The woman turned round, but started back with a shriek of terror, saying, ‘What do you want with me, you ugly dwarf? Begone, begone! I do not like such jokes.’
‘But mother, what is the matter with you?’ asked Jacob, quite terrified; ‘surely you must be unwell; why will you turn your son away from you?’
‘I have told you already to be gone,’ replied Hannah angrily; ‘you will not get any money from me by your juggleries, you ill-favoured monster.’
‘Surely God has deprived her of the light of her intellect,’ said the dwarf, deeply grieved within himself; ‘what shall I do to get her home? Dear mother, pray do listen to reason; only look well at me, I am indeed your son—your own Jacob.’
‘Why this is carrying the joke too far,’ she said to her neighbour; ‘only look at that ugly dwarf; there he stands, and will no doubt drive away all my customers; nay, he even dares to ridicule my misfortune, telling me that he is my son, my own Jacob, the impudent fellow.’
At this her neighbours rose, and began abusing him (every one knows that market women understand this), and reproaching him with making light of poor Hannah’s misfortune, who seven years ago had had her beautiful boy kidnapped, and with one accord they threatened to fall upon him and tear him to pieces, unless he took himself off immediately.
Poor Jacob did not know what to make of all this. Indeed it seemed to him that he had that very morning, as usual, gone to market with his mother, had helped her to lay out her fruit, and had afterwards gone with the old woman to her house, eaten some soup, slept a little while, and had now come back; and yet his mother and her neighbours talked of seven years, calling him at the same time an ugly dwarf. What then was the change that had come over him? Seeing, at length, that his mother would no longer listen to anything he said, he felt the tears come in his eyes, and went sorrowfully down the street towards the stall where his father sat in the daytime mending shoes.
‘I am curious to see,’ he thought to himself, ‘whether he, too, will disown me? I will place myself in the doorway and talk to him.’ And having come there he did so and looked in.
The cobbler was so busily engaged at work that he did not see him; but happening to cast a look towards the door, he dropped shoe, twine, and awl on the ground, and cried with astonishment, ‘For Heaven’s sake, what is that?’