Part 3

"Beastly cold, Peter,--beastly cold, Peter," came the answer from the tall figure wrapped in furs, as he threw down the reins, and, now a little stiff in his movements, stepped out of the sleigh, while the steaming horse shook himself in his harness so that the bells rang loudly. "I believe we are frozen stiff. And then this little rat we have for a horse would not go. It is a badger dog they have harnessed in order to dig our way through the snow-drifts. How are you, Peter? It will be pleasant to get into your house. How goes it?" he concluded, upon the steps, shaking the captain's hand. "Bring in the case of bottles, Lieutenant."

While the two gentlemen took off their furs and travelling-boots in the hall and paid for the horse, and Great-Ola carried the trunk up to the guest-chamber, an odor of incense diffused itself from the large room, which at once roused Captain Rönnow's cavalier instinct to a recollection of the lady, whom, in the joy of seeing his old comrade once more, he had forgotten. His large, stately figure stopped before the door, and he adjusted his stock.

"Do I look tolerably well, Peter, so I can properly appear before your wife?" he said, running his hand through his black curly hair.

"Yes, yes, fine enough--devilish fine-looking fellow, Lieutenant.--If you please, gentlemen. Captain Rönnow and Lieutenant Mein, Ma," he said, as he opened the door.

The mistress of the house rose from her place at the table, where she was now sitting with fine white knitting-work. She greeted Captain Rönnow as heartily as her stiff figure would allow, and the lieutenant somewhat critically. It was the governor's sister to whom the salaam was made, as Captain Rönnow afterwards expressed it--an old, great family.

She disappeared a little later into domestic affairs, to "get them something for supper."

Captain Rönnow rubbed his hands from the cold, wheeled around on one leg on the floor, and thus placed himself with his back to the stove. "I tell you we are frozen stiff, Peter,--but--Oh, Lieutenant, bring in the case of bottles."

When Lieutenant Mein came in again, Rönnow took a sealed bottle with a label, and held it, swinging by the neck, before the captain.

"Look at it, Peter Jäger! Look well at it!" and he moved over towards his friend. "Genuine arrack from Atschin in hither--farther--East--or West India. I present it to you. May it melt your heart, Peter Jäger!"

"Hot water and sugar, Ma!" shouted the captain out into the kitchen, "then we shall soon know whether you only mean to deceive us simple country folks with stories. And out with the whist-table till we have supper! We can play three-handed whist with a dummy."

"Brrr-rr-whew, what kind of stuff is it you've got in your tobacco box, Jäger?" said Captain Rönnow, who was filling his pipe at it; "powder, sneezing powder, I believe! Smell it, Lieutenant. It must be tansy from the nursery."

"Tideman's three crown, fellow! We can't endure your leaf tobacco and Virginia up here in the mountain districts," came from Jäger, who was pulling out and opening the card-table. "Only look at the next box under the lead cover, and you will find some cut-leaf tobacco, Bremen leaf, as black and high flavored as you want. Up here it is only to the goats that we can offer that kind, and to the folk who come from Bergen; they use strong tobacco there to dry out the wet fog."

The door opened, and the three girls and their little brother came in, carrying the tray with the glasses and the jug of hot water, which task they seemed to have apportioned among themselves according to the rules for the procession at the Duke of Marlborough's funeral, where, as is known, the fourth one carried nothing.

The tall, blond Kathinka marched at the head with the tray and glasses with the clinking teaspoons in them. She attempted the feat of curtseying, while she was carrying the tray, and blushed red when it was ready to slip, and the lieutenant was obliged to take hold of it to steady it.

He immediately noticed the next oldest, a brunette with long eyelashes, who was coming with the smoking water-jug on a plate, while the youngest, Thea, was immediately behind her with the sugar-bowl.

"But, my dear Peter Jäger," exclaimed Rönnow, astonished at the appearance of his friend's almost grown-up daughters, "when have you picked up all this? You wrote once about some girls,--and a boy who was to be baptized."

