Pelle the Conqueror, Martin Andersen Nexø [best fantasy books to read .TXT] 📗

properly, you calf! Oh, the boy’s gone. Very well. Does your boy often get a thrashing?”

“Oh yes, sometimes,” answered Lasse, who was ashamed to confess that he never chastised the boy.

“I don’t spare mine either. It’ll take something to make a man of such rubbish; punishment’s half what he lives on. Then I’ll send him up here first thing tomorrow morning; but take care he doesn’t show himself in the yard, or there’ll be no end of a row!”

“The mistress can’t bear to see him, I suppose?” said Lasse.

“You’re just about right. She’s had nothing to do with the making of that scarecrow. Though you wouldn’t think there was much there to be jealous about! But I might have been a farmer’s wife at this moment and had a nice husband too, if that high and mighty peacock up there hadn’t seduced me. Would you believe that, you cracked old piece of shoe-leather?” she asked with a laugh, slapping his knee with her hand.

“I can believe it very well,” said Lasse. “For you were as pretty a girl as might be when you left home.”

“Oh, you and your ‘home,’ ” she said, mimicking him.

“Well, I can see that you don’t want to leave any footmarks behind you, and I can quite well pretend to be a stranger, even if I have held you upon my knee more than once when you were a little thing. But do you know that your mother’s lying on her deathbed?”

“Oh no! Oh no!” she exclaimed, turning to him a face that was becoming more and more distorted.

“I went to say goodbye to her before I left home rather more than a month ago, and she was very ill. ‘Goodbye, Lasse,’ she said, ‘and thank you for your neighborliness all these years. And if you meet Johanna over there,’ she said, ‘give her my love. Things have gone terribly badly with her, from what I’ve heard; but give her my love, all the same. Johanna child, little child! She was nearest her mother’s heart, and so she happened to tread upon it. Perhaps it was our fault. You’ll give her her mother’s love, won’t you, Lasse?’ Those were her very words, and now she’s most likely dead, so poorly as she was then.”

Johanna Pihl had no command over her feelings. It was evident that she was not accustomed to weep, for her sobs seemed to tear her to pieces. No tears came, but her agony was like the throes of childbirth. “Little mother! Poor little mother!” she said every now and again, as she sat rocking herself upon the edge of the manger.

“There, there, there!” said Lasse, patting her on the head. “I told them they had been too hard with you. But what did you want to creep through that window for⁠—a child of sixteen and in the middle of the night? You can hardly wonder that they forgot themselves a little, all the more that he was earning no wages beyond his keep and clothes, and was a bad fellow at that, who was always losing his place.”

“I was fond of him,” said Johanna, weeping. “He’s the only one I’ve ever cared for. And I was so stupid that I thought he was fond of me too, though he’d never seen me.”

“Ah, yes; you were only a child! I said so to your parents. But that you could think of doing anything so indecent!”

“I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I only thought that we two ought to be together as we loved one another. No, I didn’t even think that then. I only crept in to him, without thinking about it at all. Would you believe that I was so innocent in those days? And nothing bad happened either.”

“And nothing happened even?” said Lasse. “But it’s terribly sad to think how things have turned out. It was the death of your father.”

The big woman began to cry helplessly, and Lasse was almost in tears himself.

“Perhaps I ought never to have told you,” he said in despair. “But I thought you must have heard about it. I suppose he thought that he, as schoolmaster, bore the responsibility for so many, and that you’d thrown yourself at anyone in that way, and a poor farm-servant into the bargain, cut him to the quick. It’s true enough that he mixed with us poor folks as if we’d been his equals, but the honor was there all the same; and he took it hardly when the fine folk wouldn’t look at him any more. And after all it was nothing at all⁠—nothing happened? But why didn’t you tell them so?”

Johanna had stopped crying, and now sat with tear-stained, quivering face, and eyes turned away.

“I did tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. I was found there of course. I screamed for help when I found out he didn’t even know me, but was only flattered at my coming, and wanted to take hold of me. And then the others came running in and found me there. They laughed and said that I’d screamed because I’d lost my innocence; and I could see that my parents thought the same. Even they wouldn’t hear of nothing having happened, so what could the other rabble think? And then they paid him to come over here, and sent me away to relations.”

“Yes, and then you added to their sorrow by running away.”

“I went after him. I thought he’d get to be fond of me, if only I was near him. He’d taken service here at Stone Farm, and I took a place here as housemaid; but there was only one thing he wanted me for, and that I wouldn’t have if he wasn’t fond of me. So he went about boasting that I’d run away from home for his sake, and the other thing that was a lie; so they all thought they could do what they liked with me. Kongstrup was just married then, but he was no better than the