Part 35

“He is one of the largest I have ever seen. But begin and talk low; he has very good ears, and, in less than a quarter of an hour, he will hear every word we say.”

“Were not your daughters alarmed at having such a neighbor?” said Christian, approaching the danneman, and lowering his voice to please him, though his apprehensions seemed to him exaggerated.

At this question, Joë Bœtsoi drew himself up stiffly, straightened his large head between his shoulders, and looked at Christian askance.

“_Herr_ Christian, my daughters are honest girls,” he said, dryly.

“Pray have I intimated anything to the contrary, _Herr_ Bœtsoi?” said Christian, feeling very much surprised.

“Don’t you know,” replied the danneman, making an effort to pronounce the name which he disliked so much, “don’t you know that the _bear_ can do no harm to a virgin, and that consequently an honest girl can go and snatch her kid or her lamb from his very claws, without any danger?”

“Pardon, Monsieur Danneman, I did not know it; I am a stranger, and I see that we can learn something new every day. But are you quite sure that the bear has such a respect for chastity? Would you allow one of your daughters to accompany you at this moment?”

“No! women can’t keep their tongues from wagging, and their chattering gives notice to the game. That is why neither girls nor women should ever go to a hunt.”

“And if you should happen to see the bear pursuing your daughters would you not be alarmed? Would you not shoot it?”

“I would shoot it for the sake of getting its skin, but I should not be uneasy about my daughters. I tell you I am sure of their conduct.”

“But your sister, the sibyl, she, without doubt, has been married?”

“Married?” said the danneman, throwing back his head disdainfully.

He resumed, with a sigh:

“Whether married or not, Karine is not afraid of wicked tongues.”

“Do wicked tongues come to torment you even here, Master Joë? I should have thought, in this wilderness--”

The danneman shrugged his shoulders, and looked discontented, but did not reply.

“Have I displeased you again without knowing it?” asked Christian, after a few seconds.

“Yes,” replied the danneman, “and, as it is not well to go together where we are going with something on your heart, I will speak out. Why did you ask me whether Karine was afraid of the bear? I will not take another step until I know whether you are thinking anything evil either of her or of me.”

Christian found it difficult to reply to this direct appeal to his sincerity, made, as it was, with a sort of grand simplicity, recalling the manners of early ages. The feeling of curiosity which had led him to question Bœtsoi about Karine had its origin in mysterious causes in his own heart, which it was impossible for him to explain. He thought to make matters right by correcting Bœtsoi’s error as to the facts of the case.

“Master Joë,” he said, “I did not ask whether your sister was afraid of the bear, but whether she had been married, and I do not see anything offensive in my question.”

The peasant looked at him again, and with such a keen, searching glance, that he felt quite confused.

“Your question does not offend me,” he said, “if you can swear that you did not listen to any wicked gossip about my family before coming to my house.”

Christian, remembering what the major had said, hesitated to reply, and Bœtsoi resumed:

“Come, come! why should you lie? You have no reasons for being my enemy, and you can tell me freely all you have heard about the child of the lake.”

“The child of the lake?” cried Christian. “Who is the child of the lake?”

“If you do not know, I have nothing to tell you.”

“Yes, yes!” Christian rejoined; “I know--I think I know. Speak to me as to a friend, Master Joë. Is the child of the lake Karine’s son?”

“No,” replied the danneman, his face lighting up with a singular expression of enthusiasm; “it belonged to her, indeed, but it was not conceived and born like other children. Karine was unfortunate, as happens to girls who learn things above their condition, and who read in the books of a religion that we ought no longer to understand; but she was not wicked, as people say. I was deceived about it myself as well as the rest, I who am speaking to you! There was a time--I was still very young in those days--when I wanted to put a bullet through the head of a man of whom Karine talked too much in her dreams; but she swore to our mother and to me that she hated that man. She swore it on the Bible, and we could not doubt her word after that. The child was suckled on the mountain by a tame doe, that followed Karine like a kid. She lived alone with him for more than a year, in a different house from ours, much higher than the one you have seen. When the child was weaned we took him into our house, and loved him. He was growing up, he talked, and he was beautiful; but, one day, he departed as he had come, and Karine wept so much that her mind flew away after him, and never returned. There is a great mystery in all this. Don’t every one know that there are women who bring children into the world merely by uttering some form of speech, just as they conceive them by breathing the air of the lakes when the trolls have set it in motion? Karine lived too much down yonder, and every one knows that there are wicked spirits in the lake of Waldemora. Enough said. It is the secret of God and of the waters. No one must think evil of Karine. She does no work, she renders no service that is seen or is useful in a house; but she is one of those who, by their learning and their songs, bring happiness to families. She sees what others do not see, and what she announces happens in one way or another. That is enough, I tell you, for here we are close to the _wicked one’s_ den, and now we must think of nothing but him. Listen to what I say, and then not a word more, not a single one, for your life.”