At the same moment Jörgen came boldly forward, strutting over the floor, and made his best bow, while he pulled his bristly yellow locks instead of his cap.

"What is your name?"

"Jörgen Winnecken von Zittow Jäger."

"That was heavy! You are a perfect mountain boy, are you not? Let me see you kick as high as your name."

"No, but as high as my cap," answered Jörgen, going back on the floor and turning a cart-wheel.

"Bold fellow, that Jörgen!" And with that, as Jörgen had done his part, he stepped back into obscurity. But while the gentlemen were pouring out the arrack punch at the folding-table, he kept his eyes uninterruptedly fastened on Lieutenant Mein. It was the lieutenant's regularly trimmed black moustache, which seemed to him like bits that he had not got into his mouth properly.

"Oh, here, my girl!" said Rönnow, turning to one of the daughters, who stood by his side while he was putting some sugar into the steaming glass, "what is your name?"

"Inger-Johanna."

"Yes, listen"--he spoke without seeing anything else than the arm he touched to call her attention. "Listen, my little Inger-Johanna! In the breast pocket of my fur coat out in the hall there are two lemons--I didn't believe that fruit grew up here in the mountains, Peter!--two lemons."

"No, let me! Pardon me!" and the lieutenant flew gallantly.

Captain Rönnow looked up, astonished. The dark, thin girl, in the outgrown dress which hung about her legs, and the three thick, heavy, black cables, braided closely for the occasion, hanging down her back, stood distinct in the light before him. Her neck rose, delicately shaped and dazzlingly fresh, from the blue, slightly low-cut, linsey-woolsey dress, and carried her head proudly, with a sort of swan-like curve.

The captain grasped at once why the lieutenant was so alert.

"Bombs and grenades, Peter!" he exclaimed.

"Do you hear that, Ma?" the captain grunted slyly.

"Up here among the peasants the children--more's the pity--grow up without any other manners than those that they learn of the servants," sighed the mother. "Don't stand so bent over, Thinka, straighten up."

Thinka straightened up her overgrown blond figure and tried to smile. She had the difficult task of hiding a plaster on one side of her chin, where a day or two before she had fallen down through the cellar trap-door in the kitchen.

Soon the three gentlemen sat comfortably at their cards, each one smoking his pipe and with a glass of hot arrack punch by his side. Two moulded tallow candles in tall brass candlesticks stood on the card-table and two on the folding-table; they illuminated just enough so that you could see the almanac, which hung down by a piece of twine from a nail under the looking-glass, and a part of the lady's tall form and countenance, while she sat knitting in her frilled cap. In the darkness of the room the chairs farthest off by the stove could hardly be distinguished from the kitchen door--from which now and then came the hissing of the roasting meat.

"Three tricks, as true as I live--three tricks, and by those cards!" exclaimed Captain Rönnow, eager in the game.

"Thanks, thanks," turning to Inger-Johanna who brought a lighted paper-lighter to his expiring pipe. "Th-a-nks"--he continued, drawing in the smoke and puffing it out, his observant eyes again being attracted by her. Her expression was so bright, the great dark eyes moving to and fro under her eyebrows like dark drops, while she stood following the cards.

"What is your name, once more, my girl?" he asked absently.

"Inger-Johanna," she replied with a certain humor; she avoided looking at him.

"Yes, yes.--Now it is my turn to deal! Your daughter puts a bee in my bonnet, madam. I should like to take her with me to Christiania to the governor's, and bring her out. We would make a tremendous sensation, that I am sure of."

"At last properly dealt! Play."

With her hands on the back of her father's chair, Inger-Johanna gazed intently on the cards; but her face had a heightened glow.

