She tore them out of his hand with a violent gesture, and, lifting up her dress to a good height, she slipped them into her miserable ragged petticoat.
The last thing had still to be settled. Even if Paul Schlieben felt certain that nobody there would inquire about the child any more, the formalities had to be observed. Loosening his pencil from his watch-chain--for where was ink to come from there?--he drew up the mother's deed of surrender on a leaf from his pocketbook. The vestryman signed it as witness. Then the woman put her three crosses below; she had learnt to write once, but had forgotten it again.
"There!" Paul Schlieben rose from the hard bench on which he had sat whilst writing with a sigh of relief. Thank goodness, now everything was settled, now the vestryman had only to procure him the birth and baptismal certificates and send them to him. "Here--this is my address. And here--this is for any outlay." He covertly pressed a couple of gold coins into the old man's hand, who smiled when he felt them there.
Well, now they would take the boy with them at once? he supposed.
Käte, who had been standing motionless staring at the mother with big eyes as though she could not understand what she saw, woke up. Of course they would take the child with them at once, she would not leave it a single hour longer there. And she took it quickly out of the cradle, pressed it caressingly to her bosom and wrapped it up in the warm wide cloak she was wearing. Now it was her child that she had fought such a hard battle for, had snatched from thousands of dangers, her darling, her sweet little one.
Little Jean-Pierre's sister and brothers stood there in silence with eyes wide open. Had they understood that their brother was going away, going for ever? No, they could not have understood it, otherwise they would have shown how grieved they were. Their big eyes were only interested in the bread on the table.
Paul Schlieben pitied the little ones greatly--they would remain there in their wretchedness, their hunger, their poverty. He stuck a present into the hands of all four. None of the four thanked him for it, but their small fingers clasped the money tightly.
The woman did not thank him either. When the strange lady took Jean-Pierre out of the cradle--she had seen it without looking in that direction--she had started. But now she stood motionless near the empty cradle, on the spot where the axe had fallen out of her right hand before with a loud noise, looking on in silence whilst Jean-Pierre was being wrapped up in the soft cloak. She had nothing to give him.
Paul Schlieben had feared there would be a scene at the very last in spite of the mother's indifference--she surely could not remain so totally void of feeling, when they carried her youngest child away with them?--but the woman remained calm. She stood there motionless, her left hand pressed against the place in her skirt where she felt the pocket. Did not that money in her pocket--Paul felt very disturbed--give the lie to all the traditions about a mother's love? And still--the woman was so demoralised by her great poverty, half brutalised in the hard struggle for her daily bread, that even the feeling she had for the child she had borne had vanished. Oh, what a different mother Käte would be to the child now. And he pushed his wife, who had the little one in her arms, towards the door, in his tender anxiety for her.
Let them only get away, it was not a nice place to be in.