Last Tales (29 page)

When the door had closed behind him, Lone rose, and remained standing up before Eitel.

“I can bear witness to God and man,” she said, “that what I have now told you is the truth.”

“You do not know what you are saying,” he said.

“Yes, I know what I am saying,” said she. “Well may I remember the time that I bore you, and the time when you quickened within my body. For you are my child.”

He thought: “Anguish and distress have upset her reason,” and waited a little to find the right words to speak to her.

“It is an ancient nursery tale that you are telling me here, Lone,” he said. “The tale of the changelings, so old that one smiles at it. You mean to help your son by telling it me. But
you are mistaken. I shall do what I can for him without it.”

“It is not to help him that I tell it you,” she said. “It is all one to me whether they cut off his head or not.”

“Why do you tell it me then?” he asked.

“I did not know for certain, till the day before yesterday,” she answered slowly, “that he was to die. When I knew, I thought: ‘Now this has been brought to an end.’ And then I came to see you once more.”

“Why did you wish to see me once more?” he asked.

“I wished to see how great and happy you were,” she answered.

“There is no one in the whole world,” she went on, “who has known of this except myself. And now you know too. The clerk has never known of it. I shall not tell it to our parson on my deathbed. But now I have come to tell you how it all happened.”

“Nay, you shall tell me nothing,” he said. “All this is but what you have dreamt, my poor Lone.”

She stood up straight before him.

“I have got no one in the whole world,” she said, “to tell it to except you, I have been waiting to do so for twenty-three years. If my tale is not told now, it will never be told.”

She brought out her hands from beneath her apron and slowly smoothed it down, and this had been a familiar gesture of hers in his childhood, when he had been obstinate, and she was talking sense to him. “But if it be your wish,” she went on, “that I shall go away without saying more, I can do so too.”

He was silent for a while. “No,” he said. “You may speak, to lighten your heart. I shall hear you.” He seated himself in the armchair by the table, but the woman remained standing up.

“Aye, now I shall begin,” she said very slowly, “and I shall forget nothing.

“It was on the very first evening that I came up here that I changed the master’s child for my own. The child up here
had been born three days after mine. He was small, and he cried much. I sat by his cradle and sang to him until I had made him sleep. Then I got up and made up a doll out of a pillow and of silk ribbons in the room, just as later I made up horses for you, and laid it in the cradle, and I drew together the cradle curtains. I told the maid of her sweet ladyship that I was now going home to my own house to fetch my Sunday shawl and two new aprons of mine, but that she was to leave the child alone the while, for now it had been fed and was quiet. But I took the child with me under my cloak and kept it warm, and I could do so because it was so small. On the stairs of the western wing I met the housekeeper, and she stopped to talk to me, and asked me if I had got plenty of milk. ‘Aye,’ I answered her, ‘the child that I lay to my breast will thrive, and will not cry.’ But I was telling myself as we stood there, that if the child now cried, it would be all over with me. But it did not cry, not that time.

“I laid the child in my own old cradle within my own house, but you I took out of it, and I hid you in a basket that I was taking with me and covered you up with my Sunday shawl and two aprons of mine.”

“Nay,” Eitel interrupted her. “Speak not like that. Speak not, in this tale of yours, the word
you.”

Lone stood still and looked at him. “Do you mean me,” she asked, “not to speak of you, or of what I did for you?”

“If you will tell me your story,” Eitel said, “tell it like any other nursery tale.”

Lone thought the matter over and again began.

“I laid, then,” she said, “my own child, my son, in the basket, and I walked up to the house, and I had to stop from time to time, for my own child was heavier than the other. There was a full moon, so that the road was clear and light all the way. The next morning I told the maids in the house that the child was not well, and that nobody must come into our room, and in this way I was alone with him for a week. Her sweet ladyship had me called before her bed every day, so
that I might tell her how things were with the child, and I told her that it was well with the child. She asked me if I wished to go home to see my own child, but I answered her that I had already sent it away from my house, to the house of people of mine.

