STORIES BY VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM

WHEN THE BELLS RING

IN southern Småland, just where the stony road to Scania branches into several village paths and a muddy slope leads up to the parish church, there stood a mill, painted red and with the largest wings that anyone had ever seen in all that region. The miller was dead long since. His widow, named Kerstin Bure, a woman who in her childhood had seen happier days and eaten from shining plates of pewter, managed the mill after her own fashion. She never made mention of her birth or of the love-dealings that had enticed her from a well-to-do pastor’s home to the narrow tower-room of a miller, where the axle-beam groaned directly over her sleeping-place; but then she did not speak of other things either. The husband had been too poor to possess a cottage of his own and had instead built a chimney straight through the roof of the mill. There year after year, with her sewing in her hand, the wife had silently continued to watch the work of the men. If at any time she was asked for advice, she answered preferably with a nod or a shake of the head, and she seldom went away further than a stone’s throw from the mill. In figure she was tall and slim with delicate hands, and her face under the starched cap, which was always of the same invariable whiteness, reminded one of Mary Magdalen’s on the picture at the altar, though it was more yellowed and shrunken. She never took women into her service, and so women in particular accustomed themselves to passing her in silence. They did not rightly know whether she was proud or meek, but most of them thought that she might well be both. When the sexton appeared with his beadsmen and in his best Sunday attire to solicit the hand of this woman, who was already old and gray, she became quite confused and abashed. She blushed to the roots of her hair and merely shook her head.

One morning she found an infant boy on a heap of twigs by the spring, and as no one knew anything about the parents, she took the little one to her with great tenderness.

“Nobody can tell whether there lies in that heart good or evil seed,” she said, “but the day may come when I am to try it. You shall be called Johannes, because you are to become devout as an angel of God. I have been sore afflicted, but for you I shall lay by a pretty penny, so that your life-days may sometime counterbalance the heavy ones I have known.”

The boy grew up, and when he prepared for confirmation, he surprised everybody by his pious and godly answers. With his glossy flaxen hair hanging over his shoulders he afterwards sat by his foster-mother on the mill steps in the bright midsummer evenings and read diligently in the books that he had borrowed from the pastor of the congregation. They sat always taciturnly and quietly, but sometimes he pointed out with his finger some line that seemed to him more beautiful than the others and read it softly aloud.

Hay-ricks and meadows were sending out their perfume of harvest and pasture, and so too, though withered, did the clover—or trefoil-blossoms that lay forgotten here and there between the leaves of the book as markers. Even late at night only a single star burned, but that was large and radiant. Everywhere people were awake and talking, and the cottage doors stood open.

Many whispered to one another a dark rumor of how the Swedish army had been beaten at Poltava and that now the Danes were to land and complete the entire overthrow of Sweden.

One Sunday night a rider stopped at the stairs of the mill and asked for lodging.

Johannes looked doubtfully at his foster-mother and asked the stranger whether he would not rather go on up the hill to the provost’s place.

“No,” he answered, “I want first to see tonight how the people are getting on.”

He managed to get his horse into the walled passage under the mill and then settled down quite contentedly among the others to a plate of beer-soup and a loaf of black bread.

He had let his hair and his goat-like beard grow, so that he looked like a common peasant, but sometimes he pulled his mouth toward his ears and talked harshly in the broadest Scanian, and sometimes he squeezed up his eyes and lamented in the most sentimental Smålandish. He kept awake all night continuing his merry discourse. Once he took a piece of charcoal and drew a speaking likeness of Johannes on the wall. A little later he gave Kerstin Bure shrewd advice as to how she should grease the mill-axle. Or he would sing psalms and polka-tunes, to which he himself set the words. In the morning he took from his traveling-sack a suit with bright soldier’s buttons. When Johannes and the old woman peeped wonderingly through the shutters to see whither he went, he was already standing in the church square, and there was such a clatter and hubbub among the populace that it echoed for miles.

“That’s Mons Bock!” clamored the crowd. “That is our valiant General Stenbock. If we have him with us, we’ll go out and fight for our country, every one of us, father and son, so God help us!”

“Johannes,” said Kerstin Bure then to her sixteen-year foster-son, with a hardness in her voice that he had never heard before, “you are meant to keep devoutly to your books and some day wear a pastor’s surplice as my sainted father did, but not to lose your blood in worldly feuds. Stick your tinder-box and clasp-knife in your jacket and tie your leather coat at your belt! Go then out into the woods and keep yourself well hid there until we have peace in the land! Before that I do not wish to see you again. Remember that! You hear now how the men shout on the church square, but mayhap their mouths will soon be stopped with black earth.”

He did as she bade him and wandered off into the woods by unknown paths. The firs became gradually more bristling and dense, so that for a long distance he had to push through backwards with the leather coat over his face. In the evening he came to a wide fen, and far out at the rim of a black lake lay an island overgrown with alders.

“There I’ll build my den,” he thought. But the quagmire of the swampy fen which floated over the twofold bottom, and the dark water where not a glimmer of daylight broke through, sank beneath his feet, until, exhausted and half-asleep, he sat down on a ledge.

A rustling still sounded from the ridges of the wood, but the lake lay quiet, and the little yellow reflections of the fluffy clouds soon stood motionless. In the infinite distance beyond the mist of the fen a goat-bell from time to time struck a few short, unresonant strokes. Two herd-girls blew quaveringly on their cow-horns, and on the forgotten and dilapidated sepulchre-mound in the dip of the valley the glow-worms kindled their lanterns in the grass.

“Are you one of those that have run away from war service?” a voice asked him, and when he looked up, a goat-girl was standing among the juniper bushes, knitting. She appeared to be one or two years older than he, and her leather boots hung on her back.

“That’s right enough; but now the fen bars my way, and berries and ferns get to be scant fare after a while.”

“It must be you don’t know the woods. Nobody suffers want there. Since my ninth year I’ve spent every summer up here in the wilds with my goats. Trim and cut down a couple of fir saplings and tie them to your feet with withes, and you can go on the quagmire wherever you like. Thatch your hut with fir bark and make yourself fishinggear.”

She carefully pulled a long basting-thread from her jacket and tied to it a pewter pin, which she had taken from her head-dress and bent into a hook.

“Here you have a hook and line,” she said and continued on her way, still knitting.

That night he did not much heed her advice, but when the sun again shone into his eyes, he pulled out his knife.

As soon as he had trimmed himself a couple of skis of the sort she had taught him to make, he betook himself out on the fen to the island. When he stamped on the grass there, the whole island swayed like a soft feather-bed, but he opined that this was good, because if there was moisture in the ground, he would not need to go far to find angleworms. Hardly, too, had he dug under the grass-roots with his fingers, before he found abundance. To be sure, the fishing went badly at the start, but after he had mystically laid two blades of sedge crosswise on the water, it became at once a different affair. As he carried a tinder-box in his jacket, it was an easy matter to broil his savory capture.

Afterwards he began to build his hut with such haste that he did not give himself leisure to sleep in the bright summer nights. He understood that it might easily tumble in on the swaying ground if he made it too high. Therefore he built instead a low turf-thatched roof-tree, under which he could not stand upright but had to creep. Every morning he fetched from the shore trimmed saplings, twigs, and pieces of fir bark. Finally he built a hearth of stones, where he let the juniper twigs smoulder and glow all night to drive off the midges. During his work he sometimes talked to himself half aloud, pretending that he was bailiff over a whole gang of workmen, and he called the island Wander Isle.

He met the goat-girl quite often. Her name was Lena. She went about with her knitting, feeding her charges on clearings and meadows. She taught him to set nooses and traps. Eventually they met every morning to see whether the fortune of hunting had been favorable to them, and she made him a good friend to all the wild animals.

“Did you see that gorgeous bird?” she asked, pointing to a blue-black black-cock that roused the whole wood with his thunderous wing-beats. “Him I call the Rich Bachelor of Vaxjö, for he asks neither after his home or his relatives, but just sits at the tavern in his fine dress-coat and smoothes his ruffles.”

“And just hark now!” she said one night when an owl hooted in the ravine. “Him I call the Tax Collector, who, when he turns his head in his white collar and rolls his red eyes or snaps his bill, frightens both man and beast. But if it’s a question of the little white harmless eggs in his own nest, then you’ll see. Then he has a father’s heart in the right place.”

But about nothing did she know so many traditions as about the cranes.

“Never yet,” she said, “have I got to see the long-legged bald-headed cranes when from their mossy retreats they set up their trumpeting and hold their autumn assembly for taking flight. Round their camp they have outposts that sit with a stone in their one uplifted claw, so that it may tumble down and wake them if they fall asleep. But the most wonderful thing is that then if any human being sees the ashen-gray birds go up, he himself begins to flap with his arms and longs to be able to fly with them, so high that the lakes below on the earth are only like little shimmering water-drops.”

“I want to see the cranes,” answered Johannes.

“Perhaps you may get to see them in the autumn, but then you must first teach yourself a great deal. First, you must be able to stand so quiet that you look like a dry juniper bush, and to bend down so that you look like a stone, and to lay yourself flat on the ground so that no one can tell you from a pile of rotten twigs.”

