A little later the minister and I were walking side by side along the road. Our relations had now become confidential, and to comfort me he told me all that Susanna had said to induce him to consent. She knew, thank G.o.d, he concluded with a sigh of relief, that she had in her father a friend in whom she could confide in the hour of need.

The minister led me into the room with its drawn blinds; he stood for a moment by the bier, then the tears fell like rain down his broad, strong face, and he turned and went out.

She lay there in her maidenly white dress. They had twined a wreath of green leaves with white flowers about her head, and for a moment I saw again the vision I had at the ball. The delicate hands now lay meekly folded upon her breast, and on the engagement finger I recognised with tears my own old bronze ring with the purple gla.s.s stones in it, that she had worn from the moment she had obtained her father's consent. The expression of the mouth, so energetic in life, was transformed in death into a quiet, happy smile, in which her beautiful delicate face, with its broad pure marble brow shone with a heavenly radiance; she lay in such innocent security, as if she now knew the secret of true love's victory over everything here on earth, and was only gone in advance, with white wings on her shoulders, to teach it to me, since G.o.d had not allowed her to share the burden of my cross here below.

When I noticed that they wanted me to go, I silently repeated "Our Father" over her as a last farewell, pressed one gentle kiss upon her brow, then one upon her mouth, and one upon her folded hands where the bronze ring was, and went out without looking back.

Two days after, I followed Susanna's remains to the grave.

One sunshiny day in winter, when I as usual visited the place where she rested in the churchyard, the snow had drifted over her grave. It lay pure and dazzlingly white, with the fine upper edge like translucent marble in the sunlight.

I took this to mean that Susanna would have me think of her in her shining bridal dress before G.o.d, in order to give me courage to go my lonely way through life, and not to fear that the hardest of all trials--even insanity, if it came and enthralled me in its confusion--could separate us.

Late in the summer, when I was to go south by the steamer, together with the minister and his wife, who had both, in a short time, aged perceptibly, and who were now moving to a southern parish, I went for the last time to take leave of my sorrowful friend, the clerk.

He played the beautiful, joyful, beloved piece again for me, which he had composed when he was twenty, and which I had thought suited Susanna and me so well, and now he played the continuation too--it was wonderfully touching and sad, but with comfort in it, like a psalm.

Thus ends a poor, delicate Nordlander's simple story; for to tell how, with my father's help, I became a student with "_laud_" [There are four grades in the Academic Degrees Examination--viz., _laudabilis prae ceteris, laudabilis, haud illaudabilis_, and _non-contemnendus_.]--he died the same year that I pa.s.sed my _Examen artium_, a respected but ruined man--and how I afterwards became something of a literary man, a private tutor and a master in a school, is only to relate the outward circ.u.mstances of a monotonous life, whose thoughts all dwell in the past.

My love for Susanna has, as she said to me with such confidence, been the fountain of health that saved me from the worst madness. When restlessness came over me, and I roamed about aimlessly in field and forest, it always came to a crisis, when I saw her, in her white dress, floating by a little way off, or sometimes even coming gently towards me; then the danger was over for the time.

During the last two years, when I have been getting worse, I have not been fortunate enough to see her, and have had a dreary time, often as if the darkness were closing helplessly round me.

But not long ago, as I lay ill in my garret, Susanna came one night, when the full moon was shining, up to the bed, in her white bridal dress, with a wreath upon her beautiful hair, and beckoned to me with the hand that bore the ring. I know she came to bring me the glad tidings that I shall soon go hence and see again the love of my youth.