THE FAR-OFF SPIRIT.
Farmer Rodel, whose house, ornamented with red striped beams, and a
pious sentence, enclosed in the form of a heart, stood not far from
the Josenhans dwelling, had himself appointed by the Mayor, guardian
of the orphan children. His guardianship consisted in nothing more
than in preserving the unsold clothes of their father, and when he met
or passed one of the children in the street he would ask, “Have you
clothes enough?” and, without waiting to be answered, he would pass
on. Yet the children felt a strange pride in having that great farmer
called their guardian. They often stood by the great house and looked
longingly at it, as though they expected something, they knew not what,
and they sat often down by the ploughs and harrows at the corner of the
shed and read over again and again the pious sentence on the house. The
house spoke to them if all others were silent.
The Sunday before _All Souls_, the children played again before
their parents’ deserted house. They seemed, as it were, banished to
this place. There came along the wife of Farmer Landfried from the
Hochdorfer Road. She had a red silk umbrella under her arm and a dark
hymn-book in her hand. She had come to make her last visit in the place
of her birth. Yesterday, her servant in a four-horse wagon had taken
all her furniture out of the village, and early this morning with her
husband and three children she would move to their lately purchased
estate in the far-off district of Allgäu. When at some distance she
nodded to the children; but they saw nothing but the melancholy
expression upon the face of the woman. As she now stood by them she
said, “God bless you, children! what do you do here? to whom do you
belong?”
“To the Josenhans,” answered Amrie, pointing towards the house.
“Oh! you poor children,” she cried, striking her hands together; “I
should have known you, lass! exactly so did your mother look, when
we went to school together. We were good comrades and friends, and
your father worked with my cousin, Farmer Rodel. I know all about
you--but tell me, Amrie, why have you no shoes on? You will take cold
in this wet weather. Say to Mariann that Farmer Landfried’s wife, from
Hochdorf, said it was not right to let you run about in this manner;
no--you need say nothing. I will speak to her. But, Amrie, you must now
be sensible and prudent, and take care of yourself. Think of it--what
if thy mother knew that in this time of the year you went about
barefoot!”
The child looked earnestly at the woman as though she would say, “Does
not my mother then know it?”
“Ah, that is the worst of it,” she said, answering the thought of
the child, “that you can never know what good and honest people
your parents were; _that_ must elder people tell you. Think of it,
Amrie, that it will make your parents happy in heaven when they hear
people say, ‘There are the Josenhans children, they are a proof of
all goodness. There they see plainly the blessing of good and honest
parents.’”
At these last words big tears ran down the cheeks of the farmer’s wife.
Painful emotions (that had, indeed, a wholly different source), at
these thoughts and words, made them continue to flow. She laid her hand
upon the head of the girl, who, at the sight of her tears, began to
weep violently. She felt that a good soul had turned towards her, and a
dawning belief that her parents were really lost became clearer to her.
The countenance of the women suddenly lighted. She raised her eyes
filled with tears to heaven and said, “_Thou_, good God, has sent this
thought to me!” Then she turned to the child and said, “Listen! I will
take you with me! My Lisbeth was taken from me at your age. Speak! will
you go with me to Allgäu, and always remain with me?”
“Yes,” said Amrie, resolutely.
She felt herself seized from behind, and a slight blow upon her
shoulder.
“You dare not,” said Dami, embracing her, and trembling from head to
foot.
“Be quiet,” said Amrie, “the good lady will take you also. Is it not
so?” she said, timidly. “My Dami may go with us?”
“No, child, that cannot be; I have boys enough at home.”
“Then I must remain here,” said Amrie, and took hold of her brother’s
hand.
There is sometimes in the soul an emotion where fever and frost
contend. It has been so with the stranger, and now she looked upon the
child with a species of relief. Through strong emotion, and influenced
by the purest benevolence, she would have undertaken a duty whose
significance and difficulty she had not sufficiently considered; and
especially as she did not know how her husband would take it. Now,
as the child herself refused, there intervened a sufficient reason;
all was clear again, and she turned quickly from the duty. She had
satisfied her heart by proposing it, and now that the objection came
not from herself, she had a kind of satisfaction in having _offered_,
without herself taking back her word.
