Seven: The Lonely Child

Some minutes later, when the thunderstorm passed over the village where the church is, a fourteen-year-old girl, precocious and with a mind of her own, was standing all by herself in the park of the estate at Lintula. She stood quite still among the trees, her raven-black pigtails hanging down her back and her gray eyes shining cunningly below her bangs, while her soul thrilled with pleasure at the raging of the elements. She was still weak from the emotional uproar she had just gone through, and bitterness sat like a thorn within her heart; but in her spirit she was raised above her grief on the mighty wings of the storm. The sudden and threatening darkness which fell upon the park, the booming roar in the trees, the thunder, the torrents of rain, and finally the tempest itself enthralled her like the untamed and beautiful expressions of some primeval force, a discharge of stifled tensions, a purifying of creation's heart from all evil. Somewhere in the depths of her own unhappy heart the thunder's metallic tone found a reply, and in a dizzying second she experienced the indomitability of her own fragile being.

Sabine was not much more than a child, and she had led such an isolated existence within the closed world of her home that in certain respects she was undeveloped for her age; but she possessed a knowledge of suffering which could   [p. 82]   have befitted an apostle of Gautama Buddha. If the precocious child had possessed the great and wise teacher's ability to express the innermost feelings she had toward earthly existence, the outpourings of her heart would not have been so very different from the famous proclamation of Benares: "Birth is suffering, death is suffering, a common existence with a being one does not love is suffering, to be separated from the object of one's love is suffering, to lose what one desires is suffering."

Unaware of what she was doing, she arranged her life in accordance with a similar conception of the basic character of existence.

She was ruled by a secret panic, an insuperable fear of every and any change, and she took recourse to the most exquisite precautionary measures against it. She rejected every offer of friendship in order to be sure that she need never be exposed to the suffering which separation or spurned emotion could entail; in such case it was better to remain alone. She developed an admirable technique for sweeping away the traces left by the progress of suffering and death through that limited area of life which was hers. She cut herself off from everything, from gratitude, from obligations, from sympathy, from whatever it might be which could have involved her person in life's painful game of give and take, and she expended an infinite solicitude upon stylizing---and thus neutralizing---her surroundings, her own appearance, and her whole concentrated expression of the life within her. She sat before her mirror by the hour, lost in the age-old mysteries of the cosmetic art and, more than anything else, resembling a little priestess who performs occult rites in honor of an unknown god. The god was none other than immutability, the cold deity of the life-will turned negative, of nirvana. In order to achieve the appearance of changelessness, the strange child sat before   [p. 83]   the mirror and transformed her woeful face into a mask, a stylized image which forever remained the same and which she herself controlled: a sovereign denial of the weaknesses of her own nature.

From behind her mask she could observe people undisturbed, artfully deciphering the secrets of the world, without exposing herself to life's brutal caresses. She concealed her naked face. She carefully shielded her body from every contact. It was with obvious repugnance that she resigned herself to the necessity of having to shake hands now and then, and in these cases she offered a hand that was feelingless and stiff. When she got undressed, she bolted the door, and it would never have occurred to her to allow even her own mother to see her naked body or to have free access to the room where she slept. Her room did not resemble any other room. The walls were covered with the most remarkable and different kinds of things, shawls, draperies, books, heavy metal ornaments and chains; oriental idols and objets d'art shimmered in dragon-like evil and secrecy from all the corners of the room, weakly illuminated by hidden sources of light. Because of its profusion of contents, the room's effect could have been banal if it had not been tragic: a setting, thought out to the last detail, for a life which wished to disguise itself to the point of unrecognizability in order not to be caught by suffering and death.

