The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Xix Part 3

They came to the other side of the wood which lies like a broad band across the slope of the Ettersberg, where there was a very old wayside shrine without a saint. The saints had been too long exposed to the weather and to the onslaughts of Protestantism, and were worn away, broken, and vanished. Nothing was to be seen but a dilapidated low wall, on which the sorrowful Mother of G.o.d had once stood. Fran Rauchfuss sat down wearily on it and lifted her child to her lap.

Together they looked out silently over the world which is closed to the people of Weimar, the world that lies behind the Ettersberg, a sunshiny, grain-bearing landscape, over which lay the last warm, lingering rays of the evening sun.

"What's the matter, mother? You're so quiet!"

"This time yesterday I had to carry you to bed because you had drunk too much." The child hid her face in her mother's neck. "Other children," she went on calmly, "while they are young, have a mother to watch over them. The time will come when you will have none. Other children have a father who helps them and advises them. That your father cannot do. Presently you will be quite alone, and will have to help yourself in every difficulty, and at the same time to look after your father and see that nothing happens to him."

The child raised her head and looked at her mother with astonishment.

"You will be all alone; you must learn to think now what is right and wrong." Tears sprang to the eyes of the frightened child. The mother's eyes were as moist as the little girl's; and they gazed at each other with sad, uncertain faces. Frau Rauchfuss let her head fall on the soft, yielding shoulder of her child, and a mighty sob tore itself loose from her laden heart. The loving fair-haired child stroked her mother's face and pressed more closely to her.

"I am ill, my darling--I cannot live very much longer; and I'm so worried I don't know what to do, because I must leave you alone with your father. No one will look after you."

A sort of convulsion pa.s.sed through the child's body, which the mother felt in the clinging arms. Then the little thing let go of her, and took the edge of her ap.r.o.n and pa.s.sed it gently across her mother's eyes. "Don't cry," she said--"I shall be all right." Frau Rauchfuss looked down into a pair of earnest and determined eyes. "Put your head down on my shoulder again, and don't worry," said the child. The mother's heart was wonderfully lightened; she felt that she had with her a n.o.ble little being who could bring her comfort.

"If you die," said the child gravely, "will they put you in a coffin and carry you away and put you in the ground and cover you all up with earth?"

"Yes," said the mother.

"Won't you ever be able to come back?"

"No. Then I shall be with G.o.d."

"Is G.o.d good?" asked the child.

"Yes--G.o.d is good."

"Good ...?" the child said thoughtfully.

The mother looked at her with surprise. "Other mothers don't tell their children when they are going to die; but I had to--it was needful that you should know."

"That's all right," said the child; "tell me everything. Tell me all I must do at home, after you're dead. I'll look after father.... And when are you going to die?"

"I don't know yet."

"Well, then ..." said the child. They sat a while in silence on the low wall, on which in the times long ago the statue of the sorrowful Mother of G.o.d had stood. The child was not crying now, but gazing steadily and seriously before her. The mother also wept no longer; she had found comfort, and looked down wonderingly at the strong, grave little thing that sat by her side. From this day she felt herself no more alone or comfortless.

And when, a year later, the time to die really came, and she held the hand of Beate, now eleven years old, in hers, she felt confident that the child would know how to help herself and others. She commended her to G.o.d, but to no one else. In the last hard moments of the struggle she felt that she had some one n.o.ble and strong by her, comforting her with silent power.

And now Captain Rauchfuss was all alone with his little "Tubby."

His wife had often been an uncomfortable companion to him. He had imagined something quite different under the name of a wife; and now it was not so very different with his little "Tubby." He expected to find in her a pretty little plaything, and began to realize that instead he had got growing up in his house a small person whom he had to respect, a manager.

He went off to the town with just as uncomfortable a conscience as before, and growled in his red beard at womenfolks that put on airs, whom a man would have to show their place or send to the devil.

Frau Rauchfuss had taken care to provide a capable woman to look after the house and a bailiff for the estate, so that Beate's inheritance might be kept in good condition in spite of her light-headed father. In this plain and thrifty company Herr Rauchfuss was not at all at his ease. He went on drinking as before; and it was no longer requisite that it should be the "Elephant" where he washed down his worries and his ill-temper. Any tavern would do, even up behind the Ettersberg--he was not so particular. But he still remained a reputable member of society with his wits about him, behaving with perfect propriety in the tavern parlor and still proud of his ability to walk and talk straight after an indefinite number of gla.s.ses.

As Beate grew older, she went down every morning at five o'clock in the milk-wagon to the town, winter and summer, to go to school, and got down in the Entenfang at Madame k.u.mmerfelden's. The child stayed with her until school began, had dinner with her at midday, took part in the famous sewing-cla.s.s with the other girls under the kind, lively teacher, and then went home in the wagon when it brought the afternoon milk.

Good Frau k.u.mmerfelden took a great deal of pleasure in the child's company--but she had some left over for the father also. When, arrayed in one of her flowered dresses and a cap tilted up over her still youthful face, she took her coffee comfortably on Sunday afternoons in the little house in the Entenfang, it was not at all disagreeable to her to have the old sinner pa.s.s an hour with her. He got two or three drinks of schnapps, some of the best snuff any nose could wish, and extra strong coffee, that even a throat as hardened as his could taste when it went down.

