LITMIR.BIZ

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      “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 say angry as Sören Qvist?” said the beggar with a faint, evil grin.

      The woman looked at him in some surprise, but made no answer, as if the question deserved none. The beggar, for a moment, seemed disposed to inquire further into this way of speaking. Then he settled his old hat on his head and, peering at her slyly from under the brim, said, in a beggar’s manner:

      “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

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