THE CONVENT.
Years glided by almost imperceptibly. Constantine and Peter had passed their examination in autumn, and were now destined to enter the convent at Rottweil. An event, however, which formed the theme of conversation for a long time to come, detained Peter at the village.
The second crop of grass had been mowed in the garden of the manor-house; the daisy--called here the wanton-flower because it presents itself so shamelessly without any drapery of leaves--stood solitary on the frost-covered sward; the cows browsed untethered; and the children gambolled here and there and assailed with sticks and stones the few scattered apples and pears which had been forgotten on the trees.
Peter sat on the butter-pear tree by the wall of the manor-house, near the corner turret. A bright golden pear was the goal of his ambition. Constantine, the marplot, wished to snatch the prize out of his grasp, and threw a stone at it. Suddenly Peter cried, "My eye! my eye!" and fell from the tree with the limb on which he had been sitting. The blood gushed from his eye, while Constantine stood beside him, crying and calling aloud for help.
Maurice the cowherd came running up. He saw the bleeding boy, took him on his shoulder, and carried him home. Constantine followed, and all the children brought up the rear. The train increased until they reached Hansgeorge's house: the latter was engaged in mending a wagon. At sight of his child bleeding and in a swoon he wrung his hands. Peter opened one eye; but the other only bled the faster.
"Who did this?" asked Hansgeorge, with clenched fists, looking from his wailing boy to the trembling Constantine.
"I fell from the tree," said Peter, closing the sound eye also. "Oh, God! Oh, God! my eye is running out."
Without waiting to hear more, Constantine ran off to Horb for young Erath, who now held the post of his late father. Finding that the doctor had gone out, he ran up and down before the house in unspeakable agony: he kept one hand pressed upon one of his eyes, as if to keep the misfortune of Peter vividly before his mind; he bit his lips till they bled; he wished to fly into the wide, wide world as a criminal; and again he wished to stay, to save what could be saved. He borrowed a saddle-horse, and hardly had the expected one come home when he hurried him on the horse and away; but he travelled faster on foot than the surgeon did on horseback. The eye was declared irretrievably lost. Constantine closed both his eyes: night and darkness seemed to fall upon him. Hansgeorge, with the tears streaming from his eyes, sat absorbed in bitter thoughts, and held the stump of his forefinger convulsively in the gripe of his other hand. He regarded the maiming of his child as a chastisement from God for having wantonly mutilated himself. He expended all the gentleness of which his nature was capable on poor unoffending Peter, who was doomed to expiate his father's sin. But Peter's mother--our old friend Kitty--was less humble, and said openly that she was sure that accursed Constantine was the fault of it all. She drove him out of the house, and swore she would break his collar-bone if he ever crossed the threshold again.
Peter persisted in his account of the matter, and Constantine suffered cruelly. He would run about in the field as if an evil spirit were at his heels, and when he saw a stone his heart would tremble. "Cain! Cain!" he often cried. He would fain have fled to the desert like him too, but always came home again.
It was three days before he ventured to see his companion. He prepared himself for a merciless beating; but the wrath of the mother had gone down, and no harm befell him.