Rönnow glanced at her from one side. "A sight for the gods, a sight for the gods!" he exclaimed, as he gathered together with his right hand the cards he had just arranged, and threw them on the table. "Naturally I mean how the lieutenant manages dummy--you understand, madam," nodding to her with significance. "Heavens! Peter, that was a card to play.--Here you can see what I mean," he continued. "Trump, trump, trump, trump!" He eagerly threw four good spades on the table, one after another, without paying any attention to what followed.

The expression of the lady's face, as she sat there and heard her innermost thoughts repeated so plainly, was immovably sealed; she said, somewhat indifferently, "It is high time, children, you said good-night; it is past your bed-time. Say good-night to the gentlemen."

The command brought disappointment to their faces; not obeying was out of the question, and they went round the table, and made curtsies and shook hands with the captain and the lieutenant.

The last thing Jörgen noticed was that the lieutenant turned round, stretched his neck, and gaped like Svarten as they went out.

Their mother straightened up over her knitting-work. "You used to visit my brother's, the governor's, formerly, Captain Rönnow," she ventured. "They are childless folk, who keep a hospitable house. You will call on them now, I suppose."

"Certainly I shall! To refrain from doing that would be a crime! You have, I should imagine, thought of sending one of your daughters there. The governor's wife is a person who knows how to introduce a young lady into the world, and your Inger-Johanna--"

The captain's wife answered slowly and with some stress; something of a suppressed bitterness rose up in her. "That would be an entirely unexpected piece of good fortune; but more than we out-of-the-way country folk can expect of our grand, distinguished sister-in-law. Small circumstances make small folk, more's the pity; large ones ought to make them otherwise.--My brother has made her a happy wife."

"Done. Will you allow an old friend to work a little for your attractive little Inger?" returned Captain Rönnow.

"I think that Ma will thank you. What do you say, Gitta? Then you will have a peg to hang one of them on. It can't be from one of us two that Inger-Johanna has inherited her beauty, Ma!" said Captain Jäger, coughing and warding off his wife's admonitory look; "but there is blood, both on her father's and mother's side. Her great-grandmother was married off up in Norway by the Danish queen because she was too handsome to be at court--it was your grandmother, Ma! Fröken von--"

"My dear Jäger," begged his wife.

"Pshaw, Ma! The sand of many years has been strewed over that event."

When the game was again started, the captain's wife went with her knitting-work to the card-table, snuffed first one candle and then the other, leaned over her husband, and whispered something.

The captain looked up, rather surprised. "Yes, indeed, Ma! Yes, indeed--'My camel for your dromedary,' said Peter Vangensten, when he swapped his old spavined horse for Mamen's blooded foal. If you come with your arrack from Holland and farther India, then I put my red wine direct from France against it--genuine Bordeaux, brought home and drawn straight from the hogshead! There were just two dozen the governor sent us with the wagon the autumn Jörgen was baptized.--The two farthest to the left, Ma! You had better take Marit with you with the lantern. Then you can tell the governor's wife that we drank her health up here among the snow-drifts, Rönnow."

"Yes, she is very susceptible to that kind of thing, Peter Jäger."

When the captain's wife came in again, she had the stiff damask tablecloth on her arm, and was accompanied by a girl who helped move the folding-table out on the floor. It was to be set for supper, and the card-table must be moved into the best room, across the hall, which was now warm.

"Can you wait, Ma, till the rubber is played?"

Ma did not answer; but they felt the full pressure of her silence; her honor was at stake--the roast veal.

And they played on silently, but at a tearing pace as with full steam.

Finally the captain exclaimed, while Ma stood immovable with the cloth in the middle of the floor, "There, there, we must get away, Rönnow!"

In the chamber above, impatient hearts were hammering and beating.

While Jörgen went to sleep with the image before him of his lieutenant who gaped like Svarten when he came out of the stable door into the light, and after Torbjörg had put out the candle, the sisters stole out into the great, cold, dark hall. There they all three stood, leaning over the balustrade, and gazing down on the fur coats and mufflers, which hung on the timber wall, and on the whip and the two sabre sheaths and the case of bottles, which were dimly lighted by the stable lantern on the hall table.

