Excerpt
THE RAVENS AND THE ANGELS. (A Story of the Middle Ages.) By the Author of "Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family."
I.
In those old days, in that old city, they called the cathedral—and they thought it—the house of God. The cathedral was the Father's house for all, and therefore it was loved and honored, and enriched with lavish treasures of wealth and work, beyond any other father's house.
The cathedral was the Father's house, and, therefore, close to its gates might nestle the poor dwellings of the poor,—too poor to find a shelter anywhere besides; because the central life and joy of the house of God was the suffering, self-sacrificing Son of Man; and dearer to Him, now and forever, as when He was on earth, was the feeblest and most fallen human creature He had redeemed than the most glorious heavenly constellation of the universe He had made.
And so it happened that when Berthold, the stone-carver, died, Magdalis, his young wife, and her two children, then scarcely more than babes, Gottlieb and little Lenichen, were suffered to make their home in the little wooden shed which had once sheltered a hermit, and which nestled into the recess close to the great western gate of the minster.
Thus, while inside from the lofty aisles pealed forth, night and day, the anthems of the choir, close outside, night and day, rose also, even more surely to God, the sighs of a sorrowful woman and the cries of little children whom all her toil could hardly supply with bread. Because, He hears the feeblest wail of want, though it comes not from a dove or even from a harmless sparrow, but a young raven. And He does not heed the sweetest anthem of the fullest choir, if it is a mere pomp of sound. Because, while the best love of His meanest creatures is precious to Him, the second-best of His loftiest creatures is intolerable to Him. He heeds the shining of the drops of dew and the rustling of the blades of grass. But from creatures who can love he cannot accept the mere outside offering of creatures which can only make a pleasant sound.
All this, or such as this, the young mother Magdalis taught her babes as they could bear it.
For they needed such lessons.
The troubles of the world pressed on them very early, in the shape little children can understand—little hands and feet nipped with frost, hunger and darkness and cold.
Not that the citizens of that city were hypocrites, singing the praises of God, whilst they let His dear Lazaruses vainly crave at His gates for their crumbs.
But Magdalis was very tender and timid, and a little proud; proud not for herself, but for her husband and his babes. And she was also feeble in health. She was an orphan herself, and she had married, against the will of her kindred in a far-off city, the young stone-carver, whose genius they did not appreciate, whose labor and skill had made life so rich and bright to them while he lived, and whose early death had left them all so desolate.
For his dear sake, she would not complain. For herself it had been easier to die, and for his babes she would not bring the shame of beggary on them. Better for them to enter into this life maimed of strength, she thought, by meager food, than tainted with the taint of beggary.
Rather, she thought, would their father himself have seen them go hungry to bed than deserve that the fingers of other children should be pointed scornfully at them as "the little beggars by the church door," the door of the church in which she gloried to think there were stones of his carving.
So she toiled on, carving for sale little devotional symbols—crosses, and reliquaries, and lilies and lambs—with the skill she had learnt from him, and teaching the little ones, as best she could, to love and work and suffer. Teaching them only, perhaps, not quite enough to hope. For the lamp of hope burnt low in her own heart, and therefore her patience, not being enough the patience of hope, lacked something of sweetness. It never broke downward into murmurs, but it too seldom soared upward into praise.
So it happened that one frosty night, about Christmas-tide, little Gottlieb lay awake, very hungry, on the ledge of the wall, covered with straw, which served him for a bed.
It had once been the hermit's bed. And very narrow Gottlieb thought it must have been for the hermit, for more than once he had been in peril of falling over the side, in his restless tossings. He supposed the hermit was too good to be restless, or perhaps too good for the dear angels to think it good for him to be hungry, as they evidently did think it good for Gottlieb and Lenichen, or they would be not good angels at all, not even as kind as the ravens which took the bread to Elijah when they were told. For the dear Heavenly Father had certainly told the angels always to take care of little children.
The more Gottlieb lay awake and tossed and thought, the further off the angels seemed.
For, all the time, under the pillow lay one precious crust of bread, the last in the house until his mother should buy the loaf to-morrow.
He had saved it from his supper in an impulse of generous pity for his little sister, who so often awoke, crying with hunger, and woke his poor mother, and would not let her go to sleep again.
He had thought how sweet it would be, when Lenichen awoke the next morning, to appear suddenly, as the angels do, at the side of the bed where she lay beside her mother, and say:
"Dear Lenichen! See, God has sent you this bit of bread as a Christmas gift."
For the next day was Christmas Eve.
This little plan made Gottlieb so happy that at first it felt as good to him as eating the bread.
But the happy thought, unhappily, did not long content the hungry animal part of him, which craved, in spite of him, to be filled; and, as the night went on, he was sorely tempted to eat the precious crust—his very own crust—himself.
"Perhaps it was ambitious of me, after all," he said to himself, "to want to seem like a blessed angel, a messenger of God, to Lenichen. Perhaps, too, it would not be true. Because, after all, it would not be exactly God who sent the crust, but only me."
And with the suggestion, the little hands which had often involuntarily felt for the crust, brought it to the hungry little mouth....