Part 12

"They say he is a constant visitor at the house of Scharfenberg, the solicitor. Very likely it is the youngest daughter, eh?"

"Don't know. Good-by, Randi."

He went quickly, so that his spurs rattled, and his sabre flapped under his coat, down to his horse without looking to the right or left or speaking to any one. He pressed his shako more firmly down on his forehead before he got into the cariole.

"Thanks, Halvor. Give me the reins. There you--"

He gave young Svarten, who began with some capers, a taste of the whip, and off he went with tight reins at full trot, so that the fence-posts flew like drumsticks past his eyes.

In the quiet, hazy autumn day the cattle here and there were out on the highway.

A pig provoked him by obstinately running before the cariole.

"There, take care to get your stumps out of the way!"

It ended with a little cut on its back.

"See there! there is a beast of a cow lying in the middle of the road," he broke out, with his lips firmly pressed together.

"Well, if you won't get up, then you are welcome to stay! If you please--I am stupid also--I'll drive on."

His bitterness took full possession of him, and he would have firmly allowed the wheel to go over the animal's back if the latter had not risen up quickly at the last moment, so near that the captain's cariole was half raised up, while it grazed and was within an ace of being upset.

"Hm, hm," he mumbled, somewhat brought to his senses as he looked back upon the object of his missed revenge.

"So, so--off, I say, you black knacker--if you once peep back again in that way, I will kill you! Ha, ha, ha! If you run, you will still find a hill, my good friend."

He had had a tremendous headache all day; but it was not that which annoyed him--that he knew.

And when he came home, where they were expecting father to-day in great suspense after his long absence, his looks were dark.

"There, Ola! Curry the horse--dry him with a wisp of straw first--take good care of him--put a blanket on his back; do you hear? I only drove the fellow a little up the hill."

Great-Ola looked at the captain and nodded his head confidently, as he led the horse and carriage away from the steps; there was surely something the matter; the captain had got cheated again with this new nag.

"Good day, Ma--good day!" and he kissed her hastily. "Yes, I am quite well."

He took off his cloak and shako. "Oh, can't you let Marit take the trunk and the travelling-bag so that they needn't stand there on the steps any longer?--Oh, yes; it has been tiresome enough," as he evaded rather coldly Thinka's attentions. "Put the sabre on the peg, and carry the bag up to my chamber."

He himself went first up to the office to look at the mail, and then down to the stable to see how Great-Ola had treated Svarten.

There was something the matter with father; that was clear!

Ma's face, anxiously disturbed, followed him here and there in the doorways, and Thinka glided in and out without breaking the silence.

When he came in, the supper-table was spread--herring salad, decorated with red beets and slices of hard boiled eggs, and a glass of brandy by the side of it--and then half salted trout and a good bottle of beer.

Father was possibly not quite insensible, but extremely reticent. You could absolutely get only words of one syllable in answer to the most ingeniously conceived questions!

"The sheriff is going to marry again, they say; it is absolutely certain!" he let fall at last, as the first agreeable news he knew from the outer world; "Scharfenberg's youngest."

The remark was followed by deep silence, even if a gleam of perfect contentment glided over Thinka's face, and she busied herself with eating. They both felt that his ill-humor came from this.

"That man can say he is lucky with his daughters--Bine soon in a parsonage, and now Andrea the sheriff's wife! Perhaps you can get a position there, Thinka, when you need it some day, as governess for the children, or housekeeper; she won't be obliged to do more in the house than just what she pleases; she can afford it."

Thinka, blushing to the roots of her hair, kept her eyes on her plate.

"Yes, yes, Ma, as you make your bed you must lie in it in this world."

No more was said before Thinka cleared off the table, when Ma apologetically exclaimed, "Poor Thinka!"

The captain wheeled towards her on the floor with his fingers in the armholes of his vest and blinked indignantly at her.

"Do you know! After the parasol and the one attention after another which he has taken the pains to show all summer, if she could have given the man a bit of thanks and friendliness other than she has--It would not have gone so at all, if I had been at home!"--his voice rose to something like a peal of thunder--"But I think it is a flock of geese that I have here in the house, and not grown-up women who look out a little for themselves. Andrea Scharfenberg didn't let herself be asked twice, not she!" he said, walking out again when Thinka came in; he did not care if she did hear it.

Ma gazed somewhat thoughtfully at him, and in the days that followed, they petted and coddled father in every way to make him a little more cheerful. Thinka, in the midst of her quiet carefulness, cast her eyes down involuntarily, when he groaned and panted in this way.