There was something of a little Buddha about her whole appearance. She could sit for hours on the floor of her room, her legs crossed under her, apparently without having anything to do at all; the introspective, intense expression on her face bore witness to a secret activity of her soul which laid claim to all her powers. Actually, still meditation of this sort was the only activity of which she approved; she called it her "intensified laziness." Her absorption in music was merely another form of the same all-devouring meditation.   [p. 84]   She sat before her old rosewood piano, stiff as a little idol, and played Bach, never anything but Bach. Since she had come to know the harmonies of the pious organist's world, sternly limited and yet divinely infinite, she would not have anything to do with any other music, to the great grief of her music teacher, old Miss Rosenholz, who revered Bach, to be sure, but who had given Beethoven her heart. She seldom left her room. If she did go out, then it was to the forests that she made her way, to the deep silence within the woods where some lonely bird let his trills be heard to the accompaniment of the harp-like soughing of the firs. She loved to listen to the melodic spirit of the water, not only down by the river but also out in the moorlands when the rain streamed down, or inside the house when it splashed against the windowpane. She had no one she could call her friend. Her only confidante was Lady Macbeth, an old thoroughbred mare which she sometimes rode. Everyone who saw the girl was struck by the oriental strain in her appearance and her manner. It was so striking that many, meeting her for the first time in the company of her loud-voiced, self-assured parents, asked themselves in their astonishment where the child had actually come from. But only a few guessed that her strange and uncommunicative passivity had its root in certain extraordinary spiritual experiences and in an abnormal sensitivity to the suffering which life contains by its very nature. Perhaps wise old Miss Rosenholz realized it, but she seldom came to Lintula nowadays, ever since she had got up in arms against Ottilia, the mistress of the house, on the child's account. The stern little face beneath the bangs cut in an Egyptian fashion became all the more reserved and stiff, the gray eyes beneath the eyebrows' pencilled arches grew all the more disdainful of the world.

It was not only the recent scene at the dinner table which   [p. 85]   had driven Sabine out into the park this stormy evening. In truth it was something else which lay much farther back in time, in her childhood, when she was seven years old and experienced the major grief of her life. Or perhaps it was not this so much as all the other things she realized then, and which had turned her into one of those children who suffer because no one loves them. People generally think that such children are unusual and that it takes especially unfortunate circumstances to make a child suffer a lack of love in his own home. In actual fact there are so many children of this sort that the homes which do not have them are the exceptions; it is only people's disinclination to explore their own hearts and their inborn hostility which makes them unaware of the sufferings silently endured in a happy home.

Up to her seventh year Sabine was what one could call a happy child; she was not aware of her existence being different from that of others. She had her brother Joachim whom she loved passionately. The two lonely children in the big and gloomy house were entirely dependent upon one another's company. They were not allowed to associate with the children whose parents worked on the estate; instead, they meant everything to one another. Their games were completely their own and no one else's. The trolls in the forest and the river's fairy-like inhabitants who peeked up with their white faces when the moon was shining---these creatures populated their imagination and provided the material for strange masquerades, while the stories in Mortimer's old adventure books stimulated them to try bolder and more dramatic pageants with high-flown tirades and fierce retorts. The noble musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan, were figures they dearly loved, and even though the musketeers caused a little difficulty, because there were four of them and only two children, the performance of double roles gave a foretaste of   [p. 86]   true art's ambiguous fascination. They had their world to themselves, their language, filled with implications, and their secret understanding, and thus they had a part of their lives in which they themselves were the masters, and where they could take refuge when things with their parents grew too difficult and the home's latent tension exploded into frightening and incomprehensible scenes.

Tension lay upon the house like a brooding thundercloud and rendered existence unsure from one moment to the next. Although the parents were not aware of it, they allowed their own inherent hostility to reach the children through their manner, their tone of voice, and their impatient expressions. The children could not understand that Ottilia grew irritable and often shut herself up in the Blue Room for several days on end because she was disappointed and unsatisfied, and, like so many other women with nothing to do, abandoned herself to fruitless dreams about the Great Love she had never had the chance to experience. And they could not imagine that Mortimer, who was so big and strong and fine to look at with his dark hair and his flashing eyes, regarded his life as a failure because he was married to a woman who did not suit him and who poisoned his existence with her hysterical excitement and her false emotionalism. For the children, all this took the form of a dark and terrifying threat directed against them. The subdued hostility around them produced a feeling in them that they had come to this home, where no one loved them or took any joy in them, by mistake. They often put their wise little heads together and made plans to run away, one more fantastic and impracticable than the last. Their hearts throbbed with eagerness and their cheeks glowed, but it usually ended with their swearing eternal love to each other. It was in one another that they found a substitute for the security which they missed in the home, and in one another's   [p. 87]   love they found redress for their own injured self-esteem.

