"She has exactly the same look on her face that came over it when she
was recovering from the plague, and he stood motionless beside her, with
that rigid hopeless tranquility on his face, just before he left to be a
monk. What will happen next?"
And my grandmother said in a feeble broken voice,
"He looks just as your grandfather did when he took leave of me in
prison. Indeed, sometimes I am quite confused in mind. It seems as if
things were coming over again. I can hardly make out whether it is a
dream, or a ghost, or a resurrection."
Our father only did not join in our tears. He said what was very much
wiser.
"Children, the greatest joy our house has known since Fritz left has
came to it to-day. Let us give God thanks." And we all stood around him
while he took the little velvet cap from his bald head and thanked God,
while we all wept out our Amen. After that we grew calmer; the
overwhelming tumult of feeling, in which we could scarcely tell joy from
sorrow, passed, and we began to understand it was indeed a great joy
which had been given to us.
Then we heard a little stir in the house, and my mother summoned us
back; but we found her alone with Fritz, and would insist on his
submitting to an unlimited amount of family caresses and welcomes.
"Come, Fritz, and assure our grandmother that you are alive, and that
you have never been dead," said Else. And then her eyes filling with
tears, she added, "What you must have suffered! If I had not remembered
you before you received the tonsure, I should scarcely have known you
now with your dark, long beard, and your white thin face."
"Yes," observed Atlantis in the deliberate way in which she usually
announces her discoveries, "no doubt that is the reason why Eva
recognized Fritz before Thekla did, although they were both facing the
door, and must have seen him at the same time. She remembered him before
he received the tonsure."
We all smiled a little at Atlantis' discovery, whereupon she looked up
with a bewildered expression, and said, "Do you think, then, she did
_not_ recognize him? I did not think of that. Probably, then, she took
him for a thief, like Lottchen!"
Fritz was deep in conversation with our mother, and was not heeding us,
but Else laughed softly as she patted Atlantis' hand, and said,--
"Conrad Winkelried must have expressed himself very plainly, sister,
before you understood him."
"He did, sister Else," replied Atlantis gravely. "But what has that to
do with Eva?"
When I went up to our room, Eva's and mine, I found her kneeling by her
bed. In a few minutes she rose, and clasping me in her arms, she said,--
"God is very good, Thekla. I have believed that so long, but never half
enough until to-night."
I saw that she had been weeping, but the old calm had come back to her
face, only with a little more sunshine on it.
Then, as if she feared to be forgetting others in her own happiness, she
took my hand and said--
"Dear Thekla, God is leading us all through all the dark days to the
morning. We must never distrust Him any more!"
And without saying another word we retired to rest. In the morning when
I woke Eva was sitting beside me with a lamp on the table, and the large
Latin Bible open before her. I watched her face for some time. It looked
so pure, and good, and happy, with that expression on it which always
helped me to understand the meaning of the words, "child of God,"
"little children," as Dr. Melancthon says our Lord called his disciples
just before he left them. There was so much of the unclouded
trustfulness of the "_child_" in it, and yet so much of the peace and
depth which are of _God_.
After I had been looking at her a while she closed the Bible and began
to alter a dress of mine which she had promised to prepare for
Christmas. As she was sewing, she hummed softly, as she was accustomed,
some strains of old church music. At length I said--
"Eva, how old were you when Fritz became a monk?"
"Sixteen," she said softly; "he went away just after the plague."
"Then you have been separated twelve long years," I said. "God, then,
sometimes exercises patience a long while."
"It does not seem long now," she said; "we both believed we were
separated by God, and separated for ever on earth."
"Poor Eva," I said; "and this was the sorrow which helped to make you so
good."
"I did not know it had been so great a sorrow, Thekla," she said with a
quivering voice, "until last night."
"Then you had loved each other all that time," I said, half to myself.
"I suppose so," she said in a low voice. "But I never knew till
yesterday how much."