LITMIR.BIZ

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The traveler had remembered it with an open door, light streaming out generously upon the road before it, and with people coming and going. This evening the door was closed and all the windows were shuttered. There was no one in sight. Something about the shape of the inn seemed changed, as well, but after slow searching in his memory the traveler concluded that it was not the inn itself, but its background and setting, that had suffered loss. Surely he could remember a small wooden dwelling just beyond the innyard, and another across the road from it, but these were gone now. The inn was no longer one of a group, but solitary.

      This matter of closed doors and shuttered windows was not new to him since he had first entered the outlying districts of Jutland. He had come through inhospitable and half-deserted country. He had passed farms but poorly under cultivation, and farmhouses still unroofed in which the thick grass of Jutland grew above charred timbers fallen into the dwelling rooms. But he had somehow taken it for granted, in his slow mind, that when he reached his own county and his own parish, things would be as they had been, the doors open and the people kindly.

      He went down the slight hill, limping, because the heel was gone from one boot, and the sole of the other had loosened, letting enter the sand and fine gravel. He approached the inn, and knocked. The Golden Lion hung above his head without creaking, so still and heavy was the air. A fawn-colored hound with a tail as long as a whip crept round the corner of the building and stared at him suspiciously with pale yellow eyes, then, hearing the door start open, turned and ran, the long tail curled under its belly. A young woman with a good tall figure, a firm bosom and straight shoulders, came out of the inn and closed the door behind her, holding one hand still upon the latch.

      With her came the aroma of the inn. It clung to the heavy serge of her garments, and she stood before the stranger in a sensuous aureole of warm air. The smell of beer, of wood smoke, of roasting meat and fish, of wool and leather impregnated with grease and sweat, all the fine compounded flavor of conviviality and food assailed the nostrils of the stranger with such a promise of good things behind the closed door that the walls of his stomach drew together painfully. She waited for him to speak, hugging her arms against the cold. The stranger took off his wide-brimmed felt hat and held it under his right arm as he inquired humbly if she were the new mistress of the Golden Lion. Her eyes went briefly to the sign above their heads and then down to his coat, his shabby feet, as she answered yes, that she was the mistress.

      “Then could you give me,” said he, “food and lodging for the night?”

      Her eyes continued to appraise him, and although her presence was surrounded with warmth and the scent of hospitality, the eyes were reserved and unfriendly. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly as she answered:

      “As a guest, or as a beggar?”

      “Well, tonight,” he said, looking down also at his broken boots, and then, with embarrassment, at her cold, bright eyes, “tonight I am out of funds. But it might not always be that way,” he hastened to add. “And I am as near starved as ever I was.”

      “But tonight,” said she, “I have guests—a wedding party—and the house is very crowded. I have no room for beggars.”

      “I have been a soldier,” he said.

      “We have no love for soldiers in these parts,” she answered.

      “You should feed the hungry and lay yourself up treasure in heaven,” he said then, but not as if he believed very greatly in such treasure. “There will be plenty of scrapings if there is a party,” he added with more conviction.

      She continued to appraise him with her eyes, as if she might find something to make her alter her refusal. That he was very tired was evident in the gray look of the skin and the drawn features. He had not been shaved in a long time. The lower part of his face was black with stubble, and the lank black hair, streaked slightly with gray, fell down in straggling ends upon the collar of his doublet. He wore no linen, but his doublet had once been exceeding fine, of a heavy padded crimson satin quilted in a diamond pattern with gold thread, and having skirts in the French style. It was filthy now, and splitting at the elbow. He might well have been a soldier. He wore above this fine French garment a heavy leather jerkin, and across this, diagonally over one shoulder and down to his belt, such a leather band as might have carried a pistol and knife. The left sleeve of the doublet was folded and tucked within the leather jerkin. It was empty from just above the elbow. His ragged serge breeches consorted ill with the crimson doublet. The hat which he held under his right arm was green with age and lacked both feather and buckle. The little green eyes in the fatigued countenance were fastened to those of the mistress of the inn with a look from which all expression had been drained save that of hunger. Neither the servility nor the fear remained. The appeal was too intense; she wished him away from the inn.

      “We have no love for soldiers or for beggars,” she repeated. “You had best be going along.”

      She had turned away and would have pressed down the latch save for his bitter exclamation.

      “Going along! As if I hadn’t been going along for weeks now, and maybe months. So when I come back to my own parish, where I may be rich again someday—yes, rich and honorable—they tell me to be going along.” Then, as if the changes in the landscape might have indeed deceived him, he inquired, “This is truly Aalsö parish, isn’t it?”

      “Truly enough,” she said, “and Aalsö village a few miles down the road if you keep going.”

      “Then could you tell me one thing,” he said, “before you shut the door on me—just one thing?”

      “And that’s what?” she asked.

      “You know of one Morten Bruus?”

      “Indeed, why not?” she answered shortly.

      “Well, then, is he living or dead?”

      “Dead,” she answered. “Dead since before St. John’s Day.”

      The beggar, still holding his battered hat in his right hand, lifted his hand and rubbed the back of it slowly across his mouth, backward and forward several times, whether, as it seemed, to partly hide the smile on his lips or simply to express his satisfaction at the news. The satisfaction was most plain, and horrible. It shone in the small green eyes, grown strangely bright in that dulled countenance. At last he said:

      “Dead almost half a year, you promise me?”

      “Surely dead, dead as a stone,” she answered.

      “Bear with me,” said the beggar. “It is a comfort to me to hear it said.”

      “And to many another,” she replied. “Well, give you good night.”

      This time she pressed her finger on the latch, and, in the silence, he heard it sprung.

      “Wait one minute,” he cried. “If you will not take me in tonight, where will I bide? You would not, mistress, be so unkind as to shut a poor soldier out in the wet and the cold. You see for yourself how cold it is going to be. Is there no charity left in Jutland?”

      The mistress of the Golden Lion shrugged her shoulders. “You might ask of the pastor,” she said.

      “The pastor?” said the beggar. Then, as if the name were dredged from a deep, muddy memory, “That would be Pastor Peder Korf.”

      “No,” she said briskly. “Peder Korf is dead, God rest him. The pastor now is Juste Pedersen, and a very good man he is, too.”

      “Pastor Juste,” repeated the beggar. “Is he a kind man, and hospitable?”

      “Kind as Sören Qvist,” she answered, pushing the door open a crack.

      “So!” cried the beggar suddenly. “And did you know Pastor Sören?”

      “How would I have known him?” said the woman. “I was not weaned in his day. It is only a way of speaking they have in these parts. Kind as Sören Qvist, generous as Sören Qvist—so the phrase goes. That is just the way they talk.”

      “And do they never

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