Katharine, the maid, had the baby with her in her own room. She
understood the care of children; in her younger days she had been a
nurse on a nobleman's estate. That was a long while ago. Katharine was
now old and thin and worn out, but she had not forgotten about nursing.
Indeed she handled the blacksmith's son with the same care and
tenderness with which, in her youth, she had tended the child of her
aristocratic employers. Ever since the evening when he was born she had
kept the boy with her; for it was on that very evening that the
mother's lingering death began. The doctor came from Waltheim, for the
smith himself brought him; but he could do no good. "Your wife is like
a bit of porcelain," said he. "Such a woman cannot stand anything."
"Yes--yes!" said Stephen, passing his hand through his thick hair.
They were standing in the living room, talking together.
"Stephen!" came Maria's feeble, anxious voice from the next room.
He went into the bedroom with his heavy tread which he did not know how
to subdue. "What is it?" he asked.
She held out her hand, as if to signify that he should come nearer.
Then he came to the bedside, but his bearing was still exactly as it
had been ever since the evening when his brother Ludwig left home.
"What--what is the baby's name going to be?" she asked tremulously.
"Haven't I told you already?" he answered, looking her straight in the
face without wincing.
"Not--not that name," she begged. "Don't do that to the child."
He turned carelessly away, as if to leave the room. The doctor stood on
the threshold with his hat and stick in his hand.
"Not--not that name, Stephen," begged the sick woman.
"You must not excite her," the doctor whispered to the smith. Maria
interrupted. "You speak to him, Sir," she gasped out, more and more
excited. "He is going to call the boy Cain."
The doctor came near laughing. "You'll not think of doing such a
foolish thing," said he to Fausch.
The smith stood there with his hands in his pockets. He went back into
the living room without answering. The doctor followed him. "Give up
your folly! Don't make your wife anxious! As to--the name--it would not
do at all, such a name," he said persuasively.
The smith stood and let the words pass over his head indifferently,
just as he might have let the rain drip down his back. Once only he
spoke: "What one is, that he must be called," said he.
"You're like a bull," said the doctor angrily. "You have a right to
send the child out of the house, but you have no right to disgrace it."
A sound of sobbing was heard from the bedroom. The doctor called the
maid, who hurried in.
"You're like a bull," he repeated to the smith. "Your violence will be
the death of your wife."
Stephen Fausch answered never a word. He turned his face fully toward
the doctor--his face with one empty eye socket and one keen black
eye--and stood there as if he had nailed himself fast to the spot,
stood there like a bull, as the doctor had said. The doctor left; he
saw that his reproofs had borne no fruit. When he was gone, Fausch went
back to his workshop.
Maria's child, poor wee man, lay in the maid's room. But Maria died two
days after the doctor's visit. She died late in the afternoon. All was
silent on the road, in the workshop below, and in the upper room, where
a few people from Waltheim went in and out, the minister, the doctor, a
distant relative of Maria's and the midwife, who had been taking care
of the dying woman.
The evening slowly changed to night. The silence in the smithy and all
around it grew still deeper. Only Katharine still moved about in her
soft old shoes that made almost no sound. Stephen Fausch rose from the
table, where he had been eating something late at night. He had left
the room dark, and it was as bare and gloomy as a cellar. With a few
steps he crossed the room, and opened the door of the bedroom where
Maria lay dead.
There was a great contrast between this room and the dark living room
from which he came. The moonlight streamed in through the bedroom
windows. The maid had put up freshly washed and starched white curtains
which gave a peculiar light. The cheap lace looked like marble openwork
artistically carved with a fine chisel. The moonlight lay clear and
dazzling, directly across the head of Maria's bed, which had been moved
out to the middle of the room. The faded blue-figured pillow case, and
the feather puff of the same color shimmered white, overlaid with a
faint, shadowy tracery, as if made expressly to throw into relief the
noble beauty of Maria's head. As Stephen Fausch entered, he cast a
timid glance at his dead wife: It was wonderful to see her lying on the
bed as if a halo shone around her. He closed the door quietly behind
him, folded his arms, and looked once more at the bed. Then he stepped
to the bedside, and stroked one of the dead woman's eyelids that had
not quite closed yet, looked at her thoughtfully once more, then lifted
her arms, which were bare almost to the shoulders and had been hidden
under the bedclothes, and laid them full length on the coverlet. Thus
he made Maria appear as if sleeping in endless peace, but he also
arranged her beautiful form so that its loveliness was seen more fully
than before. And when he had done all this, he stood once more with
folded arms by the bed and said aloud, quite calmly: "Yes, you were
beautiful, you!"
The moonlight streamed over the bed and over the dead woman, over her
pure, white brow, her cheeks, her delicate nose and her almost
transparent eyelids and then over her arms that lay so peacefully
relaxed on the bed coverings. Her face and the pure skin of her arms
were bathed in light as if in clear water. But something glistened like
fine pure gold in the light, and here and there outshone it. On Maria's
eyelids, above her brow, beside her cheeks, about her throat, and even
where the bedclothes scarcely hid her breast. It was the dead woman's
gleaming hair and eyelashes.
