“Ah! well, he was always very merry through it all”, so they began the story, and that was the only part where they did not tell him the whole truth, because they knew how greatly pleased he was that people should think he had been merry in the height of his misfortune.
They even told him that the illness of his wife was a mere pretext in order to coax him home again, and that it had succeeded.
“Ah! well,” said old Loyka about his wife, “she suffered quite enough, poor thing, when she was here by herself.”
And thus old Loyka got himself home once more.
CHAPTER XII
WHAT more have I to relate?
Frank again began to rove away from the farm and, of course, they knew to a hair whither he went. But it was not true exactly as they thought it: that is to say, when he went to the cemetery he went with a heavy heart as in the old days when he carried hither the measure for his grandfather’s grave. And now he carried thither a kind of measure, the measure of his own heart-was it that he would order a grave for it? By no means. In order that he might lay it in a heart softer than any dust and sweeter than any flower.
And yet, indeed, the path was as toilsome as if he were going to bury his heart in the grave. Enchantment seemed to murmur around him and shot about his path in the mist and the clear weather: his heart beat with a presentiment of rapture, and his hand vacillated—so it will be to the end of the world.
When he came to the cemetery he posted himself by the wicket-gate, as on that day long past, and gazed eagerly. And he saw the great ruddy cross and on it the white-iron figure of the Christus, then lesser crosses, then graves without crosses, some green, some flowery, some half sunk in the ground.
And there was in that cemetery something vast and incomprehensible, something that we can never analyse, something vast as a sea, chilling as winter’s ice and snow. But to-day the breath of winter did not issue from its gates, rather a portion of the spring seemed to hover over that dwelling-place of the dead.
