could you give me,” said he, “food and lodging for the night?”
Her eyes continued to appraise him, and although her presence was surrounded with warmth and the scent of hospitality, the eyes were reserved and unfriendly. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly as she answered:
“As a guest, or as a beggar?”
“Well, tonight,” he said, looking down also at his broken boots, and then, with embarrassment, at her cold, bright eyes, “tonight I am out of funds. But it might not always be that way,” he hastened to add. “And I am as near starved as ever I was.”
“But tonight,” said she, “I have guests—a wedding party—and the house is very crowded. I have no room for beggars.”
“I have been a soldier,” he said.
“We have no love for soldiers in these parts,” she answered.
“You should feed the hungry and lay yourself up treasure in heaven,” he said then, but not as if he believed very greatly in such treasure. “There will be plenty of scrapings if there is a party,” he added with more conviction.
She continued to appraise him with her eyes, as if she might find something to make her alter her refusal. That he was very tired was evident in the gray look of the skin and the drawn features. He had not been shaved in a long time. The lower part of his face was black with stubble, and the lank black hair, streaked slightly with gray, fell down in straggling ends upon the collar of his doublet. He wore no linen, but his doublet had once been exceeding fine, of a heavy padded crimson satin quilted in a diamond pattern with gold thread, and having skirts in the French style. It was filthy now, and splitting at the elbow. He might well have been a soldier. He wore above this fine French garment a heavy leather jerkin, and across this, diagonally over one shoulder and down to his belt, such a leather band as might have carried a pistol and knife. The left sleeve of the doublet was folded and tucked within the leather jerkin. It was empty from just above the elbow. His ragged serge breeches consorted ill with the crimson doublet. The hat which he held under his right arm was green with age and lacked both feather and buckle. The little green eyes in the fatigued countenance were fastened to those of the mistress of the inn with a look from which all expression had been drained save that of hunger. Neither the servility nor the fear remained. The appeal was too intense; she wished him away from the inn.
“We have no love for soldiers or for beggars,” she repeated. “You had best be going along.”
She had turned away and would have pressed down the latch save for his bitter exclamation.
“Going along! As if I hadn’t been going along for weeks now, and maybe months. So when I come back to my own parish, where I may be rich again someday—yes, rich and honorable—they tell me to be going along.” Then, as if the changes in the landscape might have indeed deceived him, he inquired, “This is truly Aalsö parish, isn’t it?”
“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
