His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by frost.
He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made seven human beings happy, then must it be inscribed on my black marble, It rests.... Why dost thou wonder so? Art thou even now at peace?"—The father stared at the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as if a shape had risen out of the grave,—the freezing eye laid and turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,—the face of his teacher Dahore; his knees smote together, but still he did not look over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.
"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not, my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no more the old breast, full as it may be."
Ah, I pity thee! For those wounds which can be disclosed are not deep; that grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see, because he cannot take it away,—that woe which sometimes rises into the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle which the averted face smothers,—this hangs in secret more and more heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.—
He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and from him thou must conceal it."
Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely, they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"
"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.
"But in case—?"
"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.—
Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.