"I don't know myself; but when he came to woo the princess, and was asked what present he had brought her, he pulled a handful of mud out of his pocket and filled her white hands with it. She liked that so well that she took him for her husband."
"A handful of mud! Such a dirty fellow! Did she marry him?"
"Yes, indeed! The other suitors had brought her jewels and crowns--she had plently of those already. But with mud she would have been glad to play, like other children, if the court ladies had allowed her to. Therefore she now rejoiced in her childish heart, and she thought he would certainly be the pleasantest husband for her."
"Yes, yes--the fact of the matter is, she was right."
Thus it began, and so it continued.
She was the daughter of a German cabinet-maker, who had developed his business until he had a prosperous furniture factory. Two years before, her mother had died, and since that time she had run the household with the most complete devotion, in the way that she had learned, and as befitted her single-minded, unsophisticated nature. She did all her work as though it were a benefaction, with whole-souled joy and boundless happiness in her ability. As often as my way led me near to where she lived, and that was almost daily at the same hour, I looked in at her window and found her always occupied with some sort of work. We chatted for a quarter of an hour; she told me what animated her day, asked me about everything that interested her in my existence, and initiated me into the sphere of her domestic cares. It pleased her that my needs were few; but that I did not even feel the need of damming up the briskly flowing stream of my income and making a little lake of it, this appeared to her as frivolity, indeed as unrighteous, and she endeavored to reform me, to make me more aware of the value of money, of the money that I had earned, and in some measure to guide my expenditures. I do not mean to say that she ever made tiresome reprimands or admonitions. Simple and innocent as her mind was,--whenever she had resolved to bring pressure to bear upon my indifference or my wilfulness, she pondered the possible method with such affectionate patience that she did not fail to find a delicate or a touchingly irresistible form. I once brought her a rare orchid, whose fantastic form and brilliant colors I had so much admired in the shop window that I was unwilling to allow any other human being to possess it than Mariandel--by this name I called my friend. She did not say anything so commonplace as that I ought not to have done it, or I ought not to have spent so much money; she showed the honest joy of a child who is proud to have received such a costly gift; but she added to her praise of the flower, "It is sacred!"
The expression seemed to me somewhat pompous, as many of her expressions were; nevertheless, I could not but nod assent, thinking of the virgin forest in which this flower first gleamed forth through the twilight, as a new miracle rising out of the ruins of innumerable generations of trees. But Mariandel then continued, "It is a part of your life."
I smiled in astonishment.
"Perhaps you have given for it the hardest and unhappiest of your days of toil."
Such a thought as that did not come into her head on the spur of the moment. I knew at once that she had excogitated it, and kept it in reserve for a good opportunity of impressing upon my mind what my money was. And then for days at a time I strove not to employ my money in ways that ran counter to her honest feeling.