Quietly she said a Pater Noster, but she did not kneel to say it. As she had stood motionless, self-possessed before her living father, so now she stood before him dead; only without resentment, reconciled by death.
Then she went into the kitchen to prepare a supper by the time the neighbours should come for the night to pray and to watch the dead. It kept all hands busy, and by midnight the room was so full of watchers that she could hardly provide enough to eat and to drink. For the richer a peasant is, the more neighbours come to the watching and praying by the corpse.
Wally looked on with silent aversion. Here lay a dead man--and so they ate and drank like so many flies! The dull hum and bustle were so strange to her after the sublime stillness of her mountain home, and struck her as so small and pitiful, that involuntarily she wished herself back again on the silent heights. Speechless and indifferent she passed to and fro between the noisy eating and drinking groups, and people said how much she resembled her dead father. On the third day was the funeral. From far and near people of the neighbouring hamlets came to it, partly to pay the last respect to the important and dreaded chief-peasant, partly to "make all straight" with the wicked Vulture-maiden, who now was mistress of all the great possessions of the Strommingers. Hitherto, indeed, she had been only an "incendiary" and a "ne'er do weel;" but now she was the wealthiest owner in all the mountain range, and that made all the difference.
Wally felt the change keenly, and she knew too whence it came. When she saw now after the funeral the same people stand before her with bent backs and obsequious grins, who, but one year before, had turned her from their doors with scorn and flouting when, starving with cold and hunger, she had asked them for work--then she turned away with loathing--then, and from that hour she despised mankind.
The curé of Heiligkreuz came too, and the Klötze from Rofen. Now was the moment for making at least an outward return for all their goodness to her when she had been poor and abandoned, and she distinguished them from all the others and kept with them only. When the funeral feast was over and the guests had at last dispersed, the priest of Heiligkreuz remained with her yet a little while, and spoke many good words to her. "Now you are mistress over many servants," he said, "but remember that he who does not know how to govern himself will not know how to govern others. It is an old saying, that 'he who cannot obey, cannot command'; learn to obey, my child, that you may be able to command."
"But, your reverence, whom am I to obey? There's no one here now that has any orders to give me."
"God."
Wally was silent.
"See here," said the curé, taking something from the pocket of his wide-skirted coat. "I have long meant this for you, ever since the time you were with me, but you could not have taken it with you in your wanderings." He took out of a box a small neatly-carved image of a saint with a little pedestal of wood.
"See, this is your patron saint, the holy Wallburga. Do you remember what I said to you about hard and soft wood, and about the good God who can carve a saint out of a knotty stick?"