CHAPTER II.
THE PASTOR’S BLUE APRON.
Pastor Schaefer was in serious trouble. It was the 22d of December, and his Christmas sermon was still unprepared: worse still, it stood every possible chance of remaining so; for how on earth was a man to consider texts, headings, arguments, or perorations, who had a house and six small children to care for, and a housekeeper whose brother had just been inconsiderate enough to die? In truth, however, it was rather the housekeeper who should be blamed for want of consideration, since the brother would very likely have remained alive if he had been consulted about the matter; whereas Mary, the housekeeper, could certainly have restrained her grief sufficiently to take the sausages off the fire!
It was early that same morning that it had all happened, though the brother had been in a dying condition for several weeks, ever since he had fallen from a ladder during the operation of hod-carrying, and fractured his skull. Therefore Mary’s mind had certainly had time to prepare itself for the shock; indeed the pastor’s children had become so accustomed to hearing her shriek wildly every time there came a knock at the door, under the supposition that the knocker brought news of her brother’s death, that, when this event really happened, little Bruno, the third from youngest, said solemnly, “Poor Mary’s brother is dead again;” but nobody supposed it was actually so.
“You had better hold still, and have your hair brushed,” said Christina a little sharply. Poor Tina was only nine years old, yet felt herself, as the eldest, responsible for the family; and the responsibility was apt to re-act on her temper. So they all hurried to finish dressing (for the odors of breakfast were unusually strong), and descended in procession to the kitchen, Tina first, leading Heinz, who was two and a half, and apt, when left to himself, to make only one step, and that head first, from bedroom to kitchen. He had fallen downstairs and landed on his head so often, that Tina said she did not believe he minded it at all. Next to him came Bruno, with Gretchen, who was six, and a person to whom nothing, good or bad, ever happened; then Franz, who was eight, and very useful in splitting wood, clearing away snow, and running errands; and then the father, carrying Lena, the six-months-old baby, at whose birth their mother had died.
“Poor Mary!” said Heinz.
The procession abruptly halted.
The children’s tongues had been running so fast about the nearness of Christmas, and what gifts the Christ-child might be expected to deposit in their shoes, that no one heard a sound from the kitchen until they had almost reached the lowest step.
“Tina, but why do you stop there?” cried the pastor, who at the turn, with the baby in his arms, could see nothing of what was happening below. “Go ahead!” he added in English, being very anxious that his children should acquire the language of their adopted country.
They were good children, and did their best to obey. Heinz made a flying leap down two steps, and, being withheld by Tina’s grasp upon his petticoats from landing on his head, brought some other portion of his anatomy, less toughened by hard knocks, in contact with the steps, whereupon he howled like the last of the Wampanoags. Tina, from the violence of the exertion, fell back upon Bruno and Gretchen, and Franz made two long steps over everybody’s head, and landed first of all in the kitchen.
“Donnerwetter!” said the pastor under his breath, but from the bottom of his heart.
There sat Mary on the floor, her apron over her head, howling like a legion of wolves; Heinz was singing the tenor of the same song, the baby added a soprano, Tina rubbed her back, and Bruno, with doubled fists, attacked Franz, who, he averred, had kicked him on the head in passing. Gretchen alone retained sufficient equanimity to realize the full situation.
“Oh, Tina!” she cried, “the coffee is all boiled over, and the sausages burnt to nothing at all.”
“When your mother died,” said the pastor solemnly, after they had eaten such breakfast as was possible under the circumstances, “when your dear mother died, children, I had no time to sit and weep. And I was able to do all that I had to do; but Mary, it seems, was not able even to move back the sausages. Come, let us wash the dishes.”
Matters did not improve as the day went on. There never were better children than Heinz and Bruno; but when one had upset the dishwater, and the other fallen against the stove, in their eagerness to be of use, and they had consequently been turned adrift on the wide world, pray, could they be expected to be as quiet as mice? It was quite natural they should find their way to the pastor’s study, where there was an excellent fire; natural, too, that the thought of tidying the room, as an atonement for their presence there and previous misadventures, should occur to them; and most natural of all that they should upset the lamp over a valuable book, which had been a college prize of their father’s.
Then it was certainly not the baby’s fault if she had a tooth nearly through, and was cross about it; nor Tina’s if she was too small to handle the tea-kettle dexterously, and so poured the boiling water over her foot, instead of into the basin; but when the kitchen door was opened by Frau Kellar, the wife of the obese little man, and her niece, this was the situation. Heinz and Bruno were seated in different corners of the room, with orders not to move hand or foot until permitted; Christina, in a third, was contemplating her injured member, bandaged, and supported on a pillow; Gretchen, to whom nothing ever happened, rocked the baby in the middle of the floor; and the pastor, with his coat off, and a blue check apron tied around his waist, was bending over the stove, frying cabbage.
“You poor fellow!” said Frau Kellar, “though begging your pardon for the word, Herr Pastor. Gott! but you must have the patience of Job!”
