Сказки / Fairy Tales

’

And the woman answered him,

‘I am your mother.’

‘You are mad to say so,’ cried the Star-Child angrily. ‘I am not your son, you are a beggar, and ugly, and in rags. Therefore get out, and let me never see your foul face!’

‘But you are indeed my little son, whom I bare in the forest,’ she cried. She fell on her knees, and held out her arms to him. ‘The robbers stole you from me, and left you to die,’ she murmured, ‘but I recognized you when I saw you. I also recognized the signs, the cloak of golden tissue and the amber chain.

But the Star-Child did not move from his place. He shut the doors of his heart against her. The woman wept for pain.

At last he spoke to her, and his voice was hard and bitter.

‘If you are really my mother,’ he said, ‘stay away, and do not come here to bring me to shame. I thought I was the child of a Star, and not a beggar’s child, as you tell me that I am. Therefore get away, and let me never see you again!’

‘Alas! my son,’ she cried, ‘will you not kiss me before I go? I suffered much to find you.

‘No,’ said the Star-Child, ‘you are very foul, I can’t look at you. I prefer to kiss the adder or the toad than you.’

So the woman rose up, and went away into the forest. She wept bitterly. When the Star-Child saw that she was away, he was glad, and ran back to his playmates to play with them.

But when they beheld him, they mocked him and said,

‘Oh, you are as foul as the toad, and as loathsome as the adder.

And they drove him out[11 - they drove him out  –  они выгнали его] of the garden.

The Star-Child frowned and said to himself,

‘What is this that they say to me? I will go to the river and look into it. It will tell me of my beauty.’

So he went to the river and looked into it, and lo! His face was as the face of a toad, and his body was like an adder. And he fell down on the grass and wept, and said to himself,

‘Surely this is the result of my sin.

A little daughter of the Woodcutter came to him. She put her hand upon his shoulder and said,

‘You lost your beauty  –  it does not matter[12 - it does not matter  –  это не имеет значения]. Stay with us, and I will not mock at you.