“All that I shall try to teach myself, but you must never go on my island. It isn’t the way you think there. I have a high fireplace and hangings on the walls, and the floor between the rugs is so shining and slippery that you can’t walk on it but have to crawl.”

The pretty stories he had read in the dean’s books ran in his memory, and he wanted to show the girl that he was not inferior to her but could in turn rouse her to wonder and curiosity.

“If you’ll let me get a sight of that house, I’ll go down to the settlement and fetch you a musketoon with bullets and powder-horn.”

“To my island you’ll never come.”

“If you’ll let me get a sight of that house, I’ll teach you in five days to feed yourself on ferns and roots and nothing.”

“That’s why I’ve come hither. Keep that promise, and you shall see my house, if you can really get there.”

With that he fastened the skis on his feet and vanished in the mist on the fen.

“The enemy stands on the shore,” he said to his imaginary soldiers on the island, “but they have neither axe nor knife for making skis. We may feel secure, if only we always remain upright and good.”

But late in the evening when he was about to lay fresh juniper on the hearth, he saw the goat-girl coming on the fen with the help of twigs and dry branches.

“The enemy thinks to take us by storm,” he continued, “but there is a secret which I have long suspected. I shall make the whole Wander Isle sail to sea like a boat.”

He pressed a pole against the outermost tussocks of the fen, and the floating island swam swaying further out on the water.

Then he laid himself calmly to sleep by the crackling embers, but when after a while he suddenly opened his eyes, the goat-girl stood straight before him and peeped in under the low roof on which fox-skins lay spread inside out to dry.

She asked him nothing about the high fireplace or the hangings or the slippery floor, but merely said, “A fresh breeze has blown up, so that the island has driven to land on the other shore. But why do you let the dry fox-skins lie on the roof instead of spreading them in here on the ground? And we ought to stick in juniper around the island so that people can’t see either us or the hut.”

He thought she spoke sensibly and went ashore at once to collect the juniper. When it was already long after midnight, they still worked at the strengthening and beautifying of his island. They even made of birch-bark and pegs a door which they could set before the entrance, and when they finally shoved the island off from the land again, they anchored it out in the water with two piles.

“Now the drawbridge is raised,” said Johannes, “and we must see to providing the new guests with entertainment such as is right.”

“The cook-maids and scullery-maids are always so slow,” she said and turned the two fish upon the hearth.

The heather droned and the lake splashed so that the island and the sedge and all the closed water-lilies swayed. As soon as mealtime had passed, Johannes lay down at full length nearest the hearth, but Lena, who did not yet feel that she possessed the right of ownership to Wander Isle, huddled together outside at the entrance with one hand as a pillow. She still heard the juniper sputter with heart’s delight, and as she fell asleep she counted the small sparks that sailed forth above the chink in the roof like stars through the night air. That was the fifth—that was the sixth—that was the seventh——. So she was put in mind of one of her songs:

Next day she no longer thought of leaving the island, and the third day they began without noticing it to say “our island.” Every morning they landed at the rock, and then she went up to the clearing with her goats or followed him to examine nooses and traps. At last she began also to teach him her art of feeding himself for many days on berries and ferns and nothing, and she noticed that he soon won even greater aptitude in this than she had herself. He grew thin and dry as a blown-off branch, and yet his sinews knotted themselves all the harder. But he always remained quiet and taciturn; and when she asked him what weighed on his mind, he went off on his own paths and remained long away.

They no longer knew the names of the days, but on the Sabbath the wind carried the distant sound of the bells far into the wilderness, and then Johannes put on his embroidered leather coat and led her upon the overgrown sepulchre-mound, from which they could see over fen and lake. With her hand in his he spoke then of God’s love, which covered the wretchedest crevices with its fairest bounties, and often they knelt in the grass for long periods and prayed that He would likewise sow a few grains of His seed in their souls.

After much conversation, however, Johannes was always doubly heavy in mind and sought for solitude.

The nights became ever darker, and often when she turned back from her herd she had to light her way with a torch between mountain walls and the roots of overblown trees. The giant firs, heaven high, were like tents, where black hands sprawled out from among the ragged leafage to seize her by the braids; but she felt no fear, she thought only of one thing. Wherever she went and whatever she busied herself with, she only thought that the summer would soon be ended and that no one could know what would then become of Johannes and her.

Then one October morning she was awakened by Johannes.

“Do you remember the cranes you spoke of?” he asked. “Now I can both stand so quiet that I look like a dry juniper bush, and bend down so that I look like a stone, and lie down flat on the ground so that no one can tell me from a pile of rotten twigs. I have taught myself more than that. I can feed myself on berries and roots, and if those are wanting I can starve along on nothing.”

She sat up and listened to a far-off noise.

“That is no cranes.”

“Then I’ll investigate what it is.”

He washed himself in the lake, put on his leather coat as on a Sunday, and pushed her gently aside when she wanted to hold him back.

“Don’t go, Johannes!” she begged. “I won’t let you go from me without following.”

In silence they came ashore with the island at the ledge and went down through the woods toward the settled land to a bare clearing, from which there was a free outlook over the mossy heath and meadows as far as Kerstin Bure’s mill and the church.

“Johannes!” she burst out with almost a scream, and seized him tightly by the coat-tails. “Come back with me to our place!”

He answered her meekly: “My conscience has pained me long enough. Do you see down there on the heath the gray creatures with thin legs? And the outposts that you told about are standing there too. It’s Mons Bock, who is out again on his recruiting. In that crane-dance I’d like to play myself.”

He walked violently away from her, so that the coat-tail was torn off at the cracking seam, and began to run down to the heath between the ferns and charred stumps.

She followed irresolutely after him, but when she saw how he spoke to the outposts and stepped straight into the assembled crowd of armed peasants, she went at a warm pace to get to him.

When she came into the ring, he already stood before Mons Bock and was taking his recruit penny.

“Where have you stuck your knapsack, Smålander?” asked the general.

“I have no knapsack, but I can feed myself for five days on nothing.”

Lena pressed forward between him and the general’s dark-brown horse.

“He, Johannes here, is no serving-boy, but we have a place of our own up in the woods.”

“As to the marriage I should like to see the certificate in black and white,” answered Mons Bock, and the hot color rose and fell on her forehead as he spoke.

Then Lena held out in her two hands the torn-off coat-tail and let him see that it fitted to the leather coat.

“I call that a parson’s certificate on real sheepskin,” he broke out. “The recruit money may therefore be yours, my good young lady, but the boy has clean perjured himself. And now, ye worthy yeomen of Småland, forward in Jesus’ name! Drums we have none, but we can still in our poverty stamp with wooden shoes the old Swedish march that it makes me warm at heart to hear.”

Staves and wooden shoes banged and clattered on rocks and ledges. Even the riders had wooden shoes tied fast to their feet, so that they tried in vain to use their stirrups.

When the last farmers had vanished across the heath, Lena went on to the mill. She dared not relate that Johannes had gone along to the war, but only told of how she had met him in the woods, exhibiting the coat-tail, which was carefully inspected and turned over.

“That’s the right coat-tail, sure enough,” said Kerstin Bure, “and though I don’t like to see women in my service, you may as well stay with me till Johannes comes. I really need a pair of strong arms, for I am well on in years and all my men have been bitten with madness and have run off with Stenbock. There is hardly an able-bodied man left in the parish, except the sexton, the idiot!”

After she had said this she spoke no more to Lena of what had passed in the woods and asked nothing about Johannes, but silently continued her occupations, as was her custom. The mill stood with unmoving wings, because there was no meal to grind, and through the long snowy months of winter there was heard in it neither steps nor voices. Beggars who went past on the road supposed it was unoccupied and deserted.

When the spring began to re-appear and white trailing clouds swept across the heavens, there came one day a boy hot and panting, who ran along the road and to each and all whom he met shouted a single word, until he vanished in the woods on the other side of the heather. Some hours later a rider came at a gallop and shouted in the same manner on all sides until he was gone. The women gathered in crowds on the hill by the church. Sweden, Sweden was saved, and Mons Bock and his goat-boys had beaten the whole enemy’s army at the Straits of Öresund!

Kerstin Bure alone asked nobody what had happened but sat every noon on the mill stairs in the glorious sunshine and carded wool with Lena. All at once as they were sitting silent and busy, while the spring freshet purled in ditches and brooks, they heard that the bells were ringing in the neighboring parishes to the south, although it was Wednesday. Expectantly the people ranged themselves along the road on both sides and from the wide-open door of the church advanced the stumbling pastor of the congregation, followed by his chaplains and in full ceremonials.

Once more the well-known march of the wooden shoes clattered on ledges and stones, but now to bag-pipes and shawms. It was the returning army of farmers. There were deep lines of shaggy beards and slashed sheep-skin coats and noble blue eyes. With staves in hand, muskets in the strap, and wide hats over their flowing hair, the homeward-bound troops marched back from their victory. Far in the van the fiery cross went from church to church as far as the northernmost wooden chapels, where the Lapps tied their reindeer to the steeples, and all the sunny springtime of Sweden was filled with the song of praise that re-echoed from the bells.

