At the word “mother” Johanna started. “Every one must look after themselves,” she said in a hard voice. “I’ve had more to look to than mother, and see how fat I’ve grown.”
Lasse shook his head. “I shouldn’t care to fight with you now. But what happened to you afterwards?”
“I came back to Stone Farm again at Martinmas, but the mistress wouldn’t take me on again, for she preferred my room to my company. But Kongstrup got his way by making me dairymaid. He was as kind to me as ever, for all that I’d stood out against him for nine years. But at last the magistrate got tired of having Knut going about loose; he made too much disturbance. So they had a hunt for him up on the heath. They didn’t catch him, but he must have come back to the quarry to hide himself, for one day when they were blasting there, his body came out among the bits of rock, all smashed up. They drove the pieces down here to the farm, and it made me so ill to see him come to me like that, that I had to go to bed. There I lay shivering day and night, for it seemed as if he’d come to me in his sorest need. Kongstrup sat with me and comforted me when the others were at work, and he took advantage of my misery to get his way.
“There was a younger brother of the farmer on the hill who liked me. He’d been in America in his early days, and had plenty of money. He didn’t care a rap what people said, and every single year he proposed to me, always on New Year’s Day. He came that year too, and now that Knut was dead, I couldn’t have done better than have taken him and been mistress of a farm; but I had to refuse him after all, and I can tell you it was hard when I made the discovery. Kongstrup wanted to send me away when I told him about it; but that I would not have. I meant to stay and have my child born here on the farm to which it belonged. He didn’t care a bit about me any longer, the mistress looked at me with her evil eyes every day, and there was no one that was kind to me. I wasn’t so hard then as I am now, and it was all I could do to keep from crying always. I became hard then. When anything was the matter, I clenched my teeth so that no one should deride me. I was working in the field the very day it happened, too. The boy was born in the middle of a beet-field, and I carried him back to the farm myself in my apron. He was deformed even then: the mistress’s evil eyes had done it. I said to myself that she should always have the changeling in her sight, and refused to go away. The farmer couldn’t quite bring himself to turn me out by force, and so he put me into the house down by the shore.”
“Then perhaps you work on the farm here in the busy seasons?” asked Lasse.
She sniffed contemptuously. “Work! So you think I need do that? Kongstrup has to pay me for bringing up his son, and then there are friends that come to me, now one and now another, and bring a little with them—when they haven’t spent it all in drink. You may come down and see me this evening. I’ll be good to you too.”
“No, thank you!” said Lasse, gravely. “I am a human being too, but I won’t go to one who’s sat on my knee as if she’d been my own child.”
“Have you any gin, then?” she asked, giving him a sharp nudge.
Lasse thought there was some, and went to see. “No, not a drop,” he said, returning with the bottle. “But I’ve got something for you here that your mother asked me to give you as a keepsake. It was lucky I happened to remember it.” And he handed her a packet, and looked on happily while she opened it, feeling pleased on her account. It was a hymn-book. “Isn’t it a beauty?” he said. “With a gold cross and clasp—and then, it’s your mother’s.”
“What’s the good of that to me?” asked Johanna. “I don’t sing hymns.”