When the lips which called thee child have been sealed by death, a breath has vanished from thy life that shall nevermore return.
While Black Marianne was sitting beside the child's bed, the little one said:
"I seem to be falling and falling, on and on. Let me keep hold of your hand."
Holding the hand fast, she dropped into a slumber; but as often as Black Marianne tried to draw her hand away, she clutched at it again. Marianne understood what this sensation of endless falling signified for the child; she felt in realizing her parents' death as if she were being wafted along, without knowing whence or whither.
It was not until nearly midnight that Marianne was able to quit the child's bedside, after she had repeated her usual twelve Paternosters over and over again, who knows how many times? A look of stern defiance was on the face of the sleeping child. She had laid one hand across her bosom; Black Marianne gently lifted it, and said, half-aloud, to herself:
"If there were only an eye to watch over thee and a hand to help thee all the time, as there is now in thy sleep, and to take the heaviness out of thy heart without thy knowing it! But nobody can do that—none but He alone. Oh, may He do unto my child in distant lands as I do unto this little one!"
Black Marianne was a shunned woman, that is to say, people were almost afraid of her, so harsh did she seem in her manner. Some eighteen years before she had lost her husband, who had been shot in an attempt which he had made with some companions to rob the stage-coach. Marianne was expecting a child to be born when the body of her husband, with its blackened face, was carried into the village; but she bore up bravely and washed the dead man's face as if she hoped, by so doing, to wash away his black guilt. Her three daughters died, and only the son, who was born soon afterward, lived to grow up. He turned out to be a handsome lad, though he had a strange, dark color in his face; he was now traveling abroad as a journeyman mason. For from the time of Brosi, and especially since that worthy man's son, Severin, had worked his way up to such high honor with the mallet, many of the young men in the village had chosen to follow the mason's calling. The children used to talk of Severin as if he were a prince in a fairy tale. And so Black Marianne's only child had, in spite of her remonstrances, become a mason, and was now wandering around the country. And she, who all her life long had never left the village, nor had ever desired to leave it, often declared that she seemed to herself like a hen that had hatched a duck's egg; but she was almost always clucking to herself about it.
One would hardly believe it, but Black Marianne was one of the most cheerful persons in the village; she was never seen to be sorrowful, for she did not like to have people pity her; and that is why they did not take to her. In the winter she was the most industrious spinner in the village, and in the summer, the busiest at gathering wood, a large part of which she was able to sell; and "my John"—for that was her surviving child's name—"my John" was always the subject of her conversation. She said that she had taken little Amrei to live with her, not from a desire to be kind, but in order that she might have some living being about her. She liked to appear rough before people, and thus enjoyed, all the more, the proud consciousness of independence.
The exact opposite to her was Crappy Zachy, with whom Damie had found shelter. This worthy represented himself to people as a kind-hearted fellow who would give away anything he had; but as a matter of fact he bullied and ill-used his entire household, and especially Damie, for whose keep he received but a small sum of money. His real name was Zechariah, and he got his nickname from his once having brought home to his wife a couple of finely trussed pigeons to roast, but they were in fact a pair of plucked ravens, which in that part of the country are called "crappies." Crappy Zachy, who had a wooden leg, spent most of his time knitting woolen stockings and jackets; and with his knitting he used to sit about in the village wherever there was any opportunity to gossip. This gossiping, in the course of which he heard all sorts of news, was a source of some very profitable side-business for him. He was what they called the "marriage-maker" of the region; for in those parts, where there are large, separate estates, marriages are generally managed through agents, who find out accurately the relative circumstances of the prospective couples, and arrange everything beforehand. When a marriage of this kind had been brought about, Crappy Zachy used to play the fiddle at the wedding, for he had quite a reputation in the region as a fiddler; moreover, when his hands were tired from fiddling, he could play the clarionet and the horn. In fact, he was an undoubted genius.
Damie's whining and sensitive nature was very disgusting to Crappy Zachy, and he tried to cure him of it by giving him plenty to cry about and teasing him whenever he could.