Short Fiction by Selma Lagerlöf (android based ebook reader txt) 📕

the Colonel had sat up in bed as if paralyzed, but now he jumped up and was at the door in two steps. But when he reached the door, the fellow was gone and the door closed.

The Colonel was just on the point of raising the alarm, when it struck him that the door must be fastened on the inside, on his side, as he had himself locked it the night before; and on examining it, he found that it had not been unlocked.

The Colonel felt almost ashamed to think that in his old age he had begun to see ghosts. He went straight back to bed again.

When the morning came, and he had breakfasted, the Colonel felt still more ashamed. He had excited himself to such an extent that he had trembled all over and perspired from fear. He said not a word about it. But later on in the day he and Vestblad went over the estate. As they passed a labourer who was cutting sods on a bank Beerencreutz recognised him again. It was the man he had seen in the night. He recognised feature for feature.

“I would not keep that man a day longer in my service, my friend,” said Beerencreutz, when they had walked a short distance. And he told Vestblad what he had seen in the night. “I tell you this simply to warn you, in order that you may dismiss the man.”

But Vestblad would not; he was just the man he would not dismiss. And when Beerencreutz pressed him more and more, he at last confessed that he would not do anything to the man, because he was the son of an old pauper woman who had died at Viksta close to Ekeby.

“You no doubt remember the story?” he added.

“If that’s the case, I would rather go to the end of the world than live another day with that man about the place,” said Beerencreutz. An hour after he left, and was almost angry that his warning was not heeded. “Some misfortune will happen before I come here again,” said the Colonel to Vestblad, as he took leave.

Next year, at the same time, the Colonel was preparing for another visit to Halstanäs. But before he got so far, he heard some sad news about his friends. As the clock struck one, a year after the very night he had slept there, Ensign Vestblad and his wife had been murdered in their bedroom by one of their labourers⁠—a man with a neck like a bull, a flat nose, and eyes like a pig.

The Inscription on the Grave

Nowadays no one ever takes any notice of the little cross standing in the corner of Svartsjö Churchyard. People on their way to and from church go past it without giving it a glance. This is not so very wonderful, because it is so low and small that clover and bluebells grow right up to the arms of the cross, and timothy-grass to the very top of it. Neither does anyone think of reading the inscription which stands on the cross. The white letters are almost entirely washed out by the rain, and it never occurs to anyone to try and decipher what is still left, and try to make it out. But so it has not always been. The little cross in its time has been the cause of much surprise and curiosity. There was a time when not a person put his foot inside Svartsjö Churchyard without going up to look at it. And when one of the old people from those days now happens to see it, a whole story comes back to him of people and events that have been long forgotten. He sees before him the whole of Svartsjö parish in the lethargic sleep of winter, covered by even white snow, quite a yard deep, so that it is impossible to discern road or pathway, or to know where one is going. It is almost as necessary to have a compass here as at sea. There is no difference between sea and shore. The roughest ground is as even as the field which in the autumn yielded such a harvest of oats. The charcoal-burner living near the great bogs might imagine himself possessed of as much cultivated land as the richest peasant.

The roads have left their secure course between the gray fences, and are running at random across the meadows and along the river. Even on one’s own farm one may lose one’s way, and suddenly discover that on one’s way to the well one has walked over the spirea-hedge and round the little rose-bed.

But nowhere is it so impossible to find one’s way as in the churchyard. In the first place, the stone wall which separates it from the pastor’s field is entirely buried under the snow, so with that it is all one; and secondly, the churchyard itself is only a simple large, white plain, where not even the smallest unevenness in the snow-cover betrays the many small mounds and tufts of the garden of the dead.

On most of the graves are iron crosses, from which hang small, thin hearts of tin, which the summer wind sets in motion. These little hearts are now all hidden under the snow, and cannot tinkle their sad songs of sorrow and longing.

People who work in the towns have brought back with them to their dead wreaths with flowers of beads and leaves of painted tin; and these wreaths are so highly treasured that they are kept in small glass cases on the graves. But now all this is hidden and buried under the snow, and the grave that possesses such an ornament is in no way more remarkable than any of the other graves.

One or two lilac bushes raise their heads above the snow-cover, but their little stiff branches look so alike, that it is impossible to tell one from the other, and they are of no use whatever