He merely grunted; and when she urged him, saying, "Eat, my boy--your favorite supper: sc.r.a.ps and buckwheat porridge!"--he mechanically carried a spoonful to his lips and let it run out of the other corner of his mouth. His brow remained contracted, and from the back of his head, where a fringe of hair was all that remained, a tremor seemed to run down the length of his spine. His eyes stared blankly, until suddenly they began to roll, up and down, right and left; involuntarily they followed the dancing sparks in the fireplace.
The mother watched her son intently while, silently and without the usual sipping and a satisfied smacking of the lips, she emptied her bowl. With a mute gesture she drove away the cat, which had crept up purring and was rubbing its head on the man"s legs. She herself hardly dared to breathe. What was William thinking about, that he was so still? A short while ago, in winter, he had been much more talkative.
What stories he had told of the factories down there, with their wheels and cylinders, their chimneys and kettles, their furnaces that had bellies as big as a beer-barrel at the kirmess--in fact, much bigger--as big as the pit of h.e.l.l, with flames a yard long! He had grown accustomed to the heat, and now he was always cold, poor boy.
Now, even in summer, when other people seek the shade, he stood in the broiling sun up in the field, munched his crust of bread, and gazed fixedly at the ball of burning gold in the sky. But even then, he said, he did not get warm enough. The whole day she had to keep the fire burning on the hearth, and in the hardest winter she had never had to collect so much brushwood and so many fir-cones as now.
Wiping the profuse sweat from her brow and loosening a little the cotton kerchief about her lean and wrinkled throat, Katherine Driesch picked up another armful of brushwood from the chimney-corner, broke it in pieces over her knee, and stuffed all the pieces together into the jaws of the fireplace. It was almost ready to burst.
But with a groan and shiver her son rubbed his hands, saying slowly and hesitatingly, as though every word cost him pain, and yet as though in haste to speak it, "Mother--go--to--bed."
"All right," said she, already reaching for her cap; for she knew that when William had not had one of his "good days" he was apt to be impatient. And so she meant to do quickly what he wished and draw the coverlet over her ears, though people were still stirring outside. From a distance the shrill cries of maidens could be heard, and the hammering of scythes.
William listened also. He had now stood up. Craning his neck, so that the cords were tense and rigid, he remained motionless. His knees were bent, his underlip protruding. Only the eyes in his sombre countenance moved incessantly, peering in terror, like those of a hunted wild beast that itself is impatient to hunt its prey. The nostrils in his bull-dog face quivered, as if eager to catch a scent.
Through the deepening darkness of the room the old woman"s mumbled prayer was heard:
"Hail to thee, Mary, that art highly favored, The Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou among women And blessed is the fruit of thy----"
She stopped, thinking of her son. "William!" And when he did not come, she climbed out of bed again, and crept barefoot to him, and on the forehead of the man of forty made the sign of the cross as once she had done on the forehead of the boy of four, and contentedly crept back to bed. A moment later and she was sleeping in peace.
A strange smile pa.s.sed over the gloomy face of her son: now she was asleep--now she was asleep--and now he was going--to light the fire in his furnaces--brr! he was cold--but soon he should be warm again--hi!
when the sparks danced and the red glow spread, shooting out toward you as if to dry your marrow--hot, ever hotter--ha, who comes there, who wants to interfere?
Startled, he suddenly stood still, his features convulsed as if in pain.
A strong hand pressed the latch of the front door. The door was not locked; it opened, and out of the soft twilight of the mild summer night the constable and the chairman stepped into the seething darkness of the widow"s cottage.
"Are you already asleep?" said the chairman, somewhat embarra.s.sed. "Eh, Katie, excuse us! Do you hear?"
But the constable had already seized hold of him on whose account they came, and had held him motionless with a firm fist accustomed to overcoming resistance.
Will Stoker did not offer to struggle; he cowed there, his head drooping between his shoulders. All he did was to utter a peevish cry, as children do when rudely awakened from sleep.
The old woman, who had not been aroused by the loud call of the chairman, woke up now immediately and sat up in bed.
"William, where are you? What is the matter, William?"
"He is here--don"t get excited," said the chairman, groping his way to the hearth and stirring the embers till they blazed up and lighted the room. "Katie, be sensible, make no disturbance! William here we are going to take away with us for a while--he is--he must--he--"
"Take away William--where, I should like to know?" The woman stopped short. "William?--no indeed, he stays here," she said in a decided tone, and reached for her skirts on the stool by the bedside.
"Remain where you are, stay in bed! Pst!--"
The chairman was about to cover the woman"s mouth with his hand; but she had seen the gleam of bra.s.s b.u.t.tons on the uniform, and in senseless fear of the constable had uttered a piercing shriek. With both feet she leaped out of bed and now stood trembling before the two men.
What did they want here? And in the dead of night! In a stupor of horror her eyes wandered from one to the other. Then she saw the iron grip in which the constable held her William. What--what had her William done? Nothing! They must let him go, let him go at once!
Screaming reproaches she made up to the constable; but he rudely brushed her to one side.
"Hold your tongue, woman," he said curtly, "do not get yourself into trouble. Forward, march!"