Just in front of the hay-wagons with the wounded rode Mons Bock in his gray overcoat with his riding-whip instead of a sword. Calling down blessings upon their saviour, the peasants hailed him with waving aprons and caps, but he turned to his ensigns and shouted that they should sing.

When the voices ceased, Mons Bock went on alone and sang stanza after stanza which he himself had put together.

Kerstin Bure had risen on the mill stairs and looked and looked beneath her lifted hand, but Lena, who had broken her way forward so fearlessly in the thickets of the wilderness, did not dare this time to wait and look about any longer, but stole away and threw herself sobbing among the empty meal-sacks.

Step by step Kerstin Bure withdrew up the stairs until she stood at the very top with her back against the wall of the mill. Then she pressed her hands like opera-glasses to her eyes. In the last wagon Johannes sat on the hay among the wounded, as merry and quiet as always, but paler and with bandages around his arm and shoulder.

She pressed her hands even harder to her eyes.

“So after all he was what I thought him, though to prove his soul thoroughly I commanded him otherwise. Then, though he is Kerstin Bure’s foster-son, he shall still keep for his life long her whom he himself has chosen, even if she is the poorest of goat-girls.”

But at the moment she heard how the sexton and his ringer clattered at the trap-doors of the steeple, and the great bell gave forth its first stroke.

She knitted her brow and went into the mill, saying: “I’ve no meal to grind, but if he lets his bell sound, though he has had no son in the war, my mill shall play, too.”

Creaking, the dust-white axle-beam began to move and purr, and while the peasant army marched singing by, the empty mill kept turning its great wings faster and faster.

THE FORTIFIED HOUSE

SURPRISED by the winter cold, the Swedes in crowded confusion had taken up their quarters behind the walls of Hadjash. Soon there was not a house to be found that was not filled with the frost-bitten and the dying. Cries of distress were heard out in the street, and here and there beside the steps lay amputated fingers, feet, and legs. Vehicles stood fastened to each other so tightly packed from the city gate to the market-place that the chilly-pale soldiers who streamed in from all sides had to crawl between the wheels and runners. Fastened in their harness and turned away from the wind, the horses, their loins white with frost, had already stood many days without food. No one took care of them, and several of the drivers sat frozen to death with hands stuck into their sleeves. Some wagons were like oblong boxes or coffins, where from the chink of the flat lid stared out mournful faces, which read in a prayer-book or gazed longingly with feverish delirium at the sheltering houses. A thousand unfortunates, in muffled tones or silently, cried to God for mercy. Under the sheltered side of the city wall dead soldiers stood in lines, many with red Cossack coats buttoned over their ragged Swedish uniforms and with sheepskins around their naked feet. Wood-doves and sparrows, which were so stiff with frost that they could be caught with the hand, had fallen on the hats and shoulders of the standing corpses and fluttered their wings when the chaplains went by to give a Last Communion in brandy.

Up at the market-place among burnt areas stood an unusually large house, from which could be heard raised voices. A soldier delivered a fagot to an ensign who stood in the doorway, and when the soldier went back into the street, he shrugged his shoulders and said to whomsoever cared to hear him: “It’s only the gentlemen quarreling in the chancellery.”

The ensign at the door had lately arrived with Lewenhaupt’s forces. He carried the fagot into the room and threw it down by the fireplace. The voices within ceased immediately, but as soon as he had closed the door they began with renewed heat.

It was His Excellency Piper who stood in the middle of the floor, his countenance wrinkled and furrowed, with glowing cheeks and trembling nostrils.

“I say that the whole affair is madness,” he burst out, “madness, madness!”

Hermelin with his pointed nose was constantly twitching his eyes and his hands, while he sprang back and forth in the room like a tame rat; but Field Marshall Rehnskiöld, who with his handsome, stately figure was standing by the fireplace, only whistled and hummed. If he had not whistled and hummed, the quarrel would have been finished by this time, because for once they were all fully agreed; but the fact that he whistled and hummed instead of being silent or at least speaking, that could be endured no longer. Lewenhaupt at the window took snuff and snapped shut his snuff-box. His pepper-brown eyes protruded from his head, and it looked as if his comical peruke became ever bigger and bigger. If Rehnskiöld had not continued to whistle and hum, he would have controlled himself today as yesterday and on all other occasions, but now wrath rose to his brow.

He shut his snuff-box for the last time and mumbled between his teeth, “I do not desire that His Majesty should understand statesmanship. But can he lead troops? Does he show real insight at a single encounter or attack? Trained and proved old warriors, who never can be replaced, he offers daily for an empty bravado. If our men are to storm a wall, it is considered superfluous that they bind themselves protecting fagots or shields, and therefore they are wretchedly massacred. To speak freely, my worthy sirs, I can forgive an Upsala student many a boyish freak, but I demand otherwise of a general in the field. Truly it avails not to carry on a campaign under the command of such a master.”

“Furthermore,” continued Piper, “His Majesty at present incommodes no general with any particularly hard command. At the beginning, when one succeeded in distinguishing himself more than another, it went better; but now His Majesty goes around mediating and reconciling with a foolish smile so that one could go crazy.”

He raised his arms in the air with a wrath which had lost all sense and bounds, notwithstanding he was altogether at one with Lewenhaupt. While he was still speaking, he turned about and betook himself impetuously to the inner apartments. The door slammed with such a clatter that Rehnskiöld found himself yet more called upon to whistle and hum. If he only had chosen to say something! But no, he did not. Gyllenkrook, who sat at the table and examined departure-checks, was blazing in the face, and a little withered-looking officer at his side whispered venomously into his car: “A pair of diamond ear-rings given to Piper’s countess might perhaps even yet help Lewenhaupt to new appointments.”

If Rehnskiöld had now ceased to whistle and hum, Lewenhaupt would still have been able to control himself, to take up the roll of papers he carried under his coat and sit down at a corner of the table; but instead, the venerable and at other times taciturn man grew worse and worse. He turned about undecidedly and went toward the entrance door, but there he suddenly stood still, drew himself up and smacked his heels together as if he had been a mere private. Now Rehnskiöld became quiet. The door opened. An icy gust of wind rushed into the room, and the ensign announced with as loud and long-drawn a voice as a sentry who calls his comrades to arms: “Hi-s Majesty!”

The king was no longer the dazzled and wondering half-grown youth of aforetime. Only the boyish figure with the narrow shoulders was the same. His coat was sooty and dirty. The wrinkle around the upward-protruding over-lip had become deeper and a trifle grin-like. On the nose and one cheek he had frostbite, and his eyelids were red-edged and swollen with protracted cold, but around the formerly bald vertex of his head the combed-back hair stood up like a pointed crown.

He held a fur cap in both hands and tried to conceal his embarrassment and diffidence behind a stiff and cold ceremoniousness, while bowing and smiling to each and all of those present.

They bowed again and again still more deeply, and when he had advanced to the middle of the floor, he stood still and bowed awkwardly toward the sides, though with somewhat more haste, being in appearance wholly occupied with what he was about to say. Thereupon he remained a long while standing quite silent.

Then he went forward to Rehnskiöld and, with a brief inclination, took him by one of his coat-buttons.

“I would beg,” he said, “that Your Excellency provide me with two or three men of the common soldiers as escort for a little excursion. I have already two dragoons with me.”

“But, Your Majesty! the country is over-run with Cossacks. To ride in here to the city from Your Majesty’s quarters with so small an escort was already a feat of daring.”

“Oh, nonsense, nonsense! Your Excellency will do as I have said. Some one of the generals present, who is at leisure, may also mount and take one of his men.”

Lewenhaupt bowed.

The king regarded him a trifle irresolutely without answering, and remained standing after Rehnskiöld hastened out. None of the others in the circle considered it necessary to break the silence or to move.

Only after a very long pause did the king bow again to everyone separately and go out into the open air.

“Well?” inquired Lewenhaupt and clapped the ensign on the shoulder with the return of his natural kindliness. “The ensign shall go along! This is the first time the ensign has stood eye to eye with His Majesty.”

“I had never expected he would be like that.”

“He is always like that. He is too kingly to command.”

They followed after the king, who clambered over wagons and fallen animals. His motions were agile, never abrupt, but measured and quite slow, so that he never for a moment lost his dignity. When he had finally made his way forward through the throng to the city gate, he mounted to the saddle with his attendants, who were now seven men.

