XLVI
On the following day, while they were making a meal of hot milk, Soetkin said to Katheline:
“You see how misfortune is already driving me from this world; and yet you, it seems, would like to drive me away all the faster by your accursed sorceries!”
But Katheline only went on repeating:
“Nele is naughty. Come back, Hanske, my pet!”
It was the following Wednesday when the two devils came again. Ever since the preceding Saturday Nele had slept out at the house of a widow woman named Van den Houte, saying, by way of excusing herself, that she could not stay with Katheline because of that young rogue Ulenspiegel.
Now Katheline welcomed her black master and her master’s friend out in the keet, which is to say the laundry or bakehouse adjoining the cottage. And there did they feast and regale themselves with old wine and with smoked ox tongue, which viands were always prepared and ready in that place for them. And the black devil said to Katheline:
“You must know, Katheline, that we are engaged in a mighty work, and to accomplish it we have need of a large sum of money. Give us, I pray you, what you can.”
When she only offered them a florin they threatened to kill her. But when she had raised the amount to a couple of golden caroluses and seven deniers they let her off.
“Come not again on Saturdays,” she told them, “for Ulenspiegel has discovered that your custom it is to come on that day, and he will certainly be waiting for you and will beat you to death, and that would be the death of me as well.”
“We will come next Tuesday,” they told her.
Now on that day Nele and Ulenspiegel went to sleep without any anxiety, thinking that the devils only came to the cottage on Saturdays. But Katheline got out of bed secretly and went into the yard to see if her friends had arrived. She was very impatient, for since seeing Hanske again her madness had abated, for hers was a lover’s madness, as they say.
But to-night she could nowhere see her friends, and she was greatly distressed, so that when, presently, she heard the cry of the sea-eagle coming as it seemed from the open country in the direction of Sluys, she went out towards that cry, making her way across the field by the side of a tall dike that was constructed of sticks and grass. She had not gone far when she heard the two devils conversing together at the other side of the dike. And one of them said:
“Half shall be mine.”
And the other answered:
“No. Nothing of the kind. What is Katheline’s belongs to me. All of it.”
Then they blasphemed together most terribly, disputing as to which of the two should be possessed of the property and the love of Katheline and of Nele into the bargain. Paralysed with fear, daring neither to speak nor to move, Katheline presently heard them fall to fighting with one another. And then one of the devils cried aloud:
“Ah! The cold steel!”
And after that there came the sound of a death-rattle, and of a body falling heavily.
Terrified as she was, Katheline returned to the cottage.
At two of the morning she heard once more the cry of the sea-eagle, but this time close at hand in the yard. She went to the door and opened it, and saw her devil lover standing there all alone.
She asked him what he had done with his friend.
“He will not come again,” he told her.
Then he kissed her and caressed her, and his kisses seemed colder than ever before. When the time came for him to depart, he asked her to give him twenty florins. This was all that she had, but she gave him seventeen.
The next day she could not control her curiosity, and walked out along by the dike. But she found nothing, except at one place a mark on the grass about the size of a man’s coffin; and the grass was wet underfoot and red with blood. But that evening rain fell, washing the blood away.
On the following Wednesday Katheline heard yet again the cry of the sea-eagle in the yard.