“The week after,” she went on, “the christening was to be held. On that day a lot of great people came to the house, and the old Countess of Krenkerup bore the child to the font. I drove to the church in the same coach as her, with four horses. I held the child on my lap, and only in the porch did I give it over to her. And as now I heard my son christened Eitel after the master’s father, and Johan August after the master himself, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, I said to myself: ‘Now that is done which cannot be undone.’ ”

At these last words the woman colored faintly as in pride or triumph.

“And why should you have wished it done,” Eitel asked.

Lone laid her right hand upon the table. “For this reason,” she said. “When her ladyship first sent for me, to give suck to the child, and I walked up through the farmyard, I passed the timber-mare.”

“The timber-mare?” said Eitel.

“Yes,” said Lone. “It was still standing there, in front of the barn. Her sweet ladyship had wanted it taken away, but the master had said no. I had never till that day been up to the house, but as I walked past it, by the side of her ladyship’s lackey who had been sent to fetch me, I remembered how, when I myself was ten years old, they had brought back my father from it. And on the evening of the day when my child had been christened in church, when all the fine guests were gone and the house was dark, I once more walked down to it. I laid my right hand upon that hard wood, as now I have laid it on your table, and spoke to my dead father and said to him: ‘Now your death has been paid for, Linnert.’

“And do you believe me now?” she asked.

“No, I do not believe you,” he answered. “I could not believe you if I wanted to.”

Lone drew her breath deeply, looked round the room and again looked at him.

“This is the one thing that I had never thought of,” she said slowly and dully, “that when I told you my tale you were not to believe it. I had thought that you yourself would remember how I carried you from our own house to the house of the master.”

She stood sunk in her own thoughts. “That house of the clerk’s in Funen,” she went on, “I was never really in it. It seemed to me that all the time I was over here, with you. But it was not in this great house of the master’s that we lived together. It was in that old farmhouse of ours, the old people’s house, which is standing deep down below. Down there I held you in my arms, and we spoke together sweetly. Is that what you tell me now, that you have never been down there?”

“You know yourself,” he answered her, “that I have never been down there.”

Once more she was silent. “There was one more, though,” she said, “who at the time guessed something of this, and who might bear out my tale. That was the woman who took over the master’s child and kept him with her. It was Maren in the marshes.”

“Maren in the marshes?” Eitel repeated. “I have heard of her. I have seen her once. She was a gypsy, all black to look at, and it was said that she had killed her husband.”

“Yes,” said Lone, “she was a bad woman. But she could hold her tongue.”

“Where is she now?” he asked.

“She is dead,” Lone answered.

Eitel rose from his chair. “And if all other things within your tale had been possible,” he said, “would it be possible, Lone, that a good woman like you could have behaved so to a friend who trusted you, to my mother?”

Lone took a step toward him, and although she still looked straight at him, she seemed somehow to be groping her way. “Do you call her gracious ladyship your mother even now?” she asked. As she came nearer, he drew back a little, and she followed him slowly in the same half-blind way. “Do you flee me now?” she asked.

He stood still, realizing that he had indeed meant to flee from the woman before him.

“Lone,” he said, “once you were dearer to me than any other human being. At this hour it seems to me that you may still be so, aye, as dear as if you were indeed my own mother. Or that I should hold you in horror, like one of the witches in whom old people believe, gloating over a crime against nature, as one mad with wickedness, wishing to drive me mad with her.”

So he and the woman remained standing face to face.

“And shall there be no justice on earth?” she at last asked.

“Yes, there shall be justice on earth,” he answered.

“But justice,” Lone went on in a low wailing voice, “justice, with you and me, cannot mean that when I did carry you up to the house, in danger of my life, so as to give it all to you, it was the house and the people up here who took you over and made me one of theirs! Justice,” she wailed on lowly, her body doubling up as in great pain, “cannot mean that I am never once to call you my son, and never once to hear you call me mother!”

Eitel stood gazing into the woman’s pain-quivering face.

