Then Karin, daughter of Ingmar, said in a tone of wonderment: "I hear G.o.d"s voice calling me!"
Gunhild, the daughter of Councillor Clementsson, lifted up her hands in ecstasy, and tears streamed down her face. "I, too, am going," she cried. "G.o.d"s voice calls me."
Whereupon Krister Larsson and his wife said, almost in the same breath: "It cries into my ear that I must go. I can hear G.o.d"s voice calling me!"
The call came to one after another, and with it all anguish of mind and all feeling of regret vanished. A great sense of joy had come to them. They thought no more of their farms or their relatives; they were thinking only of how their little colony would branch out and blossom anew, and of the wonder of having been called to the Holy City.
The call had now come to most of them. But it had not yet reached Halvor Halvorsson; he was wrestling in anguished prayer, thinking G.o.d would not call him as He had called the others. "He sees that I love my fields and meadows more than His word," he said to himself.
"I am unworthy."
Karin then went up to Halvor and laid her hand upon his brow. "You must be still, Halvor, and listen in silence."
Halvor wrung his hands so hard that the joints of his fingers cracked. "Perhaps G.o.d does not deem me worthy to go," he said.
"Yes, Halvor, you will be let go, but you must be still," said Karin. She knelt down beside him and put her arm around him. "Now listen quietly, Halvor, and without fear."
In a few moments the tense look was gone from his face. "I hear I hear something far, far away," he whispered.
"It is the harps of angels announcing the presence of the Lord,"
said the wife. "Be quite still now, Halvor." Then she nestled very close to him--something she had never done before in the presence of others.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, clapping his hands. "Now I have heard it. It spoke so loudly that it was as thunder in my ears. "You shall go to my Holy City, Jerusalem," it said. Have you all heard it in the same way?"
"Yes, yes," they cried, "we have all heard it."
But now old Eva Gunnersdotter began to wail. "I have heard nothing.
I can"t go along with you. I"m like Lot"s wife, and may not flee the wrath to come, but must be left behind. Here I must stay and be turned into a pillar of salt."
She wept from despair, and the h.e.l.lgumists all gathered round to pray with her. Still she heard nothing. And her despair became a thing of terror. "I can"t hear anything!" she groaned. "But you"ve got to take me along. You shan"t leave me to perish in the lake of fire!"
"You must wait, Eva," said the h.e.l.lgumists. "The call may come. It will surely come, either to-night or in the morning."
"You don"t answer me," cried the old woman, "you don"t tell what I want to know. Maybe you don"t intend to take me along if no call comes to me!"
"It will come, it will come!" the h.e.l.lgumists shouted.
"You don"t answer me!" screamed the old woman in a frenzy.
"Dear Eva, we can"t take you along if G.o.d doesn"t call you!" the h.e.l.lgumists protested. "But the call will come, never fear."
Then the old dame suddenly rose from her kneeling att.i.tude, straightened her rickety old body, and brought her cane down on the floor with a thud. "You people mean to go away and leave me to perish!" she thundered. "Yes, yes, yes, you mean to go and let me perish!" She had become furiously angry, and once more they saw before them Eva Gunnersdotter as she had been in her younger days-- strong and pa.s.sionate and fiery.
"I want nothing more to do with you!" she shrieked. "I don"t want to be saved by you. Fie upon you! You would abandon wife and children, father and mother, to save yourselves. Fie! You"re a parcel of idiots to be leaving your good farms. You"re a lot of misguided fools running after false prophets, that"s what you are!
It"s upon you that fire and brimstone will rain. It is you who must perish. But we who remain at home, we shall live."
THE BIG LOG
At dusk, on this same beautiful February day, two young lovers stood talking together in the road. The youth had just driven down from the forest with a big log, which was so heavy that the horse could hardly pull it. All the same he had driven in a roundabout way so that the log might be hauled through the village and past the big white schoolhouse.
The horse had been halted in front of the school, and a young woman had come out to have a look at the log. She couldn"t seem to say enough in praise of it--how long and thick it was, and how straight, and what a lovely tan bark it had, and how firm the wood was, and how flawless!
The young man then told her very impressively that it had been grown on a moor far north of Olaf"s Peak, and when he had felled it, and how long it had been lying in the forest to dry out. He told her exactly how many inches it measured, both in circ.u.mference and diameter.
