CHAPTER XVIII
THE FIRST HEARTH-FIRE
Meanwhile Amrei went on, wrapped in thought. Her manner showed the effect of the self-reliance she had learned to practice in her childhood. It was not for nothing that she had been accustomed to solve riddles, and that from day to day she had struggled with life's difficulties. The whole strength of the character she had acquired was firmly and securely implanted within her. Without further question, as a man goes forward to meet a necessity, quiet and self-possessed, so did she, boldly and of good courage, go on her way.
She had not gone far when she saw a farmer sitting by the wayside, with a red cane between his legs; and on this cane he was resting his two hands and his chin.
"God greet you," said Amrei. "Are you enjoying a rest?"
"Yes. Where are you going?"
"Up yonder to the farm. Are you going there too? If so, you may lean on me."
"Yes, that is the way," said the old man with a grin. "Thirty years ago I should have cared more about it, if such a pretty girl had said that to me; I should have jumped like a colt."
"But to those who can jump like colts one doesn't say such things," replied Amrei, laughing.
"You are rich," said the old man. He seemed to like to talk, and smiled as he took a pinch of snuff out of his horn snuff-box.
"How can you tell that I am rich?"
"Your teeth are worth ten thousand guilders. There's many a one would give ten thousand guilders to have them in his mouth."
"I have no time for jesting. Now, God keep you!"
"Wait a little. I'll go with you—but you must not walk too fast." Amrei carefully helped the old man to his feet, and he remarked:
"You are strong,"—and in his teasing way he made himself more helpless and heavier than he actually was. As they walked along, he asked:
"To whom are you going at the farm?"
"To the farmer and his wife."
"What do you want of them?"
"That I shall tell them."
"Well, if you want anything of them, you had better turn back at once. The mistress would give you something, but she has no authority to, and the farmer, he's tight—he's got a board on his neck, and a stiff thumb into the bargain."
"I don't want anything given me—I bring them something," said Amrei.
On the way they met an older man going to the field with his scythe; and the old farmer walking with Amrei called out to him with a queer blink in his eyes:
"Do you know if miserly Farmer Landfried is at home?"
"I think so, but I don't know," answered the man with the scythe, and he turned away into the field.
There was a peculiar twitching in his face. And now, as he walked along, his shoulders seemed to Amrei to be shaking up and down; he was evidently laughing. Amrei looked at her companion's face and saw the roguery in it. Suddenly she recognized in the withered features the face of the man to whom she had given a jug of water, years ago, on the Holderwasen. Snapping her fingers softly, she said to herself:
"Stop! Now I know!" And then she added aloud: "It's wrong of you to speak in that way of the Farmer to a stranger like me, whom you don't know, and who might be a relative of his. And I'm sure it is not true what you say. They do say, to be sure, that the Farmer is tight; but when you come right down to it, I dare say he has an honest heart, and simply doesn't like to make an outcry about it when he does a good deed. And a man who has such good children as his are said to be, must be a good man himself. And perhaps he likes to make himself out bad before the world, simply because he doesn't care what others think of him; and I don't think the worse of him for that."
"You have not left your tongue behind you. Where do you come from?"
"Not from this neighborhood—from the Black Forest."
"What's the name of the place?"
"Haldenbrunn."
"Oh! Have you come all the way from there on foot?"
"No, somebody let me ride with him. He's the son of the Farmer yonder—a good, honest man."
"Ah, at his age I should have let you ride with me too!"
They had now come to the farm, and the old man went with Amrei into the room and cried:
"Mother, where are you?"
The wife came out of another room, and Amrei's hands trembled; she would gladly have fallen upon her neck—but she could not—she dared not.
Then the Farmer, bursting into laughter, said:
"Just think, dame! Here's a girl from Haldenbrunn, and she has something to say to Farmer Landfried and his wife, but she won't tell me what it is. Now do you tell her what my name is."
"Why, that's the Farmer himself," said the woman; and she welcomed the old man home by taking his hat from his head and hanging it up on a peg over the stove.
