St. Peter's Umbrella Part 2

He jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

"Who is it?" he repeated.

"It is I," was the answer, "Mate Billeghi from your old home. Come out, Janko, no, I mean of course, please come out, your reverence. I've brought something."

The priest dressed hastily. His heart was beating fast with a kind of presentiment that he was to hear bad news. He opened the door and stepped out.

"Here I am, Mr. Billeghi; what have you brought me?"

But Mr. Billeghi had left the window and gone back to the cart, where he was unfastening the basket containing little Veronica and the goose. The horses hung their heads, and one of them tried to lie down, but the shaft was in the way, and when he tried the other side, he felt the harness cutting into his side, which reminded him that he was not in the stable, and a horse's honorable feeling will not allow of its lying down, as long as it is harnessed to the cart. There must be something serious the matter to induce it to lie down in harness, for a horse has a high sense of duty.

Mate Billeghi now turned round and saw the priest standing near him.

"Hallo, Janko! Why, how you have grown! How surprised your mother would be if she were alive! Bother this rope, I did make a firm knot in it!"

The priest took a step toward the cart, where Billeghi was still struggling with the knot. The words, "if your mother were alive," had struck him like a blow, his head began to swim, his legs to tremble.

"Are you speaking of my mother?" he stammered. "Is my mother dead?"

"Yes, poor woman, she has given up the ghost. But" (and here he took out his knife and began to cut the rope) "here is your little sister, Janko, that is, I mean, your reverence; my memory is as weak as a chicken's, and I always forget whom I am talking to. I've brought your reverence's little sister; where shall I put her down?"

And with that he lifted up the basket in which the child was sleeping soundly with the goose beside her. The bird seemed to be acting the part of nurse to her, driving off the flies which tried to settle on her little red mouth.

The autumn sunlight fell on the basket and the sleeping child, and Mate was standing with his watery blue eyes fixed on the priest's face, waiting for a word or a sign from him.

"Dead!" he murmured after a time. "Impossible. I had no feeling of it."

He put his hand to his head, saying sadly, "No one told me, and I was not there at the funeral."

"I was not there either," said Mate, as though that would console the other for his absence; and then added, as an afterthought:

"G.o.d Almighty took her to Himself, He called her to His throne. He doesn't leave one of us here. Bother those frogs, now I've trodden on one!"

There were any amount of them in the weedy courtyard of the Presbytery; they came out of the holes in the damp walls of the old church.

"Where shall I put the child?" repeated Mr. Billeghi, but as he received no answer, he deposited her gently on the small veranda.

The priest stood with his eyes fixed on the ground; it seemed to him as though the earth, with the houses and gardens, Mate Billeghi and the basket, were all running away, and only he was standing there, unable to move one way or the other. From the Ukrica woods in the distance there came a rustling of leaves, seeming to bring with it a sound that spoke to his heart, the sound of his mother's voice. He listened, trembling, and trying to distinguish the words. Again they are repeated; what are they?

"Janos, Janos, take care of my child!"

But while Janos was occupied in listening to voices from a better land, Mate was getting tired of waiting, and muttering something to himself about not getting even a "thank you" for his trouble, he prepared to start.

"Well, if that's the way they do things in these parts, I'll be off," he grumbled, and cracking his whip he added, "Good-by, your reverence.

Gee-up, Sarmany!"

Father Janos still gave no answer, did not even notice what was going on around him, and the horses were moving on, Mate Billeghi walking beside them, for they had to go uphill now, and the good man was muttering to himself something about its being the way of the world, and only natural that if a chicken grows into a peac.o.c.k, of course the peac.o.c.k does not remember the time when it was a chicken. When he got up to the top of the hill he turned round and saw the priest still standing in the same place, and, making one last effort to attract his attention, he shouted:

"Well, I've given you what I was told to, so good-by."

The priest's senses at last returned from the paths in which they had been wandering, far away, with his mother. In imagination he was kneeling at her death-bed, and with her last breath she was bidding him take care of his little sister.

There was no need for it to be written nor to be telegraphed to him; there were higher forces which communicated the fact to him.

Janos's first impulse was to run after Mate, and ask him to stop and tell him all about his mother, how she had lived during the last two years, how she had died, how they had buried her, in fact, everything.

But the cart was a long way off by now, and, besides, his eyes at that moment caught sight of the basket and its contents, and they took up his whole attention.

His little sister was still asleep in the basket. The young priest had never yet seen the child, for he had not been home since his father's funeral, and she was not born then; so he had only heard of her existence from his mother's letters, and they were always so short.

Janos went up to the basket and looked at the small rosy face. He found it bore a strong resemblance to his mother's, and as he looked the face seemed to grow bigger, and he saw the features of his mother before him; but the vision only lasted a minute, and the child's face was there again. If she would only open her eyes! But they were firmly closed, and the long eyelashes lay like silken fringes on her cheeks.