One morning the children awakened simultaneously and with a sense of anxiety. They curled up together in Sabine's bed and listened. To their excited imaginations the house seemed to be shaking to its very foundations. Uncontrolled shrieks alternated with hard banging sounds, and then it grew deathly still. The children were seized by an inexplicable terror. Taking each other by the hand, they sneaked out of their room in nothing but their nightshirts. Like silent little spirits they glided down the stairs to the ground floor, and then, their hearts in their mouths, ran through the deserted halls all the way to the wing that faced on the garden. When they had come to the little room which lay farthest away of all, and which for some reason was called the Storeroom and was not used for anything, they threw themselves into one another's arms and experienced their secret happiness in a rapture of joy. Solemn and wonderstruck, they touched one another's bodies and in some obscure way felt themselves to be fellow criminals and, at the same time, the only little children in the world who knew what it meant to love and to be loved.

The hasty caresses in the musty and almost empty chamber which should have been the innocent introduction to life's great wedding feast became instead, for Sabine, the harbinger of cruel death. Ottilia had gone away on a trip, and Mortimer was like a thundercloud for three days. On the fourth day Joachim fell violently ill, and not a week had passed before he lay dead. After closing the dead boy's eyes and laying him straight, the nurse had gone out for a few moments when Sabine crept into the room. Standing beside the bed as motionless as a statue, she gazed at Joachim. It was then that her face became frozen. She grew stiff in all her body, as though paralyzed. When the governess came rushing   [p. 88]   in and tried to take her away, she was cold as ice and did not move. They were forced to carry her out as if she herself had died.

Ottilia did not come home until the following day, after having received her husband's telegram. She found her handsome Joachim dead and Sabine in a half unconscious condition in her bed. Mortimer had locked himself into his room.

For a moment, Ottilia was permeated by the realization that everything she yearned for, restlessly searching for it beyond the horizon of her home, was to be found here, in utmost proximity to her, in the little heart which had been forced to suffer so. A hot and painful feeling of devotion to the lonely child flamed up within her, and a quick and vital instinct told her how Sabine must feel. She longed to be able to enclose her within her arms, smothering her in caresses and childishly tender words. But Sabine was as stiff and cold as death itself. Wounded, Ottilia withdrew. Things grew no better when Sabine recovered and could be up and around as usual; she rejected all her mother's approaches with a peculiar and wily expression which hurt Ottilia deeply. "Joachim would never have done anything like that," Ottilia thought, and thus she had returned to her old magic circle. She plunged herself into mourning for Joachim with that hysterical passion which she always manifested when something had been irretrievably lost. A phantom, and not reality, could open the deepest springs of her being. While Joachim was alive, she had little to do with him, paying almost no attention to him at all, but now that he was dead, she adored him as some higher sort of being, an ideal child whose like had never existed before, a little Jesus with bright curls. This adoration came to be pointed like a murderous dagger toward Sabine, who had the misfortune of being an ordinary living child. In her, Ottilia saw a constant, painful   [p. 89]   reminder of what she had lost in Joachim. Sabine was by no means as good-looking as Joachim and did not possess his special charm. In every facet of her being she was a negation of what had been so lovable in Joachim. Finally it became impossible for Ottilia to see anything but faults in Sabine, and she did not let a day pass by without calling attention to these shortcomings.

This did not mean that she loved Sabine the less because she mourned the loss of Joachim; on the contrary, her loss made her painfully dependent upon her love for her daughter. But the imaginary world in which she lived was such that nothing became real for her save what she experienced as pain and loss. Therefore Joachim grew much more alive in her eyes than Sabine was, and only those qualities of Sabine which distressed and hurt her---since thus she could focus her emotions upon them---assumed true life for her. With a curious masochistic passion she unearthed all the things about Sabine which were unlike Joachim and which for some reason or another irritated her, failing to answer to her expectations. She made no effort to conceal her aversion, for she, of course, knew that it was love which inspired it, love for the Sabine to whom she had given a transcendental affection and whom she had lost forever, love for the Sabine who had never existed.

Thus she shut herself up inside her own imaginary world, never becoming fully aware of the tragedy which was played out before her very eyes. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of the tragedy's effect in the dark flush which arose in Sabine's cheeks and in the quick and flaming glance which was the child's only reply to a withering remark. Then she felt unhappy and sat down in the Blue Room to have a good cry. But when she took out her altar cloths (she made a hobby of embroidering them) and lost herself in contemplation of the beauty of their sublime motifs, grief   [p. 90]   disappeared like a cloud from her well-preserved face, which was doll-like in its smoothness, and she could continue her embroidery untroubled, or abandon herself to one of the occult novels she always kept at hand.