"Do you see now?" said the old man to Amrei, triumphantly. "Now say what you like."
"Won't you sit down," said the mother, pointing to a chair.
Amrei drew a deep breath and began:
"You may believe me when I say that no child could have thought more about you than I have done, long ago, long before these last days. Do you remember Josenhans, by the pond, where the road turns off to Endringen?"
"Surely, surely!" said the two old people.
"Well, I am Josenhans's daughter!"
"Why, I thought I knew you!" exclaimed the old woman. "God greet you!" She held out her hand to Amrei, and said: "You have grown to be a strong, comely girl. Now tell me what has brought you here."
"She rode part of the way with our John," the Farmer interposed. "He'll be here directly."
The mother gave a start. She had an inkling of something to come, and reminded her husband that, when John went away, she had thought of the Josenhans children.
"And I have a remembrance from both of you," said Amrei, and she brought out the necklace and the piece of money wrapped in paper. "You gave me that the last time you were in our village."
"See there—you lied to me, you told me that you had lost it," cried the
Farmer to his wife, reproachfully.
"And here," continued Amrei, holding out to him the groschen in its paper cover; "here's the piece of money you gave me when I was keeping geese on the Holderwasen, and gave you a drink from my jug."
"Yes, yes, that's all right! But what does it all mean? What you've had given you, you may keep," said the Farmer.
Amrei stood up and said:
"I have one thing to ask you. Let me speak quite freely for a few minutes, may I?"
"Yes, why not?"
"Look—your John wanted to take me with him and bring me here as a maid. At any other time I would have been glad to serve in your house, indeed, rather than anywhere else. But now it would have been dishonest; and to people to whom I want to be honest all my life long, I won't come for the first time with a lie in my mouth. Now everything must be as open as the day. In a word, John and I love each other from the bottom of our hearts, and he wants to have me for his wife."
"Oho!" cried the Farmer, and he stood up so quickly that one could easily see that his former helplessness had been only feigned. "Oho!" he called out again, as if one of his horses were running away.
But his wife put out her hand and held him, saying:
"Let her finish what she has to say."
And Amrei went on:
"Believe me, I have sense enough to know that one cannot take a girl, out of pity, for a daughter-in-law. You can give me something, you can give me a great deal, but to take me for your daughter-in-law out of pity, is something you cannot do, and I do not wish you to do it. I haven't a groschen of money—oh, yes, the groschen you gave me on the Holderwasen I still have—for nobody would take it for a groschen," she added, turning to the Farmer, who could not repress a smile. "I have nothing of my own, nay, worse than that—I have a brother who is strong and healthy, but for whom I have to provide. I have kept geese, and I have been the most insignificant person in the village, and all that is true. But nobody can say the least harm of me, and that, too, is true. And as far as those things which are really given to people by God are concerned, I could say to any princess: 'I don't put myself one hair's breadth behind you, if you have seven golden crowns on your head.' I would rather have somebody else say these, things for me, for I am not fond of talking about myself. But all my life I have been obliged to speak for myself, and today, for the last time, I do it, when life and death are at stake. By that I mean—don't misunderstand me—if you won't have me, I shall go quietly away; I shall do myself no harm, I shall not jump into the water, or hang myself. I shall merely look for a new position, and thank God that such a good man once wanted to have me for his wife; and I'll consider that it was not God's will that it should be so—" Amrei's voice faltered, and her form seemed to dilate. And then her voice grew stronger again, as she summoned all her firmness and said, solemnly: "But prove to yourselves—ask yourselves in your deepest conscience, whether what you do is God's will.—I have nothing more to say."
Amrei sat down. All three were silent for a time, and then the old man said:
"Why, you can preach like a clergyman."
But the mother dried her eyes with her apron, and said:
"Why not? Clergymen have not more than one mind and one heart!"
"Yes, that's you!" cried the old man with a sneer. "There's something of a parson in you, too. If any one comes to you with a few speeches like that, you're cooked directly!"
"And you talk as if you would not be cooked or softened till you die," retorted the wife.