"But, Ingmar," she said, "it is only the first!"
Pleased as she was, the thought that Ingmar had been five years getting down the first bit of timber toward the building of their new home made her feel uneasy. But Ingmar seemed to think that all difficulties had now been met.
"Just you wait, Gertrude!" he said. "If I can only get the timber hauled while the roads are pa.s.sable, we"ll soon have the house up."
It was turning bitterly cold. The horse stood there all of a shiver, shaking its head and stamping its hoofs, its mane and forelock white with h.o.a.r frost. But the youth and the maid did not feel the cold. They kept themselves warm by building their house, in imagination, from cellar to attic. When they had got the house done, they set about to furnish it.
"We"ll put the sofa over against the long wall here in the living-room," Ingmar decided.
"But I don"t know that we"ve got any sofa," said Gertrude.
The young man bit his lip. He had not meant to tell her, until some time later, that he had a sofa in readiness at the cabinetmaker"s shop; but now he had unwittingly let out the secret.
Then Gertrude, too, came out with something which she had kept from him for five years. She told him that she had made up hair into ornaments and had woven fancy ribbons for sale, and with the money she had earned in this way she had bought all sorts of household things--pots and pans, platters and dishes, sheets and pillow slips, table covers and rugs.
Ingmar was so pleased over what Gertrude had accomplished that he could not seem to commend her enough. In the middle of his praises he broke off abruptly and gazed at her in speechless adoration. He thought it was too good to be true that anything so sweet and so beautiful would some day be his very own.
"Why do you look at me so strangely?" asked the girl.
"I"m just thinking that the best of it all is that you will be mine."
Gertrude could not say anything, but she ran her hand caressingly over the big log which was to form a portion of the wall of that house in which she and Ingmar were to live. She felt that protection and love were in store for her, for the man she was going to marry was good and wise, n.o.ble and faithful.
Just then an old woman pa.s.sed by. She walked rapidly, muttering to herself, as if terribly incensed over something: "Aye, aye, their happiness shall last no longer than from daybreak to rosy dawn. When the trial comes, their faith will be broken as though it were a rope spun from moss, and their lives shall be as a long darkness."
"Surely she can"t mean us!" said the young girl.
"How could that apply to us?" laughed the young man.
THE INGMAR FARM
It was the day after the meeting of the h.e.l.lgumists, and a Sat.u.r.day. A blizzard was raging. The pastor, who had been called to the bedside of a sick person who lived way up at the north end of the great forest, was driving homeward late in the evening under great difficulties. His horse sank deep in the snowdrifts, and the sledge was time after time on the point of being upset. Both the pastor and his hired man were continually getting out to kick away the snow for a path. Happily it was not very dark. The moon came rolling out from behind the snow clouds, big and full, shedding its silvery light upon the ground. Glancing upward, the pastor noticed that the air was thick with whirling and flying snowflakes.
In some places they made their way quite easily. There were short stretches of road where the flying snow had not settled, and others where the snow was deep, but loose and even. The really troublesome thing was trying to get over the ground where the drifts were piled so high that one could not even look over them, and where they were obliged to turn from the road, and to drive across fields and hedges, at the risk of being dumped into a ditch or having the horse spiked on a fence rail.
Both the pastor and his servant spoke with much concern of the drift which always, after a heavy snow, was banked against a high boarding close to the Ingmar Farm. "If we can only clear that we are as good as at home," they said.
The pastor remembered how often he had asked Big Ingmar to remove the high boarding that was the cause of so much snow drifting toward that particular spot. But nothing had ever been done about it. Even though everything else on the Ingmar Farm had undergone changes, certainly those old boards were never disturbed.
At last they were within sight of the farm. And, sure enough, there was the snowdrift in its usual place, as high as a wall and as hard as a rock! Here there was no possibility of their turning to one side; they had no choice but to drive right over it. The thing looked impossible, so the servant asked whether he hadn"t better go down to the farm and get some help. But to this the pastor would not consent. He had not exchanged a word with either Karin or Halvor in upward of five years, and the thought of meeting old friends with whom one is no longer on speaking terms, was no more pleasant to him than it is to most people.