“But your lordship is surely well enough off?” asked Marie, in the same simple tone.
“Well enough,” he laughed, “well enough is more than half ill; I am indeed well enough off. And you, Marie?”
“Thank you kindly for asking; we’ve got our health, and when we keep tugging at the oars every day, we’ve got bread and brandy too.”
They had reached land, and Sti stepped out and said good-by.
“Lord,” said Marie, looking after him pityingly, “he’s certainly been shorn of crest and wings too.”
Peacefully and quietly the days passed at the Burdock House, with daily work and daily gain. Little by little, the pair improved their condition, hired boatmen to do the ferrying, carried on a little trade, and built a wing on their old house. They lived to the end of the old century and ten years into the new. Marie turned sixty, and she turned sixty-five, and still she was as brisk and merry at her work as if she had been on the sunny side of sixty. But then it happened, on her sixty-eighth birthday, in the spring of seventeen hundred and eleven, that Sören accidentally shot and killed a skipper from Dragör under very suspicious circumstances, and in consequence was arrested.
This was a hard blow to Marie. She had to endure a long suspense, for judgment was not pronounced until midsummer of the following year, and this, together with her anxiety lest the old affair of his attempt on the life of Anne Trinderup should be taken up again, aged her very much.
One day, in the beginning of this period of waiting, Marie went down to meet the ferry just as it was landing. There were two passengers on board, and one of these, a journeyman, absorbed her attention by refusing to show his passport, declaring that he had shown it to the boatmen, when he went on board, which they, however, denied. When she threatened to charge him full fare, unless he would produce his passport as proof of his right as a journeyman to travel for half price, he had to give in. This matter being settled, Marie turned to the other passenger, a little slender man who stood, pale and shivering after the seasickness he had just endured, wrapped in his mantle of coarse, greenish-black stuff, and leaning against the side of a boat that had been dragged up on the beach. He asked in a peevish voice whether he could get lodgings in the Burdock House, and Marie replied that he might look at their spare room.
She showed him a little chamber which, besides bed and chair, contained a barrel of brandy with funnel and waste-cup, some large kegs of molasses and vinegar, and a table with legs painted in pearl-color and a top of square tiles, on which scenes from the Old and New Testament were drawn in purplish black. The stranger at once noticed that three of the tiles represented Jonah being thrown on land from the mouth of the whale, and when he put his hand on them, he shuddered, declaring he was sure to catch a cold, if he should be so careless as to sit and read with his elbows on the table.