But it was not equally easy for Sabine to escape the strain which lay upon her and which seemed intended to undermine her faith in her own personality's right to exist. Everything which wounded her and injured her self-assurance gnawed its way into her, forming a dark deposit in her soul, a dull pain from which she could never free herself. She could not even cry, for she had no one in whom she could confide. She did not trust anyone. Her parents' sudden changes of mood and their hidden rivalry with respect to her only strengthened her in her opinion that life was treacherous and filled with evil. She felt herself surrounded by hostile forces which pursued some end quite foreign to her own well-being, and which, whenever they wanted, could concentrate upon the task of breaking her will. Her manner, even her way of walking, acquired a crouching and creeping air, as if she were forever ready to take to flight or to protect herself in some other fashion against aggression. She learned cunning and craft, and her nature grew hard around the implacable determination to hold her ground and protect her own interests at any price, even though it should be at the cost of her own heart.

She often thought of death. When she awakened in terror during the dark nights of winter, uttering a little cry, it could happen that she experienced such an intense feeling of abandonment that she curled up in a ball beneath the covers, pressing herself as closely as possible to their soft warmth and thinking of death. It was such a consolation to think of death then. And whenever she was downcast, angry at Ottilia and the whole world, it was a comfort to think of death then, too. The death she thought of was not at all the   [p. 91]   same as the death which terrified her in reality, the death which came creeping up with its load of awful sufferings, the death which took men when they did not want to go. The death she thought of was her own trustful death, the last and most secret expression of her will. It was a great relief to know that such a possibility existed, no matter what else happened. A person could leave everything and simply die. Then there was no need to worry about anything. "They" could do nothing about it. The thought was a wonderfully happy one. It contained a seductive pleasure, a mixture of the sweetness of revenge and the delectableness of power, which quite removed whatever bitterness might cling to it. From death, this dark being, there emerged that single thread of power and secret redress which was woven into a life of helplessness and defeat.

Muttering, the thunder withdrew, but Sabine remained in the streaming rain. Standing beneath one of the defiant and aristocratic silver firs, she did not get wet at all. She listened to the mysterious crackling and splashing which passed over the earth, and to the heavy sighs in the crowns of the trees. A faint shimmer of triumph played around her thin lips.

The trouble at the dinner table had not been too much for her to bear. She had emerged without a scratch from many scenes just like it. But a single remark had broken the camel's back, the one about Joachim. It went through Sabine's heart like a sword, and then the whole world grew black before her eyes.

Ottilia knew very well why Sabine had sat brooding in her room all day long, and why she had not come out to greet the guests. She herself had ruined the visit of the company for Sabine by praising the good-natured girl's virtues at Sabine's expense, every chance she got: "What a charming girl, a real ray of sunshine!" She was all the more embittered because she realized what she had done, and was   [p. 92]   forced to take Sabine's behavior as a criticism of herself. Actually, there was something tragic in these violent reproaches of Ottilia's; and since, with her strange and all too mature perspicacity, Sabine understood a little about the way things hung together, she resigned herself to the unavoidable battle of words. The whole affair would no doubt have taken its usual course, with the exchange of accusations and the great outburst in the last act, if an evil spirit had not inspired Ottilia to say, as the worst reproach she could think of: "Joachim would never have done something like that!"

Sabine had often heard this very retort in her imagination; it had dangled over her head like an unspoken charge in all of her disputes with Ottilia. And yet it seemed as though life had fled from her in the instant it was spoken aloud. She stiffened and the food caught in her throat. She swallowed convulsively a couple of times, got up from the table pale as death, and disappeared like some mute and desperate spirit. Ottilia gazed after her, and her clear eyes held an expression composed of startled reproach and impotent regret, a regret of which she was almost unaware. She realized that a catastrophe had occurred; but she had not the slightest notion that she had touched on something which in a lonely child, even more than in others, is unbearably sensitive: its fragile and innermost awareness of being an individual, a unique being which has its justification in its self, removed from all comparison. Nothing can deal such a mortal wound to a child's self-awareness (which constantly has such cruel burdens to bear) as those criticisms based not upon the fact that the child is the way he is, but upon his being unlike others. Sabine's painful intimacy with the object of the comparison made the insult unbearable; her twin desires for self-assertion and self-destruction were   [p. 93]   joined together in a reaction which sent its impulses down to the very sources of her existence.

