Instead, I gave what comfort my office permitted to the poor man, and recommended him not to reveal his name or tell his story to anyone in the district. On these conditions I would give him a home until I could arrange for a permanent refuge for him in my brother's house, a good distance from these parts.
The day following was a Sunday. When I returned from evening service at my branch parish, the beggar had disappeared. But by the evening of the next day the story was known throughout the neighborhood.
Goaded by the pangs of conscience, Niels had gone to Rosmer and made himself known to the judge as the true Niels Bruus. Upon the hearing of the terrible truth, the judge was taken with a stroke and died before the week was out. But on Tuesday morning they found Niels Bruus dead on the grave of the late rector Sören Quist of Veilbye, by the door of Aalsö church.
HUNGARIAN MYSTERY STORIES
FERENCZ MOLNAR
THE LIVING DEATH
There is a very serious reason, my dear sisters, why at last, after an absence of twenty years in America, I am confiding to you this strange secret in the life of our beloved and lamented father, and of the old house where we were children together. The truth is, if I read rightly the countenances of my physicians as they whisper to each other by the window of the chamber in which I am lying, that only a few days of this life remain to me.
It is not right that this secret should die with me, my dear sisters. Though it will seem terrible to you, as it has to me, it will enable you to better understand our blessed father, help you to account for what must have seemed to you to be strange inconsistencies in his character. That this secret was revealed to me was due to my indolence and childish curiosity.
For the first, and the last, time in my life I listened at a keyhole.
With shame and a hotly chiding conscience I yielded to that insatiable
curiosity—and when you have read these lines you will understand why
I do not regret that inexcusable, furtive act.
I was only a lad when we went to live in that odd little house. You remember it stood in the outskirts of Rakos, near the new cemetery. It stood on a deep lot, and was roughly boarded on the side which looked on the highway. You remember that on the first floor, next the street, were the room of our father, the dining room, and the children's room. In the rear of the house was the sculpture studio. There we had the large white hall with big windows, where white-clothed laborers worked. They mixed the plaster, made forms, chiseled, scratched, and sawed. Here in this large hall had our father worked for thirty years.