Into the damp night air drifted suddenly a wave of sound. It startled Mrs. Schotz, who sat at work by the lamp, watching late into the night. Even as she lifted her head to listen it swelled into a distant growl of thunder, threatening, sullen. A startled voice came from her husband's bed asking what the noise might be. Before she had time to answer, the door burst open, and their neighbor, the cobbler's wife, ran into the shop.
"Have you heard," she shrieked--"have you heard? They have killed him, the good President!" With the last word she was out of the door.
Joseph fell back and lay still. His hands were clinched and his lips were locked. He tried to lock his heart, too. He did not dare to feel....
"'A hero.'" he thought. "He called me that." The sound of his wife's sobbing filled the room.... No, it would never do to weep. "Ah-h!" A pang greater than he had ever known shattered him. He held that down, too. It was then that a great thought came to him--the pain taught him.
"The same future, then, for him and for me."
He lay very still while the thought grew and filled him. The sound of his wife's sobbing sank lower and lower. She crept close to her husband and laid her hand on his. He took it gently in his weak fingers, and thus they remained. The room seemed empty.
"They killed him, too, thy Napoleon," at last his wife said, timidly. Joseph started. The name of the old god made him know how far he had gone. For a moment he felt shame, as though he, too, had betrayed. Then he spoke:
"If the Emperor, too, had had--toys--and if he had played with them; if he had been able to laugh at the world and--yes--a little at himself; if he had been able to laugh at himself--and cry over other people--he would not have stayed at St. Helena. And ... he would have been almost as great as the President."
Mrs. Schotz started forward and put her face close to that of her husband. She spoke with her eyes on his eyes.
He nodded his head weakly but with meaning. And both were silent with that silence which follows truth proclaimed.
After a few minutes he took up his thought again.
"I thought, my wife, that the end of life had come for me when I knew that I should have to sit here in the shop the rest of the days of my life and make toys for children. Now I know that it was but the beginning. He taught me. There could be nothing greater. The toys will live in the homes of the children. They will find them, too, the toys he bought for his boy--after he has gone. But not every one will know the work that they have done. Nor will all the toys the President left be so easily discovered.... I, too, am his toy."