“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.”