“Is it open?”
“No! but Mathew has the key. He has never let us go in. I will spring before and fetch the key;” and Dami withdrew his hand and sprang before. Amrie followed, as though fettered to the hand of the uncle, who now spoke with more confidence and interest. He told her as an excuse that he had an expensive family; that he and his wife with difficulty supported five children. But now, he informed her, a man who possessed large forests in America had offered him a free passage, and after the forest was felled, a good number of acres from the best land as a free possession. In gratitude to God, who had thus provided for him and his children, he had immediately thought it would be a good deed to take his brother’s children with him. He would not constrain them, and would take them only with the condition that they could look upon him as their second father.
Amrie, after these words, looked earnestly at him. If she only could make out to love this man! But she feared him, and knew not what to do. That he had fallen, as it were, out of the clouds so suddenly, and desired her love, only excited her opposition to him.
“Where then is thy wife?” asked Amrie. She might well feel that a woman had been milder and more suitable for this business.
“I will tell thee, honestly,” answered the uncle, “that my wife will have nothing to do in this affair. She says, ‘she will say nothing for nor against it.’ She is a little harsh, but only at first; and if you are amiable towards her, you are so sensible that you can wind her round your finger. If any thing should occur that you do not like, think that you are with your father’s brother, and tell me alone, and I will do all I can to help you. But you will see that now you begin first to live.”
Amrie stood with tears in her eyes, and yet she could say nothing. She felt this man was wholly strange to her. His voice, like her father’s, moved her; but when she looked at him, she would willingly have fled from him.
Dami came with the key. Amrie would have taken it from him, but he would not give it up. With the peculiar pedantic conscientiousness of a child, he said he had sacredly promised Mathew’s wife that he would give the key only to his uncle. He received it, and to Amrie it appeared as though a magical secret was to open when the key, for the first time, rattled and then turned in the lock. The bolt bent back and the door opened. A peculiar tomb-like coldness breathed from the dark room that had formerly served as a kitchen. Upon the hearth lay the cold heaped ashes, and upon the door were written the first letters of “Caspar Melchior Balthes.” Underneath, the date of the death of the parents written with chalk. Amrie read it aloud. “Father wrote it,” said Dami. “Look, the 8’s are made just as you make them; such as the teacher will not suffer. Look, from right to left.” Amrie winked at him to be quiet. To her it was fearful and sinful that Dami should talk so lightly here where it seemed to her like a church; yes, as though they were in eternity; quite out of the world, and yet in it. She opened the door. The little room was dark and gloomy; for the shutters were closed, and only a trembling sunbeam pressed through a crack, and fell upon an angel’s head upon the door of the stove, so that the angel appeared to laugh. Amrie, frightened, could scarcely stand, but when she looked again, her uncle had opened one of the windows, and the warm air from without pressed into the room. There was no furniture in the apartment, except a bench nailed to the wall. There had the mother spun, and there had she pressed the little hands of Amrie together, and taught her to knit.
“So, children, now we will go,” said the uncle. “There is nothing good here. Come with me to the baker’s. I will buy for both a white loaf; or would you rather have a cracknel?”
“No, no, stay a little longer,” said Amrie, always stroking the place where her mother had sat. Then pointing to a white spot on the wall she said in a low voice, “There hung our cuckoo clock, and the soldier’s reward of our father; and there is the place where the skeins of yarn hung, that our mother spun. She could spin finer than Brown Mariann. Yes, Mariann said so herself; always quicker, and more out of a pound of wool than any other; and all so even, there was not a single knot in it; and see there is the ring there upon the wall. That was beautiful when she had finished a skein. If I, at that time, had been old enough, I would never have consented that they should sell my mother’s distaff; it was my inheritance. But there was nobody to care for us. Oh, dear mother! oh, dear father! if you only knew how we are thrust about, it would make you sorry even in your blessedness!”
Amrie began to weep aloud, and Dami wept with her. Even the uncle dried a tear, and pressed them to go now. It seemed to him that this unnecessary heart-rending did neither himself nor the children any good. But Amrie said decidedly, “If you go now, I will not go with you.”