"Have you any message for me? Have you anything to say to me?"
The girl was silent.
"Why do you rove about here alone at night? Why do you not remain in Warnicken?"
"She is ill--she will die--Kätchen lives!" said the little one, as she suddenly rose and extended her arms, as though she would press Blanden to her heart.
"Poor child, you must not stay here! The night-dew will make you ill; I will see about a night's quarters for you with the maidservant. But you must not return here again; I forbid it--the dogs here are let loose upon uninvited, nocturnal visitors."
Blanden knocked at the bedroom door of the Forester's servant, and pretended Kätchen was a messenger who had come at night, and must have some place to rest in.
"The idiot child loves me," he said to himself, "her frog's eyes receive a gleam of intellect when she looks at me! And then she crouches behind the sloe hedge, treated in as step-motherly a manner as that unhappy fruit which would gladly be a plum, but which tarries for ever in sour immaturity. Nothing is more touching than these half-human beings, with their distorted souls! An evidence of the poverty of Creation's plan! It may be vast and grand upon the whole, but it can value the human mind but little which it can thus embitter! Certainly it often seems as if the comprehension of the world and of life creeps with astounding suddenness into the twilight of such minds."
On the following day, a rainy one, which drew a melancholy grey net over the whole sky, Blanden sat lost in thought beneath the eaves of the forest house; he was stroking the bull-dog which had placed itself at his feet, listening contentedly to the monotonous plashing from the water pipes, while it only reminded Blanden of the everlasting sameness of human life, and a sensation of as infinite weariness overcame him, at the regular fall of the drops, as he should have felt at the tick-tack of an old clock on a wall. All measurement of time oppressed him; life at such moments only appeared to him to be a nervous struggle to avoid hearing the beats marking its flight, the pulse-like throb of the seconds, the chiming of the hours, and like a clock's hands passing away over the thin and thick lines, over that empty scheme of time, whose laws we are to carry out, well or ill, often when our heart's blood is being shed.
He thought of Paulina, of Eva--and when he wished to forget the inevitable, other cares of life arose to his mind; he had been without news from Kulmitten for some time, and the election to the Provincial Diet must have taken place within the last few days; perhaps his participation in public life could console him for the miscarriage of the hopes of his heart.
He was awoke out of these dreams by the noise of an approaching carriage; in the woodland solitude of the forest house, the arrival of visitors was quite an event.