“Ah, ha! and what do you know of my father?”
“You look like him, there is an astonishing resemblance in the forehead and eyes; his voice, too, was exactly like yours.”
“A chip of the old block.”
“Well, well. I see Adam before me....”
“Adam?” asked Ulrich, and the blood left his cheeks.
“Yes, his name was Adam,” she continued more boldly, with increasing vivacity: “there he stands. He wears a smith’s apron, a small leather cap rests on his fair hair. Auriculas and balsams stand in the bow-window. A roan horse is being shod in the market-place below.”
The soldier’s head swam, the happiest period of his childhood, which he had not recalled for a long time, again rose before his memory; he saw his father stand before him, and the woman, the sibyl yonder, had the eyes and mouth, not of his mother, but of the Madonna he had destroyed with his maul-stick. Scarcely able to control himself, he grasped her hand, pressing it violently, and asked in German:
“What is my name? And what did my mother call me?”
She lowered her eyes as if in shame, and whispered softly in German: “Ulrich, Ulrich, my darling, my little boy, my lamb, Ulrich—my child! Condemn me, desert me, curse me, but call me once more ‘my mother.’”
“My mother,” he said gently, covering his face with his hands—but she started up, hurried back to the pale baby in the cradle, and pressing her face upon the little one’s breast, moaned and wept bitterly.