It was not until nearly midnight that Marianne was able to quit the
child's bedside, after she had repeated her usual twelve Paternosters
over and over again, who knows how many times? A look of stern defiance
was on the face of the sleeping child. She had laid one hand across her
bosom; Black Marianne gently lifted it, and said, half-aloud, to
herself:
"If there were only an eye to watch over thee and a hand to help thee
all the time, as there is now in thy sleep, and to take the heaviness
out of thy heart without thy knowing it! But nobody can do that--none
but He alone. Oh, may He do unto my child in distant lands as I do unto
this little one!"
Black Marianne was a shunned woman, that is to say, people were almost
afraid of her, so harsh did she seem in her manner. Some eighteen years
before she had lost her husband, who had been shot in an attempt which
he had made with some companions to rob the stage-coach. Marianne was
expecting a child to be born when the body of her husband, with its
blackened face, was carried into the village; but she bore up bravely
and washed the dead man's face as if she hoped, by so doing, to wash
away his black guilt. Her three daughters died, and only the son, who
was born soon afterward, lived to grow up. He turned out to be a
handsome lad, though he had a strange, dark color in his face; he was
now traveling abroad as a journeyman mason.
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