"Oh, indeed!" said the old man bitterly. "Now look you, you saint from the lowlands; you're bringing a fine sort of peace into my house; you have managed already to make my wife turn against me—you have captured her already. Well, I suppose you can wait until death has carried one off, and then you can do what you please."
"No!" exclaimed Amrei, "I won't have that! Just as little as I wish that John should take me for his wife without your blessing, just so little do I wish that the sin should be in our hearts, that we should both be waiting for you to die. I scarcely knew my parents, I cannot remember them—I only love them as one loves God, without ever having seen Him. But I also know what it is to die. Last night I closed Black Marianne's eyes; I did what she asked me to do all my life long, and yet now that she is dead, I sometimes think: How often you were impatient and bitter toward her, and how many a service you might have done her! And now she is lying there, and it is all over; you can do nothing more for her, and you can't crave her forgiveness for anything.—I know what it is to die, and I will not have—"
"But I will!" cried the old man; and he clenched his fists and set his teeth. "But I will!" he shouted again. "You stay here, and you belong to us! And now, whosoever likes may come, and let him say what he pleases. You, and no one but you, shall have my John!"
The mother ran to the old man and embraced him; and he, not being accustomed to it, called out in surprise:
"What are you doing?"
"Giving you a kiss. You deserve it, for you are a better man than you make yourself out to be."
The old man, who all this time had a pinch of snuff between his fingers which he did not want to waste, took it quickly, and then said:
"Well, I don't object," but he added: "But now I shall dismiss you, for I have much younger lips to kiss, which taste better. Come here, you disguised parson."
"I'll come, but first you must call me by name."
"Well, what is your name?"
"You need not know that, for you can give me a name yourself—you know what name I mean."
"You're a clever one! Well, if you like, come here, daughter-in-law.
Does that name suit you?"
In reply Amrei flung herself upon him.
"Am I not to be asked at all?" complained the mother with a radiant face.
The old man had become quite saucy in his joy. He took Amrei by the hand, and asked, in a satirical imitation of a clergyman's voice:
"Now I demand of you, honorable Cordula Catherine, called Dame
Landfried, will you take this—" and he whispered to the girl aside:
"What is your Christian name?"
"Amrei."
Then the Farmer continued in the same tone:
"Will you take this Amrei Josenhans, of Haldenbrunn to be your daughter-in-law, and never let her have a word to say, as you do to your husband, feed her badly, abuse her, oppress her, and as they say, bully her generally?"
The old fellow seemed beside himself; some strange revulsion had taken place within him. And while Amrei hung around the mother's neck, and would not let her go, the old man struck his red cane on the table and cried:
"Where's that good-for-nothing, John? Here's a fellow who sends his bride for us to take care of, and goes wandering about the world himself! Who ever heard of such a thing?"
Amrei then tore herself away, and said that the wagoner, or some one else, must be sent at once to the mill to get John, who was waiting there. The father declared that he ought to be left in suspense in the mill for at least three hours; that should be his punishment for having hidden in such a cowardly way behind a petticoat. And when he came home, he should wear a woman's hood; in fact, he wouldn't have him in the house, for when John came, he, the father, would have nothing of the bride at all, and it made him angry already to think of the foolish way in which they would carry on together.
Meanwhile the mother managed to slip away and send the quick-footed wagoner to the mill.
And now the mother thought that Amrei ought to have some refreshment. She wanted to cook an omelette immediately, but Amrei begged to be allowed to light the first fire in the house that was to prepare something for herself, and asked that she might cook something for her parents too. They let her have her way, and the two old people went with her into the kitchen. She knew how to manage it all so cleverly, seeing at a glance where everything was, and hardly requiring to ask a single question, that the old Farmer kept nodding to his wife, and said at last:
"She can do housekeeping like singing at sight; she can read it all off from the page, like the new schoolmaster."
The three stood by the fire, which was blazing merrily, when John came in; and the fire was not blazing more merrily on the hearth than was inward happiness blazing in the eyes of all three. The hearth and its fire became a holy altar, surrounded by worshippers, who, however, only laughed and teased one another.