“Oh, no,” said the pastor. “They are good children, all. It is not their fault if they are young and little; but of course it is hard for a man,” he added wearily.
“I should say so!” cried Frau Kellar; “but now here is my niece Lottie, who will stay to-day, and to-morrow for that matter, and help you.”
“She is very good,” said the pastor, looking up admiringly at Lottie, a tall, florid, good-natured-looking girl, who had already caught up the baby, and hushed its wailing on her substantial shoulder.
“Let Gretchen and the boys go and play with my children,” said Frau Kellar. “Lottie can look after these two, and see to your dinner, and you come into your study with me. There is something I must say to you.”
The pastor meekly obeyed. He was tired out, poor man, mind and body, and disinclined to assert himself; yet he was scarcely prepared for the decided tone of Frau Kellar’s first remark.
“You need a wife, Herr Pastor; you must marry. This state of affairs cannot go on.”
“But I wish to marry,” said the pastor seriously.
Frau Kellar hesitated a moment; there are limits to every woman’s frankness, thank Heaven! especially when she is talking to her pastor. Then she said,—
“Of course you know that Karl Metzerott and Dora Weglein are betrothed?”
The pastor, still in his blue apron, sat somewhat uneasily upon a chair much too high for his short legs. A sufficiently grotesque figure, one would have said, even if his hair had not been so very rumpled, and the hands upon his thin, aproned knees so very grimy; yet, as he straightened his meagre figure and looked Frau Kellar full in the face, there was an unselfish distress upon his ugly little face that dignified his whole personality.
“That man!” he said, “that infidel, that free-thinker!”
“Well, one knew it was sure to happen,” replied Frau Kellar, with a shrug of her ample shoulders; “he has been her shadow ever since the Kaffee-Visite.”
“I tried to hinder it,” said the pastor boldly. “Fräulein Dora is good and pious, and she has no right to marry an atheist. But she only grew angry with me,” he added sadly.
“Of course,” answered Frau Kellar with a laugh, “folks who meddle with mating birds must expect a peck or two. Well, I have no fault to find with Karl, for my part. He is as steady as a rock, and if he chooses to think for himself, it’s no more than every one does nowadays. After all, too little religion is better than too much beer,” she added sagely.
The pastor shook his head. “That may follow,” he said.
“Hardly,” she replied; then, with an access of boldness, “but if she had listened to my advice, Herr Pastor, she would have taken you.”
The pastor did not resent her freedom of speech. “She is very beautiful,” he said sadly, “and who would marry a man with six children, if she could do better?”
Frau Kellar regarded the figure before her with some inward amusement, as she mentally contrasted Dora’s two suitors. “I wonder,” she thought, “if he really considers the six children his only drawback.” Then she said aloud, “If you really wish to know, Herr Pastor, I will tell you. My niece Lottie in there would marry you to-morrow if you asked her.”
“Your niece Lottie?” he said slowly.
“Yes, indeed. And Lottie is a good girl, a very good girl, Herr Pastor; not so young as she has been, perhaps, but you were not born yesterday yourself.”
“No,” he said, “certainly I was not born yesterday.”
“And she would be all the better wife and mother for her thirty years,” continued the match-maker, recklessly subtracting several units from Lottie’s actual attainments. “She is a good worker, too, an excellent cook, and the temper of an angel. And, best of all, Herr Pastor, she has a nice little sum in bank, saved out of her wages. No one knows it, or she’d have offers enough; but Lottie is sharp; she won’t waste her money on any idle good-for-naught. No; but she is tired of living out, and wants a home of her own, and she’d like well enough to be a pastor’s lady. That, you know, gives one a good position.”
“So it does,” said the pastor absently.
“Well, think it over,” said Frau Kellar, rising, “and if it suits you, mention it to Lottie. She’ll stay with you to-day, and you can see what she is for yourself.”
The pastor sat still for a long while after Frau Kellar had left him with his hands upon his knees, gazing into the fire. Presently a tear trickled down his cheek, then another and another. The pastor was weeping the death of his first and only love: for his first marriage had been as business-like a contract as the present proposed arrangement; and his feeling for Dora had been his one romance. But, after all, one cannot live on romance; especially one plus six children, and minus either a wife or a housekeeper. Romance will not mend the broken head or heal the scalded foot: it will not light the kitchen fire or keep the sausages from burning. The pastor might shed a tear or so over his lost golden-haired darling; but business is business, and when the door at last was gently opened, he knew quite well that the buxom figure and smiling face in the doorway were the face and form of his future wife.
“Dinner is ready, Herr Pastor.”
The pastor rose and untied his blue apron.
“Fräulein Lottie,” he said, “this apron belonged to my former wife. I shall not need it, if you are good enough to stay with me: could you, perhaps, make use of it?”
It was the freedom of the city, the investiture with the best robe, the sending of the pallium, the throwing of the handkerchief; and, as she promptly and proudly tied it on, Lottie took seizin of the pastor, his house and children, and all that he had.