Part 15

"Do you believe that she will ride or drive?" he asked Ma out in the pantry. "She stands there planting here and there and taking up and putting down in the garden; she is not accustomed to that now, Ma, you see. It seems to me, she is so serious. But can you imagine what will become of her? Huh," he sighed. "Nay, can you imagine it?" He took a ladle of whey out of the tub--"Drink plenty of whey, that thins the blood and prolongs life, Rist says--so that she can be the captain's daughter the longer here at Gilje--I have been thinking, Ma, that I am not going down to the sheriff's birthday on Thursday. Thinka is soon coming up, and--Oh, it is good to drink when one is thirsty."

On that same above named Thursday, the captain went about more than commonly silent and taciturn. Not a syllable at the dinner table, from the time he sat down till he rose again and peevishly, heavily, trudged up the stairs in order to take his after-dinner nap as it now should be, sitting and only for a moment.

He did not know whether he had closed his eyes or not; it didn't matter, either.

He rushed out of the office door--"Suppose they are now talking among themselves, Scharfenberg and the others. Just as amusing as to run the gauntlet through the whole country to travel down there." He stood absorbed before the great clothes-press out in the hall, when Inger-Johanna came up. "Will you see something?" said he--"your long boots when you were small."

She did not like to go into the housekeeping, but developed a great

## activity in outside affairs. For the present, the garden must be

enlarged, the beds must be measured and spaded, and the hedge planted for Thinka's coming visit.

With a straw hat on, she was in the garden from early morning. There was such peace in being able to work in the fresh air and escaping from sitting over the sewing and thinking.

The captain went about shrinking from the drill.

Ma had several times proposed to send for Rist; but now she and Inger-Johanna in consultation determined really to do so.

Such a calming down always followed the doctor's visits.

Of course he should go to the drill-ground. A little lively marching in rank and file took off the fat so effectually and made the blood circulate as it should. "You have never yet talked about your head swimming when you were in camp, Jäger. It is just the right treatment, if you want to be allowed a glass of punch again on this side of Christmas."

While Gülcke was on the circuits, Thinka came up on a visit.

The sisters were at home again together, talking as in the old time; but neither of them wondered any longer what there might be in the outside world.

They knew that so well, both of them.

He felt so comfortable, the captain said, when he saw Thinka sitting there with her knitting-work and a novel, either out on the stairs or in the sitting-room.

"She is satisfied with her lot now, isn't she?" he said to Ma.

He came back to it so often; it was as if he had a secret disquietude on that point. By getting an insight into the matter through Inger-Johanna, he had to a degree got his eyes opened, at least to the extent of a suspicion, as to the possibility that a woman could be unhappy in a good match.

Then, on the other hand, his constant consolation was that such as Inger-Johanna must be exceptional examples of humanity--with her commanding nature and intolerance of living under any one's thumb.

But ordinary girls were not endowed with such lofty feelings and thoughts--and Thinka was, as it were, made for giving way and submitting to some one.

All the same, the question still lay and writhed like a worm in his stomach.

"Inger-Johanna!" said Thinka out on the stairs, "notice father, how unnerved he looks now, he is walking down there by the garden fence--and he is all the time forgetting his pipe; it is not halfsmoked up before it goes out."

"So you think he is changed," said Inger-Johanna, musing and resuming the conversation, up in their room in the evening. "Poor father; it is so absolutely impossible for him to get over it; I was destined to be a parade horse. But do you believe he would now demand it again of any of us?"

"You are strong, Inger-Johanna, and I suppose you are right. But he has become so good," Thinka said, sighing; "and it is that which makes me uneasy."

As the time drew nearer, he went about, dreading more and more to go to the camp, so that Ma finally began to believe that perhaps it was not advisable for him to go, since he had himself so little courage or desire for it. During the day, he would walk about quite alone, so that he might come to shun people altogether.

And the first real gleam of light she had seen for a long time on his countenance was when she, notwithstanding, proposed that he write to the army surgeon for a certificate of sickness.

It went on smoothly enough after it was first set in motion. And yet he seemed to repent it, so to speak, when his leave of absence actually lay upon his desk.

He went about annoyed and thought about them all down there. Now Captain Vonderthan would naturally spoil the men on the drill-ground; and this one and that one was speculating, he supposed, even now, on whether he would not possibly go upon half pay. But he would disappoint them by lasting as long as possible, if he should drink whey the year round.

