Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds; the cuckoo clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her father and the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning, saying nothing. She thought he had been drinking in some tavern; it had been often so with him of late.
There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice; August dropped to sleep, his curls falling over his face; Dorothea's wheel hummed like a cat.
Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the pipe on the ground.
"I have sold Hirschvogel," he said; and his voice was husky and ashamed in his throat. The spinning wheel stopped. August sprang erect out of his sleep.
"Sold Hirschvogel!" If their father had dashed the holy crucifix on the floor at their feet and spat on it, they could not have shuddered under the horror of a greater blasphemy.
"I have sold Hirschvogel!" said Karl Strehla in the same husky, dogged voice. "I have sold it to a traveling trader in such things for two hundred florins. What would you?I owe double that. He saw it this morning when you were all out. He will pack it and take it to Munich to-morrow."
Dorothea gave a low, shrill cry:
"Oh, father!the childrenin midwinter!"
She turned white as the snow without; her words died away in her throat.
August stood, half blind with sleep, staring with dazed eyes as his cattle stared at the sun when they came out from their winter's prison.
"It is not true! It is not true!" he muttered. "You are jesting, father?"
Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.
"It is true. Would you like to know what is true too?that the bread you eat, and the meat you put in this pot, and the roof you have over your heads, are none of them paid for, have been none of them paid for for months and months; if it had not been for your grandfather, I should have been in prison all summer and autumn; and he is out of patience and will do no more now. There is no work to be had; the masters go to younger men; they say I work ill; it may be so. Who can keep his head above water with ten hungry children dragging him down? When your mother lived it was different. Boy, you stare at me as if I were a mad dog! You have made a god of yon china thing. Wellit goes; goes to-morrow. Two hundred florins, that is something. It will keep me out of prison for a little, and with the spring things may turn"
August stood like a creature paralyzed. His eyes were wide open, fastened on his father's with terror and incredulous horror; his face had grown as white as his sister's; his chest heaved with tearless sobs.
"It is not true! It is not true!" he echoed stupidly. It seemed to him that the very skies must fall, and the earth perish, if they could take away Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of tearing down God's sun out of the heavens.
"You will find it true," said his father doggedly, and angered because he was in his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered away the heirloom and treasure of his race and the comfort and health-giver of his young children." You will find it true. The dealer has paid me half the money to-night, and will pay me the other half to-morrow, when he packs it up and takes it away to Munich. No doubt it is worth a great deal more,at least I suppose so, as he gives that,but beggars cannot be choosers. The little black stove in the kitchen will warm you all just as well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor house like this, when one can make two hundred florins by it? Dorothea, you never sobbed more when your mother died. What is it, when all is said? a bit of hardware much too grand-looking for such a room as this. If all the Strehlas had not been born fools, it would have been sold a century ago, when it was dug up out of the ground. It is a stove for a museum, the trader said when he saw it. To a museum let it go."
August gave a shrill shriek like a hare's when it is caught for its death, and threw himself on his knees at his father's feet.
"Oh, father, father!" he cried convulsively, his hands closing on Strehla's knees, and his uplifted face blanched and distorted with terror. "Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what you say? Send IT awayour life, our sun, our joy, our comfort? We shall all die in the dark and the cold. Sell ME rather. Sell me to any trade or any pain you like; I will not mind. But Hirschvogel!it is like selling the very cross off the altar! You must be in jest. You could not do such a thingyou could not!you who have always been gentle and good, and who have sat in the warmth here year after year with our mother. It is not a piece of hardware, as you say; it is a living thing, for a great man's thoughts and fancies have put life into it, and it loves us though we are only poor little children, and we love it with all our hearts and souls, and up in heaven I am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows! Oh, listen; I will go and try and get work to-morrow! I will ask them to let me cut ice or make the paths through the snow. There must be something I could do, and I will beg the people we owe money to to wait; they are all neighbors, they will be patient. But sell Hirschvogel!oh, never! never! never! Give the florins back to the vile man. Tell him it would be like selling the shroud out of mother's coffin, or the golden curls off Ermengilda's head! Oh, father, dear father! do hear me, for pity's sake!"
Strehla was moved by the boy's anguish. He loved his children, though he was often weary of them, and their pain was pain to him. But besides emotion, and stronger than emotion, was the anger that August roused in him; he hated and despised himself for the barter of the heirloom of his race, and every word of the child stung him with a stinging sense of shame.
And he spoke in his wrath rather than in his sorrow.
"You are a little fool," he said harshly, as they had never heard him speak. "You rave like a play-actor. Get up and go to bed. The stove is sold. There is no more to be said. Children like you have nothing to do with such matters. The stove is sold, and goes to Munich to-morrow. What is it to you? Be thankful I can get bread for you. Get on your legs I say, and go to bed."
Strehla took up the jug of ale as he paused, and drained it slowly as a man who had no cares.
August sprang to his feet and threw his hair back off his face; the blood rushed into his cheeks, making them scarlet; his great soft eyes flamed alight with furious passion.
"You DARE not!" he cried aloud, "you dare not sell it, I say! It is not yours alone; it is ours"
Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks with a force that shivered it to atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his son a blow that felled him to the floor. It was the first time in all his life that he had ever raised his hand against any one of his children.
Then he took the oil lamp that stood at his elbow and stumbled off to his own chamber with a cloud before his eyes.
"What has happened?" said August a little while later, as he opened his eyes and saw Dorothea weeping above him on the wolfskin before the stove. He had been struck backward, and his head had fallen on the hard bricks where the wolfskin did not reach. He sat up a moment, with his face bent upon his hands.
"I remember now," he said, very low, under his breath.
Dorothea showered kisses on him, while her tears fell like rain.
"But, oh, dear, how could you speak so to father?" she murmured. "It was very wrong."
"No, I was right," said August; and his little mouth, that hitherto had only curled in laughter, curved downward with a fixed and bitter seriousness. "How dare he? How dare he?" he muttered, with his head sunk in his hands. "It is not his alone. It belongs to us all. It is as much yours and mine as it is his."