“Even if it should cost me my life,” said Christian, agitated and struck by the mysterious narrative of the danneman, “you must tell me more about that child which was brought up in your house. Did he not have something peculiar about his fingers?”

The danneman’s face turned a fiery red, in spite of the cold.

“I have told you,” he replied, in an irritated tone, “all that I intend to. If it is to insult me, and to defame the honor of my family, that you have come to eat my bread and kill my game, look out for yourself, or give up going to the hunt, Herr Christian; for, as true as my name is Bœtsoi, I will leave you alone with the _wicked one_.”

“Master Bœtsoi,” replied Christian, calmly, “I am not so much alarmed by your threat, as grieved at the idea of having wounded you. You can leave me alone with the _wicked one_, if you choose. I will try to be more wicked than he; but do not, I implore you, carry away a bad opinion of me. We will resume this conversation, I hope, and you will acknowledge then, that the thought of outraging the honor of your family could never have entered my mind.”

“Very good,” replied the danneman, “let us talk, then, of the _wicked one_. Either he will fly with all speed before we have reached his den, and in that case you must fire upon him, or he will make up his mind to fight, and will rise on his hind legs. You know where the place is for the heart; and, if you do not reach it with this good knife, it can only be because your hand trembles. There is only one thing to be careful about: do not let him disarm your right hand before seizing your left arm, for he can see weapons plainly enough, and he has more sense than you suppose. Go up to him, then, coolly and quietly, without being in any hurry. As long as the _wicked one_ is not wounded, he is not insolent, and he don’t well know what he wants to do. For my part, I usually talk to him, and promise that I will not do him any harm; to lie to a beast is not to lie. I advise you, then, to talk to him pleasantly. He has sense enough to see that he is being flattered, but not enough to see that he is being deceived. And now, wait until I see whether those gentlemen have posted themselves as they ought around the den, for, if the beast escapes us, he must not escape them. I will return in five minutes.”

Christian remained alone in a strange scene. Since leaving the chalet, he had come with his guide through the depths of a magnificent forest, covering with its great green waves the flanks of the mountain. The profusion of fine trees in these regions, and the difficulty of transporting them elsewhere for manufacturing purposes, have occasioned the contemptuous, and one might almost say impious, prodigality with which the inhabitants of the country treat these noble children of the wilderness. To make the smallest tool, the most insignificant plaything (the Dalecarlian herdsman, like the Swiss, is very skilful in cutting and carving resinous wood), they sacrifice without regret a giant of verdure, and often, to save themselves the trouble of felling it, set fire to the roots; so much the worse for them, if the flames spread and devour whole forests! In many places battalions of black monsters can be seen rising over the snow, or, in summer, over plains of cinders. These are the charred trunks that no longer afford a refuge to any animal, and which are the abode of silence and of the immobility of death.[6] Hunters in Russia are shocked to find, in the splendid forests of that country, the same recklessness and the same profanations.

The forest in which Christian now was, had neither been burned nor felled, and it was not so painful, therefore, to mark its decay. What you beheld was a grand desolation, a sublime destruction, due exclusively to natural causes: the old age of the trees, the sinking of the ground, the passage of storms. It was like some primeval forest caught between the wandering ice-fields of polar seas. Great pines, shattered and withered, rested upon their neighbors, still green and erect, but whose tops or principal branches they had broken by their fall. Enormous rocks had rolled over declivities, dragging with them innumerable plants, that had either continued to live, broken and twisted as they were, or had been replaced by a new growth springing up over the ruin beneath. Several years must have elapsed since this catastrophe, the result of some deluge, for young birch-trees were growing upon heights which were nothing more than masses of debris and land-slips. With the slightest breath of wind, these trees, which were already beautiful, balanced to and fro the icicles suspended from their light and pendant branches, with a quick, clicking sound, like that of water flowing over pebbles.

This savage region was sublime. A thousand feet beneath him, Christian beheld the torrent of the abyss (the _eïf_, or _strœm_, as all streams of water are called), and was astonished to find that it had precisely the same colors and the same undulations as if it had not been frozen. At this distance it would have been impossible for a deaf man to know that it was not dashing forward, roaring and tumultuous; the eye was completely deceived by its dark metallic tint, covered with enormous eddies, that looked like foam. But for Christian, whose ear would have caught the slightest sound ascending from the ravine, nothing could have seemed stranger than the contrast between the apparent agitation of this impetuous torrent and its absolute silence. Nothing in the world resembles death so much as a world thus petrified by winter. Hence, the slightest sign of life in this motionless picture, a footprint upon the snow, the short and stealthy flight of a little bird, is greeted with surprise, and this surprise becomes almost terror when an elk or doe flees before you, with rapid, resounding steps, suddenly awakening the sleeping echoes of the solitude.

