“So Soelver carried his wonderful burden to his couch and inhaled her youthful fragrance and lifted his mouth to hers and all his blood at once leaped forth. Every fiber of his being was stirred to kisses, every blood drop became a yearning mouth to meet the thousand mouths of her blood. And lost to sense—vehemently, seized by the divine power of nature, unafraid that she might awaken, without control over himself and yet proud as a master of worlds, he was impelled as the sunbeam to its goal, when it forces open the flower and buries itself in its fragrant depths. Soelver united himself with Gro. She on her part slumbered on, quiet as the sea which has closed over its sacrifice.
“But Soelver felt his senses reawakening. What now? Should he let Gro sleep until day woke her and she saw herself in his arms? He bent over his beloved in deepest distress. She must not awaken in terror, not again weep as on that first morning when she was with him. The most delicate chords in her soul had trembled and sung to him in the night, to him whom she unconsciously loved with all the indefinable conviction of her heart. This love must not be rudely plucked and allowed to fade like a plant whose tender shoot is torn asunder. She must go back to her maiden's couch until the flower of the day had burst forth from its leafy covering. Then he discovered that the panel at the foot of his cot was opened, while some planking had been pushed back. Gro must have come this way and by this way he carried her back. Led by an unerring instinct, as if he knew from his nightly phantasied visits all the turnings of the way, he went without deliberation into the secret room behind the panel, found the passage to the main stairway, passed straight up, turned through corridors, passed under the heavy tapestry curtains, opened the last door and noticed first that he bore a burden when he laid it down. The moon threw its faint silver light round about in the little room. With a sweet wonder Soelver gazed upon the prayer stool and the brown rosary—without its cross.”
I may pass briefly over the remainder. In the first place Soelver was given his liberty and he went back to his castle. The death of Sten Basse occurred soon after. Soelver whispered to his daughter at his death bed, “Gro, whatever may happen, know now that we belong to one another.” She “turned her head slowly toward him and looked at him with her large eyes swollen with tears. Her look was that of a stranger and quite uncomprehending, so that Soelver understood that she did not simply deny everything but she had no recollection at all.” So Soelver turned and went. For the first time when bathing in the lake “he found again his youth and his freedom, his radiant hope and the jubilant certainty of his love. Gro loved him! Only the thought of love had not yet arisen from the depths of her soul like pearls to the light. Nevertheless the wonderful flower of her affection was growing in the golden light of dreams. He longed after Gro as after his bride, although he was only the bridegroom of her dreams, who dared to kiss her only when her eyes were closed. By day he was her foe, as the bear in the fairy tale, who by night alone is changed into a beautiful young man.”
They met therefore first again at Sten's bier, at the side of which they both kneeled. “Gro's eyes were directed upon him as upon a stranger, staring with wonder, burning with a mystic light. Why was this stranger here near her, the man whom her dead father had tortured and derided? And yet her eyes were wet with tears of pity and she felt that this man only desired to take her hand. Soelver observed her with his inmost soul. He pressed the small cross of moonshine between his hands, he bent over it and kissed it and a gleam from its blazing stones smote Gro's eyes. She stretched out her arms and took the cross from him and gazed into the stones as into well-known eyes. She knew not how this had come into Soelver's hands but she also bent over it and kissed it and her soul went out toward Soelver as toward a soul far, far away, whom she once had known, whom however she could scarcely remember.”
After this Soelver came and went at Egenaes, Sten Basse's castle, as if he were lord and heir of the estate. “It was rumored also among the tenants and the servants that he was betrothed to the maiden Gro. Yet no word of it was exchanged between them. Soelver stood by Gro in small things and great, and she allowed herself to be guided by his strength and cleverness. Since that night when he had kneeled with her at her father's lifeless body, she was bound to him by a nameless bond of gratitude, of mutual feeling, and by an inner apprehension that their fate was interwoven. Still no consciousness of love colored Gro's attitude. She longed for Soelver's strong handclasp because it made her will strong to withstand her sorrow. She could think of herself lying upon his broad, deep breast, only however because there slumber would come in sure forgetfulness. There was moreover a tenderness in her look, when in a fleeting moment she let her glance rest upon his, such as the realization of another's goodness awakens in us, especially when the goodness is undeserved and disinterested. Yet there was never any of love's surrender. Only she was glad to know herself observed by these quiet, steadfast, clear eyes, from which the red specter of passion, which had so frightened her that day upon Aebeloe, had long been banished. She believed that she had in Soelver a friend given her for life and death, a friend who could not desire her in love nor be desired, a brother whom one might trust with infinitely more serenity than any lover.
