Page - 160 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

his bread, and one sister remained with them and nursed poor mother. Father kept on going over the mountains to the doctors’, and all but promised them his own life, if they could save the life of his wife. In the cottage, things looked very wretched. The ailing woman suffered in silence. The light of her eyes threatened to fail her, her mental faculties appeared to fade. Death knocked at her heart with repeated strokes. She often seemed to endure severe pain, but said nothing; she no longer took any interest in the world, asked only after her husband, after her children. And she lay years a-dying. I often came to see her during that time. She hardly knew me, when I stood by her bedside; but then again she would say, as in a dream: “Is that you, Peterl? Praise and thanks be to God that you are here again!” During midsummer, we would carry her, once in a way, with bed and all, out of the stuffy room into the air, so that she might see the sunshine once more. I do not know if she saw it: she kept her eyes open and looked up at the sun; her optic nerves seemed dead. Then, suddenly, days came when she was different. She was cheerful and longed to go out into the open. “Do get quite well again, Maria,” said her husband, “and we shall remain together a long while yet.” “Yes,” she answered. I thought of all this on my way through the forest—and now it was all over with this poor rich life. When, at last, after walking for hours through the woods along the mountain-path, I saw the thatched cottage on the hill-side, then it was as though a misty shadow covered woods and plains and all; and yet the sunlight hung over it. A puff of grey smoke rose from the little chimney. Does she suspect my coming? thought I. Is she cooking my favourite dish? No, strangers are preparing a funeral feast. You stood long, Peterl, outside the half-open door; and your hand trembled when at last it touched the latch. The door opened, you walked in, it was dark in the narrow passage, with only a dim little oil-lamp flickering in a glass, and yet you saw it clearly: against the wall, under the smoky stairs, on a plank lay the bier, covered entirely with a big white cloth. At the head stood a crucifix and the holy-water stoup, with a sprig of fir in it…. You fell upon your knees…. And the tears came at last. The tears which the mother’s heart once gave us to take with us into this world for our relief in