However, Christian was thinking just now, not of admiring nature, but of preparing for his fight with the _wicked one_. His soul was oppressed by a most sad and terrible thought. The danneman’s strange narrative, which he had found almost incomprehensible at first, thanks to his incorrect language and superstitious ideas, was beginning to acquire a painful significance. This rustic sibyl, seduced by the troll of the lake, this mysterious child brought up in the danneman’s chalet, and which had disappeared when three or four years old, those inexplicable intuitions that had come to him during the morning meal, and which, perhaps, were merely reminiscences suddenly awakened--

“Yes,” he said, “now again, the recollection, or the delusion, returns to me. The three lost cows--twenty years ago--the gun-shot that stopped the fourth. It seems to me that I can hear now that fatal shot; it seems to me that I can see the poor beast fall, and that I feel again the sensation of grief and regret which I then experienced, and which was perhaps my first emotion, the awakening within me of the life of sentiment. Great God! I feel as if a whole forgotten world were reanimated, and rising before me. Was it not yonder, at the turn of that rock, at the edge of that red-colored precipice, that the scene passed? It must have been there. Has my soul visited this place in some anterior existence, or have I myself been here? And, in the latter case, who can my father be? Who is that man, whom the danneman came near killing before his suspicions had been lulled to sleep by superstition? Why did the sibyl--my mother, perhaps--why did she shudder when she touched my fingers? She was in a sort of trance, she had not looked into my face; but she said I was the baron! And just now, when I asked the danneman if the child had not some peculiar mark about his hands, did not his anger and grief prove that he had observed and understood this hereditary sign, more apparent, probably, in the child than it now is in the man?

“Besides, even if he had noticed it in me to-day, he would have been far enough from drawing any comparison. The idea of trying to recognize me did not even occur to him. In his eyes, I was merely a curious and jeering stranger, questioning him about the secret of his family, and that secret is his shame. He prefers to turn it into a legend, a fairy story. He is offended if you doubt the marvels he describes; he gets angry if you suggest that the child’s fingers were like those of Baron Olaus. It is only the truth, they say, that offends, and that truth I have divined. Poor Karine, how terrified she was when she took me for her seducer!

“Her seducer! who knows? This man, hated and despised by all, may have done her violence. She would naturally have concealed her misfortune, she would have made the most of the belief of her family in evil spirits, to prevent her young brother, the danneman, from exposing himself to danger, by seeking to revenge her upon a too powerful enemy. Poor woman! Yes, certainly, she hates him, she fears him still! She has become a seeress since her disaster--that is, mad! She must have received a sort of education, since she knows by heart the ancient poems of her country, and in her exaltation she draws from her confused recollection of these tragic songs, gloomy threats and words of hatred. At any rate, whether I am deceiving myself, or am drawing a logical deduction from facts, I believe it is the hand of God that has led me back to the hut from which I was carried off--why, and by whom? Was it the danneman, the intrepid traveller, who bore me far away, to remove from his sister’s eyes the living image of her remorse, or from his family the sign of their shame? Or should I rather believe in the jealousy of the wife of Olaus, according to the major’s theory?”

All these thoughts rushed through Christian’s mind, overwhelming him with grief and agony. The idea of being the son of Baron Olaus only redoubled his aversion for him. Under such circumstances he could only regard him as the enemy of his mother’s honor and repose.

“Or again,” he continued, “who knows if it was not he himself who had me kidnapped, to avoid fulfilling some promise made to his victim, some engagement contracted towards her? Ah! if it were so, I should remain in this country. Without seeking to make myself known, I would go into service with the danneman; by my industry, my devotion, I would certainly gain his respect, and perhaps the love of this family to which I belong, and then I could try and bring back this poor seeress, if not to her right mind, at least to a state of tranquillity, as I succeeded formerly in calming the frenzy of my dear Sophia Goffredi. What a strange destiny is mine! To be thus condemned to have two mothers driven mad by despair! No matter; undeserved as this punishment is, it gives me a duty to perform, and, in fulfilling it, I may be led to some mysterious recompense. I accept the obligation imposed upon me. Karine Bœtsoi may not remember that she has lost her child, but she shall receive, from this time, the care and protection of a son.”

