One night at the close of one of these summer evenings Stephen saw his wife's child again. It was just such a clear night as that on which Maria had lain dead on her bed. Above the black band of woodland that bounded the eastern sky with its irregular line, floated the moon, as a white pond-lily gazes forth from the dark, still water. The smith had been sitting in front of his house and was going thoughtfully upstairs to his living room, when Katharine beckoned to him in the corridor. She was quite excited, but evidently anxious as to what he might say.
"You must just see that--just once," said she and motioned toward the ladder-like stairs that led to her attic room. He followed her almost unconsciously, still lost in his own thoughts, and saw her withered hand slide upward along the banister at every step, then saw it feel over the bedroom door, and, pushing it back, cling to it as if nailed there, and only then did it occur to him that he was standing on the threshold of the maid's room, and that in the gray basket, under those rather unsightly wrappings, lay the child.
Katharine now stepped into the room and went over to the basket bed. She was trembling a little, perhaps embarrassed by her own daring. "He looks exactly--like your wife--at the last," said she, smoothing the child's coverings so carefully that he did not wake up, and handling him just as tenderly as if he were the dainty little count whom she had tended years before.
The thought was forced upon Fausch that the room looked just as the other had, in which Maria lay dead. Only it was smaller. The room was flooded with moonlight, and the radiance lay on the child's little bed as it had on the bed of the dead mother. On the bright pillow lay the little head, framed in soft, golden, downy hair. The face was full yet delicate and the lines had the same beauty as the mother's face, as it had lain there--also in the moonlight.
But in the living face there was something that enhanced its beauty beyond that of the other face. The light was so clear that the rising and falling of the chest was visible under the knitted jacket. Every breath could be seen as it distended the delicate satiny cheeks and passed from the little mouth; and at every inward breath the lips parted like the calyx of a flower.
Fausch looked at the child for a while, and for a moment it seemed as if the sight impressed him. He leaned forward involuntarily, as if in joyful surprise, but then a curious change took place in him. His dark, angular head came further forward, so that the moonlight struck his square, stubborn brow. In the smith's face and bearing it was easy to see how his own obstinacy was strangling the little pleasure that had almost found its being.
"So that's the boy, is it? Cain Fausch?" said he. "You must be feeding him well," he added, turning away and moving toward the stairs. As he was starting to go down, he grumbled over his shoulder: "You needn't have dragged me up here just for that."
The tears sprang to Katharine's eyes. She stared after him, her whole face working. Then she went to the head of the stairs, and leaning over, she called quickly after him: "Here, Fausch!"
"Yes?" he asked, pausing.
"No one must call him that when he is big enough to know--not that."