Last Tales (30 page)

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

“Take it not in bad part, dear Master,” she said. “I wished to hear a little more about this great misfortune and about poor Lone.”

“You might have spoken to her yourself,” he said.

She wiped her small mouth with her handkerchief.

“I dared not do that,” she said. “You will know yourself that at times Lone is not right in her head.”

“I never heard of that,” he said.

“But it is so all the same,” said Mamzell Paaske and again nodded her head. “We were well aware, all of us up here in the house, that she was not like other people. All her folks were queer. In the village they will tell you that in old days there were witches among them. Lone was a good, faithful servant all her time, to her ladyship and to you yourself, Master. But by a full moon she was not herself.”

“By a full moon?” Eitel repeated.

“Yes, by a full moon, like tonight,” said she. “She would say many strange things then, and make people believe them.

“I knew Linnert too,” she added after a moment.

“Did you know him?” he asked. “How did he look?”

“Oh, they were all fair folks,” she answered. “But they were all of them queer. They would not fall in with the world such as it is.”

“Still my mother will have thought well of them,” he said, “since she took Lone into her house when I was born.”

“No, no, not at the time when you were born, dear Master,”
said she. “It was not till after you had been christened, and when it was found that the first nurse here had too little milk, that her ladyship sent for Lone.”

“Not till after I had been christened?” he repeated. “Do you remember that for certain?”

“Oh, dear Master,” said she, “how would I not remember for certain everything from that good old time? Those were the happy days, when all in the house was put into my hand. The fine linen, the plate, the china and glass, the things even that had been given to the lords and ladies of the house by the King. And as to the servants of the house, too, it was I who took them on or sent them away. Aye, this your first nurse, Mette Marie, it was I who engaged her, and later on—since her ladyship was not well enough to look after things—it was I who found that she had too little milk, and sent her away. Then Lone came up here to be your nurse.”

“Were you here, too,” Eitel asked after a while, “at the time when Linnert brought back the bull and died?”

“Yes, said Mamzell Paaske, “I was here then, too. And in my humble way I warned my dear master to let him off. ‘My dear noble Lord,’ I said to him, ‘do not go on with this. There may be blood in it.’ ”

They were both still for a minute.

“You were here,” Eitel then said, “when my father was my own age. Was he a hard man even then?”

“Nay, nay,” said she. “My lord was a handsome, gay gentleman; he was never hard. But he was bored. Great lords are bored, that is their grief, just as the peasants have got their cares and worries in life. I myself, by the grace of God, have been lucky. I have never been bored, nor have I had cares or worries.”

“Look after Lone well tonight,” Eitel said after another silence. “Let her be short of nothing, now that in her misfortune she has come to my house.”

Mamzell Paaske had been looking away, thinking about
the time of which she had spoken. Now she turned her face round toward him in a little birdlike movement. “I cannot do that, dear Master,” she said. “Lone has gone.”

“Gone?” he repeated.

“Aye, indeed she has gone,” said the old woman.

“When did she leave?” he asked.

“Just after she had come from you,” she answered. “I met her on the stairs, but she would hardly speak a word to me. And then she walked away.”

“Where did she go?” he again asked.

“Oh, I did not ask her,” she answered. “I thought that she would be trying to get to Maribo this very night, and that it would be too pitiful to question her.”

“She had come a long way,” said Eitel. “Did she not want to take a rest?”

“She did so,” said Mamzell Paaske. “When she took leave of me she said: ‘Now there is nothing more for me to do. Now I shall take my rest.’ ”

“You ought not to have let her go away tonight,” he said.

“I thought so myself, dear Master,” said she. “But Lone always wanted to have things her own way. One did not like to go against her.”

She saw that her news had made an impression on her young master, and sat on a little enjoying her own importance. But as he did not speak again she got up. “Well, good night then, my dear Master,” she said. “The grace of God be with all of us. May you sleep well.”

“And you yourself,” said he. “It is late, too late for you.”

