Page - 158 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

entirely; the setting sun shone with a faint golden gleam over the wide landscape, over wood and meadows; and a cool breeze blew in our faces. A bright tear lay on my mother’s pale cheeks. As, silent and tired, we drove through our home meadows, the stars appeared in the sky. On every side, the song of the crickets purled and chirped in the grass. By the fence, where our hillside began, stood a black figure that accosted us and asked if it was we. It was my father, who had come to meet us. My mother called him by name; her voice was weak and trembling. Father took us indoors, without asking a question. Not until we were in the parlour and the rushlight was burning did he ask how we had fared. “Not badly,” said Steve, “not at all badly: we have been very cheerful.” “And Tom of the Footpath: what did he say?” “He said that, like other people, woodman’s wife wouldn’t live for ever, but that she has plenty of time before her, oh, plenty of time. Only you’re to take care: give her lots of good air in the summer, not too much work and no excitement, good food and drink and no physic, no physic at all, he said. And then she’ll get all right again.” A time elapsed after that. My father tried to nurse mother according to Steve’s dictum, which he believed to be Tom of the Footpath’s dictum; and, when winter came, she sat at the spinning-wheel and span. The mouse had not bitten the thread in two. That same winter brought the news that Tom of the Footpath had been found frozen to death in the snow, not far from the ale-house on the Fischbacheralpe. We said an Our Father for his soul. Carrier Steve, who came to see us now and then and always remained the good, cheerful man he was, had also forgiven Thomas: true, it was wholly and solely because he had proved wrong that time. II I failed—to return to our other circumstances—to take any pleasure in the peasant’s life and also I really lacked the strength for it. I then took up a trade, but was not able to help my parents; I wanted to pay my father for my Sunday board, which I had at home, but he would take nothing from me, said that I was just as much his child as before, only I must not burn so many rushes