“A total change of air, scene, and idea,” he said privately to Karl Metzerott, “might possibly put new life into her; but I doubt if she have sufficient elasticity of mind or body to make such a change possible. Set her down in the middle of Paris or London, and she would mentally carry Grind and Crushem and her sewing-machine along with her. She can’t shake them off as her sister has done.”
“Not till she moves to the graveyard,” said Karl grimly; “that’s the only change possible for her, I suppose.”
“And she will piously believe that an All-Merciful God has sent her there! Well, poor soul, it’s her only consolation; I would not rob her of it if I could.”
“Which you couldn’t, doctor. That’s the queerest part of all the lot of rubbish. Those two women believe that the All-Merciful God you speak of has watched over them all their lives, as firmly as I believe you have just written that prescription. I cannot understand it.”
“Nor I,” said the doctor; “but there are so many things one cannot understand,” he added, half to himself.
Did it ever occur to him now, as he lay upon his bed of pain, that an all-merciful, loving Father might be trying—even then—to teach him the lesson which Susan Price already had learned,—the lesson he could not understand?
The move on New Year’s Eve brightened up poor Susan so as to cheer Sally wonderfully. They were busy all day arranging their new domicile; for they meant to use the front portion of the former shop as a dining-room, where those whom they supplied might, if they preferred, take their meals instead of having them sent home. They had already had an application from a young German girl who taught in the public schools, and had neither friends nor relatives in the city, and from one or two clerks in the various stores. Metzerott and Frau Anna, for a while at least, would provide for the conveyance of their own meals, though the former had plans and designs upon a house that stood next to the Hall, whereof he spoke not until the time should be ripe.
Besides their “moving and unpacking,” as Sally jocularly called it,—for they had little to move but their three selves,—and the meals to prepare for their regular customers, there was the supper to be served at the ball that night, so it may be imagined that the Prices had their hands full. Franz Schaefer came around early “to help,” as he said, in reality to look at Polly in the intervals of his proper business of attending to the fire and lights. He was now a tall, somewhat gawky youth of nearly seventeen, with his father’s reddish hair standing up like a halo around an honest, open, but ugly countenance, which, lacking the pastor’s nervous quickness, wore for its most constant expression a stolid impassibility. Only with his violin upon his shoulder did his face light up or change; but, with the soft touch of the electric wood against his cheek, the eyes grew soft and humid, a half-smile curved the corners of the rather heavy lips, and a slight color crept into his usually pale face.
Polly, who was three years his senior, laughed at the lad’s devotion, and alternately petted and scolded him, like a mother. Franz submitted; but he had entirely made up his mind as to his own course.
“I mean to marry her if she will wait until I come back from Germany,” he said to himself. “If she marries any one else, I will kill him like a mosquito.”