Last Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  Once more she lifted Ulrikke’s hand to touch it with her lips.

  “Oh, dear Mama,” said Ulrikke, “if today you and I went down to bathe in our old place, where the river bends—as when I was a little girl—the five weeping willows there would, just as then, bend down to kiss your white shoulders. Look,” she added, taking her flower from her fichu and fastening it upon the lapel of that same green riding coat which had caused such bitter tears, “this flower old Daniel gave me. It is a new dahlia which he himself has forced. Nobody on the whole isle has got the like of it, He begs you to let him name it after you, ‘Sibylla,’ because it is so sweet and so big. Gaze at yourself now, gaze at Sibylla! It is truer than that silly glass.”

  Eitel rode home from the wood across the stubble fields. When he came onto his own land he set his horse into a canter and made it jump some low stacks of rakings.

  His mind was still resting in the happiness of the forest meeting, tranquilly, like a trout between two stones in a brook, keeping its stand by the slightest movements of its fins. His eyes strayed over the landscape. By this time flights of wild ducks began to draw their thin lines low down on the sky; big, light rosy clouds were towering up above the horizon; far away to the west the sea met the sky in a stripe of grave blue. His ears caught many distant sounds round him: a cart rolling along the road, people shouting as they were driving home their cattle. But he kept his own being collected, he would think of nothing but her.

  He called to mind how, three years ago when he and she had met again, they had dreamt of the time when she would once more be free again, and to the eyes of all the world the two should belong to one another. Now he no longer knew whether, were that time to come, he should be any happier than he was now. There was infinite sweetness in their secret intimacy. To love her, he thought, to him was like washing his face and hands, or like diving down, in a clear, evenly running stream, which was ever renewing itself, and it was fitting that his path to the stream and his bathing place itself should be hidden to all the world.

  When above the trees he caught sight of the tall roof and proud gables of his house, he slowed down his steaming mount. He did not ride up the broad stately lime avenue to the courtyard, but took the narrower poplar avenue which led to the farmyard. Here ears, straw and thistledown from the harvesting lay in the deep wheel tracks and stuck high up in the branches of the poplars.

  Within the house, in the long library, the light of the sunset fell through the windows as the light of the afternoon had been falling through the tree crowns onto the spot where they had been sitting together. The old oak floors shone in it like dark forest pools; the gilt frames of the portraits, the tints of silk and velvet became alive and luminous like tree stems, foliage and mosses. This last deep glow of the day was her trembling smile at their parting, her compassion and the promise of a next meeting.

  He was shortly expecting the visit of a learned old man from Copenhagen, a prophet of the new reforms, and was looking forward to their talk together. When he had had supper he told his young German valet, whom he had brought with him from Hanover, that he was not to be disturbed, and fetched down a number of heavy books to look up such matters as he would discuss with his guest. He could stall, in the window recess, read by the last daylight, and he sat down with a book on his knee and other books on the window sill.

  While he was reading his valet came into the room to place a three-armed candlestick on the table, remained standing by it and announced: “There is a person outside who asks to have speech with gnädiger Herr.”

  His master did not look up from his book. “It is late,” he said after a moment.

  “That is what I said myself,” said the valet. “But this person has come afoot, in great haste, and will not be turned off.”

  Eitel closed his book and again was silent. “Let him come in then,” he said at last.

  “It is a woman, gnädiger Herr,” Johann said, “She tells me her name is Lone Bartels. The housekeeper seems to know her, and assures me that she has once been in service in the house.”

  “A woman,” said Eitel. “Lone Bartels. Bring her in.”

  Presently he heard his old housekeeper talking lowly to somebody outside the door. It was opened, and his guest entered.

  She dropped a curtsy by the door and stood still there. She was not dressed like a peasant woman, but had on a white cap and a black silk apron, beneath which she kept her hands. She was a heavy woman with a pale, as if mealy, skin—a parish clerk’s wife, who had not needed to do hard work. She looked straight at him.

  He had felt an immediate deep relief and happiness on learning the name of his visitor of this late hour. But as now his and Lone’s eyes met, against all reason he was seized with a kind of cold, deadly fear, which made his hair stand on end. It was not, here, a distressed mother come to plead for the life of her son. It was the old dark ages, eternity, destiny itself entering his room.

  He was terrified at his own terror. Only after a long silence did he take a step toward the woman before him. And when the candlelight was no longer between him and her, he recognized the face once so well known, and beloved by the child above all other human faces. Almost without knowing what he did he folded her in his arms, he felt her big soft body filling them, and smelled her clothes. It was as if he had lain at her breast yesterday.

  “So you have come to me, Lone,” he said, surprised at the sound of his own voice, which rang almost like the voice of a child.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “Now I have come.”

  She spoke as in old days, lowly and slowly. During her years in a nobleman’s house she had laid off her peasant’s dialect, she spoke like an educated woman. They looked each other in the face.

  “It is good that you have come,” said he.

  “I wished to see my dear master,” said she.

  “Nay, Lone,” said he, “do not call me master. Say ‘Eitel’ as you did in the old days.”

  A faint, slow blush mounted into her pale face. Otherwise it remained immovable, the lips pressed together, the eyes very clear.

  “How is it with you, Lone?” he asked.

  “Now it is well with me,” she said and drew her breath deeply. “Now that I see you again.”

  The familiar ring of devotion in her voice went to his heart. And at the same moment his sudden deep terror at her arrival was explained to him. It was she, he now knew, who long, long ago had told him the story of his father and Linnert.

  Had she now come to give him the means of making up for it? For a while he kept as still as she. He would allow himself a few minutes in which to speak to her as he had done when he was a child, before he let her name her tragic errand to him.

  “You ought to have come earlier,” he said. “Why have you not come to see me, Lone, these many years?”

