Only a Girl: or, A Physician for the Soul.

by Wilhelmine von Hillern

Hartwich made no reply; he had turned his face to the wall, and did not look around until his brother had noiselessly left the room.

During this conversation little Ernestine had allowed her dress to be put on. When this was done, the housekeeper left the room, and the child busied herself with lacing upon her feet an old pair of boots that were really too small for her.

"That's right, Ernestine," one of the maid-servants whispered. "Frau Gedike is a bad woman: none of us can bear her--it is good for her to be vexed, and we are glad of it!"

"I do not want to vex her, but I hate her--and my father, too--he is cruel to me," said the child, with the bitterness with which a defenceless human being, when ill used, seeks to revenge itself.

"Indeed he is a dreadful father," Rieka, the elder of the maids, whispered softly to her companion, but Ernestine heard all that she said perfectly well. "He always wanted a son, and talked forever of what he would do for his boy when he had one. And when the child was born, and was not a boy after all, he was quite beside himself, and cried furiously, 'Only a girl! only a girl!' and rushed out of the house, banging the door after him so that the whole house shook. The young mother--she was a delicate lady--fell into convulsions with sorrow and fright, and took the fever, and died on the third day. Then he was sorry enough, and raved and tore his hair over the corpse, but he could not bring her to life again. He has been well punished since he had his stroke, and perhaps it was to punish him that Ernestine has grown so ugly; but he ought at least to show his repentance for what he did, by kindness to the sickly little thing, instead of abusing her. It isn't the child's fault that she's not a boy."

Ernestine listened to all this with a beating heart, and now slipped out gently that the maid might not know she had overheard her. Outside she stopped to stroke the dog, but the poor thirsty brute growled at her. She saw that he had no water, and took his can to the well and filled it. When she saw the water gushing so sparkling from the pipe, she could not resist the temptation to let it run upon her burning head.

"Ernestine, what mischief are you about now?" the housekeeper screamed from the window; but the water was already dripping down from the child's long hair upon her shoulders, breast, and back.

"The sun will dry it before I get to the Frau Staatsräthin's, she thought, and carried the dog his drink; but when she attempted to pat him, he growled again, because he did not wish to be disturbed while drinking.

"Even the dog does not like me," she thought, and crept away. "Only a girl! And my father is so cross to me because I am not a boy." And as she went on she repeated the phrase to herself, and her step kept time to it as to a tune, "Only a girl--only a girl!"

From the window of the upper story her uncle and his wife looked after her. The wife presented an utter contrast to her husband. She was uncommonly stout, and her jolly face was so flushed that if her husband had really been a vampire she might have afforded him nourishment for a long term of ghostly existence. But he was no such monster, although his meagre body seemed to bask in his wife's warm fulness of life as some puny, starving wretch does in the heat of a huge stove. Any more poetical comparison is impossible in connection with Frau Leuthold; for, in spite of her massive beauty, her thick bushy eyebrows, her sparkling black eyes, her thick waves of dark hair, the whole expression of her large face, with its double chin and pouting mouth, was coarsely sensual. Yet there was something in this expression that showed that, however great the dissimilarity between the husband and wife in mind and body, there was still one thing in which they were alike: it was the heart,--in his case ossified, in hers overgrown with fat.