Sabine was just barely able to summon up the strength she needed to lock her door behind her. Her body was as if frozen, her eyes were dead, her soul had gone far away. She fell heavily onto her bed. Within her brain a single thought repeated itself obstinately: the thought of dying. Of not existing. Of being removed from the face of the earth. Of disappearing. She was not strong enough to decide how it would happen. She only knew that she would cease to exist. She felt neither rancor nor malice, only an infinite loneliness. She was terribly cold. Instinctively she fumbled for something to cover herself with, and when she found nothing she curled up into mankind's primal position, and was lost in worlds of darkness.

It seemed as though she heard a dear old friend grumbling somewhere close to her. She lay there for a while, listening to his growls. It was the thunder. She took a deep breath and stretched. Something untamed, deep within her oppressed spirit, could not resist the mighty explosions of the thunderstorm. When violent storms arose, she was seized by a wild happiness and could not make herself stay inside. It was her practice to rush outside bareheaded and without a coat, running and dancing like a foal among the trees. It was as though the thunder and the storm gave her a sense of those free and uncowed worlds where even the least and weakest of living creatures has its origin. She felt a desire to fly away in the train of the winds and, set free, to abandon herself to the turbulence within her.

When now, in the hour of her degradation, she heard the familiar sound of an approaching thunderstorm, a gleam was kindled in her eye, and she felt life come streaming back into her heart. Getting up, she went to the window. A   [p. 94]   strange and portentous illumination lay upon the park: a sharp yellow light fought in vain against the mighty darkness which welled up threateningly from among the trees, spreading itself in heavy shadows across the lawn and the bright red geraniums. The birds flew restlessly back and forth, and the smallest of the flowers opened their eyes wide in terror. Sabine did not hesitate any longer. She slipped outdoors, as if enticed by unseen spirits, creeping along with that extreme caution which had become her practice. No one in the whole house noticed that she had disappeared from her room.

She stood unmoving beneath the fir and listened to the stormy music around and within her. After some majestic crashes the thunder seemed to withdraw, and the rain enveloped her in its melodic roar. She looked longingly at the wet grass which shone with such a clear green light in the dark. She wondered how it would feel to be grass, dwelling in the earth and caressed by the soft and streaming rain. She emerged onto the lawn, and waded like a thoughtful water bird in the soft wet grass. Suddenly and without warning the thunder crashed, hard and metallic, right above her head. Her eyes glittered. The bolts of lightning came, one close after the other, and the thunder kept up its unbroken rumbling and crashing. All of a sudden, before she had actually had time to think of what she did, she began to run down toward the beach. The sky was like a sea of fire, and its vaults rang. Sabine ran as silently and lightly as a spirit. The rain whipped her face and her black braids drooped like gloomily folded wings, but her breast was full to bursting with music and her face was her own face, childish and cheerful, from the days before the great sorrow had befallen her.

Hurrying past the stable, she saw up above the doors the beautiful white horses' heads that she had always loved and   [p. 95]   that now seemed to turn and cast reproachful glances after her. Where are you running to in such a hurry? Why are you leaving us? She felt a sting in her breast and stopped abruptly. Not until that moment was she aware that she intended to leave home and never come back, whatever might happen.

She stood quietly, her eyes lowered, and pondered. The fact that she was going to leave her home forever did not bother her. Instead, she thought of Lady Macbeth whom she was now about to desert---she would be so lonely here, without a single friend. The old mare, grown useless, had become a thorn in Mortimer's side, and Sabine suspected that he would take advantage of her disappearance to get rid of the condemned horse. He had let Lady Macbeth live only because of her impassioned intercession. From the start, she had chosen Lady Macbeth to be her closest friend, perhaps because she felt that the old thoroughbred, put out to pasture, suffered from the same sense of loneliness as she did. With her lineage tracing back to the "days of the count," Lady Macbeth gave a certain aura to the ruined estate; and the existence of a link, no matter how fragile, between the estate's prosaic present and its magnificent past appealed to Sabine's imagination.

