“That’s just what I’ve thought,” said Morten sadly. “Do you know, Pelle, I loved that child who came to me from the very lowest depth. She was everything to me; misery has never come so cruelly near to me before. It was a beautiful dream of mine—a foolish dream—that she would live. I was going to coax life and happiness into her again, and then I would have written a book about all that triumphs. I don’t know whether you understand me—about misery that becomes health and happiness beneath the sunshine of kindness. She was that; life could hardly be brought lower! But did you notice how much beauty and delicacy there was after all buried beneath the sewer-mud in her? I had looked forward to bringing it out, freed from all want and ugliness, and showing the world how beautiful we are down here when the mud is scraped off us. Perhaps it might have induced them to act justly. That’s what I dreamed, but it’s a bitter lot to have the unfortunates appointed to be one’s beloved. My only love is irretrievably dead, and now I cannot write about anything that triumphs. What have I to do with that?”
“I think it’s Victor Hugo who says that the heart is the only bird that carries its cage,” said Pelle, “but your heart refuses to take it when there is most use for it.”
“Oh, no!” said Morten with a little more energy. “I shan’t desert you; but this has been a hard blow for me. If only I had a little more of your clear faith! Well, I must be glad that I have you yourself,” he added, holding out his hand to Pelle with a bright smile.
The librarian came across the fields to meet them. “It’s taken you two Dioseuri a long time,” he said, looking at them attentively. “Ellen’s waiting with the dinner.”
The three men walked together up the bare stubblefield toward the house. “The best of the summer’s over now,” said Brun, looking about with a sigh. “The wheel has turned on one more cog!”
“Death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to one,” answered Morten, who was still in a morbid mood.
“That’s the sort of thing one says while one’s young and prosperous—and doesn’t mean seriously. To-morrow life will have taken you and your sorrow into its service again. But I have never been young until now that I’ve learned to know you two, so I count every fleeting hour like a miser—and envy you who can walk so quickly,” he added with a smile.
They walked up more slowly, and as they followed the hedge up toward the house they heard a faint whimpering in the garden. In a hole in an empty bed, which the two children had dug with their spades, sat Boy Comfort, and Sister was busy covering him with earth; it was already up to his neck. He was making no resistance, but only whimpered a little when the mould began to get near his mouth.
Pelle gave the alarm and leaped the hedge, and Ellen at the same moment came running out. “You might have suffocated little brother!” she said with consternation, taking the boy in her arms.
“I was only planting him,” said Anna, offended at having her work destroyed. “He wanted to be, and of course he’d come up again in the spring!” The two children wanted a little brother, and had agreed that Boy Comfort should sacrifice himself.