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Updated: May 31, 2025
The doctor called the maid, who hurried in. "You're like a bull," he repeated to the smith. "Your violence will be the death of your wife." Stephen Fausch answered never a word. He turned his face fully toward the doctor his face with one empty eye socket and one keen black eye and stood there as if he had nailed himself fast to the spot, stood there like a bull, as the doctor had said.
Hallheimer, who had spent the night at the smithy, was there, ready to receive the key. He was to sell the blacksmith shop among the woods for Fausch. Now, for the first time in many years, the blackened door of the workshop was closed, the shutters were drawn over the dim windows, and the house already looked dark and dead.
Then Fausch too left the room and slept that night on a leather covered couch in the living room. He did not concern himself about the baby, in fact he had not troubled himself about it since the maid had taken it into her care. The next day he attended to what remained to be done for his wife and for her last journey to Waltheim.
As Stephen Fausch entered, he cast a timid glance at his dead wife: It was wonderful to see her lying on the bed as if a halo shone around her. He closed the door quietly behind him, folded his arms, and looked once more at the bed.
"I wish you a good journey, Fausch!" the smith grumbled: "Yes yes," or some word that was hard to make out; but only rarely did he step up to one of his customers or other acquaintance, shake hands and say perhaps, "We're going away now," or something of the sort, and then turn quickly away, leaving behind those who would have been glad to ask more about this or that.
Cain now reached the workshop, and said, as he passed, "Good morning!" "Good morning!" answered Simmen, and turned to Fausch: "What is the boy's name?" The smith looked up with a sullen expression and was so slow in answering, that it seemed as if he first had to recollect himself, and then as if the words stuck in his throat: "The boy's name is Franz."
Her faded eyes, which had neither eyebrows nor lashes, looked down at the smith and his boy, and when Fausch looked up at her, she laughed back at him. It was a long while since old Katharine had laughed. Fausch spoke a few words more with the trader, to whom he gave over the keys of the smithy, then he growled "Go on," and the wagon started. Cain and the smith walked behind.
On Maria's eyelids, above her brow, beside her cheeks, about her throat, and even where the bedclothes scarcely hid her breast. It was the dead woman's gleaming hair and eyelashes. "Yes, you were beautiful," said Stephen Fausch.
It had a single blind window, but a huge door. The house was built of great blocks of granite, with the workshop in the lower part, and the superstructure projected far out over the workshop door, and was supported on wooden pillars, so that a sort of large, covered portico resulted. The sun never made its way into the dark room, but that did not trouble Stephen Fausch.
He stooped forward, and his rugged brow looked as if he meant to butt into some obstacle; moreover he began to walk faster. "The teacher calls me Fausch, just Fausch. He calls all the other boys by their first names," Cain began again. "The teacher is a fool," said the smith. As he spoke, they had already reached home, and without pausing, he went at once into his workshop.
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