The horses stumbled on the icy street, and some fell, but Lewenhaupt’s remonstrances only induced the king not to use his spurs yet more heartlessly. The lackey Hultman had read aloud to him all night or had related sagas, and had at length coaxed him into laughing at the prophecy that, had he not been exalted by God to be a king, he would for his whole life have become an unsociable floor-pacer, who devised much more wonderful verses than those of the late Messenius of Disa on Bollhus, but especially the mightiest battle stories. He tried to think of Rolf Gotriksson, who ever rode foremost of all his men, but today it did not please him to bound his thoughts within the playroom of a saga. The restlessness which during the last few days had struck its claws into his mind would not let go of its royal prey. At the chancellery he had just seen the heated faces. Ever since the pranks of his boyhood he had been rapt in his own imaginary world of the past. He had sat deaf to the piercing cries of distress along the way, while he became distrustful of each and all who exhibited a more sensitive hearing. Today as at other times he hardly noted that they offered him the best-rested horse and the freshest cake of bread, that in the morning they laid a purse with five hundred ducats in his pocket. He challenged the horseman at the first mêlée to form a ring about him and offer themselves to death. On the other hand he noticed that the soldiers saluted him with gloomy silence, and misfortunes had made him suspicious even of those nearest to him. The most cautious opposition, the most concealed disapproval, he made a note of without betraying himself, and every word remained and gnawed at his soul. Every hour it seemed to him that he lost an officer on whom he had formerly relied, and his heart became all the colder. His thwarted ambition chafed and bled under the weight of failure, and he breathed more lightly the farther behind him he left his headquarters.

Suddenly Lewenhaupt came to a stand, debating within himself how to exercise an influence upon the king.

“My heroic Ajax!” said he, and tapped his steaming horse, “you are indeed an old manger-biter, but I have no right to founder you for no good cause, and I myself am beginning to get on in years as you are. But in Jesus’ name, lads, let him who can follow the king!”

When he saw the ensign’s anxious sidelong look toward the king, he spoke with lowered voice: “Be faithful, boy! His Majesty does not roar out as we others do. He is too kingly to chide or bicker.”

The king feigned to notice nothing. More and more wildly over ice and snow he kept up the silent horse-race without goal or purpose. He had now only four attendants. After another hour one of the remaining horses fell with a broken fore-leg, and the rider out of pity shot a bullet through its ear, after which he himself, alone and on foot, went to meet an uncertain fate in the cold.

At last the ensign was the only man who was able to follow the king, and they had now come among bushes and saplings, where they could proceed but at a foot-pace. On the hill above them rose a gray and sooty house with narrow grated windows, the garden being surrounded by a wall.

At this moment there was a shot.

“How was that?” inquired the king, and looked around.

“The pellet piped nastily when it went by my ear but it only bit the corner of my hat,” answered the ensign without the least experience of how he ought to conduct himself before the king. He had a slight Småland accent and laughed contentedly with his whole blonde countenance.

Enchanted by the good fortune of being man by man with him whom he regarded as above all other living human beings, he continued: “Shall we then go up there and take them by the beard?”

The answer pleased the king in the highest degree, and with a leap he stood on the ground.

“We’ll tie our steeds here in the bushes,” he said exhilaratedly and with bright color on his cheek. “Afterwards let us go up and run through anybody that whistles.”

They left the panting horses and, bending forward, climbed up the hill among the bushes. Over the wall looked down several Cossack heads with hanging hair, yellow and grinning as those of beheaded criminals.

“Look!” whispered the king, and smote his hands together. “They’re trying to pull shut the rotten gate, the fox-tails!”

His glance, but recently so expressionless, became now flickering and anon open and shining. He drew his broadsword and raised it with both hands above his head. Like a young man’s god he stormed in through the half-open door. The ensign, who cut and thrust by his side, was often close to being struck from behind by his weapon. A musket shot blackened the king’s right temple. Four men were cut down in the gateway and the fifth of the band fled with a fire-shovel into the garden, pursued by the king.

Then the king wiped off the blood from his sword on the snow, while he laid two ducats in the Cossack’s shovel and burst out with rising spirits, “It is no pleasure to fight with these wretches, who never strike back and only run. Come back when you have bought yourself a decent sword.”

The Cossack, who understood nothing, stared at the gold-pieces, sneaked along the wall to the gate, and fled. Ever further and further away on the plain he called his roving comrades with a dismal and lamenting “Oohaho! Oohaho!”

The king hummed to himself as if chaffing with an unseen enemy: “Little Cossack man, little Cossack man, go gather up your rascals!”

The walls around the garden were mouldering and black. From the wilderness sounded an endlessly prolonged minor tone as from an æolian harp, and the king inquisitively shouldered in the door of the dwelling-house. This consisted of a single large and a half-dark room, and before the fireplace lay a heap of blood-stained clothing, which plunderers of corpses had taken from fallen Swedes. The door was thrown shut again by the cross-draught, and the king went to the stable buildings at the side. There was no door there, and a sound was now heard the more plainly. Within in the darkness lay a starved white horse bound to the iron loop of a wagon.

A lifted broadsword would not have checked the king, but the uncertain dusk caused the man of imagination to stand on the threshold, fearful of the dark. Yet he gave no sign of this, but beckoned the ensign. They stepped in down a steep stairway to a cellar. Here there was a spring, and as a stop-cock to the singing wind which stirred the water, a deaf Cossack with whip and reins, and without an idea of danger, was driving a manly figure in the uniform of a Swedish officer.

When they had loosed the rope and had bound the Cossack in the place of the prisoner, they recognized the Holsteiner, Feuerhausen, who had served as major in a regiment of dragoon recruits, but had been cut off by the Cossacks and harnessed as a draught animal for hoisting water.

He fell on his knees and stammered in broken Swedish: “Your Majesty! I gan’t pelief my eyes.... My gratitude....”

The king cheerily interrupted his talk and turned to the ensign: “Bring up the two horses to the stable! Three men cannot ride comfortably on two horses, and therefore we shall stay here till a few Cossacks come by, from whom we can take a new horse. Let the gentleman also stand guard at the gate.”

After that the king went back to the dwelling-house and shut the door after him. The horses which, desperate with hunger, had been greedily gnawing the bark from the bushes, were meanwhile led up to the stable, and the ensign went on guard.

Slowly the hours went by. When it began to draw towards dusk, the storm increased in bitterness, and in the light of sunset the snow whirled over the desolate snow-plain. Deathly yellow Cossack faces raised themselves spying above the bushes, and long in the blast sounded the roving plunderers’ “Oohaho! Oohaho! Oohaho!”

Then Feuerhausen stepped out of the stable, where he had sat between the horses so as not to get frost in his wounds from the ropes with which he had been bound. He went forward to the barred doors of the dwelling-house.

“Your Majesty!” he stammered, “the Cossacks are gathering more and more, and darkness is coming soon. I and the ensign can both sit on one horse. If we delay here, this night will be Your Mightiest Majesty’s last, which Gott in His secret dispensation forbit!”

The king answered from within, “It must be as we said. Three men do not ride comfortably on two horses.”

The Holsteiner shook his head and went down to the ensign.

“Such is His Majesty, you damt Swedes. From the stable I heard him walk and walk back and forvart. Sickness and conscience-torture will come. Like a pater familiæ the Muscovite czar stands among his subjects. A sugar-baker he sets up as his friend and a little serving-boy he raises on his glorious imperial throne. Detestable are his gestures when he gets drunk, and he treats women à la françois; but his first and last word always runs: ‘For Russia’s good!’ King Carolus leafs his lands as smoking ash-heaps and does not possess a single frient, not efen among his nearest. King Carolus is more lonely than the meanest wagon-drifer. He has not once a comrade’s knee to weep on. Among nobles and fine ladies and perukes he comes like a spectre out of a thousand-year mausoleum—and spectres mostly go about without company. Is he a man of state? Oh, have mercy! No sense for the public. Is he a general? Good-bye? No sense for the big masses. Only to make bridges and set up gabions, clap his hands at captured flags and a couple of kettle-drums. No sense for state and army, only for men.”

“That may be also a sense,” replied the ensign.

He walked vigorously back and forward, for his fingers were already so stiff with cold that he scarcely could hold his drawn blade.

The Holsteiner shifted the ragged coat-collar around his cheeks and went on with muffled voice and eager gestures: “King Carolus laughs with delight when the bridge breaks and men and beasts are miserably drownt. No heart in his breast. To the deuce wit him! King Carolus is such a little Swedish half-genius as wanders out in the worlt and beats the drum and parades and makes a fiasco, and the parterre whistles Whee!”

“And that is just why the Swedes go to death for him,” answered the ensign, “that is just why.”

“Not angry, my dearest fellow. Your teeth shone so in a laugh when we first met.”

“I like to hear the Herr Major talk, but I’m freezing. Will not the major go up and listen at the king’s door?”

The Holsteiner went up to the door and listened. When he came back he said, “He only walks and walks, and sighs heavily like a man in anguish of soul. So it always is now, they say. His Majesty nefer sleeps any more at night. The comedy-actor knows he is not up to his part, and of all life’s torments, wounded ambition becomes the bitterest.”

“Then it should also be the last for us to jest at. Dare I beg the major to rub my right hand with snow; it is getting numb.”

The Holsteiner did as he desired and turned back to the king’s door. He struck his forehead with both hands. His gray-sprinkled, bushy mustaches stood straight out, and he mumbled, “Gott, Gott! Soon it will be too dark to retreat.”

The ensign called, “Good sir, I should like to ask if you would rub my face with snow. My cheeks are freezing stiff. Of the pain in my foot I will not speak. Ah, I can’t bear it.”

