“I am a stranger in these parts—at least, I’ve been gone so long I’m as good as a stranger. But does the parsonage still stand where it used to?”
“Why would it be changed?” she said.
He did not reply, but looked at her oddly again from under the brim of his hat before he resumed his journey. In spite of the cold, the inn wife remained to watch him, her hand still on the latch, until his limping figure had rounded the bend in the road and quite disappeared from view. As she stood so, the door was pulled open behind her, and a man, coming to stand beside her, dropped his arm about her shoulders.
“What keeps you so long, lass?” he said. He was a well-favored fellow in his middle forties, his face ruddy and toughened, marked by few lines, and his thick blond hair fell evenly on a clean white linen collar. The inn wife turned toward him and smiled, and continued to look at him as if she were rinsing her vision of an unpleasant image.
“Only a beggar,” she said at last, “but a filthy animal, a son of the Bad One. He was asking about Morten Bruus. And now it seems to me that he looked oddly like Morten. Had Morten yet a brother?”
He shook his head. “Only the one you’ve heard of. And that was two too many whelps of the same breeding,” he said.
“He seemed pleased to hear of his death.”
“Even the beggars of the roads,” said the man.
In the room behind them someone began to sing, a good rich voice in a rolling stave that was taken up by the other merrymakers. The inn wife and her companion still stood without, the light from the open door pouring out around them and blurring upon the heavy air. The man presently said, without raising his voice, but his voice, close to the woman’s ear, distinct in every word:
“Morten Bruus, may God send him, though dead, a lasting and a feeling body to suffer all the torments of the flesh forever and ever. May his skin be torn from him in little pieces, each one no bigger than a fingernail. May worms devour his bowels, and his stomach be filled with broken glass, and the roof of his mouth scorched, his eyelids cut off, and his eyes open upon the fire that surrounds him, world without end. May God never permit him to repent of his life in order that he may never be forgiven for any deed of it. Amen.”
This unangered expression of a quiet, impersonal, and well-considered hatred came forth phrase by phrase in leisurely fashion to the accompaniment of the merry trolling within doors. “Amen,” said the inn wife, and the music continued.
Two
The one-armed beggar went on toward the village of Aalsö. After the nearness of warmth and nourishment withheld, the evening seemed increasingly lonely and the cold more penetrating. The twilight faded so slowly that the lessening of the light seemed rather a thickening of the air, as those night vapors considered full of harm and contagion gathered in the hollows of the road, in the low bushes, and in the shadows of the beechwoods. The fawn and umber tones of the dried weeds, the sandy road, in the gentle landscape were gradually obscured, and the faint pale gold of the stubble fields had no counterpart of pale gold in the sky. The beggar, in his soiled crimson doublet like a dying coal, moved on laboriously between the fields and hedges and came at last to Aalsö village. It was like the other villages of Jutland, diminished, closed, and dark, although so early in the night. It was inhabited, however, he could tell. Smoke issued from its chimneys. He turned from the highroad to a lane through a plowed and planted field and, feeling the landscape ever more familiar in its small details, crossed a plank bridge above a brook and found himself before a small whitewashed half-timbered dwelling.
It was surely the Aalsö parsonage; it was smaller than he remembered it. He had not come here as often as he had been sent, when he was a boy, but he remembered it. He stepped close to the door and knocked, and, as he waited for a sound from within, he put up his right hand and touched the blackened straw of the thatch which came down shawl-like about the doorway.
There should have been a jog in the wall to the right of him, and the higher roof of the unit which he remembered as the New Room. This was gone, and had been gone for some time; the older part of the house had been rethatched, and that portion of the wall of the New Room which remained had been leveled off at shoulder height and made to be the wall of a courtyard. He looked over the wall and saw that grass had grown between the bricks of the old floor. On the farther side of the courtyard was a small byre with a half-open doorway. As he looked, an old woman came through the doorway, carrying a ruffled brown hen under each arm. She did not see him at once, for she was picking her steps upon the uneven bricks; when she did glance up and observe him, she was frightened. She stopped short, then stepped back against the wall of the byre, holding her two brown hens in a closer embrace. For her, the outline of the broad and rakish hat, the long black hair, the gleam of crimson of the French doublet, meant the presence of a soldier, and, like the inn wife, she had no love for soldiers. However, after her first fright, she came forward staunchly, passed through the swinging wooden gate in the side wall, and so around to the spot where the stranger waited.
The stranger had never been skilled at begging, but whereas he had presented himself to the inn wife as one who had been a soldier, he now had wit enough to present himself as a beggar. He took off his battered hat and asked for food and shelter. There was a certain honesty in his servility; he was half starved, and shaken with fatigue.
The old woman had a kind face, a face full of wrinkles in a soft, fresh-colored skin. Her blue eyes were round and gentle, her head bound in a cap of dull blue camlet. The line of white which framed her face was not linen, but the smooth margin of white hair. She said:
“Do you come from far?”
“As far as from Hamburg within the last month. Before that, from Bohemia. But I was a boy in Aalsö parish. I did my catechism here,” he expatiated, “with Pastor Peder Korf.”
“Did you so?” she said, taking a step forward. “But did you look to find Pastor Peder?”
“They tell me that he is dead.”
She nodded.
“And that Pastor Juste is kind as Sören Qvist.”
She did not smile at this, but nodded again, seriously. “Yes,” she said, “he is kind. If you will wait now, I will go tell him that you are here.”
She edged by him and pushed the door open with her elbow, being careful not to joggle her hens, and pushed it shut again from within. She returned after a little time and let him into the kitchen of Aalsö parsonage.
The room was so dark that at first he saw nothing but the light of the fire on the raised hearth, but it was warm, warm and snug. He felt with pleasure the closeness of the walls, the nearness of the heavy beams in the low ceiling. He had been too long out of doors under a sky crowded either with wind or with massing fog. It was fine to feel a roof close over his head. He made his way across the brick floor to a stool near the hearth and sat down, holding out his hands to the fire. The old woman busied herself in the darker corner of the kitchen. He heard her wooden shoes clapping on the bricks, the swish and swing of her heavy skirts, and, behind him, the rustling of feathers, a few sleepy clucks. In a short time the old woman came bearing a wooden plate on which was a loaf of bread, uncut. She dragged a small bench near the hearth, set the plate upon it, and stood back, winding her hands in her dark blue apron. The beggar looked from the loaf to the old woman, standing there solidly with the light from the fire on her face, on her white smock and yellow bodice and her blue apron, watching him. The light was golden upon the glazed side of the loaf. He eyed it, then, since she did not move, reached out his hand toward it.
“Stop!” cried the old woman, dropping her apron and reaching toward the loaf herself. “You would not take my good loaf in your dirty hand, like that! Where is your knife? Cannot you cut yourself a piece, like a Christian man?”
“I