He did not go out any farther than to look after young Svarten.

The horse had fever in one hoof to-day after the new shoeing. It was a nail which had been driven in too far by that blockhead of a smith. It must come out.

The captain stood silently looking on in his favorite position, with his arms on the lower half of the stable door, while Great-Ola, with the hind leg of young Svarten over his leg, was performing the operation of extraction with the tongs. The animal was good-natured and did not so much as move his leg.

"O-o-ola," came hoarsely, half smothered.

Great-Ola looked up.

"Good Lord!" if the captain did not sink slowly down, while he still held onto the stable door, right on the dung!

Ola looked a moment irresolutely at his master, dropping the horse's foot. Then he took the stable pail and spattered some water into his face until he once more manifested a little life and consciousness.

He then held the pail to his mouth.

"Drink, drink, Captain! Don't be afraid. It is only the result of all that drilling and pleasuring. It is just as it is when one has kept up a wedding festivity too long. My brother--"

"Help me out, Ola! There, let me lean on you--gently, gently. Ah, it does one good to breathe--breathe," as he stopped. "Now it's over, I believe. Yes, entirely over, nothing more than a half fainting spell. Just go with me a little bit, Ola, as a matter of precaution. Hm, hm, that goes well enough. Yes, yes, I have no doubt it is the irregular life the whole of the autumn. Go and call my wife. Say I am up in the chamber. I can manage the stairs bravely."

There was no little fright.

This time it was the captain who was at ease and turned it off, and Ma who without authority dispatched a messenger. If the army surgeon was not at home, then he must go to the district doctor.

When the army surgeon, Rist, came, and had received at the door Ma's anxious explanations that Jäger had had a slight shock, for the calming of the house he delivered a humorous lecture.

It was wholly a question of degree. The man who drank only so much that he stammered suffered from paralytic palsy of the tongue--and in this way every blessed man that he knew was a paralytic patient. This was only a congestion not uncommon among full-blooded people.

Jäger himself was in fact so far over it that he demanded the toddy tray in the evening--true enough, only an extremely light dose for his part! But cock and bull stories from the encampment and about Svarten were told in the clouds of smoke, and with constant renewals of the thin essence, till half-past one in the morning.

There was a roaring in the stove on one of the following forenoons, while the captain sat in his office chair, and wrote so that his quill-pen sputtered.

As usual at this time of the year, after his long absence, there was a great multitude of things to be disposed of. Thea's Norwegian grammar was lying on the green table by the door; she had just finished reading, and was heard humming outside in the hall.

There was a noise on the stairs, and Ma showing some one the way up, "That way--to the captain."

There was a knocking at the door.

"Good day, my man! Well?"

It was an express from the sheriff--in Sunday dress--with a letter. It was to be given to the captain himself.

"What? Is there to be an answer? Well, well! Yes, go down to the kitchen and get a little something to eat and a dram.--Hm, hm," he mumbled and threw the letter, written on letter-paper and fastened with a seal, down on his desk, while in the mean time he took a turn up and down the floor. "Notice of the betrothal, I suppose--or perhaps an invitation to the wedding."

Opening it, he read it, standing up--eagerly running it over hastily--a cursed long introduction!--Over that--over that--quite to the third page.

"Well, there it comes!"

He struck the back of the hand in which he held the letter with a resounding whack into the other, and then seated himself--"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!"

He snapped his fingers, once, twice, three times, in a brown study, scratched his head behind his ear, and then slyly up under his wig.

"Now, we shall see--we shall see!--And that nonsense about Scharfenberg." He rushed to the door and jerked it open; but bethought himself and walked on tiptoe to the stairs. "Who is there in the hall--you, Thea?"

The little square-built, brown-eyed Thea flew up the stairs.

"Tell Ma to come up," he said, nodding.

Thea looked up at her father: there was something out of the ordinary about him.

When Ma came in, he walked about with the letter behind his back, clearing his throat. There was the suitable deliberate seriousness about him which the situation demanded.

"I have got a letter, Ma--from the sheriff!--Read!--or shall I read?"

He stood leaning against the desk, and went through its three pages, period by period, with great moderation, till he came to the point, then he hurled it out so that it buzzed in the air, and hugged Ma wildly.

"Well, well!--what do you say, Ma? Take a trip when we want to go down to our son-in-law!" He rubbed his hands. "It was a real surprise, Ma,--hm, hm," he began, again clearing his throat. "It is best that we ask Thinka to come up and tell her the contents--don't you think?"