They smelt the odor of the roast as it came up, warm and appetizing, and saw when the guests, each with his punch-glass in his hand and with flickering candle, went across the hall into the large room. They heard the folding-table moved out and set, and later caught the sound of the clinking of glasses, laughter, and loud voices.

Every sound from below was given a meaning, every fragment of speech was converted into a romance for their thirsty fancy.

They stood there in the cold till their teeth chattered and their limbs shook against the wood-work, so that they were obliged to get into bed again to thaw out.

They heard how the chairs made a noise when the guests rose from the table, and they went out in the hall again, Thinka and Inger-Johanna,--Thea was asleep. It helped a little when they put their feet upon the lowest rail of the balustrade, or hung over it with their legs bent double under them.

Thinka held out because Inger-Johanna held out; but finally she was compelled to give up, she could not feel her legs any more. And now Inger-Johanna alone hung down over the balustrade.

A sort of close odor of punch and tobacco smoke frozen together rose up through the stairs in the cold, and every time the door was opened and showed the heavy, smoky, blue gleam of light in the great room, she could hear officers' names, fragments of laughter, of violent positive assertions, with profane imprecations by all possible and impossible powers of the heavens above and the earth beneath, and between them her father's gay voice,--all chopped off in mince-meat every time the door was shut.

When Inger-Johanna went to bed again, she lay thinking how Captain Rönnow had asked her twice what her name was, and then again how at the card-table he had said, "I should like to take her with me to the governor's wife; we would make a tremendous sensation." And then what came next, "Naturally I mean how the lieutenant plays dummy,"--which they thought she did not understand.

The wind blew and howled around the corner of the house, and whistled down through the great plastered chimney-pipe in the hall--and she still, half in her dreams, heard Captain Rönnow's "Trump! trump! trump! trump!"

The next day Ma went about the house as usual with her bunch of keys; she had hardly slept at all that night.

She had become old before her time, like so many other "mas," in the household affairs of that period--old by bearing petty annoyances, by toil and trouble, by never having money enough, by bending and bowing, by continually looking like nothing and being everything--the one on whom the whole anxious care of the house weighed.

But--"One lives for the children."

That was Ma's pet sigh of consolation. And the new time had not yet come to the "mas" with the question whether they were not also bound to realize their own personal lives.

But for the children it was a holiday, and immediately after breakfast they darted into the great room.

There stood the card-table, again moved against the wall, with the cards thrown in a disorderly pile over the paper on which the score had been kept. It had been folded up and burned on one end for a lighter; and by its side, during a preliminary cleaning, the three pipes were lying, shoved aside. One window was still open, notwithstanding the wind blew in so that the fastening hook rattled.

There was something in the room--a pungent odor, which was not good; no, but there was, nevertheless, something about it--something of an actual occurrence.

Outside of the window Great-Ola stood with his hands on the shovel in the steep snow-drift, listening to Marit's account of how the captain had left a broad two-kroner piece for drink money on the table up in the guest-chamber and the lieutenant a shilling under the candlestick, and how the mistress had divided them among the girls.

"The lieutenant was not so butter-fingered," suggested Marit.

"Don't you know that a lieutenant would be shot if he gave as much as his captain, girl," retorted Great-Ola, while she hurried in with the keys of the storehouse and the meal-chest.

From the captain's sleeping-room the sound of his snoring could be heard for the whole forenoon. The guests did not go to bed, and started at six o'clock in the morning, when the post-boy came to the door--after the second bottle, also, of Rönnow's Indian arrack had been emptied, and a breakfast with whiskey, brawn, and the remnants of the roast veal had strengthened them for the day's journey.

But the thing to be done was to have a good time on the holiday. The sisters bustled about in the hall with their skis, and Jörgen was trying how the outer steps would do for a ski slide.

