Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/80

68 indeed, his spirit could be near as here on earth, it would only bring us blessings and happiness. I am quite easy on that score; he was a pious, God-fearing man, and there was nothing in his life to disturb his repose after death. Report said that he had drowned himself; but I am quite convinced that was not true. If I had not unluckily been away on my travels as a journeyman, and you with your dying aunt—your mother's sister—we would most likely have had him with us now. How often I have warned him against sailing about alone in Kalleboe Bay. But he would go every Sunday. As long as I was in his employ I always made a point of accompanying him; and when I went away, he promised me never to go without a boatman."

"Alas! that was an unfortunate Christmas!" sighed Johanna. "It was not until he had been advertised in the newspapers as missing, and Mr. Stork had recognised his corpse at the dead-house for the drowned, and had caused him to be secretly buried as a suicide,—it was not until all this was over, that I knew he had not been put into his own coffin, and laid in consecrated ground."

"Let us not grieve longer, dear Johanna, for what it was not in our power to prevent. But let us rather, in respect to the memory of our kind benefactor, put the house which he occupied, and where he worked for us, in order, inhabit it cheerfully, and rescue it from mysterious accusations and evil reports. Our welfare was all he thought of and laboured for."

"As you will, then, dear Frants," said Joiianna, yielding to his arguments. She hastened at the same moment to take up from its cradle the child who had just awoke, and holding it out to its young father, she added, "May God protect this innocent infant, and spare it to us!"

Frants kissed the mother and the child, smoothed his brown hair, and taking his hat down from its peg, he hurried off to conclude the purchase on which he had set his heart. He returned in great spirits; and the next day the little family removed to the house which had belonged to Mr. Flok. Frants was rejoiced to see his old master's furniture, which he had bought at an auction, restored to its former place; and he felt almost as if the easy-chair and the bureau, formerly in the immediate use of the old man, must share in his gladness.

But the baker's wife at the corner of the street shrugged her shoulders and pitied the handsome young couple, whom she considered doomed to sickness and misfortune, because five corpses within the last six months had been carried out of that house, and because there was an inscription on its walls, that, however often it had been effaced, had always re-appeared: """ stood there, written in red characters, and all the old crones in the neighbourhood affirmed that the words were written in blood.

"Mark my words," said the baker's wife at the corner of the street to her daughter, "before the year is at an end we shall have another coffin carried out of that house."

Frants the joiner had bestirred himself to set all to rights in the long-neglected workshop, and Johanna had put the house in nice order, and arranged everything as it used to be in days gone by. The little parlour