She nodded her head in a kind of friendly assent. “Yes,” she said, “it is late. Too late.”

But when she had got up, she lingered. She fixed her clear eyes on his face, stretched out her small hand and touched the hem of his coat.

“My good noble Lord,” she said. “My dear Master Johann August. Do not go on with this thing. There may be blood in it.”

She turned the door handle without a sound.

Eitel for a second time took the candlestick from the table, went up to his father’s portrait and stood still before it. He remained there till the candlestick weighed down his arm, then set it back. For a long time the two faces, the painted and the live, looked at each other.

“We heard it all, you and I,” he at length said, “and it makes no difference. A good, faithful woman set her heart on avenging an injustice in a way more hideous than the injustice itself. In that hour the revenge was taken. I was your son, but she made me hers. We ourselves, my father, and these people of ours have got the roots too tightly intertwined, deep down in the ground, ever to be able to free ourselves of one another.”

He went to the window and looked out. The night was clear and cold, such as nights will become at the end of summer. The full moon standing behind the house laid the shadow of the building on the broad moat below, which here in front of the windows widened into a lake, and was patterned, as in a mosaic, with broad, flat water-lily leaves. As far as the shadow reached, the water was brown as dark amber, but farther out in the moonlight its sheet was misty with delicate silver. On the other side of it, the grass of the park was silvery too with the heavy dew; the small darker spots on it were wild ducks, asleep. A feeling of deep satisfaction ran through him as he called to mind that the harvest was in.

The still moonlit landscape called up the idea of a perfect harmony to be found somewhere in the world. His thoughts went to Ulrikke, and dwelt with her for a long time. A few hours ago he had held her in his arms. Soon he might hold her so again; all the same things were over between her and him. For of what had happened tonight, of his two talks with a couple of old women, each of them in her own way somewhat off her mind, he could not speak to her. He thought of his small daughter, who in her short life he had seen but a few times. It was fortunate, he reflected, that the child was a
girl. She would grow up to be like Ulrikke. “Women,” he told himself, “have got another kind of happiness than we, and another kind of truth.” The picture of Ulrikke as a little girl, and of her and the prisoner at Maribo in the wood, once more passed before him. It brought no pain with it; it was as if he had been an old man, content to leave the two at play in the green shades, while he himself was advancing upon another long lonesome road.

As he turned away from the window his eyes fell upon the books on the table, which a short time ago he had taken down and had meant to consult. He set them back on their shelves, one by one, and looked the shelves over, walking from one bookcase to another. Much human knowledge and wisdom were stored here in the tall, heavily bound books. Did any of them have anything to tell him tonight?

At length at the end of the room he found on a shelf an old storybook from his boyhood. He took it down and laid it on the table. He let it fall open at random, and, standing up, by the light of the candles read one of the old tales through.

Once upon a time, the story ran, there was in Portugal a proud and hasty young king. To him one day came an old knight, who in the past had led the armies of the king’s father to victory. The king received him with great honors. But when the baron stood before his liege, without a word he raised his arm and struck the king’s face. Angered as never before, the young king had the offender thrown into his deepest dungeon and had the scaffold raised for his execution.

But in the night the king pondered the matter and counted the great services which this same old knight had rendered his father. So early in the morning he sent for his vassal, ordered all his courtiers out of earshot, and demanded from him the true reason for the affront.

“My lord,” said the white-haired warrior, “I shall tell you
the reason. Once, when I was a young man, such as you are today, I had an old steward who had served my family faithfully all his life. One day in a fit of unjust wrath I struck the servant who could not return my blow. My steward is dead these fifty years. I have looked for, but never found, means to atone for my blow. In the end I have decided that the best way to do so would be to strike the face of the man who, above all others, had power to return the blow. For that reason, my lord, did I strike your royal face.”

“Verily,” the king said, “now I understand you. You have chosen for your blow the face of your king, of the mightiest man you knew. But if your arm had been long enough, it would have been the face of your God Himself, who justly deals out reward and punishment, that you had struck.”