"It's good to see something like a man now and then," she said; "and Rauchfuss with his red beard and his giant stature and his mighty stride reminds an old woman like me that there are still men on earth, which one goes near to forgetting in these endless sewing-cla.s.ses of wretched little girls!"

And, to tell the truth, she liked just such an old reprobate. "Yes,"

she said once to her friend, "if the good G.o.d were a woman, which isn't such an impossible thing to imagine, the men would get a pretty good deal up above. The worst scapegraces would be handled most graciously, as they are here on earth--where a man can do without any morals and be loved and run after because he's got a way with him." By such discourses the wise woman established herself in the captain's favor, and was able to make herself very much at home with him. Often she scolded him as if he were a schoolboy--but he took it in the friendliest fashion.

"With a man you must never come straight out with a thing. Spread plenty of honey about your mouth, and while they're licking it off they get the right thing with it, what they should get. That's the only way." So said the old woman often. And thus she gave it him roughly and merrily, like many another clever woman, and had a submissive friend for her pains.

The captain was foolishly vain of "Tubby's" beauty. The old friends were sitting together one Sunday afternoon in the little house in the Entenfang--the captain and the old actress turned sewing-teacher.

"Well, Rauchfuss has got a pretty good-looking daughter, eh, my good k.u.mmerfelden? Such plump, firm arms--and the walk of her! A well set up creature--and then her red-gold hair, and her confounded eyes! Eh, k.u.mmerfelden, I didn't do a bad piece of work there, did I? Look at all the generation that's growing up--can you show me her like?"

"Now, now," said Frau k.u.mmerfelden; "you needn't be stuck up about it, my good sir. She is more than half the daughter of her n.o.ble mother."

"Eh, what? n.o.ble?" said the captain. "Deuce take it--beauty's the thing in a woman. There you are!"

"You old fool!" said Frau k.u.mmerfelden. "What was it kept your property in such fine condition? Was it your wife's beauty, or her ability?"

"Ah, bah! Of course non-essentials have their use too. But the main thing ... Look--she might have gone down on her knees to me, and I'd never have married Frau Rauchfuss if she hadn't been such a fetching little thing."

"The Lord have mercy on you men!" said Frau k.u.mmerfelden, stirring the sugar in her coffee. "You choose one that takes your fancy, and you call her beautiful as long as you care for her. What sort of a life did your wife have up there, lonely and deserted, as if she'd married a log of wood?"

"I say, k.u.mmerfelden! Thunder--you're saying a good deal!"

"Because it's the truth!" said Frau k.u.mmerfelden crossly. "And a rocking-horse would make as good a father as you are to that dear child. What kind of a way is that to do--to come home drunk at two o'clock in the morning, without a thought for the poor little thing that's waiting for you half asleep to help you to bed, you old rascal?

And at that hour of the morning you make the good little thing get you a cup of coffee; and you take it like a thankless fool. Pooh, captain, I don't expect any man to be a pattern of morality and temperance. But even for a man there are _some_ limits--and those limits you overstep, my good sir!"

On this particular day Frau k.u.mmerfelden was more than usually put out with her old friend on account of something that had just come to her ears. But none the less she poured him out his third cup of strong coffee, and waited on him just as attentively as if he had been Saint Nicholas himself.

"And another thing," she said--"do you suppose the good child ever talks of the way you go on? Not a syllable! People might tear her in little pieces and they wouldn't get a word out of her that wasn't to your credit."

"A soldier's child--d.a.m.n it all!" cried the captain, bringing down his fist on the table. "She gets that from me, the little rogue!"

Frau k.u.mmerfelden put up both her busy hands to her big cap, as if to protect it from hearing impossible things. "Lord save us!" she said.

"There's no use talking to people like you."

When Captain Rauchfuss's daughter had reached her seventeenth year, it came to pa.s.s that the old man got involved in a love-affair. On his Sunday visits to Frau k.u.mmerfelden about this time he had often found there a neat little widow who professed a charming devotion to her old teacher. After her husband's death she had been left in poor circ.u.mstances. She came to consult Frau k.u.mmerfelden very seriously about a project of settling down in Weimar as a nurse; and she made it all so touching and edifying that the captain, who happened to be present at some of these discussions, found his heart growing quite warm. Moreover, the little woman had a fascinating heart-shaped face, broad in the brow and pointed at the chin, and a pair of round, merry brown eyes.

"That'd be the kind of nurse for me," said the captain; "a lively creature, who'd make the whole business look less bad. It would be rather fun!"

"Shame on you, old simpleton!" said Frau k.u.mmerfelden crossly.

"Well, but, k.u.mmerfelden," said the captain, "you're a stately old frigate with that cap of yours. A light modern craft like our Marianne sails in different waters from such a venerable ship of virtue--eh, Frau Marianne?"

"Oh, really, captain," pouted the little woman. "Do you think I am not serious about all this?" And once more she paraded her virtues and her edifying design before the eyes of the good old woman and Herr Rauchfuss.

"A devil of a girl!" muttered the captain in his red beard.