"Just as he was able to understand my projects!" he said, "and I would
have bequeathed them all to him!"
For some days he never touched a model! but now he has crept back to his
old follies and his instruments, and tells us there was something in
Fritz's horoscope which might have prepared us for this, had he only
understood it a little before. However, this discovery, although too
late to warn us of the blow, consoles our father, and he has resumed his
usual occupations.
Eva looks very pale and fragile, partly, no doubt, from the effects of
the pestilence; but when first the rumour reached us, I sought some
sympathy from her, and said, "O Eva, how strange it seems, when Fritz
always thought of us before himself, to abandon us all thus without one
word of warning."
"Cousin Else," she said, "Fritz has done now as he always does. He _has_
thought of us first, I am as sure of it as if I could hear him say so.
He thought he would serve us best by leaving us thus, or he would never
have left us."
She understood him best of all, as she so often does. When his letter
came to our mother, it gave just the reasons she had often told me she
was sure had moved him.
It is difficult to tell what Eva feels, because of that strange inward
peace in her which seems always to flow under all her other feelings.
I have not seen her shed any tears at all; and whilst I can scarcely
bear to enter our dear old lumber-room, or to do anything I did with
him, her great delight seems to be to read every book he liked, and to
learn and repeat every hymn she learned with him.
Eva and the mother cling very closely together. She will scarcely let my
mother do any household work, but insists on sharing every laborious
task which hitherto we have kept her from, because of her slight and
delicate frame.
It is true I rise early to save them all the work I can, because they
have neither of them half the strength I have, and I enjoy stirring
about. Thoughts come so much more bitterly on me when I am sitting
still.
But when I am kneading the dough, or pounding the clothes with stones in
the stream on washing-days, I feel as I were pounding at all my
perplexities; and that makes my hands stronger and my perplexities more
shadowy, until even now I find myself often singing as I am wringing the
clothes by the stream. It is so pleasant in the winter sunshine, with
the brook babbling among the rushes and cresses, and little Thekla
prattling by my side, and pretending to help.
But when I have finished my day's work, and come into the house, I find
the mother and Eva sitting close side by side; and perhaps Eva is silent
and my mother brushes tears away as they fall on her knitting; but when
they look up, their faces are calm and peaceful, and then I know they
have been talking about Fritz.
EISENACH, _February_ 2.
Yesterday afternoon I found Eva translating a Latin hymn he loved, to
our mother, and then she sang it through in her sweet clear voice. It
was about the dear, dear country in heaven, and Jerusalem the Golden.