The Trial of Sören Qvist by Janet Lewis

Author:Janet Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2013-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

So Niels stayed on. He had become, in a way beyond his comprehension, possessed of an immunity as far as his master was concerned. He noticed, even he, that Sören Qvist, when speaking to him, had developed the habit of standing with his hands behind his back. He was aware that all rebukes for his laziness or his incompetence were tempered by a great patience. He received also many preachments, as he called them. The parson praised him, encouraged him, reasoned with him, and all of this which might have touched a man with some faint essence of nobility became for Niels but the license to conduct himself with greater impudence. He was in his own way bewildered, but since Morten, when these things were reported to him, rewarded Niels, and since the parson stayed his hand, and since Kirsten was pretty, although not always kind, Niels shrugged his shoulders and made the best of his days.

The growing season, compressed from either end, as it were, by the late northern spring, the early fall, was swift, and contained great drama for those who were concerned with it. It seemed a brief time from the day when the rye was tall enough to bow in the wind until the day when, heavy-headed, it was ready to be cut. The summer, cool and springlike, was in a few weeks the sunburned summer, with tawny haycocks and a strong pungent odor of herbs and grasses distilled in the heat. Then, with September, nearly every day brought its reminder of cold days coming. The storks went southward, trailing their long legs. Like the piled snowy cumulus of summer, they lifted the eyes of the farmer above the treetops to the wideness of the sky, and were a warning that the good days were not forever.

Judge Thorwaldsen was urging Anna to set the date of the wedding, and had once almost held her committed to the week of Martinmas. He had courted faithfully and well, and she no longer held him off because she wanted to hear him plead. She was in love with him, as he with her, deeply and happily, and the hope of adventure which had thought of journeys to Aebeltoft or even to the King’s Copenhagen was all absorbed in the adventure of finding out how deeply she was in love. But she refused him because of Sören. She felt that as long as her father continued in this strange duel with his servant, and as long as Niels persisted in staying on the farm, she dared not leave the old man. She had tried, as her father had indicated that he wished her to try, to explain to Tryg why Sören retained the worthless servant. She was no theologian, and she had not fully understood her father when he talked of devils as the wardens of God, but she understood him by love and intuition in the essence of the matter. The parson could not let himself be abased by his servant.

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