[CHAPTER XI.]
"GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD."
"What a hard winter we are having!" said Ernestine to herself, looking thoughtfully out through the dim panes of the little window by which she was sitting, upon the roofs of the houses that bounded her prospect. They were covered with snow, that lay thick also on the outside window-sill. She sat with her hands wrapped in her cotton apron. "Well, I wanted to know everything,--why not poverty, and hunger, and cold,--the mighty foes with which humanity is always contending? I could philosophize excellently well upon abstinence in a warm room, by a well-spread table, and am I to shrink now? No, no! no living soul shall ever hear me ask for help."
She stood up, and walked firmly to and fro.
The room was a gloomy garret, a kind of kitchen,--at all events, there was a cooking-stove in it, and a cupboard containing articles of crockery. The floor was paved with stone.
Ernestine's feet were bitter cold. "I wonder what o'clock it is," she thought. "The postman ought to be here soon. It is terrible to have nothing to mark the time."
She listened to catch the striking of a church-clock--going to the window and letting her eyes wander over the white roofs in search of a distant tower. There was no sun visible through the snowy air. It was a genuine winter's day.
At a window just opposite, a little boy breathed upon the frosty pane and made two round peep-holes, through which a pair of blue eyes beamed at her. She nodded to them--she knew the pretty child well. The little head behind the peep-holes nodded in its turn. She thought of Little Kay and her northern winter. Then the snow before the window rose like white clouds hiding the prospect, and, gradually taking a human shape clothed in wide flowing robes, that began to sparkle and glitter as if strewn with diamonds, and a veil of frozen gossamer fluttered in the air. And beneath the veil there looked at her through the window a white face, with fixed transparent eyes like crystal, and upon the beautiful brow was a diadem of icicles made of the tears of all who had perished in the ice and snow since the world was made, and of all who starve and freeze in winter-time,--a diadem richer in pearls than that of any earthly monarch. The mighty form had on one arm a shield,--but it was a plate of the ice upon which had been wrecked the ships that sought to penetrate the inhospitable kingdom of the Snow-queen around the north pole. With the other hand she was leading away the little boy from over the way,--she longed for some coral to adorn her colourless robes, for a few drops of warm human blood. It was the Snow-queen of the fairy-dreams of Ernestine's childhood. But she was more majestic and gloomy than formerly, and she spoke other words to her now:
"I know you,--you never feared me as you do now that you have no warm roof, no firm walls, to protect you from my icy breath. But I will not harm you,--you belong to those who believe in the future of my dominion, who know that in thousands and thousands of years it must spread over the whole world, when all this swarming life will have passed to other spheres. Then my time will come,--there will be quiet, eternal icy quiet, here below,--and I will laugh at the old extinguished sun, glimmering like a burnt-out coal and envying me my diamond palace which he can no longer melt away."
Thus spoke the Snow-queen to the dreaming woman of science, and there was a cold pain at her heart,--sorrow for the end of Being here below, sorrow at "the judgment-day of an eternal glacial period," as Du Bois has it.