STORIES BY
VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM
WHEN THE BELLS RING
IN southern Småland, just where the stony road to Scania branches into several village paths and a muddy slope leads up to the parish church, there stood a mill, painted red and with the largest wings that anyone had ever seen in all that region. The miller was dead long since. His widow, named Kerstin Bure, a woman who in her childhood had seen happier days and eaten from shining plates of pewter, managed the mill after her own fashion. She never made mention of her birth or of the love-dealings that had enticed her from a well-to-do pastor’s home to the narrow tower-room of a miller, where the axle-beam groaned directly over her sleeping-place; but then she did not speak of other things either. The husband had been too poor to possess a cottage of his own and had instead built a chimney straight through the roof of the mill. There year after year, with her sewing in her hand, the wife had silently continued to watch the work of the men. If at any time she was asked for advice, she answered preferably with a nod or a shake of the head, and she seldom went away further than a stone’s throw from the mill. In figure she was tall and slim with delicate hands, and her face under the starched cap, which was always of the same invariable whiteness, reminded one of Mary Magdalen’s on the picture at the altar, though it was more yellowed and shrunken. She never took women into her service, and so women in particular accustomed themselves to passing her in silence. They did not rightly know whether she was proud or meek, but most of them thought that she might well be both. When the sexton appeared with his beadsmen and in his best Sunday attire to solicit the hand of this woman, who was already old and gray, she became quite confused and abashed. She blushed to the roots of her hair and merely shook her head.
One morning she found an infant boy on a heap of twigs by the spring, and as no one knew anything about the parents, she took the little one to her with great tenderness.
“Nobody can tell whether there lies in that heart good or evil seed,” she said, “but the day may come when I am to try it. You shall be called Johannes, because you are to become devout as an angel of God. I have been sore afflicted, but for you I shall lay by a pretty penny, so that your life-days may sometime counterbalance the heavy ones I have known.”
The boy grew up, and when he prepared for confirmation, he surprised everybody by his pious and godly answers. With his glossy flaxen hair hanging over his shoulders he afterwards sat by his foster-mother on the mill steps in the bright midsummer evenings and read diligently in the books that he had borrowed from the pastor of the congregation. They sat always taciturnly and quietly, but sometimes he pointed out with his finger some line that seemed to him more beautiful than the others and read it softly aloud.
Hay-ricks and meadows were sending out their perfume of harvest and pasture, and so too, though withered, did the clover—or trefoil-blossoms that lay forgotten here and there between the leaves of the book as markers. Even late at night only a single star burned, but that was large and radiant. Everywhere people were awake and talking, and the cottage doors stood open.
Many whispered to one another a dark rumor of how the Swedish army had been beaten at Poltava and that now the Danes were to land and complete the entire overthrow of Sweden.