"Yes, you were beautiful," said Stephen Fausch. His eye wandered
over her form with an observant and thoughtful expression similar to
the look he had worn a few days before, when he was studying the beauty
of the bronze figure. But together with the strangely happy calm with
which he enjoyed his wife's beauty, the bull-like stubbornness and a
self-willed indifference plainly appeared on his brow and in his
bearing. This he had constantly shown to Maria, ever since he had
discovered her own and his brother's unfaithfulness. He had in fact
treated her as a servant. And yet Maria could have told how he had
formerly adored her, as one person rarely adores another. This she had
seen long ago when he used to visit her in her native village, which
was a couple of hours distant from his own house; he would come almost
daily, in all weathers, and often at night, in case he had had no free
time during the day! His persistence had finally prevailed and won her
consent. And afterward, during the years of their married life, before
Ludwig had come home! Although he was a rough fellow and had his bad
times, yet he had petted and indulged her--for he had loved her!
But--ever since the trouble with his brother, he had, as it were,
pushed her out of his way with his heavy shoes, and yet he held her
once more to her duties and kept her close to him, making her feel that
he was the master, whose heavy hand could drive her where he chose.
Even now, when she was dead, he would not let himself feel either pity
or grief for her; only the strange joy that he took in her beauty found
its place side by side with the sullen resentment that he felt against
her. This joy was so great, that after a while, he went slowly out into
the passageway and called his maid, beckoned to her, and with his ugly
hand, pointed toward the bed.
"See how beautiful she is," and smoothed a fold of the coverlet that
seemed to him to break the perfection of the picture.
The maid began to sob, indeed she had been crying all day. She was of
medium height, had a withered, sinewy neck, very red cheeks, and
kind-looking, watery blue eyes. She was poorly dressed, but more neatly
than the smith, or even than Maria when she was living. In the midst of
her weeping, she nodded to the smith, to show that she too thought
Maria beautiful; but when she saw no signs of grief in him, she stopped
crying in surprise, almost in fear. Shaking her head, she looked
furtively, and from one side at the smith, and soon went out of the
room, as if she were uncomfortable near him. Then Fausch too left the
room and slept that night on a leather covered couch in the living
room. He did not concern himself about the baby, in fact he had not
troubled himself about it since the maid had taken it into her care.
The next day he attended to what remained to be done for his wife and
for her last journey to Waltheim. As he was fulfilling the legal
requirements concerning his dead wife, it occurred to him that he might
save himself a journey by arranging what was necessary for the child at
the same time. So he went to the registrar's office and informed the
clerk, in one breath, of Maria's death and of the child's birth. The
clerk, a pale young peasant, who had not been long in the place, and
whose bad health hindered him from earning his living by hard work,
wrote down without delay the details concerning Maria: Her name, the
date of her birth, of her death and so forth. Then they came to the
child. "On this day and date was born ..."
The clerk looked up; as a newcomer he had already a nervous manner, and
besides, the smith stood as close to him as if he had to guide his hand
in writing.
Stephen Fausch gave the child's name: "Cain Fausch."
"Aren't you making a mistake?" asked the clerk.
"Cain," repeated the smith. His eye rested steadily on the small blank
spot in the register, where the name was to stand, as if he were
nailing it in place.
"But--but I can't write that down," said the clerk, blushing.
"Must I tell you again!" grumbled Stephen. "I suppose we could have
chosen a better, smoother sounding name in the parish."
He spoke slowly, looking steadfastly at the paper, with his head thrust
forward like a butting ram. The bashful clerk was completely
intimidated by this speech. He recollected that even a bad name is
still a name, that he, himself, would not have to bear that name, and
that the smith, as a father, had the right to name his son as he chose.
So he wrote the word in the little blank space on which Stephen's eye
rested.
Accordingly Maria's boy was named Cain, duly and lawfully. When the
name stood in black and white, in the book, Fausch nodded, quickly,
crossly, and indifferently, as if to say: "There it stands now! Of
course it would have to be there!" When the clerk went on writing:
"Legitimate son of Stephen Fausch and Maria his wife, _née_ Lehr," he
laughed aloud, but he made no objection.
After this business was finished, there remained only Fausch's errand
at the minister's to be done. The pastor was a stout, phlegmatic old
man. He did, indeed, look surprised, when the smith told him the name,
by which he wanted the child baptized, and thought, as the clerk had,
at first, that such a name would never do. But when Stephen grew
impatient, it occurred to the worthy man, that in any contest with
these hard-headed peasants during his long ministry, he had often got
the worst of it, and that strife always cost him too much trouble, and
his weight and his comfort did not permit him to make any resistance.
So he too wrote the name in the register: Cain Fausch.
Thus the smith had butted his head through two walls.
At home, in Katharine's attic room, lay the child, whose brow had just
been branded with a shameful mark, and slept and throve; for the maid
understood the care of babies.