"Ye-es," said Ma huskily, having turned to the door; she could see no help or escape for her any more, poor girl!

The captain walked up and down in the office, waiting. He had the high-spirited, dignified, paternal expression which is completely absorbed in the importance of the moment.

But where was she gone to?

She could not be found. They had hunted for her over the whole house.

But the captain was not impatient to-day.

"Well, then, don't you see her?" he mildly asked two or three times through the door.

At last Thea found her in the garret. She had taken refuge up there and hid herself, when she saw the express and heard that it was from the sheriff, in anticipation of the contents. And now she was sitting with her head on her arms and her apron over her head.

She had not been crying; she had been seized with a sort of panic; she felt an irresistible impulse to hide herself away somewhere and shut her eyes, so that it would be really dark, and she would not be obliged to think.

She looked a little foolish when she went down with Thea to her father and mother in the office.

"Thinka," said the captain, when she came in, "we have received to-day from the sheriff an important letter for your future. I suppose it is superfluous to say--after all the attention you have allowed him to show you during the year--what it is about, and that your mother and I regard it as the greatest good fortune that could fall to your lot, and to ours also. Read the letter and consider it well. Sit down and read it, child."

Thinka read; but it did not seem as if she got far; she shook her head dumbly the whole time without knowing it.

"You understand very well, it is not any youthful love fancy, and any such exalted nonsense that he asks of you. It is if you will fill an honored position with him that you are asked, and if you can give the good will and care for him which he would naturally expect of a wife."

There was no answer to be got, except a weak groan down into her lap.

The captain's face began to grow solemn.

But Ma whispered, with a blaze of lightning in her eyes, "You see plainly, she cannot think, Jäger.--Don't you think as I do, father," she said aloud, "that it is best we let Thinka take the letter, so that she can consider it till to-morrow? It is such a surprise."

"Of course, if Thinka prefers it," came after them, from the captain, who was greatly offended, as Ma went with her, shutting her up in her chamber.

She had her cry out under the down quilt during the whole afternoon.

In the twilight Ma went up and sat beside her.

"No place to turn to, you see, when one will not be a poor, unprovided-for member of a family. Sew, sew your eyes out of your head, till at last you lie in a corner of some one's house. Such an honorable proposal would seem to many people to be a great thing."

"Aas! Aas, mother!" articulated Thinka very weakly.

"God knows, child, that if I saw any other way out, I would show it to you, even if I should have to hold my fingers in the fire in order to do it."

Thinka slipped her hand onto her mother's thin hand and sobbed gently into her pillow.

"Your father is no longer very strong--does not bear many mental excitements,--so that the outlook is dark enough. The attack when he came home last--"

When Ma went out, sigh followed sigh in the darkness.

Late in the evening Ma sat and held her daughter's head so that she could get some sleep; she was continually starting up.

And now when Thinka finally slept, without these sudden starts any longer--quietly and peacefully, with her fair young head regularly breathing on the pillow--Ma went out with the candle. The worst was over.

If the captain was in an exalted mood after having seen from the office window Aslak, who went as express messenger to the sheriff, vanishing through the gate, then in certain ways he was doubly set up in the kingdom of hope by a little fragment of a letter from Inger-Johanna, dated Tilderöd:

We are all in a bustle, packing up and moving to the city, therefore the letter will be short this time.

There have been guests here to the very last; solitude suits neither uncle nor aunt, and so they had said "Welcome to Tilderöd" so often that we had one long visit after another all through the summer--in perfect rusticity, it was said. But I believe indeed they did not go away again without feeling that aunt preserves style in it. With perfect freedom for every one, and collations both in the garden room and on the veranda, there is, after all, something about it which makes the guests feel that they must give something and be at their best. People don't easily sink down to the level of the commonplace when aunt is present. She flatters me that we are alike in that respect.

And I don't know how it is, I feel now that I am almost as much attracted by assemblies as formerly by balls. There certainly is much more of an opportunity to use whatever little wit one has, and they may be a real influential circle of usefulness: aunt has opened my eyes to that this summer. When we read of the brilliant French _salons_, where woman was the soul, we get an impression that here is an entire province for her. And to be able to live and work in the world has possessed me since I was little, and mourned so that I was not a boy who could come to be something.

I had got so far, dear parents, when Miss Jörgensen called me to go down into the garden to aunt. The mail had come from the office in the city, and on the table in a package lay a flat, red morocco leather box and a letter to me.

It was a gold band to wear in my hair, with a yellow topaz in it, and in the letter there was only, "To complete the portrait. RÖNNOW."