The time, which was so absorbing and disturbing to his mind, when the drill was taking place, was over at last, and he had already, through Ma's persuasion, by degrees reconciled himself to a possible trip to the principal parish, when a scrap of a letter from Jörgen was brought in the mail, which put them all in great distress.

He could not endure any longer to sit there as the poorest in his class, and had shipped on board a vessel which was going to sail that evening for England. From there he hoped to find some means of getting over to America, where he would try to become a blacksmith or a wheelwright or something else. He would not fail to write home to his dear parents what his fate was.

"There, Ma," said the captain with a deep, trembling voice, when at last he had got over his stupefaction a little, "that Grip has been expensive for us. It is nothing but his teaching."

* * * * *

The autumn was already far advanced. The snow had come and gone twice, and had now been swept off by the wind from the slippery, hard frozen road. The slopes and mountains were white, with red and yellow tones of the frost-touched leaves of the leafy forest still showing in many places, and the lake down below was shining coldly blue, ready to freeze over.

There was a thundering over the country road hard with frost, so it waked the echoes in the quiet October day; one crow was standing, and another started up from the hedge-post at the sound.

It was the wheels of a cariole, and in it was sitting, with a long whip hanging down behind his back, in cloak and large overshoes, the Captain of Gilje.

He had been ten miles down and had his yearly settlement with Bardon Kleven.

It is true, the bailiff had not been willing to let him go out of the house without compelling him to taste a little brandy in a small tumbler, with a little ale in addition, and a little something to eat. But he had been prudent. It was almost the only trip he had made away from home for a long time, except his visit to the sheriff.

Old Svarten ran over the long, flat stretches in the heavy, strong trot to which he was accustomed; the road showed that he was sharp shod with full caulks. He knew that he was not to stop till he had done the three miles to the foot of the steep ascent up the Gilje hills.

It was probably because he was newly shod, and the lumps of mud were so large and were frozen hard; but now he stumbled.

It was the first time it had happened. Perhaps he felt it himself, for he kept on at a brisker trot--but then slackened up by degrees. He felt that the reins were loose and slack; their folds fell longer and longer down over his shoulders.

The whip-lash hung down as before over the captain's back, only still more slantingly.

He had begun to feel such cold shivers, just as if he had suddenly got cold all over--and now he had become so sleepy--had such a longing for a nap.

He saw the reins, the ears, and the hanging mane over the neck of Svarten nodding up and down before him, and the ground beneath him flying away--

It was just as if a crow flew up and made it dark right over his face; but he could not get his arm up to catch it--so let it be.

And there stood the grain-poles, like crooked old witches, crouched down--they wanted to avenge themselves--with straw forelocks they resisted him more and more like goblins and would forbid him to get his arms up to take the reins and drive to Gilje. They were swarming between heaven and earth, as it were, swimming, dancing--were bright and dark. Then there was something like a shout or a crash from somewhere. There was Inger-Johanna coming--

Svarten had got the reins quite down over his forelegs; a little more and he would be stepping on them.

From the gentle trot, into which he had at last fallen, he began to walk.

Then he turned his head round--and remained standing in the middle of the road.

The whip-lash hung down as before. The captain sat there immovable with his head a little tipped back--

They were still on the level, and Svarten stood patiently looking toward the Gilje hill, which lay a bit farther on, until he turned his head round again two or three times and looked into the cariole.

Now he began to paw on the ground with one forefoot, harder and harder--so that the lumps flew about.

Then he neighed.

A good hour later, in the twilight, there was a conversation in an undertone out in the yard, and the sound of cariole wheels which moved slowly.

Great-Ola was called down to the gate by the man down yonder at the Sörgaard; he had met the cariole with the captain down in the road.

"What is it?" Ma's voice was heard to say through the darkness from the porch.

* * * * *

At the entrance of the churchyard, a week later, old Svarten and young Svarten stood before an empty sleigh.

A salute before and after the lowering into the ground informed the parish that here lay Captain Peter Wennechen Jäger.

_Chapter XIV_

About twenty years had passed, and the traffic down in the country store and inn showed an entirely different style both in building and goods. There had also begun to be a route for travellers and tourists in the summer up through the valley.

The snow drifted, so that it lay high up on the steps this Sunday afternoon.

But in the little warm room behind the shop there was jollity. He had come up again, he, the delightful Grip; and now he was sitting there with the shopkeeper, the bailiff's man, and the execution-server.

Only let him get a little something to drink.

"Your health, you old execution-horse!" came in Grip's voice--"When I think of all those whom you have taken the skin off without ever getting any part in the roast, I can get up a kind of sympathy for you; we are both of us cheated souls."

