“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.