ll the time, as there is now in thy sleep, and to take the heaviness
out of thy heart without thy knowing it! But nobody can do that--none
but He alone. Oh, may He do unto my child in distant lands as I do unto
this little one!"
Black Marianne was a shunned woman, that is to say, people were almost
afraid of her, so harsh did she seem in her manner. Some eighteen years
before she had lost her husband, who had been shot in an attempt which
he had made with some companions to rob the stage-coach. Marianne was
expecting a child to be born when the body of her husband, with its
blackened face, was carried into the village; but she bore up bravely
and washed the dead man's face as if she hoped, by so doing, to wash
away his black guilt. Her three daughters died, and only the son, who
was born soon afterward, lived to grow up. He turned out to be a
handsome lad, though he had a strange, dark color in his face; he was
now traveling abroad as a journeyman mason. For from the time of Brosi,
and especially since that worthy man's son, Severin, had worked his way
up to such high honor with the mallet, many of the young men in the
village had chosen to follow the mason's calling. The children used to
talk of Severin as if he were a prince in a fairy tale. And so Black
Marianne's only child had, in spite of her remonstrances, become a
mason, and was now wandering around the country. And she, who all her
life long had never left the village, nor had ever desired to leave it,
often declared that she seemed to herself like a hen that had hatched a
duck's egg; but she was almost always clucking to herself about it.
One would hardly believe it, but Black Marianne was one of the most
cheerful persons in the village; she was never seen to be sorrowful, for
she did not like to have people pity her; and that is why they did not
take to her. In the winter she was the most industrious spinner in the
village, and in the summer, the busiest at gathering wood, a large part
of which she was able to sell; and "my John"--for that was her surviving
child's name--"my John" was always the subject of her conversation. She
said that she had taken little Amrei to live with her, not from a desire
to be kind, but in order that she might have some living being about
her. She liked to appear rough before people, and thus enjoyed, all the
more, the proud consciousness of independence.
The exact opposite to her was Crappy Zachy, with whom Damie had found
s
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