Then, after a pause, she added: "Write to me if you change your residence. I should always like to know where you are to be found, for I have one earnest desire, which I have long secretly counted on you to fulfill. When you have a parish, or a good wife, such as I desire for you, I should be glad to put my son in your charge."
"Do you intend to part with the child?"
"Yes, dear friend," she replied, her brows contracting with an expression of pain. "How I am to bear it I do not know. But my resolution is fixed. He must grow up in a perfectly pure atmosphere. While he is a child, I guard him myself. But how long will that be? Even now it is almost impossible for me to reconcile all my duties. When I go to the rehearsals I am compelled to trust him to Kunigunde, who is an excellent person, but does not always take the right course with him, and he shall not accompany me to the theatre. It would be worse than if I were to give him brandy to drink, instead of milk."
Then we grew silent. "Poor woman!" a voice in my heart continually repeated; "you are indeed lonely."
Meantime we had returned to the town, and then something happened, whose memory even now makes my heart throb faster.
When we entered the courtyard of the commandant's residence, my companion's first glance sought the windows of her room. She suddenly grasped my arm as if to save herself from falling, and I asked in alarm if she were ill. But, as I looked up, a thrill of horror ran through my frame also. For at the open window I saw the child, who had climbed out on the sill, clinging with one little arm to the sash and stretching out the other toward a drooping chestnut bough, whose ripening nuts had probably roused his longing. As in his eagerness he held one little foot suspended in the air, he seemed fairly hovering aloft with but the feeblest support, and an icy chill crept down my back.
Suddenly I heard the mother say in her gentlest voice: "Wouldn't it be better for me to get you the beautiful chestnuts, Joachimchen? You shall have a whole handful, if you are a good boy and climb down again at once. Do what your mother tells you, my darling. I am coming up directly. Then you shall show Uncle Johannes how to make a chain of chestnuts."
The smiling boy looked down at us, nodded to his mother, cautiously drew first his foot and then his arm back from the giddy height, and quickly disappeared inside the dark frame of the window.
My own heart had fairly stopped beating. When I could breathe again, I wanted to tell my companion how much I admired her for having had courage to repress any cry of terror that might have startled the little one and perhaps hurled him to destruction. But the words died on my lips, for the next instant she had thrown her arms around my neck, and, with her face hidden on my breast, burst into such convulsive sobs that I was forced to exert all my strength, to support the tall, noble figure in its helpless emotion.
She did not regain her self-control until we heard steps in the gateway, then, still clinging to my arm, she hurried into the rear building and up the stairs. "Not a word about it to anybody!" she whispered. At the top she stood still, panting for breath, and passed her hand over her eyes. At last she rushed to her room, on whose threshold the child met her, and clasped her sole happiness in her arms with a cry of rapture in which all the pent-up excitement of the mother's heart found utterance.