The Holsteiner filled his hands with snow. “Let me stand guard,” he said, “only for an hour.”

“No, no. The king has commanded that I stay here at the entrance.”

“Och, the king! I know him. I will make him cheerful, talk philosophy, tell of gallant exploits. He is always amused to hear of a lover who climbs adventurously through a window. He often looks at the beautiful side of womankint. That appeals to his imagination, but not to his flesh, for he is without feeling. And he is bashful. If the fair one ever wishes to tread him under her silken shoe, she must herself attack; but if she pretends to flee, then all the other women must strive against a liaison. The most mighty lady his grandmother spoiled everything with her shriek of ‘Marriage, marriage!’ King Carolus is from top to toe like the Swedish queen Cristina, though he is genuinely masculine. The two should have married each other on the same throne. That would haf been a fine little pair. Oh, pfui, pfui! you Swedes. If a man gallops his horses and lets people and kingdom be massacred, he is still pure-hearted and supreme among all, only his bloot is too slow for amours. Oh, excuse me! I know pure-hearted heroes who were faithfully in love with two, three different maidens or wives in one and the same week.”

“Yes, we are so, we are so. But for Christ’s pity you must rub my hand again. And excuse my moaning and groaning!”

Just inside the gate, which could not be shut, lay the fallen Cossacks, white as marble with the hoarfrost. The yellow sky became gray, and ever nearer and more manifold in the twilight sounded the wailing cries: “Oohaho! Oohaho! Oohaho!”

Now the king opened his door and came down across the garden.

The pains in his head, from which he was accustomed to suffer, had been increased by his ride in the wind and made his glance heavy. His countenance bore traces of lonely soul-strife, but as he drew near, his mouth resumed its usual embarrassed smile. His temple was still blackened after the musket-shot.

“It’s freshening up,” he said, and producing from his coat a loaf of bread, he broke it in three, so that everyone had as large a piece as he did. After that, he lifted off his riding-cape and fastened it himself about the shoulders of the sentinel ensign.

Abashed over his own conduct, he then took the Holsteiner forcibly by the arm and led him up through the garden, while they chewed at their hard bread.

Now if ever, thought the Holsteiner, is the time to win the king’s attention with a clever turn of speech and afterwards talk sense with him.

“The accommodation might be better,” he began, at the same time biting and chewing. “Ah, good old days! That reminds me of a gallant adventure outside of Dresden.”

The king kept on holding him by the arm, and the Holsteiner lowered his voice. The story was lively and salacious, and the king grew inquisitive. The roughest ambiguities always lured out his set smile. He listened with a despairing and half-absent man’s need of momentary diversion.

Only when the Holsteiner with cunning deftness began to shift the conversation over to some words about their immediate danger did the king again become serious.

“Bagatelle, bagatelle!” he replied. “It is nothing at all worth mentioning, except that we must behave ourselves well and sustain our reputation to the last man. If the rascals come on, we will all three place ourselves at the gate and pink them with our swords.”

The Holsteiner stroked his forehead and felt around. He began to talk about the stars that were just shining out. He set forth a theory for measuring their distance from the earth. The king now listened to him with a quite different sort of attention. He broke into the question keenly, resourcefully, and with an unwearied desire to think out new, surprising methods in his own way. One assertion gave a hand to another, and soon the conversation dwelt on the universe and the immortality of the soul, to return afresh to the stars. More and more flickered in the heavens, and the king described what he knew about the sun-dial. He stood up his broadsword with its scabbard in the snow and directed the point toward the Polestar, so that next morning they might be able to tell the time.

“The heart of the universe,” he said, “must be either the earth or the star that stands over the land of the Swedes. No land must be of more account than the Swedish land.”

Outside the wall the Cossacks were calling out, but as soon as the Holsteiner led the talk to their threatened attack, the king was laconic.

“At daybreak we shall betake ourselves back to Hadjash,” said he. “Before then we can hardly secure a third horse, so that each of us can ride comfortably in his own saddle.”

After he had spoken in that strain he went back into the dwelling-house.

The Holsteiner came down with a vehement stride to the ensign, and pointing at the king’s door, he cried out, “Forgif me, ensign. We Germans don’t mince words when a wound oozes after a rope, but I lay down my arms and give your lord the victory, because I also could shed my bloot for the man. Do I love him! No-one efer understands him that has not seen him.—But ensign, you cannot stay any longer out in the weather.”

The ensign replied, “No cape has warmed me more sweetly than the one I now wear, and I lay all my cares on Christ. But in God’s name, major, go back to the door and listen! The king might do himself some harm.”

“His Majesty would not fall on his own sword but longs for another’s.”

“Now I hear his steps even down here. They are getting still more violent and restless. He is so lonely. When I saw him in Hadjash bowing and bowing among the generals, I could only think: How lonely he is!”

“If the little Holsteiner slips away from here alife, he will always remember the steps we heard tonight and always call this refuge Fort Garden.”

The ensign nodded his approval and answered, “Go to the stable, major, and seek rest and shelter a while between the horses. And there through the walls you can better hear the king and watch over him.”

Thereupon the ensign began to sing with resonant voice:

The Holsteiner went back across the garden into the stable and, his voice quavering with cold, intoned with the other:

“Oohaho! Oohaho!” answered the Cossacks in the storm, and it was already night.

The Holsteiner squeezed himself in between the two horses and listened till weariness and sleep bowed his head. Only at dawn was he wakened by a clamor. He sprang out into the open air and beheld the king already standing in the garden, looking at the sword that had been set up as a sun-dial.

By the gate the Cossacks had collected, but when they saw the motionless sentry, they shrank back in superstitious fear and thought of the rumors concerning the magic of the Swedish soldiers with blow and shot.

When the Holsteiner had gotten forward to the ensign, he grasped him hard by the arm.

“What now?” he asked, “Brandy?”

At the same instant he let go his grip.

The ensign stood frozen to death with his back again the wall of the gate, his hands on his swordhilt, and wrapt in the king’s cloak.

“Since we are now only two,” the king remarked, drawing his weapon out of the snow, “we can at once betake ourselves each to his horse, as it was arranged.”

The Holsteiner stared him right in the eyes with re-awakened hate and remained standing, as if he had heard nothing. Finally, however, he led out the horses, but his hands trembled and clenched themselves so that he could hardly draw the saddle-girths.

The Cossacks swung their sabres and pikes, but the sentry stood at his post.

Then the king sprang carelessly into the saddle and set his horse to a gallop. His forehead was clear and his cheeks rosy, and his broadsword glimmered like a sunbeam.

The Holsteiner looked after him. His bitter expression relaxed, and he murmured between his teeth, while he too mounted to the saddle and with his hand lifted to his hat raced by the sentry: “It is only joy for a hero to see a hero’s noble death.—Thanks, comrade!”

THE QUEEN OF THE MARAUDERS

THE tocsin in the church tower at Narva had ceased. In a breach of the battered rampart lay the fallen Swedish heroes, over whose despoiled and naked bodies the Russians stormed into the city with wild cries. Some Cossacks, who had sewed a live cat into the belly of an inn-keeper, were still laughing in a circle around their victim, but the gigantic Peter Alexievitch, the czar, soon burst his way through the midst of the throng on street and courtyard and cut down his own men to check their misdeeds. His right arm up to the shoulder was drenched with the blood of his own subjects. Weary of murder, troop after troop finally assembled in the square and the churchyard. Under the pretext that the churches had been desecrated by the misbelievers who lay buried there, bands of soldiers began to violate and plunder the graves. Stones were pried up from the floor of the church with crowbars, and outside, the graves were opened with shovels. Pillagers broke the copper and tin caskets into pieces and threw dice for the silver handles and plates. The streets, where at the first mêlée the inhabitants had thrown down fire-brands and tiles, and where the blood of the slain was still swimming in the gutters, were for many days piled up with rusty or half-blackened coffins. The hair on some of the bodies had grown so that it hung out between the boards. Some of the dead lay embalmed and well preserved, though brown and withered, but from most of the coffins yellow skeletons grinned forth from collapsed and mouldered shrouds. People who stole anxiously among them read the coffin-plates in the twilight and now and then recognized the name of a near relative, a mother or a sister. Sometimes they saw the ravagers pull out the decayed remains and throw them into the river. Sometimes, again, protected by night, they themselves succeeded in carrying them off and burying them outside the city. So in the dusk one might encounter an old man or woman who came stealing along toilsomely with children or serving-maids, carrying a coffin.

One night a swarm of pillagers bivouacked in a corner of the churchyard. Hi! what fun it was to pile up a bonfire of bed-slats and bolsters and chairs and coffin-ends and what the devil else could be dragged forth. Flames and sparks blazed up as high as the attic window of the parsonage. Round about stood coffins propped one against another. The bottom of one of the uppermost had been broken, so that the treasurer, of blessed memory, who was inside it, stood there upright with his spliced wig on his head and looked as if he thought: “I pray you, into what company have I been conducted?”

“Haha! little father,” the robbers called to him, as they roasted August apples and onions at the flames; “you always wanted something to wet your whistle, you there!”

