Katharine lingered a little while longer at the Skyds-station to
comfort, by her sympathetic presence, the brother and friend of the dead
Englishman. To the end of their lives they remembered her ministration.
She gave out to them royally in generous fashion. It was nothing to her
that they were strangers; it was everything to her that they were in
trouble and needed a little human kindness. They themselves had
forgotten that they were strangers to her. It was a pathetic tribute to
her powers of sympathy that they both spoke of the dead man as if she
had known him.
"You remember," the brother said, "he never did care for fishing. It
always bored him, didn't it?"
"Yes," said Katharine gently.
"Do you remember him saying a few years ago," the friend said, "that he
should love to die on the mountains? He always loved the mountains."
"Yes," said Katharine gently.
She scarcely had the heart to leave them; but at last she rose to go,
telling them there was an Englishman at the Solli Gaard who spoke
Norwegian well, and who would come to help them.
"He is the one for whom we came to seek here," she said, looking away
from them. "We are not yet sure that he is safe; but if he comes down
from the mountains, I know he will hasten to help you about----"
They bowed their heads silently as she broke off.
"We shall take him home to England," the brother said.
"I am glad he will rest in his own country," Katharine answered.
The people of the Skyds-station fulfilled their promise to Solli, and
put Katharine in their best cariole. The two strangers helped her to get
in, and then stood watching her. They could not speak. But when she held
out her hand in farewell greeting, each man took it and reverently
kissed it. She was touched by their silent gratitude, and the tears
came into her eyes.
"I am so thankful I stayed behind," she said.
Then the driver, a little fellow of about twelve years old, whipped up
the yellow pony, and the Skyds-station was soon out of sight.
"And now, if indeed he has come back, I shall see him," Katharine
thought, with a thrill of happiness.
At the Skyds-station, when, by her own choice, she was left alone, she
had for the moment felt the bitterness of being outside everything. She
remembered her own words:
"He will come down from the mountains, and the joy of reunion will be
theirs, and I shall be outside of it--outside of it as always. Always
outside the heart of things."
That moment had been only one of the many times of passing sadness and
bitterness in Katharine's life, when she had said and felt that she was
outside everything: outside the inner heart of friendship which never
fails, outside ambitious achievement, outside the region of great gifts,
great talents, outside the magic world of imagination, outside love. Her
friend had died, her girlhood's lover had died, her brother had failed
her. She was alone, a solitary spectator of other people's close
friendships, passionate love, successful work, absorbing careers; alone,
outside the barrier which separates all restless yearning spirits from
that dim Land of Promise; alone, outside. She, ever unconscious of her
own genius of giving, had no means of knowing that, by a mysterious
dispensation, those who give of themselves royally, without measure, are
destined to go out alone into the darkness of the night; alone, outside
everything in life.
But no such sad reflections came to Katharine now, as she sped along the
narrow valley, by the side of the glacier-river. Her thoughts turned to
Clifford and Knutty and Alan in loving unselfishness.
"The boy will have seen his dear father, and will now be comforted," she
said.
"Knutty will have seen her Englishman, and will now raise her old head
again," she said.
"Ah, how I hope and hope he was there to receive them when they got back
to the Gaard," she said.
"And now I shall see him, and the joy of reunion will be mine," she
said.
But in the midst of her happy thoughts and yearnings, she did not forget
those two lonely compatriots and that silent companion in the bedroom of
the Skyds-station.
"My poor strangers," she said, "we will not forsake you."
They had come to the place where the sudden break in the valley had
cheered them during that terrible drive of the morning.
"Yes," thought Katharine, "that gave us hope this morning. I should
recognise this spot anywhere on earth. It was here I began to have a
strong belief that it could not be he lying dead at the Skyds-station."
"Oh," she thought, with a shudder, "if it had been he!--if it had been
he!"
And her own words echoed back to her as an answer:
"My womanhood would be buried with my girlhood."
Then she looked up and saw a carriage in the distance, in the far
distance. The boy also saw it. As it approached nearer he said:
"It is from the Solli Gaard. That is Jens driving."
Katharine's heart gave a sudden bound.
"Haste, haste!" she said excitedly to the boy; and he, moved by her
eagerness, urged on the little yellow pony, which rose to the occasion
and flew over the ground.
Carriage and cariole drew up at the same moment, and Katharine saw face
to face the man whom she loved.
"We came to fetch you," he said.