Free Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen Page B

sympathy for the forlorn Norwegian girl and would have liked to help and comfort her. But she was sensitive to something in their help and comfort that she did not want or could not bear. Even before her child was born, with the money her lover had given her when he left she established her little milliner’s shop. She justput one single sovereign aside, for her child was to have an heirloom of pure gold from its father. From now on she kept back from her own family and her old acquaintances in town. She had nothing against them, but they would not leave her time to think of Alexander Ross. When once more it began to show green round the fjord she gave birth to a daughter who would, she thought, in years to come, help her in the task.
    Madam Ross had had her daughter christened Malli because her husband had sung a song about a Scotch girl called Malli, who was all in all complete. But she told the customers who peered at the child lying within its cradle in the shop that this was a family name among her husband’s kin; his mother had been called Malli. She ended up by believing it herself.
    During the months in which she had been waiting in rising anxiety and finally, as it were, in deep darkness, the unborn child to her had been a sure proof that her husband was alive. It grew and kicked in her womb; it could not be a dead man’s child. Now, after the rumors about her husband had reached her, to her the child slowly became a just as certain proof that he was dead. For a child so healthy, beautiful and gentle could not be a deceiver’s gift to her. As Malli grew up she realized, without her mother having ever expressed it in words, nor having ever been able to express it, what a powerful, mystic, at the same time tragic and blissful importance her very existence had to that gentle, lonesome mother. So the two lived wonderfully quiet and secluded, and very happily, together.
    When the girl grew older and now and then came out among people, she heard her father spoken of. She was quick-witted and had an ear for intonation and silence; she soongot wind of the sort of name Captain Ross had in the town. No one got to know what she felt about it. But she took her mother’s side against the whole world with growing vigor. She stood guard over Madam Ross like an armed sentry, and she became exaggeratedly wise and demure in all she did. Without making it really clear even to herself, in her young heart she decided that never in the conduct of the daughter should people find any confirmation that the mother had let herself be seduced by a bad man.
    But when Malli was alone she happily gave herself up to thoughts of her big, handsome father. For her he might well have been an adventurer, a privateer captain, like those one heard of in time of war—indeed even a corsair or a pirate! Below her quiet manner there lay a vital, concealed gaiety and arrogance; in her contempt for the townspeople was mingled forbearance for her own mother. She herself, and Alexander Ross, knew better than they.
    Madam Ross was proud of her obedient, thoughtful child, and in the eyes of the town became somewhat ludicrous in her maternal vanity. She had Malli taught English by an old spinster who was still sitting about in the fjord town after coming there a generation ago as governess to Baron Loewenskiold’s daughters. In the dried-up, beaky-nosed Englishwoman’s small room above a grocer’s shop Malli learned her father’s tongue. And up here a meeting took place, fateful for the girl; one day she also read Shakespeare. With trembling voice and with tears in her eyes the old maid read out her bard to the young one, the exiled woman asserted her lineage and her wealth, and with majestic dignity introduced the milliner’s daughter to a circle of noble and brilliant compatriots. From then on Malli saw her hero Alexander Ross as a Shakespearean hero. In her heart she cried out with Philip Faulconbridge:
    “Madam, I would not wish a better father. Some