"Although I have not acquired the learning and sciences"--began the gray-headed man who had been spoken to, somewhat irritated--"I insist on--"

"Everything lawful, yes--oh--oh--never mind that, Reierstad. Consider that science is the sea of infinity, and a few drops more or less do not count either for or against. Just peep out a little into the starry night, and you will have a suspicion that the whole of the planet, my friend, on which you parade in such a very small crevice, is only one pea in the soup--soup, I say--it is all the same. Isn't that so, Mr.--Mr. Simensen?"

He always appealed to the shop boy, who, with his small pig's eyes, smiled very superciliously and was evidently flattered.

"And in regard to the last information, one ought to have a little something to reinforce the oil in the lamp with, Sir."

It was the execution-server who had stood treat first--a pint and a half bottle of spirits.

The execution-server had a kind of ancient deferential respect for Grip. He knew that he had belonged to the higher sphere, and that he still, whenever he liked, might show himself in the houses both of the sheriff and of old Rist, places which he never left without improvements in his outfit.

"I will confide a secret to you, Reierstad. If you are a little of a genius, then you must drink--at least it was true in my time. There was great havoc on that kind, you see, on account of the vacuum. Did you not notice something of that?"

"Hi, hi, hi," neighed Simensen.

"Yes, you understand what I mean, Simensen?--A good glass of punch extract in this frost--of yours in the shop--would taste so good now, wouldn't it? I am not at present flush of money; but if you will have the goodness to put it down."

Simensen caught the idea, of course. "All right, then."

"As you grease the wheels, the carriage goes, you know very well, my dear Simensen--and, well,--there comes the fluid.--Do you want to know why we drink?"

"Oh, it can't be so very difficult to fathom that."

"No, no; but yet it may perhaps be placed in a higher light, which a man like you will not fail to appreciate--you know there is a great objection to new illumination fluids, besides--you see, hm!" He seated himself comfortably--"You live in a thin coat and cold, poor conditions--are ashamed of yourself at heart--feel that you are sinking as a man, day by day. If there is a discussion, you don't dare to assert yourself; if you are placed at a table, you don't dare to speak. And then--only two drams--two glasses of poor brandy for spectacles to see through--and _ein_, _zwei_, _drei_, _marsch_! The whole world is another!--You become yourself, feel that you are in that health and vigor which you were once intended for; your person becomes independent, proud, and bold; the words fall from your lips; your ideas are bright; people admire. The two glasses--only two glasses--I do not refuse, however, the three, four, five, and six, your health!--make the difference--you know what the difference is, Simensen!--between his healthy and his sick man, while the man whom the world struck down--well, yes--But the two glasses carry him always farther--farther--inexorably farther, you see--until he ends in the workhouse. That was a big syllogism."

"Yes, it certainly was," said Simensen, nodding to the execution-server; "it took half a bottle with it."

Grip sat there mumbling.

The strong drink had plainly got more and more hold on him; he had been out in the cold the whole day. His boots were wet and in bad condition. But he continued to drink; almost alone he had disposed of the punch extract.

"Come, come, don't sit there so melancholy--or there won't be any more to get," Simensen prodded him.

"No, no--no, no--more syllogisms, you mean--something Reierstad also can understand." He nodded his head in quiet, dull self-communion. "Came across an emaciated, pale child, who was crying so utterly helplessly down here. There is much that screams helplessly--you know, Reierstad!--if one has once got an ear for the music, and has not a river of tears--there, you drink, drink. Give me the bottle."

"It were best to get him to bed over in the servants' room, now," suggested Simensen.

"Perhaps the pig is drunk," muttered Grip.

Monday morning he was off again, before daylight, without having tasted anything; he was shy so early, before he had got his first dram to stiffen him up.

Grip had his own tactics. He was known over very nearly the whole of the country south of the Dovrefjeld.

As he had had fits of drinking and going on a spree, so he had had corresponding periods when he had lived soberly in the capital, studying and giving instruction. Again and again he awoke the most well-grounded hopes in his few old comrades and friends who remained there. A man with such a talent for teaching and such a remarkable gift for grasping the roots of words and the laws of language, not only in Greek and Latin, but right up into the Sanscrit, might possibly even yet attain to something. Based on his total abstinence for three and four months and his own strong self-control, they would already begin to speak of bringing about his installation at some school of a higher grade, when all at once, unexpectedly, it was again reported that he had disappeared from the city.

Then he would pop up again after the lapse of some weeks--entirely destitute, in one of the country districts, shaking and thin and worn from drink, from exposure, from lying in outhouses and in haylofts, seldom undressed and in a proper bed.