She had loved Lintula so much because within its gloomy salons and musty old stables and coachhouses it sheltered so many restless spirits from days gone by. As soon as the cabriolet left the highway and began to roll with a gentle crunching over the gravel drives of the spacious tree-filled park, its passenger got the feeling that he had entered an enchanted world which lay lost in slumber---it merely awaited a sign from the great magician's hand in order to arise once more, continuing the interrupted festival. Walking alone on a moonlit evening past the summerhouse, green and pagoda-like, dripping with moisture beneath the great   [p. 96]   elm, you felt your heart throbbing, and in the empty window could catch a glimpse of a dazzling white arm which sadly waved farewell to the cavaliers of the last serenade. Everything one had ever heard about life on the Carelian estates in former days, when Russian courtiers and grand seigneurs ruled them and when these isolated marches warmed themselves in the sun of imperial Petersburg, arose before the dreamer's vision in the deep twilight between the trees, and the air was filled with wondrous phantoms and the chatter of merry voices. If one's ears were truly keen, they could hear the clatter of hoofs during mad rides in the moonlight, and a coach, pulled three in hand, rushing past in a storm of recklessness, of treacherous intoxication with life's joys.

Nevertheless, the most mysterious spot at Lintula was the so-called Old Coachhouse, where all the saddles were stored. What particularly attracted Sabine, making her eyes grow dark, were the old-fashioned ladies' saddles, with their odd shapes and faded colors and richly ornamented mountings and splendid tassels and the brocades which were much the worse for wear; vague dreams of marvelous and intoxicating festivals awoke within her, as if love had cautiously touched her slumbering being with the tip of its magic wand---had touched it in that silent old coachhouse where a pair of swallows fluttered restlessly around their nest and the spiders had woven their webs over the memories of the past.

In some way, all these romantic things which satisfied Sabine's sense of the unreal had collected around old Lady Macbeth's nobly formed head. As she stood there not knowing whether to go or stay, Sabine felt that she would leave the fairy castle of her childhood in the very moment that she parted from Lady Macbeth.

Her shoulders drooping, her eyes fixed on the ground, she   [p. 97]   began to walk slowly in the direction of the stable, and as she walked over the stableyard in the streaming rain, she suddenly burst into tears. She wept as though her heart would break. Her frozen little face was contorted in an oddly pathetic way; it seemed that subterranean forces had been at work in order to break the petrified earth which covered them. Who had ever seen Sabine cry? Perhaps Lady Macbeth had, sometimes, but no one else. People had only seen how her glance avoided theirs, and the tight defiance of her mouth with its corners drawn downward.

Weeping convulsively, Sabine threw her arms around Lady Macbeth's neck and pressed herself tight up against the horse's velvety muzzle. How kind a horse can be! Lady Macbeth rubbed her head against Sabine, giving her gentle little nudges with her velvety nose now and then. If an onlooker watched very closely, he perhaps would have seen a few bright tears in the mare's soft dark eyes. She loved the child. Under other circumstances she did not leave her stable willingly, for her joints were stiff and she gladly fell into sluggish dreams as she stood at her crib, her eyes half closed and her lower lip hanging; but when Sabine came to take her out, she felt a thrill run through her old body, and she entered into a curious kind of nervous excitement. When the girl rode her, she exerted herself to the utmost in order to imitate, in gait and bearing, the style of her youth. People thought it was both painful and ludicrous to look at; Sabine was the only one who completely understood Lady Macbeth and loved her for her nervous behavior's sake.

The horse's friendly and almost tender sympathy calmed Sabine. She avidly drank in the stable's familiar and beautiful smells and all its deep serenity, which had so often given her consolation and comfort. In a caress, she passed her hand over Lady Macbeth's silky neck, and chatted with the horse in her usual intimate way. The cheerful shine came back   [p. 98]   into her eyes, and she felt that she was big and strong, the master of her fate. She quickly leaned her cheek against Lady Macbeth's head and whispered quite gently in the direction of the horse's large mild eye: "I can't do anything else, you see. You understand what I mean."

Unnoticed, a rowboat was shoved off from the landing place of Lintula estate; it disappeared into the veil of rain between the holms. The old pale-rose house with the white pillars had lost its treasure. Hereafter no one would creep out onto the upper balcony, there to lose herself in contemplation of the arm of the lake, which mirrored the sunset in the water between its inlets, filled with a rank growth of reeds and edged with the weeping birch. No one would fill her impassioned soul with the sight of the brooding rocks, with their dark rust color, and the gnarled pines in the crevices of the opposite bank. No one would catch the sound of the wild wood-doves' cooing beneath the high and lonely treetops.

The river had received the lonely child into its protecting arms.