Then they kept silence for some time. Each was thinking busily. But in Cain's mind the thoughts were fairly seething. He began to imagine what it would be like to leave the place where everybody knew him and pointed at him scornfully. A feeling of relief arose mightily within him. He leaned back until his arms straightened out. His youthful health and strength seemed at this moment to effervesce, so that he felt a new buoyancy. This feeling overcame the discomfort he had felt at the idea of his father's making a sacrifice for him. His joy in life and work redoubled. His gratitude to his father increased and grew into a resolve: "You must work for him. Good Lord, how hard you must work."
But once a scruple came over him. "I could have gone away by myself" he said, speaking his thought aloud. Whereupon Katharine answered, after thinking a little: "It seems to me that he wouldn't let you go alone now."
After a little while longer she added: "He wants to have you with him."
And so in very few words they exchanged their ideas, until Fausch called out from the living room that he wanted his supper.
This evening Cain sang as he went to bed. Fausch listened long to his beautiful voice, not loud, but almost like a distant bell, and the sound rang strangely in the house, where all was usually so still, because joy found but little room there.
Five weeks later, early on a bright morning, a four-horse team stood before the smithy, packed with household goods and with Stephen's tools, ready for the journey. Hallheimer, who had spent the night at the smithy, was there, ready to receive the key. He was to sell the blacksmith shop among the woods for Fausch. Now, for the first time in many years, the blackened door of the workshop was closed, the shutters were drawn over the dim windows, and the house already looked dark and dead. Hallheimer stood on the road talking with the two teamsters who were helping with the moving. Then Fausch, Cain and Katharine came out of the door at the head of the steps. The early sunlight lay on the broad stone platform, to which the steps led, and on which Cain and Katharine were standing. The bright light also penetrated the dark, forbidding passageway, the door of which Fausch was still holding open. The heavy man with his scorched and wrinkled face stood in the full brilliancy, and it seemed as if the dark and stubborn figure found it hard to leave the gloomy and forbidding house where it had dwelt so long.
Cain and Katharine had paused, with their backs toward the road, the smith having detained them by a word. Hallheimer, who was looking up at them, saw that they were stopping for something important; for they stood for a moment leaning forward, as if the smith were saying something to them that they found difficult to understand.
"You!" Stephen Fausch had called out to Cain, as he stepped across the threshold. He might have left these words until the very last, because they were not easy to say, and after his "You" it was some time before the rest would come. He seemed to break off every word from within and to drag it forth with difficulty. Finally he said: "So long as we are going away--you may leave your name behind you. I--you may change your name to Franz--for the future--it was my father's name--and he was an honest man."
When he had with difficulty forced out these scanty words, he did not wait for an answer, but turned at the threshold and closed the house door. The long disused lock creaked under the pressure of his hard fingers. Because he involuntarily made an effort with the key, the others did not know that the dark flush that rose to his forehead, was not merely a sign of bodily exertion, but that he was at the same time expending far more strength than on the refractory lock on something within himself, that yielded grudgingly like a rusty latch. To change the boy's name, and so to strike out what he, Fausch himself, had intended to stand for all time, was--was not easy! With his head thrust forward he now walked down the steps.
One of the teamsters muttered to the other: "There he comes, the old hardhead." They had had experience with him while they were loading up; the work had to be done exactly according to his will.