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“Was it then—-“

“No, don’t interrupt me! ‘Karl Mander often seemed to me as unlike all other people as though he belonged to a different order of things. He was not like an individual, he represented a race. He swept by like a mighty river: at the mercy of chance and natural obstacles, perhaps, but ever rolling on. So was he, both in life and in speech. Neither was his voice merely individual, it had in it the reverberation of a torrent–a melancholy, captivating harmony, but monotonous, unceasing.'”

“That surely is what the sea sounds like, mother?”

The mother was as much carried away by her memories as animated in her movements, as eager in her glance as a young girl. Now she stopped.

“Like the sea, do you say? No, no, no, not like the sea. The sea is only an eye. No, dear, not like the sea; there were warm depths and hiding-places in his nature such as the sea has not. One had a sense of intimate security and comfort with him. He was capable of the most self-forgetting devotion. Listen further. ‘Karl Mander was chosen,’ he wrote, ‘chosen as a forerunner before the people’s own time should come–chosen because he was good and blameless; his message to futurity was not soiled in his soul.'”

“That is beautiful.”

“Child, can you imagine how I was carried away? I had had a vague feeling that the surroundings of my life were unreal; here was something that was real.

“And he himself! We women do not love that which is lofty merely because it is lofty; no, there must be a certain weakness too–something that appeals to our help; we must feel a mission. And you cannot conceive how powerful and yet powerless he was.”

“How powerless, mother?”

“Well, when he came–in that condition—-“

“Yes, of course.”

“And his way of expressing himself. He never found the right words first, he stopped and changed them even as they poured out. And, in the meantime, if he caught something up in his hand he stood there with it. If it were the tumbler–and it generally was–he grasped it tightly, and so, because of it, would keep his hand still for a quarter of an hour at a time. His personality was so pathetically simple, or how shall I express it? He was a seer, not a prophet–yes, I told you that before. But seers are quite different, they don’t know themselves so well, they have absolutely no vanity. Heavens, how I longed to go and take off his cuffs! One could see that he was not accustomed to wear them: some one must have told him that it would not do to make a speech from a platform without cuffs on. He had crumpled and tumbled them; they had come unfastened, or perhaps never had been fastened; they got in the way and slipped over his hands. He struggled with them. There was something wrong about the waistcoat too; it was buttoned wrong, I believe, and puckered up at one side, so that it showed one of his braces–to me at any rate, where I sat looking at him sideways and with the light full upon him. Ah, that mighty creature with the stooping head! The tears rose in my eyes. Who would not have been willing to follow him?

“I felt as deeply as it could be felt that he must be helped. I did not know that I was to help him; I only knew that he must be helped and sustained.”

A rush of memory so overpowered her that she could not go on, she turned away.

PART III

The daughter saw her mother in a new light. Surely this was not she who ordered and managed her house, who sent wise letters to her, with earnest, well-weighed words! How her passion had transfigured and beautified her!

“But how did you feel, dearest mother?”

“I was not conscious of what I felt. We went away from there the day after, and our next halting-place was close to his two farms. I had my wits so far about me, however, that when some of us had to be quartered out, I chose the house which was nearest his. And when the tempest within me was no longer to be resisted I wrote to him, without signing my name. I asked him for an interview. He was to meet me on the road that went through his wood, between his house and ours. I dropped the letter into his own letter-box on the road. You can imagine what a state I was in when I tell you that I had appointed ten o’clock in the evening, as I thought that then it would be dark! I had not noticed that it was still light at that time, so far north had we come. The result was that I did not dare to go out until eleven, and then I was sure there would be no one to meet. But there he was! Mighty and stooping, his hat pressed together in his hand, he came forward, hesitatingly, shyly, and awkwardly, glad. ‘I knew it was you,’ he said.”