Читать книгу The Cuckoo Clock - Mary Stolz - Страница 7

Frau Goddhart enjoyed a reputation for kindness.

“Ach, Frau Goddhart,” people of the village would say, “she is the soul of kindness.”

Let anyone fall sick, and there was Frau Goddhart, usually even before the doctor came. Should a family be needy, Frau Goddhart would arrive with clothing and blankets, clean and neatly mended, things no longer wanted at the Goddhart Manor House. A person in trouble found in Frau Goddhart a willing listener. As she explained to Herr Goddhart, a person in trouble often needs a listener more than he needs material aid. She had a pleasant voice, almost as pleasant to her hearers as to herself, and was frequently to be found reading to invalids. She sang in the church choir. She carried sweetmeats in her pocket and gave them to children as she went about the village being the soul of kindness.

A godsend, she was called.

Frau Goddhart sometimes found the burden of her reputation heavy to bear. She rejoiced in it, but it weighed upon her. Nobody, she reasoned, could be expected to be kindly all the time.

And so, within the walls of the Manor House, she let slip the yoke. She snapped at her husband, snarled at the children, bullied the servants. Having been a good listener and a godsend all day in the village, she thought it little enough to expect quiet and obedience at home in the evening.

What Frau Goddhart expected, she got.

When she was at home, the Manor House was quiet. Despite a man, six children, a foundling, and many servants, one might almost have thought the big house deserted as folks tiptoed about and spoke in whispers so as not to disturb Frau Goddhart, resting from a day of charity and compassion.

The snarls she directed at her own children were of an absent-minded, usually quite affectionate order. Those she aimed at Erich the Foundling were genuine. He had taken advantage of her reputation for kindness. She had no doubt of that in the world.

It had come about thus:

One morning, ten years before, a bundle with a baby within had been found on Frau Goddhart’s doorstep. In the ordinary way of things, in those days, foundlings were found on the church steps. But with Frau Goddhart’s renown for benevolence, what was more natural than that the desperate parent should think of this good woman and suppose that her large heart could accommodate an unfortunate waif? She already had six children. Could one more be in the way? So the unhappy parent who left the baby must have reasoned.

Frau Goddhart had always felt it very hard luck indeed that the bundle had been disclosed in full view of the villagers, all returning from church on a soft spring morning. Had she come out to find it earlier in the day, when no one was about, she would most assuredly have bundled the bundle off to the church steps, where she felt it belonged. But as she and Herr Goddhart and the six young Goddharts approached the Manor House, there it was—a struggling, whimpering bundle of baby. Frau Goddhart was not only offered an opportunity for public kindness, there was no way to avoid it.

“Ach, the poor little one,” she exclaimed angrily. Observing many eyes upon her, she continued, lifting her voice and her chin, “It enrages me that a child of God should be cast off in this manner. I shall take the waif in and mother it as one of my own.”

Much gratification among the onlookers. Herr Goddhart picked up the blanket-enfolded bellowing baby and held it gently. Its sobs subsided.

“Take the thing—take the child into the house,” Frau Goddhart directed. “God has sent it to us.”

God could easily have sent it to the church, she thought irritably, and it seemed to her unfair that He had chosen to do otherwise.

Consider, just consider, all she had done and given in His name! A pipe for the church organ. An aisle runner. The most beautifully embroidered altar cloth in the Black Forest. A stained-glass window! Her lovely singing, week after week! Her visits to the poor! Her—benefices, too many to count!

This was how God rewarded her!

Well, it was not easy to be a woman of extraordinary kindness, not at all easy, she thought, as she accepted this burden that was laid upon her in full view of the village.

The villagers now turned away to their homes. In her mind she could hear their praises. No doubt some would be going too far, calling her a saint. The chorus of their admiration sounded in her mind and made up for much inconvenience.

Once inside the Manor House, Frau Goddhart called one of the maids and informed her that she was to be greatly blessed. She was to have the sole care of this waif of God. The maid, a young girl with little free time, proved stubborn about accepting her good fortune, but Frau Goddhart had little trouble convincing her to accept the ways of Divine Providence. The maids, the grooms, the gardeners, Herr Goddhart, and the six young Goddharts were all afraid of Frau Goddhart. They knew she was a woman of unusual kindness, because everybody said so, and the entire village could not be wrong. They only wondered at how different it seemed to be when she was alone with her household. None of them spoke of her elsewhere in any but the warmest terms. They would not have been believed, to begin with. But, in addition, Frau Goddhart would have found out. She would not be pleased. It seemed best all around to please her. Herr Goddhart occasionally explained to a weeping scullery maid or a fuming groom or a crying small Goddhart that the problem must lie with them. They must not perfectly understand the nature of goodness.

Then he’d step outside the house to smoke his pipe.

Erich the Foundling lived in the attic. In the days of which we speak, foundlings, waifs, orphans, and stepchildren lived in the attic. As it chanced, Erich quite liked his room under the eaves. The maid into whose care he’d been given had long since gone off with a follower, a young man who laughed a lot. She had explained as she eloped with him on a moonlit summer’s night that in all her years at the Manor House she had never heard anyone laugh.

“It gives Frau Goddhart a headache, to hear laughter,” she said.

“Now, that’s a funny thing,” said her young man. “Many’s the time I’ve heard her laughing away on the lawn at the castle.” He had been a forester in Baron Balloon’s park until he decided to run off with Frau Goddhart’s maid in the middle of the night. “But she’s a saintly woman, all the same,” he said.

“Oh yes, of course,” said the little maid, out of habit, and off they went and were never heard of again.

From the age of five, Erich was quite on his own. Except for jobs he was required to do around the Manor House—blacking boots, scouring pots, toting pails of water for the copper hip-tubs in the bedrooms, carrying slops to the pigs, splitting wood for the fires, cleaning out the hearths, scrubbing the stone floors, all tasks normally set to orphans and suchlike in those days—his time was his own, since no one except Herr Goddhart paid him any attention.