The glow of the fire lighted up the living-room of the parsonage and the sparks flew in through the broken panes. In the rooms stood only a broken table and a chair, upon which sat the parson with his head propped on his hands.

“Who knows? Perhaps it might succeed,” he mumbled and raised himself as if he had found the key to a long-considered problem.

His silver-white beard spread itself over all his breast, and his hair hung down to his shoulders. In his youth as chaplain he had gone in for a little of everything and he had never pushed back a cup that was offered him. Afterwards as a widower in the parsonage he had worshipped God with joy and mirth and a brimming bowl, and it was bruited about that he did not reach first for his Bible if a well-formed wench happened to be in his company. He therefore even now took misfortune more bravely and resignedly than others, and his heart was as undaunted as his soldierly body was unbowed by years.

He went out into the entry and cautiously pulled out the five or six rusty nails that held down a couple of boards above a little narrow recess under the stairs. Then he lifted the boards aside.

“Come out, my child!” he said.

When no one obeyed him, his voice grew somewhat more severe and he repeated his words: “Come out, Lina! Both the other maids have been bound and carried away. It was verily at the last minute that I got you in here. But it is almost a day since then, and you cannot live without meat and drink. Eh?”

When he was not obeyed, he threw back his head in annoyance, and he now spoke in accents of harsh command: “Why don’t you obey? Do you think there is food here? There’s not so much as a pinch of salt left in the house. You must be got away, you understand. If it goes ill with you, if a plunderer gets you on the way, I can only say this: clasp your arms about his neck and follow with him on his horse’s back wherever it carries you. Many a time in the rough-and-tumble of war have I seen such a love, and then I have slung the soldier’s cloak over my priest’s frock and waved my hat for a lucky end to the song. Don’t you hear, lass? When your late father, who was a drinker—if I must tell the truth—was my stableboy and pulled me out of a hole in the ice once, I promised for the future to provide for him and his child. Besides, he was Swedish born as I was. Well, haven’t I always been a fatherly master to you, or what has Her Grace to object? Have her wits deserted her, eh?”

Something now began to move in the pitch-black recess. An elbow struck against the wall, there was a rustling and scraping, and with that Lina Andersdotter stepped out in nothing but her chemise, bare legs, and a torn red jacket without sleeves but with a whole back to it, over which hung the braid of her brown hair.

The light of the fire fell in through the window. Squatted together she held her chemise between her knees, but her fresh, downward-bent face with broad, open features was as merry as if she had just stepped out of her settle-bed on a bright winter morning in the light of the dawn.

The blood ran impetuously enough through the veins of the white-haired chaplain, but in that moment he was but master and father.

“I did not know that in my simple house folk had learned such a ceremonious feeling of delicacy,” said he, and gave her a friendly pat on the bare shoulders.

She looked up.

“No,” she said, “it’s only because I’m so wretchedly cold.”

“Ah, well, that’s natural. That’s the way I like people to talk in my house. But I have no garments to give you. My own hang on me in tatters. The house may burn at any time. I myself can maybe sneak out on my way unaccosted, and I have a Riga riksdollar in my pocket. Who asks about a ragged old man? It’s another affair with you, Lina. I know these wild fellows. I know but one way to get you off, but I myself shrink from telling it. Naturally, you are afraid.”

“Afraid I’m not. It will go with me as it may. To be sure, I am no better than the others. Only I’m perishing of cold.”

“Come here to the door then, but don’t be frightened. Do you see out there in the doorway the rascals have set a little wooden casket. It cannot be very heavy, but perhaps you will have room in it. If you dare lay yourself in the casket, perhaps I can smuggle you out of the town.”

“That I surely dare.”

Her teeth chattered and she trembled, but she straightened herself up a little, let the chemise hang free, and went out on the stones in the doorway.

The pastor lifted off the moist lid, which was loose, and found nothing else in the plundered casket than shavings and a brown blanket.

“That was just what I needed,” she shivered. She pulled up the blanket, wrapped it over her, stepped up, and laid herself on her back in the shavings.

The pastor bent over her, laid both his hands on her shoulder, and looked into her fearless eyes. She might be eighteen or nineteen years old. Her hair was stroked smoothly back to the braid.

As he stood so, it came over him that he had not always looked on her in the past with as pure and fatherly feelings as he himself had wished and as he had pretended to do. But now he did so. His long white hair fell down as far as her cheeks.

“May it go well with you, child! I am old. It matters little whether my life goes on for a while still or is destroyed in the day that now is. I have been in many a piece of mischief and many an ill deed in my time, and for the forgiveness of my sins I will also for once have part in something good.”

He nodded and nodded toward her and raised himself.

There outside the clamor sounded louder than ever. He laid on the lid and fastened in the long, crookedly set screws as well as he was able. Then he knelt, knotted a rope crosswise around the casket, and with strong arms lifted the heavy burden on his back. Bending forward and staggering, he strode out into the open air.

“Look there!” shouted one of the pillagers at the fire, but his nearest comrade silenced him with the word: “Let the poor old man alone! That’s only a miserable beggar’s casket.”

Sweat trickled out over the old man’s face, and his back and arms ached and smarted under the severe weight. Step by step he moved forward through the dark streets. Every now and then he had to set down the casket on the ground to take breath, but then he stood with his hands on the lid in constant fear of being challenged and hustled away or of being stabbed by some roving band of soldier revelers. Several times he had to step to one side because of the heavy wagons, loaded with men and women, who were to be taken hundreds of miles into Russia to people the waste regions. The great conquering czar was a sower who did not count the seeds he strewed.

When finally the old war-pastor reached the town gate and the watch came to meet him, he roused his strength to the utmost with all the collected will-power of his anxiety. With a single arm he held the casket in place on his back, while with his free hand he drew the Riga riksdollar from his pocket and handed it to the sentry as a bribe.

The soldier motioned to him to go on.

He wanted again to move his foot forward, but now he was unable. Through the town gate he saw the river glimmer on the open plain, but then it grew dark before his eyes. Still afraid for his burden in his helplessness, he softly and cautiously lowered the casket beside him on the stone flagging. Thereupon he fell forward and died.

The other men of the watch sprang forward and began to curse and complain. No casket could remain standing there in the door of the gateway.

The officers, who were sitting and gambling in a room of the casemate, now came likewise to the spot. One of them, a little dry, weather-beaten figure with rectangular spectacles, who was more like a clerk than a soldier, took a lantern, came forward and held the lid slightly ajar with his scabbard.

First he drew back his head precipitately, nearly dropping the lantern. The next time he bent down and looked in, he dwelt on the action longer and more searchingly, and afterwards passed his hands over his whole face to hide his thoughts. Then he unhooked his spectacles and stood pondering. When he bent the third time, he sent the light back and forward through the crevice,—and there inside lay Lina Andersdotter quite calmly, screwing up her eyes at him in the lantern’s light without herself knowing what was going on.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

He laid aside the lantern and went a couple of paces up and down through the door with hands crossed behind his back. There came then into his frigid expression a sly and merrily vibrating life, and unnoticed he took some August apples and thrust them into the casket. Thereupon he began to give commands.

“Come here, boys! Let eight men take the casket to General Ogilvy, salute him and say that this is a small gift from his humble servant, Ivan Alexievitch. Eight of you others who have just come from working on the walls go after it and roll up your leather aprons like trumpets, in which you are to blow the regimental march. But in front of all two men are to go with rushlights. Forward, march!”

The savage soldiers looked open-mouth at one another and obeyed. Laughing, they lifted the casket on their muskets. Two long stalks, tarred and twisted about with straw, were brought forward from a corner of the gateway and lighted at the lantern; and as the procession set itself in motion into the field toward the camp, the musicians tooted the march in their aprons:

When they came to the camp, the soldiers rushed together around them in the torch-light. General Ogilvy, who was sitting at table, came out of his tent.

“Beloved little father,” said one of the bearers, “Lieutenant Ivan Alexievitch humbly sends you this gift.”

Ogilvy grew pale and bit his lips under his bushy gray mustaches. His face, wrinkled and strained to harshness, was at bottom good-natured and friendly.

“Is he out of his right mind?” he thundered with pretended wrath, though in reality he was as frightened as a boy. “Put down the casket and break off the lid!”

The soldiers pried it open with their blades, and the dark lid rattled to one side.

Ogilvy stared. With that he burst out laughing. He guffawed so that he had to sit down on an earthen bench. And the soldiers laughed too. They laughed down through the whole lane of tents, so that they reeled and tottered and had to support themselves one against another like drunkards. Lina Andersdotter lay there in the casket with a half-eaten apple in her hand and made great eyes. She had now become warm again and was as blooming of cheek as a doll.

“By all the saints,” Ogilvy burst out. “Not ever in the catacombs of St. Anthony has man seen such a miracle. This is a corpse that ought to be sent to the Czar himself.”

“By no means,” answered one of his officers. “I sent him two little fair-haired baggages day before yesterday, but he only cares for thin brunettes.”