With a prod in the back he urged his prisoner on. But the old lady seized the skirts of his coat and held him fast with unlooked-for strength.
"William, William," she cried at the top of her lungs, "What has he done, what can he have done? Constable, oh, leave him here; in all his life he has never done anything wrong; he always goes straight to bed; he does not drink, he never quarrels, he is always peaceable--oh, do him no harm! Jesus, Mary, constable, dear constable, do the child no harm!"
Her teeth chattered in fear and sobbing; she had let go the uniform and tried now to release her son from the iron grasp. She probably did not herself know that she was. .h.i.tting and scratching.
The constable had no little difficulty in shaking off the woman, especially when the prisoner, incited by the example of his mother, also began to offer resistance. But finally a vigorous push disposed of the old woman, and handcuffs, taken in a twinkling from his pocket, fettered the culprit.
"To jail?--" The woman"s outcry echoed from the dingy walls. She lay on her knees and wrung her hands. "Nicholas, Nicholas, constable, G.o.d in heaven, what has he done? I swear he is as innocent as a new-born babe! He never cuts gra.s.s in other people"s fields, he tears off no branches in the wood--he never climbed the fence to steal the pastor"s apples--believe me, believe me, by my eternal salvation, he is a good boy! He always sent me coffee and sugar, and a black ap.r.o.n to wear to church on Sunday, and he had his photograph taken for his mother, and every year he came to spend one day with me. Oh, he is so good, believe me every word! I will die on the spot if I am not telling the simple truth. Nicholas"--she turned beseechingly to the chairman--"Nicholas, you have known me all the days of my life. Have I ever told you a lie?
Help me! Let him stay here!" She made a motion as if to embrace his knees.
"Do not be too hasty, Katie," murmured the chairman as he drew back.
"Your William will soon be coming home again; it is only that he may prove that he--hm--" In embarra.s.sment he tried to avoid the woman"s anxiously penetrating look. "Hm, in order that we may find out--in short, that it was not he who lighted all these fires."
"Fires? He--lighted the fire?" Utterly nonplussed the woman glared at her own hearth. "No, I have always lighted the fire myself!"
"Nonsense!" The constable was becoming impatient; the idea had been to arrest the fellow without further ado, and now the tumult had lasted so long that soon the whole street would swarm with curious spectators.
"Stupid woman, we are not talking about that fire. He has been setting fires, the scalawag! Forward now, march!"
William had been setting fires? The old woman lifted her hands in amazement. It could be believed that her William had set fires!
"Jesus, Mary!" she made the sign of the cross and folded her hands. "A sin!" Why, that was a crime! Her William a criminal? That was almost enough to make you laugh! "Ha, ha!" She laughed convulsively: "No, constable, William never does anything of that kind."
"Come along," said the constable, shoving William out of the door.
"We shall find out about that. If the fellow has not done it, they will send him back home again before very long!"
Indeed they would! Of this she was quite certain.
But William did not come as soon as Widow Driesch had expected. Four times she had already been at the chairman"s house to find out about it, and on the street and in the fields she shouted after him, "Hey, Nicholas, when is William coming home?"
But he too could tell her nothing. He only shrugged, and consoled her, when he saw her anxious face and expectant eyes, with the unvarying words, "Do not be so hasty, Katie, he will soon come back!"
Meanwhile four weeks had come and gone. From the grove of fir-trees near the village went forth an extraordinary odor of pitch; slow-running, amber colored streaks had oozed from the s.h.a.ggy trunks; every drop of moisture seemed to have evaporated from the trees. In the stillness of the August afternoon one could hear the falling of needles and the crackling of twigs and branches. The sun had glowed too ardently overhead.
A mealy odor came from the fields; the grain had been cut. It lay in swathes on the ground; the women gathered, the men bound it into sheaves, and the children, who now were at liberty to pa.s.s by the closed door of the schoolhouse, ran about over the stubble and collected the stray ears. The hammering of scythes after the day"s work was done, this monotonous village music, had ceased; in its stead could now be heard by day the creaking of ox carts over the hardened clayey road, while cries of "gee," "haw" and the cracking of whips woke the echoes in the glimmering air above the fields.
All the people were in the fields--all but Katherine Driesch; she had no harvest to gather. Quietly she sat in her cottage and heard, when the rumble of the outgoing wagons had died away, nothing but the buzzing of flies and the crackling of the brush-fire on her hearth. She kept the fire going as always; for when he came home she wished him to find things to his liking. And as she sat there, her idle hands in her lap--she could not work; what should she do, why should she do anything?--he was not there--the thoughts pa.s.sed through her mind, merciful heaven, what if they did something to William! How long were they going to keep him in jail? She no longer put faith in Nicholas--he was deceiving her, in spite of his gray hair. He avoided her; yesterday evening she had plainly seen it.
She had run up to him as he was striding home in front of his loaded harvest wagon with his pitchfork over his shoulder.
"When is William coming home?"
But he had turned his head and said something about the weather to Matt, his son, who was walking behind him.
"Hi, Nicholas!" Was he deaf? She had seized him by the bosom of his shirt and shouted into his face, "When is he coming?" He must have heard!
But instead of giving any answer he had grown angry. "Let me alone!"