The Meeting
Two days later, Lotta Hedman sat in a hired cart, jolting on along a stony road in the parish of Algeröd, in the eastern part of Bohuslän, far from the sea, right up on the Dalsland side.
“Heavens!” she thought, looking round; “this is worse than Lappland. Bare rock everywhere—I never saw the like in all my life. How can anyone live and get their wherewithal in such a desert?”
And indeed the country she was passing through was little more than a level stretch of rocky upland. Heather and juniper, moss and stunted fir showed here and there, but the rock was everywhere.
The more she looked at her surroundings, the more her spirits sank.
“What could Sigrun and her husband have been thinking of,” she wondered, “to move out to a place like this? They were not so badly off before, by all accounts. Close to the sea, with a well-to-do congregation, and people round about. What possessed them to come out to a wilderness like this?”
The stony waste seemed filling her with its own desolation.
“There’s no living to be got here, for priest nor any other. Well, if they’ve not enough to have me with them, I’ll just have to go back home again, that’s all.”
At the moment, she felt doubtful if she had acted wisely in coming thus to visit Sigrun without an invitation, or even sending word herself beforehand of her coming. She ought at any rate to have sent a message through Sigrun’s parents, or let her know in some way.
“Herre Gud!” she thought to herself, as she drove on. “And six years now since Sigrun left her home at Stenbroträsk, and all that time I’ve hardly heard a word of her. A letter or two the first year, and then I saw her once or twice the summer she came home to visit her people, but neither of us did anything really to be friends again like we used.
“I can’t forget the beautiful letter she wrote me when her little daughter was born. I was so glad. And she wanted me to come to her then and help her with the little one. But I couldn’t leave them at home, and I didn’t really want to, I suppose. It seemed hard to go and stay with Sigrun as a maid, and I was afraid of her husband, too. Anyhow, I’ve regretted it since, for when the child died I couldn’t help thinking it might have lived if I had been there helping Sigrun as she asked. And perhaps she thinks so too. I’ve never heard a word from her since then.”
She felt a weight at her heart. Perhaps, after all, the long journey would come to nothing.
She strove to repress her anxiety. “What will be, must be,” she told herself. “Day after day I heard voices and had warnings telling me to go. I had no peace nor rest to work things out. ‘Sigrun, Sigrun, first of all,’ something was always saying, when I was trying to find out about the war and the millennium. And then, when father and mother died, and my brother took over the place and gave me the wretched little cellar room to live in—why shouldn’t I start out and see if she needed me? There, Lotta Hedman, now pull yourself together. At least, you are seeing something of the world, and not wasting your money all to nothing.”
As she was thus endeavouring to raise her drooping courage, the driver lifted his whip and pointed to a dark, pointed church-tower rising from a clump of trees.
“There’s the church already,” he said. “We’re nearly there now.”
Directly after, the road began to slope down into a narrow valley, with a winding river at the bottom, some farms and houses and fields, groups of trees, and a little wooden church.
But before they reached the place, the driver lifted his whip again.
“Bless me, but I do believe it’s Mistress from the parsonage herself going down the road, ahead there.”
At his words Lotta Hedman felt the weight at her heart almost stifling her. She could hardly breathe, and all her courage was gone in a moment.
“Oh, why ever did I come like this?” she asked herself. “Perhaps she won’t even remember me. What ever made me set off on this wild adventure? Perhaps, after all, only to be laughed at and treated with scorn.”
The driver of the cart evidently thought he was driving a new servant to the vicarage; he turned to Lotta and asked if he should pull up, so that she might speak to her new mistress as they passed.
“Oh, heavens!” she thought. “If I could only turn back now.”
And then, when they were within a few steps of Sigrun, Lotta felt her fears completely overwhelming her. All her faith in voices and warnings was gone; she stretched out her hand to grasp the reins.
“Turn, turn back!” she cried. “I am not going any farther. It must be the wrong way.”
But they were so close now that Sigrun heard, and turned round. And at sight of a strange woman trying to take the reins from the driver, a slight smile passed over her serious face.
Next moment, however, before the smile had faded, she put her hand to her heart, and hurried up to the pair.
“Oh, Lotta—is it really you?” she said, with tears in her eyes.
But at sight of her tears, Lotta thought only that they must be for her little girl that had died because she had not come to help.
She threw herself down from the cart, and would have fallen at Sigrun’s feet in the road to beg her forgiveness.
But before she could do so, Sigrun had taken her in her arms, and was telling her how glad—how glad she was to see her.
And Lotta understood that Sigrun was weeping for joy that she had come.
And she herself was very happy; this was surely the greatest thing that had ever happened in her life. But at the same time she thought to herself: “Sigrun must be unhappy, indeed, if she weeps for joy at seeing one so poor as I.”