"She has finished!" said the dikegrave, and took the child in his arms. "She is far away from us now, with God."
"With God," repeated the child and was silent for a while as if she were thinking over the words. "Is it good to be with God?"
"Yes, best of all." But in Hauke's heart the dying woman's last words tolled heavily. "God have mercy on the others!"—the words sounded softly within him. What did the old witch mean? Can the dying prophesy?
Soon, after Trien' Jans had been buried up by the church, there began to be ever louder talk of all kinds of misfortune and curious vermin that were said to have frightened the people in northern Friesland. And it was certain that on the Sunday in Mid-Lent the golden cock had been thrown down from the top of the tower by a whirlwind; and it was true too that in midsummer a shower of large insects fell from heaven like snow so that it was impossible to open one's eyes and they lay nearly as high as a hand on the fens and no one had ever seen anything like it. But after the end of September when the head-man and the maid Ann Grete came back from town where they had driven with grain and butter for the market, they climbed down from their wagon with faces pale with fear. "What is it? What is the matter with you?" cried the other maids, who had come running out when they heard the sound of the wagon.
Ann Grete in her traveling dress stepped breathlessly into the roomy kitchen. "Oh, hurry up and tell us!" called the girls again, "where is the misfortune?"
"Oh, may our dear Jesus protect us!" cried Ann Grete. "You know from the other side, across the water, that old Molly from Siegelhof—we always stand together with our butter at the corner near the apothecary's—she told me about it and Iven Johns said too, 'that means a misfortune,' he said, 'a misfortune for the whole of northern Friesland; believe me Ann Grete!' And"—she lowered her voice—"perhaps after all it's not all right with the dikegrave's white horse."
"Ssh! Ssh!" said the other maids.
"Yes, yes; what does it matter to me! But over there, on the other side, it's going on worse than with us! Not only flies and vermin, blood too has fallen like rain from heaven; and on the Sunday morning after that when the pastor went to his washbasin there were five death's-heads, the size of peas, in it, and they all came to see it; in the month of August horrible red-headed caterpillars went through the land and ate up the grain and flour and bread and whatever they could find and no fire was able to destroy them!"
Ann Grete suddenly ceased; none of the maids had noticed that their mistress had come into the kitchen. "What tales are you telling there?" she asked. "Don't let your master hear that!" And as they all wanted to begin to tell her she went on, "It's not necessary; I heard enough of it; go about your work, that will do you more good!" Then she took Ann Grete with her into the sitting-room to go through her market accounts with her.
So in the dikegrave's house none of the family paid any attention to the superstitious gossip that was going about; but it was different in the other houses and the longer the evenings grew the more easily did it find its way in. Everyone lived as if in an oppressive atmosphere and secretly people said to themselves that a misfortune, and a heavy one, would fall on northern Friesland.