“So it is,” answered Ogilvy, and turned himself bending toward Narva. “Salute Ivan Alexievitch and say that, when the casket is returned, there shall lie in the bottom of it a captain’s commission.—Hey, sweetheart!”

He went forward and stroked Lina Andersdotter under the chin.

But at that she sat up, took hold of his hair, and gave him a resounding box on the ear, and after that another.

He did not let it affect him in the least, but continued to laugh.

“That’s the way I like them,” he said, “that’s the way I like them. I will make you queen of the marauders, my chick, and as token thereof I give you here a bracelet with a turquoise in the clasp. A band of our worst rabble stole it just now from the casket of Countess Horn in Narva.”

He shook the chain from his wrist and she caught it eagerly to her.

When later in the evening the cloth was laid in the tent, Lina Andersdotter sat at the table beside Ogilvy. She had now got French clothes of flowered brocade and wore a head-dress with blonde-lace. But what hands! She managed to eat with gloves, but under them swelled the big, broad fingers and the red shone between the buttons.

“Hoho! hoho!” shouted the generals. “Those hands make a man merrier than he would get with a whole flask of Hungary. Help! Loosen our belts! Hold us under the arms! It will be the death of us.”

Meanwhile she helped herself, munched sweetmeats, and sat with her spoon in the air. If anything tasted bad, she made a face. Eat she could. Drink, on the contrary, she would not but only took a swallow in her mouth and then spurted the wine over the generals. But all their curses and worst expressions she picked up while she sat ever alike blooming and gay.

“Help, help!” shrieked the generals, choked with laughter. “Blow out the light so they can slip her away! Hold our foreheads! Help! Will you have a little pull of a tobacco pipe, mademoiselle?”

“Go to the deuce! Can’t I sit in peace!” answered Lina Andersdotter.

There was one thing, though, that Ogilvy skillfully concealed so that the laughers should not turn to him and nudge him in the ribs and pull his coat-tails and say: “Oho, little father, you’ve got into water too deep for your bald head. Bless you, little father, bless you and your little mishap!”

He pretended always to treat her with slightly indifferent familiarity, but he never sat so near her that his dog could not jump up between them. He never took hold of her so that anyone saw it, and never either when no one saw it, for then he knew that her hand would catch him on the face so that the glove would split and the red shine out in all its strength. It was enough that, notwithstanding, she now and then gave him a slap in the middle of the face, and no one did she snub worse than him. But at all that he only laughed with the others, so that never before had there been in the camp such a clamor and bedlam.

Sometimes he thought of knouting her, but he was ashamed before the others, because everything could be heard through the tent, and he feared that they then would the more easily guess how things stood and how little he got along with the girl. Wait, he thought, we shall be sitting alone sometime under lock and key. Just wait! Till then things may go on as they do.

“Help, help!” shouted the generals. “That’s how she carries her train. We must take hold of it. Lord, lord, no; but just look!”

“Take it up, you,” said she. “Take it up, you. That’s what you are for.”

And so the generals were cuffed and bore her train, both when she came to the table and when she went.

Then it happened one evening when she sat among the drinking old men that an adjutant stepped in, hesitating and embarrassed. He turned to Ogilvy.

“Dare I be frank?”

“Naturally, my lad.”

“And whatever I say will be forgiven?”

“By my honor. Only speak out!”

“The czar is on his way out to the camp.”

“Very good, he is my gracious lord.”

The adjutant pointed at Lina Andersdotter.

“The czar has a fancy for tall brunettes,” said Ogilvy.

“Your Excellency, in these last days he has changed his taste.”

“God! Call the troops to arms—and forward with the three-horse wagon!”

Now the alarm was struck. Drums rolled, trumpets shattered, weapons clattered, and shouts and trampling filled the night. The drinking party was broken up, and Lina Andersdotter was set in a baggage-wagon.

Beside the peasant who was driving, a soldier sprang up with a lighted lantern, and she heard the peasant softly inquire of him the purpose of the flight.

“The czar,” answered the soldier in a monotone and pointed with his thumb over his shoulder at the girl.

At that the peasant shrunk together as at a frost-cold breeze and whipped the small, shaggy horses more and more wildly. He hallooed and beat and urged them into a thundering gallop. The lantern-light fell caressingly on the fir bushes and the burnt homesteads; the wagon banged and tottered among the stones, and creaked in its joints.

Lina Andersdotter lay on her back in the hay and looked at the stars. Whither was she carried? What fate awaited her? She wondered and wondered. On her wrist hung the bracelet as a talisman, a pledge for the accomplishing of Ogilvy’s wonderful prediction. Queen of the Marauders! It sounded so grand, though at first she had so gradually discovered what the word really betokened. She stroked and plucked at the small silver rings. Then she sat up and scanned the stony road in the lantern’s light. Cautiously she moved further and further out. Unnoticed, she climbed slowly over the wagon-sill and lowered her feet to the ground. Would she be crushed and left lying? For a few steps she dragged along. Then she lost her hold, stumbled, and fell lacerated among the bushes.

On thundered the baggage-wagon with its three galloping horses, and the lantern-light vanished. Then she got up and wiped off the blood from her cheeks while she wandered forth into the trackless woods.

When she met barbarous-looking fugitives and they saw her pretty face, they at once picked berries and mushrooms for her and followed along. She got a whole court of ragamuffins and she treated them so ill that they scarcely dared to touch her dress, but sometimes they stabbed each other. Finally she took service with a skipper’s wife, who was to sail with her husband to Danzig. Scarcely had it begun to grow dark when the ragamuffins came out one after another and took service for nothing. The skipper sat on his cabin in the moonlight, blew his shepherd’s pipe, and congratulated himself on having got such a willing crew. And never had an old woman seen a stronger serving-maid. But hardly had they put to sea when Lina Andersdotter sat herself beside the skipper with her arms crossed, and all the ragamuffins lay on their backs and sang in tune with the pipe.

“Do you think I’ll scour your bunks?” said she.

“Beat her, beat her,” cried the old woman, but the skipper only moved nearer and blew and blew on his pipe. Night and day the vessel rocked on the bright waves with slack sail, and the skipper played for Lina Andersdotter, who danced with her ragamuffins, but down in the cabin sat the old woman crying and lamenting.

When they came to Danzig the skipper stuck the pipe under his arm and slunk off the vessel at night with Lina Andersdotter and her ragamuffins. They guessed now that she thought of going to the Swedish troops in Poland and compelling the king himself to give her his hand.

When she with her followers stepped humming in among the Swedish women of the camp, there was uproar and alarm, because for two days they had sat by their wagons without food. The last provisions had been delivered to the sutlers and divided among the soldiers. Then she stepped forward to the first corporal she happened on and set her hands on her hips.

“Aren’t you ashamed,” said she, “to let my women starve, when in spite of all you can’t get along without them?”

“Your women? Who are you?”

She pointed to her bracelet. “I am Lina Andersdotter, the Queen of the Marauders, and now take five men and follow us!”

He looked toward his captain, the reckless Jacob Elfsberg, he looked at her pretty face and at his men. How the line surrounded her with their muskets, and the women armed themselves with whip-handles and pokers! At night when the light of the camp-fire tinged the heavens, the king, inquisitive, got into his saddle. As the wild throng came back with well-laden wagons and oxen and sheep, the troops cheered louder than ever: “Hurrah for King Charles! Hurrah for Queen Caroline!”

The women thronged about the king’s horse so that the lackeys had to hold them back, and Lina Andersdotter went to him to shake hands with him. But he thereupon rose in his stirrups and shouted over the women’s heads to the corporal and the five soldiers: “That’s well maraudered, boys!”

From that moment she would never hear the king named, and whenever she met a man, she flung her sharpest abuse right in his face, whether he was plain private or general. When Malcomb Bjorkman, the young guardsman—who, however, was already famous for his exploits and wounds—held out his hand to her, she scornfully laid in it her ragged, empty purse; and she was never angrier than when she heard General Meyerfelt whistling as he rode before his dragoons, or recognized Colonel Grothusen’s yellow-brown cheeks and raven-black wig. But if a wounded wretch lay beside the road, she offered him the last drops from her tin flask and lifted him into her wagon. Frost and scratches soon calloused her cheeks. High on the baggage-wagon she sat with the butt of a whip and commanded all the wild camp-followers, loose women, lawful wives, and thievish fellows that streamed to them from east and West. When at night the flare of a fire arose toward heaven, the soldiers knew that Queen Caroline was out on a plundering raid.

Days and years went by. Then, after the jolly winter-quarters in Saxony, when the troops were marching toward the Ukraine, the king commanded that all women should leave the army.

“Teach him to mind his own affairs!” muttered Lina Andersdotter, and she very tranquilly drove on.

But when the army came to the Beresina, there was murmuring and lamenting among the women. They gathered around Lina Andersdotter’s cart and wrung their hands and lifted their babies on high.

“See what you have to answer for! The troops have already crossed the river and broken all the bridges behind them. They have left us as prey to the Cossacks.”