"And I am to take care of this tiny creature?" thought Janos. "And I will take care of her. But how am I to do it? I have nothing to live on myself. What shall I do?"

He did as he always had done until now, when he had been in doubt, and turned toward the church in order to say a prayer there. The church was open, and two old women were inside, whitewashing the walls. So the priest did not go quite in but knelt down before a crucifix at the entrance.

CHAPTER IV.

THE UMBRELLA AND ST. PETER.

Father Janos remained kneeling a long time and did not notice that a storm was coming up. When he came out of the church it was pouring in torrents, and before long the small mountain streams were so swollen that they came rushing down into the village street, and the cattle in their fright ran lowing into their stables.

Janos's first thought was that he had left the child on the veranda, and it must be wet through. He ran home as fast as he could, but paused with surprise before the house. The basket was where he had left it, the child was in the basket, and the goose was walking about in the yard.

The rain was still coming down in torrents, the veranda was drenched, but on the child not a drop had fallen, for an immense red umbrella had been spread over the basket. It was patched and darned to such an extent that hardly any of the original stuff was left, and the border of flowers round it was all but invisible.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE CHILD WAS IN THE BASKET"]

The young priest raised his eyes in grat.i.tude to Heaven, and taking the child into his arms, carried it, under the red umbrella, into his room.

The child's eyes were open now; they were a lovely blue, and gazed wonderingly into the priest's face.

"It is really a blessing," he murmured, "that the child did not get wet through; she might have caught her death of cold, and I could not even have given her dry clothes."

But where had the umbrella come from? It was incomprehensible, for in the whole of Glogova there was not a single umbrella.

In the next yard some peasants were digging holes for the water to run into. His reverence asked them all in turn, had they seen no one with the child? No, they had seen the child, but as far as they knew no one had been near it. Old Widow Adamecz, who had run home from the fields with a shawl over her head, had seen something red and round, which seemed to fall from the clouds right over the child's head. Might she turn to stone that minute if it were not true, and she was sure the Virgin Mary had sent it down from Heaven herself to the poor orphan child.

Widow Adamecz was a regular old gossip; she was fond of a drop of brandy now and then, so it was no wonder she sometimes saw more than she ought to have done. The summer before, on the eve of the feast of Sts.

Peter and Paul, she had seen the skies open, and Heaven was before her; she had heard the angels sing, as they pa.s.sed in procession before G.o.d, sitting on a throne of precious stones. And among them she had seen her grandson, Janos Plachta, in a pretty red waistcoat which she herself had made him shortly before his death. And she had seen many of the inhabitants of Glogova who had died within the last few years, and they were all dressed in the clothes they had been buried in.

You can imagine that after that, when the news of her vision was spread abroad, she was looked upon as a very holy person indeed. All the villagers came to ask if she had seen their dead relations in the procession; this one's daughter, that one's father, and the other one's "poor husband!" They quite understood that such a miracle was more likely to happen to her than to any one else, for a miracle had been worked on her poor dead father Andras, even though he had been looked upon in life as something of a thief. For when the high road had had to be made broader eight years before, they were obliged to take a bit of the cemetery in order to do it, and when they had opened Andras's grave, so as to bury him again, they saw with astonishment that he had a long beard, though five witnesses swore to the fact that at the time of his death he was clean-shaven.

So they were all quite sure that old Andras was in Heaven, and having been an old cheat all his life he would, of course, manage even up above to leave the door open a bit now and then, so that his dear Agnes could have a peep at what was going on.

But Pal Kvapka, the bell-ringer, had another tale to tell. He said that when he had gone up the belfry to ring the clouds away, and had turned round for a minute, he saw the form of an old Jew crossing the fields beyond the village, and he had in his hands that immense red thing like a plate, which his reverence had found spread over the basket. Kvapka had thought nothing of it at the time, for he was sleepy, and the wind blew the dust in his eyes, but he could take an oath that what he had told them had really taken place. (And Pal Kvapka was a man who always spoke the truth.) Others had also seen the Jew. He was old, tall, gray-haired, his back was bent, and he had a crook in his hand, and when the wind carried his hat away, they saw that he had a large bald place at the back of his head.

"He was just like the picture of St. Peter in the church," said the sacristan, who had seen him without his hat. "He was like it in every respect," he repeated, "except that he had no keys in his hand." From the meadow he had cut across Stropov's clover-field, where the Kratki's cow, which had somehow got loose, made a rush at him; in order to defend himself he struck at it with his stick (and from that time, you can ask the Kratki family if it is not true, the cow gave fourteen pints of milk a day, whereas they used to have the greatest difficulty in coaxing four pints from it).