"Yes.Just as he came down-stairs little Lisa's mother came in and said the child had wandered off somewhere, and as she was a little uneasy Itold Nikolaus to never mind about his father's orders--go and look her up....Why, how white you two do look! I do believe you are sick.Sit down; I'll fetch something.That cake has disagreed with you.It is a little heavy, but I thought--"She disappeared without finishing her sentence, and we hurried at once to the back window and looked toward the river.There was a great crowd at the other end of the bridge, and people were flying toward that point from every direction.
"Oh, it is all over--poor Nikolaus! Why, oh, why did she let him get out of the house!""Come away," said Seppi, half sobbing, "come quick--we can't bear to meet her; in five minutes she will know."But we were not to escape.She came upon us at the foot of the stairs, with her cordials in her hands, and made us come in and sit down and take the medicine.Then she watched the effect, and it did not satisfy her;so she made us wait longer, and kept upbraiding herself for giving us the unwholesome cake.
Presently the thing happened which we were dreading.There was a sound of tramping and scraping outside, and a crowd came solemnly in, with heads uncovered, and laid the two drowned bodies on the bed.
"Oh, my God!" that poor mother cried out, and fell on her knees, and put her arms about her dead boy and began to cover the wet face with kisses.
"Oh, it was I that sent him, and I have been his death.If I had obeyed, and kept him in the house, this would not have happened.And I am rightly punished; I was cruel to him last night, and him begging me, his own mother, to be his friend."And so she went on and on, and all the women cried, and pitied her, and tried to comfort her, but she could not forgive herself and could not be comforted, and kept on saying if she had not sent him out he would be alive and well now, and she was the cause of his death.
It shows how foolish people are when they blame themselves for anything they have done.Satan knows, and he said nothing happens that your first act hasn't arranged to happen and made inevitable; and so, of your own motion you can't ever alter the scheme or do a thing that will break a link.Next we heard screams, and Frau Brandt came wildly plowing and plunging through the crowd with her dress in disorder and hair flying loose, and flung herself upon her dead child with moans and kisses and pleadings and endearments; and by and by she rose up almost exhausted with her outpourings of passionate emotion, and clenched her fist and lifted it toward the sky, and her tear-drenched face grew hard and resentful, and she said:
"For nearly two weeks I have had dreams and presentiments and warnings that death was going to strike what was most precious to me, and day and night and night and day I have groveled in the dirt before Him praying Him to have pity on my innocent child and save it from harm--and here is His answer!"Why, He had saved it from harm--but she did not know.
She wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, and stood awhile gazing down at the child and caressing its face and its hair with her hands;then she spoke again in that bitter tone: "But in His hard heart is no compassion.I will never pray again."She gathered her dead child to her bosom and strode away, the crowd falling back to let her pass, and smitten dumb by the awful words they had heard.Ah, that poor woman! It is as Satan said, we do not know good fortune from bad, and are always mistaking the one for the other.
Many a time since I have heard people pray to God to spare the life of sick persons, but I have never done it.
Both funerals took place at the same time in our little church next day.
Everybody was there, including the party guests.Satan was there, too;which was proper, for it was on account of his efforts that the funerals had happened.Nikolaus had departed this life without absolution, and a collection was taken up for masses, to get him out of purgatory.Only two-thirds of the required money was gathered, and the parents were going to try to borrow the rest, but Satan furnished it.He told us privately that there was no purgatory, but he had contributed in order that Nikolaus's parents and their friends might be saved from worry and distress.We thought it very good of him, but he said money did not cost him anything.
At the graveyard the body of little Lisa was seized for debt by a carpenter to whom the mother owed fifty groschen for work done the year before.She had never been able to pay this, and was not able now.The carpenter took the corpse home and kept it four days in his cellar, the mother weeping and imploring about his house all the time; then he buried it in his brother's cattle-yard, without religious ceremonies.It drove the mother wild with grief and shame, and she forsook her work and went daily about the town, cursing the carpenter and blaspheming the laws of the emperor and the church, and it was pitiful to see.Seppi asked Satan to interfere, but he said the carpenter and the rest were members of the human race and were acting quite neatly for that species of animal.He would interfere if he found a horse acting in such a way, and we must inform him when we came across that kind of horse doing that kind of human thing, so that he could stop it.We believed this was sarcasm, for of course there wasn't any such horse.