Page - 44 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

Later, when the servants were all sitting at the evening meal, Moss-Maggie was with them at table. During the morning service she had been out in the churchyard, cowering on her husband’s grave; and after High Mass my father went and found her there and brought her with him to our house. They could get nothing out of her about the event of the night, save that she had been searching for the Christchild in the forest. Then she came over to my bed and looked at me, and I was scared at her eyes. In the back part of our house was a room in which there were only old, useless things and a lot of cobwebs. This room my father gave Moss-Maggie for a dwelling, and put a stove and a bed and a table in it for her. And she stayed with us. She would still very often go rambling about in the forest, and bring home moss, and then return and sit for hours upon her husband’s grave; from which she could never more tear herself away to return to her own district—where, indeed, she would have been just as lonely and homeless as everywhere else. Of her circumstances we could learn nothing more definite: we could only conjecture that the woman had once been happy and certainly in her right mind; and that grief for the loss of her mate had robbed her of reason. We all loved her, for she lived peacefully and contentedly with all and caused nobody the least trouble. The house-dog alone, it seemed, would never trust her, he barked and tore furiously at the chain whenever she came across the home meadow. But the creature was meaning something quite different than we thought, all the time; for once when the chain broke he rushed to the woman, leapt whining into her bosom and licked her cheeks. At last in the late autumn, when Moss-Maggie was almost always in the graveyard, there came a time when, instead of barking cheerily, the dog howled by the hour together, so that my grandmother, herself very worn and weary by then, said, “You mark my words; there’ll soon be somebody dying in our neighbourhood now, when the dog howls like that! God comfort the poor soul!” And a little while after that Moss-Maggie fell ill, and when winter came she died. In her last moments she held both my father and mother by the hand and uttered the words, “May God requite you a thousand and a thousandfold, right up into heaven itself!” Footnotes: [3] A morning service of the Catholic Church held during Advent. [4]