While the workmen were stretched off on the ground in groups eating their lunch Hauke rode along the deserted works and his eyes were keen to discover spots where careless hands had handled the spade. If, however, he rode up to the men and explained to them how the work must be done, they did indeed look up and went on chewing their bread patiently, but he never heard a word of agreement or any other remark from them. Once at that hour, it was already late, when he found a place in the dike where the work had been particularly well done; he rode up to the next group of lunchers, sprang from his horse, and asked pleasantly who had done such good work there, but they merely looked at him shyly and sullenly and named slowly a few men as if they did it against their will. The man whom he had asked to hold his horse, which was standing as quiet as a lamb, held it with both hands and looked, as if in fear, at the animal's beautiful eyes which, as usual, were fixed on its master.
"Well, Marten," said Hauke; "why do you stand as if you had been struck by lightning?"
"Your horse is as quiet, sir, as if it were thinking of some mischief."
Hauke laughed and took hold of the rein himself, when the horse at once began to rub its head caressingly against his shoulder. A few of the workmen looked fearfully over at horse and rider; others, as if all that did not concern them, continued to eat their lunch in silence, now and then throwing a crumb to the gulls which had remembered this feeding-place, and, balancing on their slender wings, tipped forward almost onto their heads. The dikegrave stood for a while, absently watching the begging birds as they caught the pieces thrown to them in their bills; then he sprang into the saddle and rode away without looking round at the men; the few words which they now spoke sounded to him almost like mockery. "What is it?" he said to himself; "was Elke right when she said they were all against me? Even these servants and small owners for many of whom my new dike means added prosperity?"
He spurred his horse so that it flew down to the koog like mad. He himself knew nothing, to be sure, of the uncanny nimbus that his former stable-boy had thrown about the rider of the white horse; but if only the people had seen him then as he galloped along, his eyes staring out of his lean face, and his horse's red nostrils cracking!
Summer and autumn had passed by; the work had gone on till near the end of November; then frost and snow had called a halt; the men had not been able to finish and it was decided to leave the koog lying open. Eight feet the dike rose above the level of the ground; only to the west towards the water where the sluice was to be laid a gap had been left; also above, in front of the old dike, the water-course was still untouched. Thus, as for the last thirty years, the tide could flow into the koog without doing much damage there or to the new dike. And so the work of men's hands was consigned to the great God above, and placed under his protection until the spring sun should make its completion possible.
In the meantime preparations had been made in the dikegrave's house for a happy event; in the ninth year of their married life a child was born to him and his wife. It was red and shriveled and weighed its seven pounds as new-born children should when, like this one, they belong to the female sex; only, its cry had been strangely muffled and did not please the midwife. But the worst was that on the third day Elke lay in a high fever, wandered in her speech and did not know either her husband or the old nurse. The wild joy that had seized upon Hauke at the sight of his child had turned into tribulation. The doctor had been fetched from the town; he sat beside the bed, felt Elke's pulse, wrote prescriptions and looked helplessly about him. Hauke shook his head; "He can't help; only God can help!" He had figured out a kind of Christianity for himself; but there was something that prevented his praying. When the old doctor had driven away he stood at the window staring out into the winter day and, while the patient screamed aloud in her delirium, he clasped his hands together tightly; he did not know himself whether it was an act of devotion or due to his tremendous fear of losing control of himself.
"Water! The water!" whimpered the sick woman. "Hold me!" she screamed; "hold me, Hauke!" Then her voice died down; it sounded as if she were crying; "into the sea, out into the ocean? O, dear God, I'll never see him again!"
At that he turned and pushed the nurse away from the bed. He dropped on his knees, put his arms round his wife and held her close: "Elke! Elke! Oh, know me, Elke, I am right here with you!"
But she only opened wide her eyes burning with fever and looked about her as if helplessly lost.