“I have been off my mind,” he thought. “I have spoken hard to an old sorrowful peasant woman, who has taken refuge in my house. I have said that I must loathe and fear an old parish clerk’s wife from Funen.” He went up to Lone and took her hand.

“Yes, my poor Lone,” he said, “you are to call me your son, and to hear me call you my mother. We did so many times, years ago. And nothing has changed between you and me since then.”

Lone very slowly with her right hand fumbled along his arm from wrist to shoulder and back again, then let the hand sink. “I have come a long way to see you tonight,” she said.

“And I have not looked after you, Lone,” he said. “You should have had something to eat and drink. Now I shall have it brought for you. You shall sleep tonight in your own room. And tomorrow,” he added after a pause, “as I said before, I shall drive with you to Maribo. You shall come back with me from there, to stay in my house as long as you choose.”

He stood with her hand in his. Wonderingly he felt, deep down in his mind, a reluctance to put an end to a talk which had been filled with such ugly confusion, and heard, there, a voice cry out sadly: “Never more, never more.” He put off the parting for a moment.

“At this time of night, Lone,” he said, “it happened that I would wake up from a bad dream. Then you would sing to me till I fell asleep again. I remember now, too, that one of the horses which you made for me was sewn of crimson silk, with a name of gold fringe from one of my father’s court coats, and that his name was Guldfaxe.”

“Yes, that was his name,” said Lone.

Her eyes still met his, but they were now without expression, the eyes of a blind woman.

After a long silence she whispered: “May you sleep well.”

“And you, Lone, little mother,” he said.

He listened to her steps down the long corridor.

When the sound had died away, he took the heavy candlestick from the table, walked up to his father’s portrait on the wall, and lifted the candlestick up high, so that the smiling face was fully illuminated. “Hullo, my father,” he said, “did you hear that? You were a handsome, gallant, gay gentleman. What now, if the nursery tale that the clerk’s old wife has told us had been true? You would then have seen the grandson of the servant whom you wronged and killed giving up his life and his thoughts and his happiness even, in your service, to clear your name and wipe out your guilt. Would
that seem to you the crowning joke of the whole affair—a fine extravaganza? Would it be at that that you are now laughing?”

He was still standing so, the candlestick in his raised hand, when the door behind him opened once more, and his old housekeeper came in noiselessly.

Mamzell Paaske had been in his father’s house before he had married, and it was a privilege of hers to enter the son’s room unannounced, when she had matters of importance to communicate or discuss.

In her young days she had been a beauty and had had offers of marriage from all parts of the isle, but she had refused to give up her spinsterhood. Now in her old age she had become extremely pious. There was still a pathetic loveliness in the very small, delicate figure, and she was light and graceful like a lady of high birth. At the moment she was deeply moved, and was wiping her eyes with a small folded handkerchief.

“Another old woman,” Eitel thought as he set down the candlestick. “This one may be twice the age of the first. Can it be that she will bring me twice as strange a message?”

He told her to take a seat, and she sat down on the edge of a chair, her old head nodding and shaking a little all the time.

“Dear me, how sad, how very sad,” she began.

“What is it that you want of me?” he asked.

“Oh, me, it is of Lone that I am thinking,” said Mamzell Paaske. “So Lone came back to the house once more, after all. The way up here has been heavy for her to walk this time. She was so proud here in the old days, in the fine clothes that her ladyship gave her. Dear master, will you, now, be able to obtain mercy for that poor unhappy son of hers?”

“Mercy,” Eitel repeated, in his own thoughts. “No, Mamzell Paaske, I fear that it cannot be done.”

“Nay, I understand, I see,” said the old housekeeper. “Justice must have its way. And he was caught in the act, I am
told, and has been sentenced to death by the learned, venerable judges themselves.

“In other ways Lone is well preserved, I am bound to say,” she continued. “She has had easy days with the parish clerk. I remember him well, he was a peaceful man, if a little stingy. You will know, dear Master, that he is somehow related to the Paaskes. It is hard on him that his stepson should fare so ill.”