“As you please,” said the stranger; “I will not urge you. Who knows?
perhaps it would be better that you should grow up first. It is well
to learn to suffer in youth; the good comes easier after we have
learnt the evil. Be only honest and good, and never forget that, on
account of your parents, as long as God spares my life you shall have
a shelter with me. Remember, if it does not go well with you, that you
are not left alone in the world. Think of the wife of Farmer Landfried,
in Zusmarshofen, in Allgäu. A word more. Don’t say in the village that
I would have taken you. It is the way with people--they would blame you
because you did not go--but it is as well so. Wait, I will give you
something to remember me by.” She sought in her pocket, then suddenly
putting her hand to her neck she drew out a five stringed garnet
necklace, to which there was fastened a Swedish ducat, and, throwing
the ornament over the neck of the child, she kissed her. Amrie looked
as one enchanted upon all these proceedings. “For thee, alas! I have
nothing,” she said to Dami, who stood with a little switch in his hand
which he continued to break into small pieces; “but I will send you
a pair of leather trousers of my John’s--they are not entirely new,
but you can wear them when you are taller. Now God protect you, dear
children! If it is possible I will come to see you again, Amrie. In
the mean time send Mariann to me in the church. Remember always to be
good, pray constantly for your parents, and never forget that you have
a protector in heaven and also upon earth.”
For convenience in walking she had turned up her outer garment; now,
at the entrance of the village, she let it down and went on with quick
steps without once turning back.
Amrie kept her face bent down in order to see the keepsake upon her
neck, but the necklace was too short. Dami was chewing the last piece
of his stick when his sister, observing tears in his eyes, said, “We
shall see--you will have the most beautiful pair of trousers in the
village.”
“I will not take them,” said Dami, and spit out the last piece of stick.
“And I will ask her to give you a knife. I will stay at home the whole
day; perhaps she will come to us.”
“Yes! if she were there already,” said Dami, without knowing what he
said. His anger, and the feeling of being rejected, had excited these
suspicious reproaches.
At the first stroke of the bell they hastened back to the village.
Amrie gave over, with few words, her new ornament into the hands of
Mariann, who said, “Thou art fortune’s child! I will take good care of
it. Now hasten to the church.”
During the service both children looked constantly at their new friend,
and when it was over they waited for her at the door of the church; but
the respectable matron was so surrounded by men and women, all claiming
her notice, that she could only turn in the circle to answer, sometimes
here, sometimes there; thus for the waiting glances of the children
she found no attention. She held Rose, the youngest daughter of Farmer
Rodel, by the hand. She was a year older than Amrie, and thrust herself
constantly before the latter, as though pressingly to take her place by
the matron. Had, then, the respectable matron eyes only for Amrie by
the last house in the solitude of the village, but in the midst of the
people she did not know her? Amrie was frightened, when this thought
just dawning in her mind was spoken aloud by Dami; but while she, with
her brother, followed at a distance the great crowd that surrounded
the matron, she gave utterance herself to the same thought. The matron
vanished at last into the house of Farmer Rodel, and the children
turned quietly back.
“When she comes,” said Dami, “tell her that she must go to
Krappenzacher and tell him that he must treat me better.”
Amrie nodded, and the children separated, each to go to the house where
they had found shelter.
The fog that had been so great in the morning now came down in pouring
rain. The great red umbrella of Madam Landfried moved here and there
in the village, and the form that was under it could scarcely be seen.
Mariann had not met her, and at coming home she said, “She can come to
me--I shall not seek her again.”
The two children wandered out again, and sat down together upon the
threshold of their parents’ house. They waited silently, and again the
thought came to them, that their parents would never return to them.
Dami would count how many drops fell from the roof. But they came all
too quickly, and he shouted out at once, “A thousand million.”
“She must pass here as she goes home,” said Amrie, “and we will call to
her. Only cry out at the same time with me, and then she will speak to
us again.”
So said Amrie, for the children waited here only for the Landfried to
pass.
A whip snapped in the village; they heard the quick step of a horse
upon the road, and a carriage rolled by. Their friend sat within it.
“Our father and mother will come in a carriage to fetch us,” said Dami.
Amrie cast a melancholy glance at her brother. “Do not chatter so,” she
said. As she turned again, the wagon was close to them, and some one
nodded from beneath the red umbrella. It rolled on, only Mathew’s dog
barked after it, and made as though he would seize the spokes of the
wheels with his teeth. At the fish-pond he turned back, barked once
more, and then slipped into the house.
“Hurrah! she has gone,” cried Dami with triumph. “That was the
Landfried. Did not you know Farmer Rodel’s black horse?”
“Don’t forget my leather trousers,” he shrieked with all the strength
of his lungs, although the wagon had already vanished in the valley,
and was creeping up the little height of the Holder Meadow. The
children turned back silently to the village.
Who can tell how this bitter experience struck a tiny root into the
inner being of a child, and what may hereafter spring from it? Other
feelings may immediately overpower the consciousness of this heavy
disappointment, but the bitter root has struck into the soul.
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