Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/349

 smiles and now deadly pale, seems to express a silent but urgent entreaty.

“Forgive—forget!” laments the mother, vexed by her fears. “No, no!—And yet!”

She stands mute awhile. Her breast heaves; hot tears steal to her eyes.

“Yet—I must—to save my child,” she whispers as in a dream; and then suddenly bending forward, she takes the child from the cradle into her arms, and pressing it to her heart, she prays,—“O God, only save my little angel from the baneful breath! I forgive—all.”

Here the child cries out; but, from its opening eyes new life gleams, and a smile plays about the lips.

The mother shouts with joy. She runs to the window. The east begins to blush with the first flush of dawn. The gleam shines in through the window; and in the rosy glow it seems to the mother that her little angel’s cheeks are as bright as they were before the poisonous vapor of the father’s grave touched them.

From that night the ill-starred mother loved her child more devotedly than ever; she guarded her daughter as she would her eye, but she no longer kept her away from the “cursed” grave. Oftentimes the child played on the mound under the lilac bush, where were decaying the bones of a man without whose sin she would not have seen the light of day.

Later, when she shall have grown up into maidenhood, she will spend many an hour in melancholy dreams under that ill-fated bush of lilacs, and perhaps she will think of her father with bitterness, or perhaps she will willingly pluck from the shrub a little twig with a fresh blossom, and pinning it to her bosom, will kneel down at the grave without rebuke, without bitterness, and will forgive as her mother has forgiven.

Translated from the Bohemian by Josef Jiři Král.