“Soelver was ever watchful of Gro. His eyes were on the lookout whether he might not once surprise in hers the brightness of the dream, and make the hidden rose of love break through the green covering and bloom in reality. He longed thus within himself once to see the day and night aspects of her soul melt into a wonderful golden twilight. But Gro made no response to the gaze from his eyes. She turned her head aside so that her silken lashes concealed her glance. ‘Gro, why do you never look at me?’—‘I do look at you.’—‘Do you see me with your cheek, Gro?’—‘I see you, though, Soelver. I see you with the outermost corner of my eye.’ Soelver bent his face beneath hers. ‘Are you looking at me?’ But Gro pressed her lids together as before a bright light and shook her head, ‘No, Soelver, not so! You look too sharply, you look too deeply. You look so deeply that it hurts me very much. No, stand so Soelver, turn your eyes away!’—‘Are you afraid of me?’—‘No, no—why should I be afraid? But I do not feel comfortable to have you all the time wanting to read my heart, to have your eyes searching for some writing that does not stand written there. My friend and beloved brother, I fear what your look would draw from me—what would you drag out from my soul?’—‘The spring day, Gro, when we first met.’—‘Ah! Soelver, I scarcely remember it. It seems to me that I have always known you, that all your days you have been good and kind to me. Lately I have felt it in my heart and upon my cheek, as when my mother caressed me and that is long, long ago.’—‘Gro, only say it, you are afraid of the word, but not truly—just say it—you love me.—You are silent because it is true.’ ‘No, Soelver, I have never felt that.’—‘So you have dreamed it, Gro.’—‘Dreamed!’ Gro became fiery red. ‘Dreamed—dreamed—oh Soelver, what have I dreamed? What do you know of my dreams? To have dreamed is to have dreamed, and my dreams belong to me, to me alone!’ For a moment she turned to him a shy, quivering look, then tears trickled down from under her drooping lids. But Soelver observed that he had hit upon the truth. Immediately however he regretted that he had cast this look into the sanctuary of her soul. It was like the curious peeping of which the knight had been guilty, spying through the keyhole upon his wife, Undine.
“A long time they sat silent. At last Gro was herself again, quiet and controlled. Then she spoke in a soft but firm voice, ‘Soelver, if you remain with me to awaken me to love, then I beg of you, go and never return. I can never look upon you with the eyes of love. Passion seems to me like a glowing sword, which burns out one's eyes as it goes by. There was a day when you made the flaming sword of your desire pass by my face—since that time it is burned out. I have been blinded, Soelver, I am blind to the desire of your eyes, and all your fervent prayers. I have hated you, despised you, defied you, yet you have repaid evil with good and now I return good for good. Look not upon me with love's eyes, seek not to awaken the dead in me to life. You are to me more precious than if the proud brother of my childhood had returned in you, your spirit is his, I did not believe that in the will of a man so much kindness could dwell. Leave it so, stay with me as my brother, or leave me like my brother, but never speak to me of love, neither in words nor in looks for I know no reply.’”
The young nobleman knew finally, for all his eager power, no other way of escape than to go with the king to the war. He saw quite clearly that “Gro struggled against the force deep in her heart. And yet the day's flaming sun could cause the weak chrysalis of the dream to shrivel so that no butterfly would break through the covering and rejoice in the strong light of midday. But with Soelver away, the longing for him would support the invisible growth of the dream and prepare the way for it into consciousness. Ah! it was worth his departure.” Then he took leave of his beloved. “Goodbye; forget me not on our island. Bid me return when you will. The wind will find me, wherever I am. Tell the wild birds, when you want me and would call me home.”
Gro, remaining behind alone, first became aware what she had lost in him and in his “strong will, which was her source of light.” She began to long more and more for him who was far away. “Ah, if he would only come again!” And when a bird flew by, she “flushed red at her own thought; was that a message sent forth by her desire? This took place contrary to her wish and will—she wished not to long for him, not to call him back, not to love him! Angrily she roused herself and sought to recall the burning gaze with which Soelver had wounded her modesty. So with a vexed and hard stroke of the oars she pushed the boat away from Aebeloe.”
When the war was ended, Soelver went to serve the king of France. For, as he wrote in a letter sent by carrier pigeon, “he who is not summoned, comes not.” Meanwhile love towards the young nobleman had begun to grow in her bosom. “Night after night she dreamed of Soelver and at last one night she suddenly awoke and found herself cold and naked, wandering around in her room and heard the last note of her heart's unconscious avowal, ‘Soelver, I love you.’ There was a change within her. Hour after hour would she sit inactive and half asleep, listening to the irregular beating of her heart—something was drawing upon her very depths, sucking her strength from her, from her proud will, something that paralyzed her thought and bound her always to the same name, the same memory.” As she listened to her own depths, “she caught a momentary something like a weak, quickly beating echo of her own slow heart, a busily living little heart, that ticked louder and louder until at last it deafened hers. A trembling joy seized her at that moment through all her senses as she knew that she bore a life within her life, that she enclosed in her body the germ of a new life that was not growing from her alone and of her life alone.”