A night nurse passed by, shivering.
"Already at work, so early?" said she, turning her pale face toward him.
The lawyer put down his watering-pot, bowed and took off his cap. "One must keep at it," he whispered, "the little ones will not wait."
Then he began with the tenderest care to water the beds beside the principal buildings. He paused by the open windows of the kitchen, which were very low, and examined the window-sills. He shook his head and seemed much grieved and disappointed. Yes, they had once more forgotten to put out the bread crumbs for his birds! How could any one rely upon such maids?
He hunted up a couple of little pebbles on the path and threw them, one at a time, into the dark kitchen, laughing softly to himself. They really must learn to be more careful. O, he would soon teach them to put the bread crumbs regularly on the window-sill. There was plenty of gravel on the path. And what if they had already complained so often!
The watering-pot was empty and in the gray light of dawn the lawyer walked back to the well.
Ever since his wife's death the poor man had been a friend of birds and flowers. When she was dying, she had said, with her last breath, "The flowers must always be watered and the birds must always be fed." Those had been her last words and the lawyer heard them ringing in his ears day and night. He heard them in every breeze, in every conversation, even when all was silent they were wafted to him. In his wife's room there had stood a dark, heavy clothes press (which, oddly enough, he could still remember), and this large, dark object also repeated his wife's last words, although it made no sound whatever. The lawyer continued to live in seclusion and solitude, and watered the flowers in the window-boxes and fed and watered the birds in the cages. The flowers withered and the birds died, one by one. The lawyer took no notice of his loss. Indeed it seemed to him as if the birds were hopping and twittering gaily in their cages. They hatched their young and kept on increasing. And the lawyer took a childlike pleasure in this increase. Finally there were hundreds, thousands, whose chirping he heard from morning till night. They lived in the walls, on the ceiling, everywhere. And the good man could not understand why others neither saw nor heard them.
As the sun rose, the lawyer had already finished a good part of his day's work and turned back to the ward, which looked like a country cottage standing in a pretty garden.
In the doorway, leaning against the doorpost, Michael Petroff, a former officer in the Russian army, stood smiling, and greeted him with a bright, cheerful "Good morning, my friend!"
The lawyer in his woolen shawl, scarf and wadded boots, bowed and touched his cap.