Along in the afternoon he appeared at the sheriff's house.

Gülcke was the only one of the functionaries of his time who still kept his office, after Rist had left. He was still there, nursed by a careful wife, who had ever surrounded him with a padding of pillows, visible and invisible.

Grip knew what he was doing; he wanted to find the mistress, while the sheriff was in his office.

She was sitting in an easy chair snugly behind the double windows in the sitting-room with her knitting-work and _The Wandering Jew_ before her, while her clever sister Thea, an unmarried woman now in the thirties, was looking after the dinner out in the kitchen.

Thinka took the care of the house upon herself after Miss Gülcke's death, and was her old husband's support and crutch unweariedly the whole twenty-four hours together.

And these greasy, worn books of fiction from the city, with numbers on their backs, were the little green spot left for her to pass her own life on.

Like so many other women of those times, to whom reality had not left any other escape than to take any man who could support her, she lived in these novels--in the midst of the most harshly creaking commonplaces--a highly strained life of fancy. There she imagined the passions she herself might have had. There were loves and hates, there were two noble hearts--in spite of everything--happily united; or she consoled picturesque heroes, who in despair were gazing into the billows.

There--in the clouds--was continued the life with its unquenchable thirst of the heart and of the spirit for which reality had not given any firm foothold--and there the matronly figure which had become somewhat large, cozily round and plump, and which was once the small, slender Thinka, transferred her still unforgotten Aas from one heroic form to another--from Emilie Carlén to James, from Walter Scott to Bulwer, from Alexander Dumas to Eugène Sue.

There in her domestic, bustling sister's place lay the sewing, with a ray of sunshine on the chair.

The dark inlaid sewing-table was Thea's inheritance from Ma. And the silver thimble, with the shell old and worn thin inside and out, broken and cracked at the top and on the edges, she used and saved, because her mother had used it all her time. It stood, left behind like a monument to Ma--to all the weary stitches--and pricks--of her honorably toiling, self-sacrificing--shall we call it life?

It was more at a pressure than by regularly knocking that the door to the sitting-room was opened, and Grip cautiously entered.

"You, Grip? No, no, not by the door, sit down up there by the window. Then my sister will get you a little something to eat,--oh, you can manage to eat a little bread and butter and salt meat, can't you? Well, so you are up this way, Grip?"

"Seeking a chance to teach, I may say, Mrs. Gülcke," was the evasive reply. "I am told you have heard from Jörgen over in America," he hastily added, to get away from the delicate subject.

"Yes, just think: Jörgen is a well-to-do, rich manager of a machine-shop over in Savannah. He has now written two letters and wants to have his eldest sister come over; but Inger-Johanna is not seeking for happiness any more--" she added with a peculiar emphasis.

There was a silence.

Grip, with a very trembling hand, placed the plate of bread and butter, which the maid had brought, on the sewing-table. He had drunk the dram on the side of the plate. There was a twitching about his lips.

"It gives me pleasure, exceeding great pleasure," he uttered in a voice which he controlled with difficulty. "You see, Mrs. Gülcke, that Jörgen has amounted to something I count as one of the few rare blades of grass that have grown up out of my poor life."

Sleigh-bells sounded out in the road; a sleigh glided into the yard.

"The judge's," Thinka said.

Grip comprehended that he would not be wanted just now, and rose.

Thinka hastened out into a side room and came in again with a dollar bill--"Take it, Grip--a little assistance till you get some pupils."

His hand hesitated a little before he took it. "One--must--must--" He seized his cap and went out.

Down by the gate he stopped a little, and looked back. The window had been thrown open there.

"Airing out after Grip," he muttered bitterly, while he took the direction of the valley, with his comforter high up around his neck and his cap, which down in the main parish had replaced his old, curled up felt hat, down over his ears; in the cold east wind he protected his hands in the pockets of his old thin coat, which was flapping about his emaciated form.

It was not an uncommon route, whither he went over the mountains in his widely extended rambles in the summer, or, as now, in the short, dark midwinter, when he was obliged to confine himself to the highway.

This country district had an attraction for him, as it were; he listened and watched everywhere he came for even the least bit of what he could catch up about Inger-Johanna, while he carefully avoided her vicinity.

"The young lady of Gilje," as she was called, lived in a little house up there, which she had bought with one of the four thousand dollars that old Aunt Alette had given to her by will.

She kept a school for the children of the region, and read with those of the captain, the newly settled doctor, and the bailiff.