She sat with her whip on her knee with her high boots, but on her wrist gleamed the silver chain with its turquoise. All the more violently did the terrified women sob and moan around her, and from the closed baggage-wagons, which were like boxes, crept out painted and powdered Saxon hussies. Some of them, none the less, had satin gowns and gold necklaces. From all sides came women she had never seen before.

“Dirty wenches!” muttered she. “Now at last I have a chance to see the smuggled goods that the captains and lieutenants brought along in their wagons. What have you to do among my poor baggage-crones? But now we all come to know what a man amounts to when his haversack is getting light.”

Then they caught hold of her clothes and called upon her as if she alone could seal their fate.

“Is there no one,” she asked, “who knows the psalm: ‘When I am borne through the Vale of Death’? Sing it, sing it!”

Some of the women struck up the psalm with choked and nearly whispering voices, but the others rushed down to the river, hunted out boats and wreckage from the bridges, and rowed themselves across. Each and every one who had a husband or a beloved in the army had hoped even at the last she would be taken along and hidden; but all the worst women of the rabble, who belonged neither to this man nor to that, stood with their rags or their tasteless, ridiculous gowns in a ring around Lina Andersdotter. Meanwhile swarms of Cossacks, who had crossed the river to snap up any straggling marauders, were sneaking up through the bushes on their hands and knees.

Then her heart failed her and she stepped down from the wagon.

“Poor children!” she said, and patted the hussies on the cheek. “Poor children, I will not desert you. But now,—devil take me!—do you pray to God that he will make your blood-red sins white, for I have nothing else to offer you than to shame the men and die a hero’s death.”

She opened the wagon-chest and hunted out from among her plunder some pikes and Polish sabres, which she put into the hands of the softly-singing women. Thereupon she herself grasped a musket without powder or shot and set herself among the others around the cart to wait. So they stood in the sunset light on the highest part of the shore.

Then the women on the river saw the Cossacks rush forward to the cart and cut down one after another of them with the idea that they were men in disguise. They wanted to turn their boats, and soldiers sprang down from their ranks to the water and opened fire.

“Hurrah for King Charles,” they cried with a thousand intermingled voices; “and hurrah—No, it’s too late. Look, look! There is Queen Caroline who in the midst of the harlots is dying a virgin with a musket in her hand!”

CAPTURED

FAR out in the wastes of Småland and Finnved wondrous prodigies appeared in the air and after that work lost all worth and the morrow all hope. People either went hungry or ate and drank with riot and revel amid half-stifled curses. At every farm sat a mother or a widow in mourning. During the day’s occupation she talked of the fallen or the captives, and at night she started from her sleep and thought she was still hearing the thunder of the hideous wagons on which teamsters in black oil-cloth cloaks carried away those who had died of the plague.

In the church of Riddarsholm the body of the Princess Hedwig Sofia had lain unburied for seven years from lack of money, and now a new coffin had been laid out for the old Queen Dowager Hedwig Eleonora, Charles’s mother. Several sleepy ladies-in-waiting were keeping the death-watch, and wax-lights burned mistily around the dead, who lay wrapped in a simple covering of linen.

The youngest lady-in-waiting arose yawning, went to the window, and drew back the black broad-cloth to see if dawn had not appeared.

Limping steps were heard from the ante-room, and a little man of a gnarled and rugged figure, who in every way tried to subdue the thump of his wooden leg, advanced to the coffin and with signs of deep reverence lifted aside the drapery. His fair, almost white hair lay close along his head and extended down his neck as far as his collar. From a flask he poured embalming liquid into a funnel, which was set in the royal corpse between the kirtle and the bodice. But the liquid was absorbed very slowly, and, waiting, he set down the flask on the funeral carpet and went to the lady at the window.

“Is it not seven o’clock yet, Blomberg?” she whispered.

“It has just struck six. It’s an awful weather outside, and I feel in the stump of my leg that we’re going to have a snow-storm. But then it’s a long while since one could foretell anything good in Sweden. Trust me, not this time either will there be enough money for a decent funeral. It was only the beginning when the sainted Ekerot prophesied misery and conflagration. And perhaps the fire didn’t go on over the island in front of the castle! Over the plain of Upsala it threw its light from cathedral and citadel. In Vasterås and Linköping the tempest sweeps the ashes around the blackened wastes—and now there’s burning in all quarters of the kingdom. Forgive my freedom, gracious mistress, but to tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. That’s my old maxim that saved my life once down there by the Dnieper River.”

“Saved your life? You were then a surgeon in your regiment. You must sit down by me here and tell the story. The time is so long.”

Blomberg spoke resignedly and a trifle like a priest, from time to time lifting his dexter and middle fingers with the other fingers closed.

Both cast a glance at the corpse, which slept in its coffin with gracefully disposed locks, and wax and rouge in the deepest of the wrinkles. Thereupon they sat themselves on a bench in the window nook outside the hanging broad-cloth, and Blomberg began whispering his narrative.

I was lying unconscious in the marshy wilderness at Poltava. I had stumped along on my wooden leg and got a blow from a horse’s hoof, and when I came to, it was night. I felt a cold, strange hand fumble under my coat and pull at the buttons. An abomination before the Lord are the devices of the wicked, I thought; but gentle words are pure. Without becoming frightened, I seized the corpse-plunderer very silently by the breast, and by his stammered words of terror I perceived that he was one of the Zaporogeans who had made an alliance with the Swedes and followed the army. As surgeon I had tended many of these men, as well as captured Poles and Muscovites, and could make myself tolerably understood in their various languages.

“Many devices are in the heart of man,” said I meekly; “but the counsel of the Lord, that shall abide. No evil can befall the righteous, but the ungodly shall be filled with misfortunes.”

“Forgive me, pious sir,” whispered the Zaporogean. “The Swedish czar has left us poor Zaporogeans to our fate, and the Muscovite czar, whom we faithlessly deserted, is coming to maim and slay us. I only wanted to get me a Swedish coat so that in a moment of need I could give myself out as one of you. Do not be angry, godly sir!”

To see if he had any knife, I searched out flint and steel while he was speaking and made a fire with dry thistles and twigs which lay at my feet. I noted then that I had before me a little frightened old man with a sly face and two empty hands. He raised himself as vehemently as a hungry animal that has found its prey and bent in the light over a Swedish ensign who lay dead in the grass. Thinking that a dead man might willingly grant a helpless ally his coat, I did nothing to hinder the Zaporogean; but as he drew the coat from the fallen one, a letter slipped from the pocket. I saw by the address that Falkenburg was the name of the boy who had bled to death. He lay now as fairly and peacefully stretched out as if he had slept in the meadow by the house where he was born. The letter was from his sister, and I had only time to spell out the words which from that hour became my favorite maxim: To tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. At that moment the Zaporogean put out my light.

“With your wise consent, sir,” he whispered, “do not draw the corpse-plunderers hither.”

I paid little attention to his talk, but repeated time after time: “To tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. That is a big saying my old fellow, and you shall see that I get along further with it than you do with your disguise.”

“We may try it,” answered the Zaporogean, “but we must promise this, that the one of us who survives the other shall offer a prayer for the other’s soul.”

“That is agreed,” I said, and gave him my hand, for it seemed as if through misfortune I had found in this shaggy-bearded barbarian a friend and a brother.

He helped me up and at daybreak we fell into the long line of stragglers and wounded that silently tottered into Poltava to give themselves up as prisoners. They willingly tried to conceal the Zaporogean among the rest. His big boots with their flaps reached up to his hips and his coat-tails hung down to his spurs. As soon as a Cossack looked at him, he turned to one of us and cried with raised voice the only Swedish words he had come to learn in the campaign: “I Shwede, Devil-damn!”

My Zaporogean and I with eight of my comrades were assigned quarters in the upper story of a big stone house. As we two had come up there first, we picked out for ourselves a little separate cubby-hole with a window on an alley. There was nothing else there than a little straw to lie on, but I had in my coat a tin flute, which I had from a fallen Kalmuck at Starodub, and on which I had taught myself to play a few pretty psalms. With that I shortened the time, and soon we noticed that, as often as I played, a young woman came to the window on the other side of the alley. Possibly for that reason I played more than I should have otherwise cared to and I know not rightly whether she was fairer and more seemly than all other women, or whether long sojourn among men had made my eye less accustomed, but I had great joy in beholding her. However, I never looked at her when she turned her face toward our window, because I have always been bashful before women-folk and have never rightly understood how to conduct myself in that which pertains to them. Never, too, have I sought fellowship with men who go with their heads full of wenches and do nothing but hanker after gallant intrigues. “Let everyone keep his vessel in holiness,” Paul saith, “and not in the lust of desire as do the heathen, which know not God; also let no one in this matter dishonor and wrong his brother, because the Lord is a powerful avenger in all such things.”

I recognized, however, that a man should at all times bear himself courteously and fittingly, and as one arm of my coat was in tatters, I always turned that side inward when I played.

She usually sat with arms crossed above the window-sill, and her hands were round and white, though large. She had a scarlet-colored bodice with silver buttons and many chains. An old witch who often stood beneath her window with a wheel-barrow and sold bread covered with jam called her Feodosova.