Of course aunt must try it on me at once--take down my hair, and call in uncle. Rönnow's taste was subtly inspired when it concerned me, she declared.

Oh, yes! it is becoming.

But with the letter and all the fantastical overvaluation, there is that which makes me feel that the gold band pinches my neck. Gratitude is a tiresome virtue.

Aunt lays so many plans for our social life next winter, and is rejoicing that Rönnow may possibly come for another trip.

For my part I must say I don't really know; I both want it and don't want it.

_Chapter X_

The more quickly and quietly the wedding could be arranged, the better, said the sheriff. It had its advantage in getting ahead of explanations and gossip. People submitted to an accomplished fact.

The third day of Christmas was just the right one to escape too much sensation; and it suited the sheriff exactly, so that he could enter upon his new state of household affairs with the new year.

Naturally, Kathinka was asked about every one of these points; and she always found everything that her father thought right.

The decision that the wedding should be arranged speedily and promptly was exactly after the captain's own heart. On the other point, on the contrary, that everything should be kept so quiet and still, he was in agreement with the sheriff and Ma, of course; but it really did not lie in his nature that the whole joyful affair should take place smothered with a towel before his mouth, and whispering on tiptoe, as if it were a sick-room they were having at Gilje instead of a wedding.

Some show there must be about it; that he owed to Thinka, and to himself also a little.

And thus it came about that before Christmas he took a little sleighing trip, when it was good going, down to the lieutenant's and to the solicitors, Scharfenberg and Sebelow, with whom he had some money settlements to get adjusted in regard to the map business that had been done in the last two suits.

And then, when he met the report that the banns had been published in church for his daughter and the sheriff, he could answer with a question if they would not come and convince themselves. Confidentially, of course, he invited no one but the army surgeon and those absolutely necessary. "But"--winking--"old fellow, how welcome you shall be, the third day of Christmas, not the second and not the fourth, my boy, remember that!"

And he took care that provisions as well as batteries of strong liquors should be stored up inside the ramparts at home, so the fortress could hold its own.

On Christmas Eve there came a horse express from the sheriff with a sleigh full of packages--nothing but presents and surprises for Thinka.

First and foremost, his former wife's warm fur cloak with squirrel-skin lining and muff, which had been made over for Thinka by Miss Brun in the chief parish; then her gold watch and chain with earrings, and rings, all like new, and burnished up by the goldsmith in the city, and a Vienna shawl, and, lastly, lavender water and gloves in abundance.

In the letter he suggested to his devotedly loved Kathinka that his thoughts were only with her until they should soon be united by a stronger bond, and that she, when once in her new home, would find several other things which might possibly please her, but which it would not be practical to send up to Gilje, only to bring them right back again.

He had not brought Baldrian and Viggo home for Christmas--and in this he hoped she would agree with him; he had sent them down to his brother, the minister at Holmestrand.

Never in Great-Ola's time had there been such a festive show in horses and vehicles, as when, on the third day of Christmas, they started down the hill to the annex-church; the harnesses and bells shone, and both the black horses glistened before the double sleighs, as if they had been polished up, both hair and mane.

Under the bearskin robe in the first sat the captain in a wolf-skin coat and Thinka adorned with the chains and clothes of the sheriff's first wife, with young Svarten. In the second Ma and Thea, with Great-Ola on the dickey seat behind and old Svarten.

There stood the subalterns in uniform paying their respects at the church door; and inside, in the pew, Lieutenants Dunsack, Frisak, Knebelsberger, and Knobelauch rose up in full uniform. So the sheriff could see that there was some style about it, anyway.

And when they turned towards home, after the ceremony was over, now with the captain and his wife in the first sleigh and the wedded couple in the other--there was such a long cortège that the sheriff's idea of celebrating the wedding quietly must be regarded as wholly overridden.

At Gilje dinner was waiting.

During this the powers of the battalion from the youngest lieutenant up to the captain developed a youthful courage in their attack on the strong wares, so wild and so regardless of the results, that it could only demand of the sheriff a certain degree of prudence.

All would drink with the bride and the bridegroom, again and again.

The sheriff sat contented and leaning forward with his great forehead thinly covered with hair, taking pains to choose his words in the cleverest and most fitting manner for the occasion.

And so long as it was confined to the speeches, he was the absolute master, unless he might possibly have a rival in the army surgeon's sometimes more deeply laid satire, which became more problematical and sarcastic after he had been drinking.

But now the small twinkling eyes, shining more and more dimly and tenderly veiled, devoted themselves exclusively to the bride.