"You must not excite her," the doctor whispered to the smith. Maria interrupted. "You speak to him, Sir," she gasped out, more and more excited. "He is going to call the boy Cain."
The doctor came near laughing. "You'll not think of doing such a foolish thing," said he to Fausch.
The smith stood there with his hands in his pockets. He went back into the living room without answering. The doctor followed him. "Give up your folly! Don't make your wife anxious! As to--the name--it would not do at all, such a name," he said persuasively.
The smith stood and let the words pass over his head indifferently, just as he might have let the rain drip down his back. Once only he spoke: "What one is, that he must be called," said he.
"You're like a bull," said the doctor angrily. "You have a right to send the child out of the house, but you have no right to disgrace it."
A sound of sobbing was heard from the bedroom. The doctor called the maid, who hurried in.
"You're like a bull," he repeated to the smith. "Your violence will be the death of your wife."
Stephen Fausch answered never a word. He turned his face fully toward the doctor--his face with one empty eye socket and one keen black eye--and stood there as if he had nailed himself fast to the spot, stood there like a bull, as the doctor had said. The doctor left; he saw that his reproofs had borne no fruit. When he was gone, Fausch went back to his workshop.
Maria's child, poor wee man, lay in the maid's room. But Maria died two days after the doctor's visit. She died late in the afternoon. All was silent on the road, in the workshop below, and in the upper room, where a few people from Waltheim went in and out, the minister, the doctor, a distant relative of Maria's and the midwife, who had been taking care of the dying woman.
The evening slowly changed to night. The silence in the smithy and all around it grew still deeper. Only Katharine still moved about in her soft old shoes that made almost no sound. Stephen Fausch rose from the table, where he had been eating something late at night. He had left the room dark, and it was as bare and gloomy as a cellar. With a few steps he crossed the room, and opened the door of the bedroom where Maria lay dead.