And in the forest-hut blind Bruno awoke the next morning, and as he went towards the city with his baskets, an armed band dashed past him with the clatter of arms and spurs: and he heard his kinsman's voice in harsh tones of command, and the old bitterness was deep in his heart, as he said to himself, "'Apparebit repentina.' All wrongs shall be avenged at last. Better to suffer and be avenged, than to be in Paradise and see that villain smile there too, his sins forgotten and unpunished."
The next morning, when the miser awoke and found all in the familiar room as usual—the great iron chests solid as ever, his housekeeper Griselda's voice as sharp as ever when she called him—he wondered a little at his own panic the night before.
"My master's daughter made a foolish marriage, poor thing!" he said to himself, "and I am not bound to repair other people's mistakes; and if I had yielded her a little more from what her father left, she would probably only have wasted it. It is after all safer in my keeping than in hers. And if the monk was right, and she does not come in for the reversion I have secured in my will, that is not my fault; we are not to know the times and the seasons. However, there is certainly a good deal about feeding the hungry. I will tell Griselda to boil down those mutton bones that were left yesterday into broth for the poor woman; she had a cough."
But when he came down to breakfast, Griselda laughed scornfully at the suggestion, and said she had given the bones to the dog; and Griselda being the one being in the world who represented public opinion to him, and of whom he was afraid, because her scornful honesty was essential to him, the master's widowed daughter went without the broth. But Gaffer Gregory trusted the intention would go to his credit. He, indeed, went himself to market, intending to get a larger joint, so as to have some to spare; but mutton was dear that week, so he waited till the next market day. It was not likely the End would come before that.
Habit was stronger than terror. The market day close at hand still preponderated over any day even a year off.
Gammer Trüdchen had hardly been seated an hour at her stall, the next morning, when one of her cronies came with a whisper that the Burgomaster's young wife had been seen, quite late one night that week, in one of the lowest lanes of the city, shrouded close in her hood, and evidently not at all wishing to be recognized.
Trüdchen had a twinge about evil-speaking, and the monk's warning; but after all, as she said to her crony, if somebody did not look after the morals of the place, what would become of them? The Burgomaster's young wife was fair as a lily, and had the reputation of a saint, although "she had always had her doubts, for those were just the dangerous people, who must be watched, and must not be suffered to impose on others. And besides, it might be well to teach men like the Burgomaster to choose their brides in their own town, and not go roaming to strange cities to bring home young women of whose family no one knew anything."
And so an evil rumour was hatched no one knew how, and a buzz of malignant murmurs began to gather around the sweet unconscious young stranger; and when, a month afterwards, the same old crony who had brought the whisper, came to tell Gammer Trüdchen that the Burgomaster's wife had been visiting a poor sick fellow-townswoman of her own that evening, and did not wish her husband to know because of his fear of infection for her, the one evil whisper had hatched a swarm which no contradiction of Gammer Trüdchen's could silence.