She bowed her head with a calm reverence. But that was not what she wanted. Her heart craved emotion. "I am going to speak to the Son of God. He was poor, he was despised and rejected. When I was the poorest, I had my little attic to sleep in, but he had not where to lay his head. O dear Lord! it was pitiful. I will never, never turn you out in the cold!"
When Melicent softly entered her room, next to Edith's, and stopped a moment, hesitating whether to speak to her cousin, she heard her breathe out as she laid her head upon the pillow, "In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I lie down to sleep!"
Melicent stole noiselessly away from the door. She could not address any trivial word, even any word of common affection, to one who had just lain down to sleep in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. It made sleep seem awful and sacred as well as sweet. It made guardian angels seem possible, even necessary. "How beautiful the Catholic religion is in some of its forms!" she thought, and, after a moment, knelt, and said a short prayer that she also might be guarded during the night, and that the Lord would not refuse to let her also rest in his name. She felt a sense of safety in having her cousin near, and the door of Edith's chamber seemed to her like the door of a shrine.
The next morning when they waked, the windows were all of a glitter with sunshine, and wrought over by the artisans of frostland with samples of every landscape under the sun—cliffs with climbing spruce-trees, silvery-sanded deserts with palms, an infinite variety. The sky was a dazzling clearness. The earth was like a stormy sea that had suddenly been enchanted into a motionless and ineffable whiteness; the wave curled over, with the spray all ready to slide down its back; the hollows were arrested in their sinking, the ripples frozen in their dimpling.
Then when evening came there was a grand display of northern lights, that pitched their tents of shifting rose and gold, with flags flying, and armies marching, and stained the snow with airy blood.
Carl stood in the cupola with Edith and Clara clinging to him, both a little uneasy, and told them stories of Thor, Odin, the Bifrost bridge, and Valhalla. What they saw was the Scandinavian gods carousing, he said; or, no, it was a repetition of that fierce battle of olden time, when, at night, spectators saw the dead arise from the field, float up into the air, and fight their battle over again in the sky, that wild legend that Kaulbach painted on canvas.
"Carl," Edith said hesitatingly, "I think that the truth is more beautiful than any legend."
"But we do not know the truth about northern lights," he replied, taking a scientific view of the matter.
She hesitated a moment. She was not used to speaking of what came nearest to her heart. But Father Rasle had given her a charge: "Whenever you have a chance to say anything beautiful about God, say it. That is your duty."
"We know that God made them," she faltered.