He lived all alone with a skinflint of an old cook, as stingy as himself, who would rather by far have seen an apple rot than give it to a hungry child whose mouth watered for it.
Those two grim old fogeys, birds of one feather, cared for no one else in this world except for each other, and, in fact, the people in Steino said——, but people in villages have bad tongues, so it's useless to repeat what was said about them.
The priest had a nephew, a smith, a good-hearted, bright-eyed, burly kind of a fellow, beloved by all the village, except by his uncle, whom he had greatly displeased because he had married a bonny lass of the neighbouring village of Smarje, instead of taking as a wife the——, well, the cook's niece, though, between us and the wall, the cook was never known to have had a sister or a brother either, and the people——, but, as I said before, the people were apt to say nasty things about their priest.
The smith, who was quite a pauper, had several children, for the poorer a man is the more babies his wife presents him with—women everywhere are such unreasonable creatures—and whenever he applied to his uncle for a trifle, the uncle would spout the Scriptures in Latin, saying something about the unfitness of casting pearls before pigs, and that he would rather see him hanged than help him.
Once—it was in the middle of winter—the poor smith had been without any work for days and days. He had spent his last penny; then the baker would not give him any more bread on credit, and at last, on a cold, frosty night, the poor children had been obliged to go to bed supperless.
The smith, who had sworn a few days before never again to put his foot in the priest's house, was, in his despair, obliged to humble himself, and go and beg for a loaf of bread, with which to satisfy his children on the morrow.
Before he knocked at the door, he went and peeped in through the half-closed shutters, and he saw his uncle and the cook seated by a roaring fire, with their feet on the fender, munching roasted chestnuts and drinking mulled wine. Their shining lips still seemed greasy from the fat sausages they had eaten for supper, and, as he sniffed at the window, he fancied the air was redolent with the spices of black-pudding. The smell made his mouth water and his hungry stomach rumble.
The poor man knocked at the door with a trembling hand; his legs began to quake, he had not eaten the whole of that long day; but then he thought of his hungry children, and knocked with a steadier hand.
The priest, hearing the knock, thought it must be some pious parishioner bringing him a fat pullet or perhaps a sleek sucking-pig, the price of a mass to be said on the morrow; but when, instead, he saw his nephew, looking as mean and as sheepish as people usually do when they go a-begging, he was greatly disappointed.
"What do you want, bothering here at this time of the night?" asked the old priest, gruffly.