During the next few days, Maria was carried away from the smithy to the
churchyard at Waltheim. This gave the village people plenty to talk
about. The name that had been given to Maria's boy was noised abroad,
and idle tongues found fresh work to do. Finally Stephen, the smith,
had the midwife carry the boy, firmly bound on his pillows, to the
church, while he and Katharine went also, as godparents. And now the
village gossips could scarcely find a moment's rest.
But all this too passed by. The smith carried on his work, grumbling,
obstinate and solitary, for indeed he had been a lonely man all his
life. He did not seem at all changed, and the fact that his wife was
gone forever seemed to have left no trace upon him. He never asked
about the child and saw it more rarely than ever. Toward his customers
he had his old self-willed manner, which angered some, and made others
laugh. He constantly had enough customers to have found an apprentice
useful, but he did not employ one. Perhaps the fact that his brother,
who used to help him, had behaved badly, made him dislike to hire
another helper. Nothing more was heard of Ludwig. From the day he left
Stephen's house, he had disappeared from his life.
Always grimy, bearing the signs of his work upon him, Stephen Fausch
went about, so that a stranger, seeing him for the first time, carried
away the impression of having seen a bit of darkness in the midst of
broad daylight. Yet summer was upon the land, and the smith, who seemed
so gloomy both in look and bearing, often sat, when his work was clone,
on the bench before his door and gazed, with a peculiar expression of
mingled surprise and admiration, at a beautiful sunset, a slowly
drifting cloud, or the increasing brilliancy of a star. He felt a
strange pleasure in looking at a well formed animal that passed along
the road, would watch a beautiful woman or would slowly follow a child,
the expression of whose face had struck him, would scrutinize it
earnestly, though without any special friendliness, and would then turn
thoughtfully away, keeping the same face in mind for some time
afterward and delighting in it.
One night at the close of one of these summer evenings Stephen saw his
wife's child again. It was just such a clear night as that on which
Maria had lain dead on her bed. Above the black band of woodland that
bounded the eastern sky with its irregular line, floated the moon, as a
white pond-lily gazes forth from the dark, still water. The smith had
been sitting in front of his house and was going thoughtfully upstairs
to his living room, when Katharine beckoned to him in the corridor. She
was quite excited, but evidently anxious as to what he might say.
"You must just see that--just once," said she and motioned toward the
ladder-like stairs that led to her attic room. He followed her almost
unconsciously, still lost in his own thoughts, and saw her withered
hand slide upward along the banister at every step, then saw it feel
over the bedroom door, and, pushing it back, cling to it as if nailed
there, and only then did it occur to him that he was standing on the
threshold of the maid's room, and that in the gray basket, under those
rather unsightly wrappings, lay the child.
Katharine now stepped into the room and went over to the basket bed.
She was trembling a little, perhaps embarrassed by her own daring. "He
looks exactly--like your wife--at the last," said she, smoothing the
child's coverings so carefully that he did not wake up, and handling
him just as tenderly as if he were the dainty little count whom she had
tended years before.
The thought was forced upon Fausch that the room looked just as the
other had, in which Maria lay dead. Only it was smaller. The room was
flooded with moonlight, and the radiance lay on the child's little bed
as it had on the bed of the dead mother. On the bright pillow lay the
little head, framed in soft, golden, downy hair. The face was full yet
delicate and the lines had the same beauty as the mother's face, as it
had lain there--also in the moonlight.
But in the living face there was something that enhanced its beauty
beyond that of the other face. The light was so clear that the rising
and falling of the chest was visible under the knitted jacket. Every
breath could be seen as it distended the delicate satiny cheeks and
passed from the little mouth; and at every inward breath the lips
parted like the calyx of a flower.
Fausch looked at the child for a while, and for a moment it seemed as
if the sight impressed him. He leaned forward involuntarily, as if in
joyful surprise, but then a curious change took place in him. His dark,
angular head came further forward, so that the moonlight struck his
square, stubborn brow. In the smith's face and bearing it was easy to
see how his own obstinacy was strangling the little pleasure that had
almost found its being.
"So that's the boy, is it? Cain Fausch?" said he. "You must be feeding
him well," he added, turning away and moving toward the stairs. As he
was starting to go down, he grumbled over his shoulder: "You needn't
have dragged me up here just for that."
The tears sprang to Katharine's eyes. She stared after him, her whole
face working. Then she went to the head of the stairs, and leaning
over, she called quickly after him: "Here, Fausch!"
"Yes?" he asked, pausing.
"No one must call him that when he is big enough to know--not that."
"What else then? See that you don't meddle! The name is short. And what
is, is!"
The smith stamped away toward the living room. In the clear moonlight
which now lay on the landing, Katharine could plainly see from above
his black woolly head. It passed through her mind that if one should
strike it with a sledge-hammer, the head would be the harder of the
two.
Nevertheless something of the picture that he had seen that evening
remained in Fausch's mind. The impression lingered for days and weeks,
and often occupied his thoughts. Once or twice he asked Katharine about
the boy: "What is the little fellow doing? Do you still feed him so
well?"