Bimbi | Page 7

the same husky, dogged
voice. "I have sold it to a traveling trader in such things for two
hundred florins. What would you?--I owe double that. He saw it this
morning when you were all out. He will pack it and take it to Munich
to-morrow."
Dorothea gave a low, shrill cry:--
"Oh, father!--the children--in midwinter!"
She turned white as the snow without; her words died away in her
throat.
August stood, half blind with sleep, staring with dazed eyes as his cattle
stared at the sun when they came out from their winter's prison.
"It is not true! It is not true!" he muttered. "You are jesting, father?"

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.
"It is true. Would you like to know what is true too?--that the bread you
eat, and the meat you put in this pot, and the roof you have over your
heads, are none of them paid for, have been none of them paid for for
months and months; if it had not been for your grandfather, I should
have been in prison all summer and autumn; and he is out of patience
and will do no more now. There is no work to be had; the masters go to
younger men; they say I work ill; it may be so. Who can keep his head
above water with ten hungry children dragging him down? When your
mother lived it was different. Boy, you stare at me as if I were a mad
dog! You have made a god of yon china thing. Well--it goes; goes
to-morrow. Two hundred florins, that is something. It will keep me out
of prison for a little, and with the spring things may turn--"
August stood like a creature paralyzed. His eyes were wide open,
fastened on his father's with terror and incredulous horror; his face had
grown as white as his sister's; his chest heaved with tearless sobs.
"It is not true! It is not true!" he echoed stupidly. It seemed to him that
the very skies must fall, and the earth perish, if they could take away
Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of tearing down God's sun out of
the heavens.
"You will find it true," said his father doggedly, and angered because
he was in his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered away the
heirloom and treasure of his race and the comfort and health-giver of
his young children." You will find it true. The dealer has paid me half
the money to-night, and will pay me the other half to-morrow, when he
packs it up and takes it away to Munich. No doubt it is worth a great
deal more,--at least I suppose so, as he gives that,--but beggars cannot
be choosers. The little black stove in the kitchen will warm you all just
as well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor house like
this, when one can make two hundred florins by it? Dorothea, you
never sobbed more when your mother died. What is it, when all is
said?-- a bit of hardware much too grand-looking for such a room as
this. If all the Strehlas had not been born fools, it would have been sold
a century ago, when it was dug up out of the ground. It is a stove for a
museum, the trader said when he saw it. To a museum let it go."
August gave a shrill shriek like a hare's when it is caught for its death,
and threw himself on his knees at his father's feet.

"Oh, father, father!" he cried convulsively, his hands closing on
Strehla's knees, and his uplifted face blanched and distorted with terror.
"Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what you say? Send IT
away--our life, our sun, our joy, our comfort? We shall all die in the
dark and the cold. Sell ME rather. Sell me to any trade or any pain you
like; I will not mind. But Hirschvogel!--it is like selling the very cross
off the altar! You must be in jest. You could not do such a thing--you
could not!--you who have always been gentle and good, and who have
sat in the warmth here year after year with our mother. It is not a piece
of hardware, as you say; it is a living thing, for a great man's thoughts
and fancies have put life into it, and it loves us though we are only poor
little children, and we love it with all our hearts and souls, and up in
heaven I am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows! Oh, listen; I will go and
try and get work to-morrow! I will ask them to let me cut ice or make
the paths through the snow. There must be something I could do,