LITMIR.BIZ

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old woman considered him. “Turn toward the fire,” she commanded him. Obediently he slewed around on his seat. “Very well,” she said, “you carry no knife on your back at least, and”—she hesitated a little, as if in slight apology—“I did not at first notice that your sleeve was empty. I saw a Spanish soldier,” she continued, “came with Wallenstein’s men, had a belt like yours over his shoulder and carried a long dagger in it, on his back. I will cut the bread. Were you ever a soldier?”

      “Until I lost my arm,” he said. “But what can a man do with only one arm? Since then I am a beggar.”

      When she had cut the bread, she gave him a slice of cheese as well, and she noted how the hand that reached for it shook with eagerness, and how, as the man ate, he seemed to forget where he was, and everything except the taste of food in his mouth. Watching him, as she had watched so many others here in the pastor’s kitchen, she felt her fear give way to pity, and having filled a pewter mug with beer, she set it close to the coals to warm. Starving men, starving animals, for over forty years this had been one of her duties, to feed them and to give them shelter. The bounty was less great now than in the old days because there was less to give. Still, what the pastor could bestow was for the homeless, and she had the bestowing of it.

      “You can sleep in the byre,” she said. “It is clean enough, and the beasts make it warm.”

      He consumed the bread and cheese to the last crumb, drank the warm beer, and sat, with his hand about the mug, staring into the fire for a few minutes before he spoke again.

      Then he said, half to himself, “I have nothing, you see, not even a knife. Nothing at all but the rags I wear. But it may not always be so.” The warm beer in an empty stomach made him feel sorry for himself. It was pleasant to be sorry for himself beside a warm fire. Slowly his mind began to work again, and he remembered why he had come back to Aalsö. Surely it was not to study Luther’s Catechism in the New Room, which was now gone. But he had needed to see Pastor Peder. He said to the old woman cautiously, yet as if it did not concern him greatly, “Do you know one Morten Bruus?”

      “Aye,” she answered without enthusiasm. “He was at one time of this parish.”

      “Then he is dead? As I hear?”

      “Yes, dead, and no one the sadder.”

      “Surely not myself,” said the beggar. “Well, we cannot all be mourned.”

      “We need not be hated,” said she.

      “So he was hated, eh?” said the beggar.

      “If you know his name, you know that he was hated,” she replied.

      She rose to put away the remnant of the loaf in a wooden chest on the farther side of the fire, and he watched her regretfully but did not venture to protest. Beyond the chest was a door, the door to the parson’s bedroom, as he remembered, and in the wall beyond it, at right angles, was the alcove where the housekeeper’s pillows and quilts were piled. In all the years that he had been away he had not paused once to try to remember this room, but now that he was here again everything returned to his memory as being just as it had been, except that the door to the New Room was now walled up. As for the old woman, he seemed somehow to remember her, and yet the more he thought, the more it came to him that the pastor’s housekeeper had been a smaller woman, with sharp black eyes and a quick hand. She had not had the patience of Peder Korf.

      “So the old pastor is dead,” he said at length. “Was it long since?”

      The old woman seated herself on the bench in which she had bestowed the bread.

      “Long since indeed,” she said. “I was young then. Well, at least I was but in my forties, and today that’s young.” She sighed, and the beggar inquired:

      “It was not old age then that did away with the pastor. Like enough it was the plague.”

      “A plague of Catholic bandits,” said the old woman. “A gang of Wallenstein’s men. May God never forgive them.”

      The beggar considered. “Yes, that was long since I had not been long out of Jutland then.”

      “Torstenson’s men were thieves and vandals also,” said the old woman, “but at least they were not Catholics but merely Swedes. Ah, but Jutland has suffered, suffered for all of Denmark. I wonder why God was willing to have us suffer so. But Wallenstein’s men were the worst.”

      The beggar said nothing, and the old woman, speaking out of an old and deep sadness, continued:

      “Everyone fled to the islands that had strength to move, or nearly everyone. Pastor wouldn’t go, and I stayed with Pastor. But when they came, and we saw the flames about Aalsö village and the nearby farms, I ran into the woods. Pastor stayed by the place. He was a brave man, Pastor Peder Korf. He said that his people might be running to him for help, and he meant to stay and protect them.” She paused, and the beggar kept silent, his head tipped forward, watching her from under his black brows with his little greenish eyes. She drew a deep breath and said, “When I came back to the place, Pastor was hanging from the beech tree, close by the door there, hanging by his beard—you remember his thick brown beard—and cut in many places; and he was dead. The house was burning. The cattle gone. Each last little hen was gone. There was a fire set in the barley field, that was ripe for mowing. I came back and stood here in front of this house and looked at him, and saw the turf all bloody under where he was hanging. They did that because they thought to mock him, to mock a priest for wearing a beard. You remember how thick and strong a beard he had, and how he used to tug at it with his fingers when he was thinking? The fire burned almost all night. Then, before morning, it began to rain. And so, year before last, when Torstenson came, we all hid. Pastor Juste went through the village and gathered all his people together, and we hid in the beechwood, and so we are still alive. The Swedes burned much and stole everything. Still, it was not quite so bad as when the Catholics came.” She stopped speaking. Then she said, “That God should make such men.”

      “I was with Wallenstein’s men,” the beggar muttered, as if to himself. “I was with them in Bohemia. But,” he added piously, “when they took the road to Jutland, I left them. Not for anything would I have come back to soldier in Jutland.”

      “God may take that into consideration when your time comes,” said the housekeeper, “that you burned houses only in another country. Well, it is late. Come. I will show you where you can sleep.”

      The beggar picked up his hat from the floor beside him and stood up, unwillingly. He looked at the embers on the hearth, red-golden, translucent, showing, some of them, the exact shape of the twig or branch, transmuted but intact, and all veiled in a blue flickering.

      “A pity to leave so good a fire,” he said.

      The housekeeper stood with her hand on the door, waiting for him.

      “I never thought to give food or drink to one of Wallenstein’s men,” was all she said.

      “Well, thanks for the food,” said the soldier, “all the same.”

      He moved limping toward the door, his hat in his hand, but turned once more to look back at the glowing hearth.

      “I can surely see Pastor in the morning?” he asked.

      The old woman answered by a nod.

      “This Morten Bruus,” he said again, delaying his departure. “If all the farms in Jutland have been twice robbed, I suppose he can no longer be very rich. Were his buildings fired, like the others?”

      “Oh no,” the old woman answered, “he had the devil’s protection on him, if you ask me. His buildings were never fired, nor his fields trampled, and he died the richest man in Vejlby parish, or in this one, too.”

      “Do you say so? Well then.” The beggar considered this information and then inquired with an air of great caution, “Did he leave a rich widow, this fellow Bruus?”

      “Never a wife, never a widow, nor any kith or kin,”

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