At this moment Christian thought he heard some one call. He looked around, and on every side, but saw no one. The danneman had told him to wait; he was to return for him: Christian hesitated, but, after a second, a cry of distress made him start up, seize his weapons, and rush forward in the direction of the voice.

Scaling with wonderful agility the overthrown trees and fragments of debris hardened by the ice and interlocked by enormous roots, Christian, without knowing it, came out at twenty steps from the bear’s den. The terrible animal was on the ground between him and this cave, licking up the blood which stained the snow around her bleeding flanks. The danneman was at the opening of the den, pale, his hair blown by the wind and as it were standing on end, and without any weapon at all in his hands. His boar-spear, broken in the side of the bear, was lying near the animal, and, instead of thinking of taking his gun from his shoulder-belt to finish his work, Bœtsoi seemed fascinated by some mysterious terror, or enchained by some inexplicable prudence.

As soon as he saw Christian he made signs to him, which the latter did not comprehend; he guessed, however, that he was not to speak, and took aim at the bear. Luckily, before pulling the trigger, he looked again at Joë Bœtsoi, who ordered him, with a despairing gesture, to stop. Christian, imitating his pantomime, asked whether he was to cut the creature’s throat, in silence; and, on receiving a sign in the affirmative, he marched straight up to the bear, who, upon her side, arose erect and growling, to receive him.

“Quick! quick! or we are lost!” cried the danneman, who had taken the gun, and seemed to be watching some invisible object at the bottom of the den.

Christian did not wait to be told twice. Presenting his left arm, wrapped in a cord, to the rather feeble embrace of the wounded bear, he ripped her open in proper style, but without thinking that she might fall forward, and that he ought to jump quickly aside, to give her room. Luckily, the bear fell to one side, dragging Christian with her to the ground; but her formidable claws, contracted in the death agony, could do nothing now but clutch at the skirt of his coat. Buried in the snow, and nailed down, as it were, by the weight and claws of the _wicked one_, laid upon and thrust into the edge of his garment, Christian had some difficulty in getting free, and he left behind him a considerable portion of the major’s reindeer-skin coat, but he scarcely thought of that now. The danneman was struggling with other enemies. He had just fired into the dark cave, and another bear, black, and of quite a good size, although young, had come forward to meet him, with a threatening air; while two cubs, about the size of two strong whelps, threw themselves between his legs, with no other intention, it is true, than that of flying, but in such a way as to make it difficult for him to maintain his equilibrium. The danneman, resolved to perish rather than make room for his triple prey to pass, supported himself against the trees, whose trunks formed a sort of naturally arched entrance to the cave, and awaited the attack of the young bear, who had been wounded by his shot; but, shaken in spite of himself by the young ones, he had just fallen, and the wounded and furious animal was throwing himself upon him, when Christian, sure of his eye and his coolness, put a ball into the animal’s head, at a foot above that of the man.

“Very well done!” said the danneman, springing up with agility.

In the meanwhile the cubs had run over his body, and, for the moment, his only thought was to prevent them from escaping.

“Stay! stay!” said Christian, following the two fugitives with his eye; “see what they are about!”

In fact the two cubs had rushed up to their dead mother, and had glided, cowering, under her bleeding sides.

“It is only fair,” said the danneman, rubbing his arm, which the black bear had bruised through the cord, “it is not our place to kill them. We have each of us secured a prize. Call your comrades; for my part, I am too much blown, and then I have had a fine fright, I confess. That was a narrow escape; and without you--. But call them, I say. I will talk about that another time.”

Christian shouted with all the strength of his lungs; and the danneman, still trembling a little, but as attentive as ever, reloaded his gun quickly, so as to have it in readiness in case the cubs should abandon their mother’s body, and attempt to fly before the arrival of the other hunters.

The firing had already notified the latter of the combat, and they soon appeared, coming from three directions. Larrson, who was first, shouted victory when he saw the enormous bear lying at Christian’s feet.

“Look out! stop!” cried Christian. “Our bear was a mother; she had two fine young ones. I intercede for these poor orphans. Take them living.”

“Certainly,” replied Larrson. “To the rescue, comrades! here are some pupils for us to bring up.”

They surrounded the corpse of the she-bear, and raised it cautiously; for even when this animal seems to be dead it is necessary to be on your guard, lest it should be feigning. They had some difficulty in capturing the cubs, who already showed their claws and teeth, but they were secured, at last, and carefully bound and muzzled. This accomplished, they had leisure to admire the ample booty which the den had concealed, and regrets were half expressed, which the danneman hastened to anticipate.