"The teacher is a fool," said the smith. As he spoke, they had already reached home, and without pausing, he went at once into his workshop. The child got no other answer.
But during the next few weeks, a curious wave from Waltheim reached the smithy. The village people grew quite disturbed over Stephen Fausch's whim, to make his boy bear the name of a sinner. They might have worked themselves into this state long ago, or even when the boy was christened, but at that time, the little commotion had quickly died away. They now actually saw among them the child whom the smith had branded with a mark, and he was a child upon whom the hardest and most commonplace among them could not look without a secret joy. Therefore they took him under their protection. The first who came to see Stephen Fausch was the teacher, an enlightened young man, and accordingly more officious. He greeted the smith a little condescendingly, a trifle masterfully. Then he blurted out at once the errand that had brought him. "You must change your boy's name, Fausch. He can't let every one call him by a shameful name like Cain. Give him your own name, Stephen, or some name or other, but--"
This long speech was cut short by a rough, short questioning "What?" from Fausch. Then the smith left the room, in which the teacher had taken him by surprise, and shut the door with a bang. He was seen no more. So the teacher had to withdraw with nothing gained. After the teacher's failure, one and another tried to make Fausch change his mind, a good-natured old man who was a member of the school board, the village constable, whose opinion of himself was only equalled by his great stature, and finally a couple of sympathetic women. Fausch let them all chatter, gave them no answer, and only ran away, when they went a little too far. And so he stemmed the tide, that flowed around his house, like a rock against which the waves must part.
"What a bullheaded fellow he is," the Waltheimers would grumble. But finally this little commotion too subsided. The smith had his own way.
Weeks and month flew past; the years went more slowly, but still they went.
EVENING
As the boy, Cain, grew older, he grew more lonely. His playmates became estranged from him. He was too different from the others, and so they did not associate much with him, and then his name always aroused their scorn. At home he still had Katharine, the maid. She spoiled him when he was twelve years old, just as she had done when he was little. He had her to thank for his unusual, almost high-bred appearance and manners. But because he had no comrades, he began to love solitude, and soon liked to sit over the books that his teacher lent him, and would sit for hours in a forest clearing to dream and marvel; but music he prized more than anything else, and especially the sound of his own voice. His singing attracted so much attention at school, that the teacher let him sing in his little choir at church on Sundays, and Cain sang in the woods and at home, but he liked best to sing in his own little room near Katharine's, in which he had slept since he had grown bigger. It was now two years since he had given up wearing his hair hanging down on his shoulders, but it was still long and soft and blond, it glittered in the sunlight, and he wore it brushed back from his forehead. His brow was so white and clear that the light seemed always to shine upon it, and his face had lost none of its pure, noble lines. His figure, too, was unusually symmetrical, at once flexible and strong. Although he was dressed in the coarse and unbecoming clothes of a villager, yet no stranger could pass him by without glancing a second time at such an uncommonly fine looking lad.
Stephen Fausch had allowed him to grow up in his home and had always behaved in the same way to him. Today indifferent, surly, speaking scornfully to him before others, tomorrow, if they were alone, talkative in his brief way, and casting stolen glances at his face and form, as if the boy's beauty were like meat and drink to him. Then came a day that altered their relations.