“It is so,” the old man said.

“Verily,” the king said again. “This blow of yours, then, is the truest homage that I ever received from a vassal. And I shall answer you as truthfully myself.

“I shall answer you, first, in the manner of a king.” With these words he loosened his gold-hilted sword from his sword-belt, held it out to the baron and said: “Take this, my good and faithful servant, as a token of your king’s grace and gratitude.

“And,” he went on, “I shall answer you, secondly and in accordance with your wish, in the manner of Almighty God. I tell you, then, that I cannot quench the thirst for justice within your soul. For I shall not alter my own law. Until the hour when you meet again that old servant of yours whose face you struck, you will carry the burden of your shame with you wherever you go. Till then you will be, in your castle in the mountains, by the side of your wife and in the circle of your children and grandchildren, or in the arms of a young mistress, forever lonely, the loneliest man in my kingdom.”

With these words the young king of Portugal dismissed his old liegeman.

Eitel set back the book on the shelf, and seated himself in his armchair by the table, his chin in his hand.

“Forever lonely,” he repeated in his thoughts. “The loneliest man in the kingdom.”

For a long time his mind wandered to all sides.

“The prisoner at Maribo,” he thought in the end, “is as lonely as I am. I shall go to him.”

As he made this decision he felt like a man who, having lost his way in woods and moors, comes upon a road. He knows not whereto it leads, whether to salvation or destruction, but he follows it because it is a road.

“Now,” he told himself, “now, after all, I shall sleep tonight.”

“He alone, of all people,” he continued his thoughts, “will help me to sleep tonight. All through this long evening I have been fearing or hoping, that the rumor of his flight from prison were true, and have been waiting for him. It is no good waiting for him any longer. I shall go to Maribo tomorrow.”

Early on Wednesday morning the old coachman of the manor got an order to get the carriage ready. A while after he was told to take out the closed carriage. The old man was puzzled; his young master was not in the habit of using the closed carriage in fair weather. But a little later he again had a different order; he was to take out the new, light open carriage from Hamburg.

“What is the matter with Eitel today?” he asked himself. “Never before have I had, in one morning, three different orders from him.”

With his foot on the hub, Eitel hesitated whether to take the reins himself, then he handed them over to the old man. “Drive quickly,” he told him, “until we come into the town of Maribo. Then go slowly through the street.” He thought: “I shall not try to hide my face from the people today.”

The weather this morning was colder than the day before, and the landscape less rich in color and light. A wind blew in
from the sea; there might be rain before evening. In the fields and above them the sea gulls were moving restlessly.

The sound of the carriage wheels changed from a softer to a louder rumble as they rolled from the high road onto the paved street of Maribo.

Eitel had the carriage stop outside the courthouse. There was a clock on the house. As on the stone stairs in front he was informed that he would find the police magistrate in his office, the clock above his head struck eight strokes.

The police magistrate himself, old Counselor Sandoe, who came out in a hurry to meet him, was a small rigid official of the old school, who still wore his little pigtailed wig. He had sat in his peaceful office in Maribo as long as the people of the town could remember, but this was his first death sentence. It made him conscious of his own high significance; at the same time the idea of it was curious and disturbing to him. He was now cheered by the prospect of discussing the event with a young nobleman whom he had known from birth.

He grew silent, pushing his lower lip over the upper lip, at Eitel’s demand to see the condemned man in his cell and to speak with him alone there.

“This person,” he said, “hardly seems to have any human qualities left. He has passed more years of his life in the woods and on the moors than in a house. I suppose that he has never loved any human being. I gather from our good Pastor Quist, who has sacrificed much of his time to him, that he knows no more of the word of God than of law and justice. Verba mortuo facta.”

He recounted how his prisoner, when seized red-handed in the manslaughter, had defended himself with most extraordinary strength, and had knocked down three men before he was taken. The counselor had had him put in chains, but even thus did consider him dangerous.