  “Nay,” she answered, “there was no need for that. I knew that things were going well with you.” Her bright eyes did not leave his face. “I have been waiting,” she said after a short pause, “to hear that you had married.”

  “Would that have pleased you, Lone?” he asked.

  “Yes, that would have pleased me,” she answered.

  His thoughts strayed far away, then came back to her.

  “But I have had news of you,” she said, “every year.”

  “You have had that?” he asked.

  “Why, yes,” she answered. “I heard that you had gone far away to foreign countries. Once the weaver from here came to a wedding in Funen, and he told me that you had become a very learned man. And two years ago you came to Funen yourself, and bought a pair of horses at Hvidkilde.”

  “Yes,” he said, searching his mind, “I bought the two bay wheelers there.”

  He led her to a small settee by the wall, beneath the portrait of his father and mother, and sat down with her, her hand in his.

  “Aye, you were always the one for horses,” said the woman. “When you were a small boy you had a hobbyhorse with you wherever you went.”
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  “I had that, Lone,” he said.

  “In those days we rode many miles together, you and I,” she said and smiled a little without parting the wrinkled lips, “right up to the King’s castle. I sewed all your horses for you, out of leather and wool and bits of silk ribbons.”

  “You did that,” Eitel said again, his thoughts with those mounts of long ago; if now he searched his memory he would find their names there. “Nobody could do it as well as you.”

  For a while the two sat silent, hand in hand. He thought. “But it is of her son that she means to speak to me.”

  “You had to have them in bed with you,” said Lone, “so that they, too, might listen when I was telling you a story.”

  “You knew many stories, Lone,” he said.

  “Do you still remember them?” she asked.

  “I think I do,” said he.

  “It was only this morning,” he said after a while, “that I heard of your son, Lone.”

  She stirred a little in her seat, but did not speak at once. “Yes, now he is to die,” she said at last.

  This calm, collected resignation moved him, as if he and the humble mother were mourning together over her child.

  “He has been in my thoughts all day,” he said. “I have considered begging the King’s mercy for him in Copenhagen. I would fain have gone to Copenhagen to do so, Lone.”

  “You would fain have done so?” she said.

  “But he is a manslayer, my poor Lone,” he said. “He has killed a man. I fear that it would be no good begging the King’s mercy for him.”

  “Yes, he has killed two men,” said Lone.

  “Then it may be the best thing for him,” Eitel said, “to atone for his guilt. Then nobody can bear him any grudge.”

  “No,” she said, “then nobody can bear him any grudge.”

  “But I can get you leave to see him in prison tomorrow morning,” said he.

  “That is not needed,” said she.

  “So you have already seen him there?” he asked.

  “No,” Lone answered, “I have not seen him there.”

  “They have not dealt fairly with you, then,” said Eitel. “They should have let you see each other, and speak to each other. But I shall go with you to Maribo and see to it that it be done. We will go together tomorrow, you and I.”

  “We went to Maribo, too,” said the woman, “the time we took our rides together.”

  Eitel did not know how to go on. “Have I forgotten,” he asked himself, “the way the simple, deep mind of an old peasant woman works? Or does she feel that she had to speak to me of old days in order to make me help her?”

  “In return for that, Lone,” he said gently, “should I not now drive you to Maribo, so that you may see your son?”

  Once more she waited a while before answering. “I have not seen him for twenty years,” she said.

  “For twenty years?” he asked in surprise.

  “Yes,” she said, “It is twenty years since I saw him last.”

  “Why have you not seen him for twenty years?” he asked after a pause.

  “There was no reason why I should see him,” she said. Her voice was so low that he was not sure she had spoken.

  “How did it come to pass,” he said, “that your son did fare so ill?”

  “It had to be so, I think,” she said.

  “But you might have fetched him back when you married and got a house of your own,” he said. “Was it your husband who would not let you do so?”

  “No, the clerk would have let me do as I liked,” said Lone.

  “Did you never help him,” Eitel asked, his voice low like her own, “when he got into trouble?”

  “No,” the woman answered.

  A dull alarm and pain made him rise from his chair. His own words to Ulrikke came back to him with a keener edge, now that he sat beside the heavy, close mother. It was true, then, that with her milk he had sucked the very mother’s love from the peasant woman’s breasts.

  “You ought to have done so, Lone,” he said slowly. “He has been lonely and friendless. I myself ought to have remembered him before today. You were as good to me as if I had been your own child. I should have stood by your son.”

  “There was no reason why you should do so,” said Lone.

  He went to the window, but felt her eyes following him and came back to her. He thought: “When I heard that she had come, I believed that she had come to judge me. But it is harder still that she should have come to acquit me.”

  “Yet he is still your son, Lone,” he said, “be his trespasses ever too grave.”

  “No,” said Lone.

  A sort of sorrowful resentment blended with his compassion for the woman. He thought: “She cannot lay all this on me.” It seemed to him that he must at all costs reawaken in the heart of the mother some kind of love for her doomed son.

  “You are a woman, Lone,” he said. “You will remember the time that you bore him. He is the child that quickened in your body, even now when he has forfeited his life.”

  “No, it is not so,” she said. “It is you who are my child.”

  He was so deeply absorbed in his own thoughts that at first he did not hear what she said. It was only when once more he found her eyes upon him that he caught her words.

  “Me?” he said, and after a few seconds, “Of what are you speaking, Lone?”

  “Aye, now I shall speak the truth,” said Lone.

  “The truth?” said he.

  “Yes,” she said. “Linnert is the master’s boy. I took away the child and put my own in his stead, when I was giving suck up here.”

  The door opened, and Eitel’s valet came in with the evening wine, as he was wont to do when his master sat up to read. He placed the silver tray on the table, looked at his master and the woman and went out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She stood up straight before him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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