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Page 8
"Well, well," replied the master of the house with a smile, "you have
your trials with Undine, and I have mine with the lake. The lake
often beats down my dams, and breaks the meshes of my nets, but for
all that I have a strong affection for it, and so have you, in spite
of your mighty crosses and vexations, for our graceful little child.
Is it not true?"
"One cannot be very angry with her," answered the old lady, as she
gave her husband an approving smile.
That instant the door flew open, and a fair girl, of wondrous beauty,
sprang laughing in, and said, "You have only been making a mock of
me, father; for where now is the guest you mentioned?"
The same moment, however, she perceived the knight also, and
continued standing before the young man in fixed astonishment.
Huldbrand was charmed with her graceful figure, and viewed her lovely
features with the more intense interest, as he imagined it was only
her surprise that allowed him the opportunity, and that she would
soon turn away from his gaze with increased bashfulness. But the
event was the very reverse of what he expected; for, after looking at
him for a long while, she became more confident, moved nearer, knelt
down before him, and while she played with a gold medal which he wore
attached to a rich chain on his breast, exclaimed,
"Why, you beautiful, you kind guest! how have you reached our poor
cottage at last? Have you been obliged for years and years to wander
about the world before you could catch one glimpse of our nook? Do
you come out of that wild forest, my beautiful knight?"
The old woman was so prompt in her reproof as to allow him no time to
answer. She commanded the maiden to rise, show better manners, and
go to her work. But Undine, without making any reply, drew a little
footstool near Huldbrand's chair, sat down upon it with her netting,
and said in a gentle tone--
"I will work here."
The old man did as parents are apt to do with children to whom they
have been over-indulgent. He affected to observe nothing of Undine's
strange behaviour, and was beginning to talk about something else.
But this the maiden did not permit him to do. She broke in upon him,
"I have asked our kind guest from whence he has come among us, and he
has not yet answered me."
"I come out of the forest, you lovely little vision," Huldbrand
returned; and she spoke again:
"You must also tell me how you came to enter that forest, so feared
and shunned, and the marvellous adventures you met with in it; for
there is no escaping without something of this kind."
Huldbrand felt a slight shudder on remembering what he had witnessed,
and looked involuntarily toward the window, for it seemed to him that
one of the strange shapes which had come upon him in the forest must
be there grinning in through the glass; but he discerned nothing
except the deep darkness of night, which had now enveloped the whole
prospect. Upon this he became more collected, and was just on the
point of beginning his account, when the old man thus interrupted
him:
"Not so, sir knight; this is by no means a fit hour for such
relations."
But Undine, in a state of high excitement, sprang up from her little
stool and cried, placing herself directly before the fisherman: "He
shall NOT tell his story, father? he shall not? But it is my will:--
he shall!--stop him who may!"
Thus speaking, she stamped her little foot vehemently on the floor,
but all with an air of such comic and good-humoured simplicity, that
Huldbrand now found it quite as hard to withdraw his gaze from her
wild emotion as he had before from her gentleness and beauty. The
old man, on the contrary, burst out in unrestrained displeasure. He
severely reproved Undine for her disobedience and her unbecoming
carriage towards the stranger, and his good old wife joined him in
harping on the same string.
By these rebukes Undine was only excited the more. "If you want to
quarrel with me," she cried, "and will not let me hear what I so much
desire, then sleep alone in your smoky old hut!" And swift as an
arrow she shot from the door, and vanished amid the darkness of the
night.
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