Fixed to one side of the piano-organ on the level of the handle he saw a little box, in which lay, as in a cradle, what looked like a monkey, then like a doll, but on closer inspection turned into a tiny live child, flaxen-haired, staring with wide gray eyes from under a blue cap, and sucking at a milk-bottle with preternatural placidity, regardless of the music throbbing through its resting-place.
"Even so shall humanity live," thought Zussmann, "peaceful as a babe, cradled in music. God hath sent me a sign."
He returned home, comforted, and told Hulda of the sign.
"Was it an Italian child?" she asked.
"An English child," he answered. "Fair-eyed and fair-haired."
"Then it is a sign that through the English tongue shall the Idea move the world. Your book will be translated into English—I shall live to see it."
V
A few afternoons later the Red Beadle, his patched garments pathetically spruced up, came to see his friends, goaded by the news of Hulda's illness. There was no ruddiness in his face, the lips of which were pressed together in defiance of a cruel and credulous world. That Nature in making herself should have produced creatures who attributed their creation elsewhere, and who refused to allow her one acknowledger to make boots, was indeed a proof, albeit vexatious, of her blind workings.
When he saw what she had done to Hulda and to Zussmann, his lips were pressed tighter, but as much to keep back a sob as to express extra resentment.
But on parting he could not help saying to Zussmann, who accompanied him to the dark spider-webbed landing, "Your God has forgotten you."