Soon they were out on the long steep hill behind the cow-barn--the ski-staff in both hands in front for a balance, their comforters streaming out behind their necks. In the jump Inger-Johanna lost her balance and almost--no, she kept up!

It was because she looked up to the window of the sleeping-room to see if her father appreciated her skill.

He was walking about and dressing. Ma had at last, about dinner time, ventured to wake him up.

_Chapter II_

Two days before Christmas Great-Ola with Svarten and his load was expected from Christiania, where he went twice a year, St. John's Day and Christmas, for the household supplies. To-day was the ninth day; but in sleighing like this, when the horse's feet struck through at every step, no one could be sure of anything.

The load, met on the run, far down the slippery, slushy hill, by the children and the barking, one-eyed Pasop, came along in the afternoon, while Svarten, even in his exertions on the steep part of the hill, neighed and whinnied with pleasure at being home again and longing to get into the stall by the side of Brunen. He had had quite enough of the journey, and worked himself into a foam in the harness to get over the Gilje hill.

Marit, the cook, and Torbjörg were out in the porch before the kitchen; the three girls and Jörgen stood wholly absorbed by the load and the horse, and the captain himself came down the stairs.

"Well, Great-Ola, how has Svarten pulled through? Sweaty and tired, I see! Did you get my uniform buttons? Ah, well! I hope you did not forget the tobacco!--And my watch, could they do anything with that?--Have you the bill?--Well, then, you must put up Svarten--he shall have an extra feed of oats to-day. What? What have you got there?"

Besides the bill, Great-Ola had taken out of his inside vest pocket a letter wrapped up in paper, blue postal paper, with a beautiful red seal on it. The captain looked at it a moment with surprise. It was the writing of the governor's wife and her seal in the wax, and without saying a word he hastened in to his wife.

The load from the city, the great event of the half year, occupied the attention of the whole household. Its contents interested all, not the children alone, and when Great-Ola, later in the evening, sat in the kitchen, where he was treated as a guest on account of his return home, and told about his trip to the city and about Svarten and himself, what miracles they had wrought on such and such hills--and the load weighed this time at least two hundred pounds more than the last--then there was a sort of glamor about him and Svarten, too.

One evening he had even found his way in a snowstorm, and once the salt-bag was forgotten, and then Svarten actually would not stir from the inn-yard, but lashed his tail at every cut of the whip, and kept looking back, until the boy came running out of the hall and shouted out about the bag, then off he started willingly enough.

The captain had gone in and had wandered up and down in the room for a while with the letter of the governor's wife in blue postal paper in his hand. He looked very much offended at Ma, when she seemed to think more about the load from the city than about his letter. She only suggested gently that they must talk about all that in the evening.

"All that--you say, Ma!--that Inger-Johanna is invited down there next winter--and we have Rönnow to thank for it. That is short and clear enough, I should think! What? What?" he roared out impatiently. "Is it not plain?--or have you some notions about it?"

"No--no, dear Jäger!"

"Well, then you should not delay the whole unloading of the goods with your quiet sigh, full of importance, and your secret meanings which always make me mad. You know I hate it! I go straight to the point always!"

"I was merely thinking about your uniform coat, whether the tailor has sent the pieces with it, you know--"

"You are right, you are right, Gitta," and out he rushed like a flash.

The unpacking went on in the kitchen, before the spice closet with its numerous compartments, where raisins, prunes, almonds, the different kinds of sugar, allspice, and cinnamon, were each put into their own places. Now and then fell a tribute, a prune, two almonds, three raisins, to each of the children; and it could not be denied that this load from the city was like a foretaste of Christmas Eve.

At first the captain was intensely interested in getting hold of the ink bottles, the tobacco, and the strong wares which were to be kept in the cellar--everything else must be put aside for them. And then he flew in and out, with one bill or another in his hand and a quill pen full of ink, to compare with the general bill which his wife had nailed up on the upper door of the spice closet.