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She could not go on. She sat down, her daughter by her; they were both in tears. The roar of the river swept pitilessly past them, and yet it seemed to bring them a kind of comfort. All the tears we may shed avail nothing. It goes on its way, and nothing arrests its determined course to the sea.

Through the voice of nature the whispers of memory brought back his tragic end. It came over them both again how, after the banquet, he wanted to refresh himself with a bath. How every one tried to dissuade him, but it was no use. How he sprang in from a great height, took longer and longer strokes out, as though each one of them were taking him home, was seized by cramp and sank.

“Mother, there is so much I still want to hear about your life together.” Then, after a moment: “Mother, you must give me that too! Yes, you have told me so much, so very much about it. But not just the thing I want to know now! The love, mother, the devotion between you both! Mother, that must have been something too wonderful to realise.”

“Beyond all comprehension, my child! Beyond all understanding! And, do you know, the calumnies that were spread about us, especially the miserable anonymous letters, all kinds of meanness, it all helped. For each time we found in each other a perfect refuge. He was not so thin-skinned in such matters as I. It was through me that he first came to understand them–how to manage the petty incidents of social life. The leaders of society in this little country are not of pure Norwegian race, but of foreign descent. A man like him could never learn to keep pace with them. But I was one of them, and, through the effect on me, he understood! When he once was started on a line of thought you can’t imagine how fast he went. He was a discoverer, an investigator by nature. But when he first rightly found out what I had exposed myself to by choosing him, ah! how the thought of it spurred him on! If ever any one has been rewarded here on the earth, he rewarded me. Night and day, the whole summer, the whole autumn, the whole winter, the whole spring, we were never apart. Our life was one continued flight from the outer world, but it was a flight into Paradise. He refused all invitations; he had hardly time to speak to the people who came to see him; he would not have them in the house. He and I, and I and he, in the big rooms, and the smaller ones, he in mine or I in his. And on the country roads, in the fields, in the mountain pastures, on the lake, on the ice, working, superintending together, together always, or if we were away from each other it was but to meet again at the very earliest moment. But the more we were together the more I came to understand the wealth of his nature. What impressed me most about him was not the flow of ideas, it was the man himself. To fathom his perfect uprightness, clear to the very bottom, gave me the most glorious moments I have known. His devotion to me–or what shall I call it?–was all summed up in one image–his mighty head on my lap! There he often rested it, and always said, ‘How good it is to be here!'”

And the daughter laid her head in her mother’s lap and sobbed.

It began to rain. They rose and went home again. The little assembly house up by the station loomed more indistinct but more inviting through the rain. And the landscape took on a greater harmony of tints and greater friendliness; the scent from the birch-trees seemed trebled.

“Yes, my child. I believe I have given you some of his aspirations. Have I not?” She bent down towards her face.