This last piece of evidence was deposed to by several of the regular customers, or as they were described in the police report—"Several of the regular visitors to the refreshment-room, whose testimony may be considered as thoroughly reliable."

Several of these silent, somewhat tottering, figures who had been thus aroused from their dull, Saturday evening drowsiness, had already disappeared from the scene. Bottles and glasses remained standing with their contents.

"Might there not possibly be some other direct or indirect cause?"

It was at first hesitatingly that Mrs. Selvig could think of anything of the sort.

Unwilling as she was to go to extremes with an old, regular customer, she yet had been obliged this evening to give him to understand that whatever he required in future must be paid for in cash. His bill had now, after all the years he had enjoyed credit in the tap-room, grown so enormous, that she, a widow with two daughters, could no longer feel justified in letting it run on. During all the years he had frequented her house, she had faithfully kept her word never to send a bill home to his house. But a bill cannot lie for ever on the threshold, as the police know. That is the way of the world: it is the same for one as it is for the other—so it must just be got by a distress warrant. That was what she had said to him, unwilling though she had been to do so, and so unpleasant, she could truthfully say, as it was to disturb such a quiet, decent man.

It was high time to rid the bar of its encumbrance. The public-house bear had hunted up a hand-barrow, but had to get a couple more men to help carry. And they must have a proper contrivance with a cloth over, so that the whole thing would look like a hospital stretcher—a dead man with nothing but a tablecloth over him would make too great a commotion out in the street!

It was something of this kind that Mrs. Selvig and her daughters were busy looking out and putting together, out of some green bed-hangings. One's good name is dear to every one, and Mrs. Selvig felt that what had just taken place was a blow to the house.

It was now nearly dark in the tap-room. Holman's dark figure had been moved on to the stretcher, which stood on the floor ready to be lifted, and a message had been sent to Mrs. Holman.

Perhaps they delayed purposely; a little later in the evening when it was darker, and an undesirable sensation in the street would be avoided.

Silla's face was stiff with crying. There was no one in the room but her and Nikolai.

He stood by the counter, and she was sitting with her back to the window; there was no sound but the humming of a gnat in the half-darkness up under the curtain.

At last he broke the silence.

"He was kind, both to you and to me, as often as he dared be, you know."

Silla did not answer.

"He always dreaded going home at night so, you know. He'll be spared that now, and setting his foot inside this public-house again, too!"

"Father! Father!" broke from Silla, followed by a fit of violent sobbing.

"Listen, Silla!" he said, interrupted by the repressed weight on his own breast. "If you have no father, you have some one here who will take care of you, and knows what it is—I have never had any father either, nor ever seen any. And I will be a smith, as there won't be any more block-making for you now. I only wanted to tell you, so that you can remember it afterwards," he added softly—it did not look as if Silla were listening to him.

"And this evening I'll follow you right to the corner, and I'll stand there until everything is in, and I shall be outside to-night; so you know it, if anything is wanted."

"Yes, stay outside, Nikolai!" she whispered.

The public-house bear and the two bearers came in. They lifted the stretcher out through the door, and, with a little difficulty at the turn, down the steps, where a few spectators stood.

And so they went up the street—the dead with the two bearers and the public-house bear in front, and Silla and Nikolai behind.

At the place where they were to part, he pressed the basket, which she had forgotten, into her hand, and then stood looking after them.



CHAPTER VI

THE FACTORY GIRLS

What becomes of all the swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets and outskirt alleys of the capital—children of whom no one has any account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day become large male and female fish?

Disease wields a broad broom in the earliest age. The harbour takes them into its embrace; the streets with their stray livelihoods, or a wandering vagabond life, takes them; refuges, police-stations, prisons and the house of correction take them. In later years, labour also, on a great scale, has taken them into its embrace—the factory doors stand wide open.

People who now and then have an attack of conscientious scruples about existences to which they may possibly stand in original relationship, can draw a sigh of relief. The responsibility is at any rate diminished, as the chances now are that they will be drawn into Labour's educating wheel; and then, too, the matter is in certain respects carried over into moral territory.

There they sat, the more ripely-developed youth of the town, in rows up in the rooms of the Veyergang firm's great factory, and minded the whirring shuttles, balls and rollers—Swedish Lena, and Stina, and Kristofa, and Kalla, and Josefa and Gunda, and all the rest of them. Had any one asked them about their parents, they would now and then have been hard put to it for an answer.

The conversation went on very busily at the top of the room; it was even continued with nods and glances whenever one or other of the controlling authorities turned his steps in that direction. They had to gesticulate, nod, talk in a loud voice, but they got on best with their faces close up to one another in all this whizzing, where the band-wheels each whirred away for their little sub-division of power, the boards of the floor quivered and shook with the movement of the engines, and the waterfall outside in the sun, with a thundering and deafening roar, buried the great water-wheel beneath its creamy, powerful splendour.

They were for the most part quite young vagabond girls of from barely sixteen to twenty, who were making the noise up there: new-comers, more or less, without practice, who were still striving to acquire the knack. And that was Silla Holman, she with the dark hair, slender and freckled, with heelless slippers and a large spot of paraffine on the front of her dress, who coughed and questioned, and questioned and coughed, while her eyes looked like two little round, black fire-balls, and her weak, flat chest went up and down with the mere exertion of making herself heard. She sat there among the youngest; her fingers worked among the spools, and now and then she looked up like a bird.

They had got over the angry dispute about Josefa's new braided jacket. She need not try to persuade any one that she had got the money from her stepmother; no, let any one who liked believe that, but neither Gunda nor Jakobina did! Then Kristofa had related her wonderful adventure of last Sunday—she was always passing through remarkable occurrences, most wonderfully interesting, if not true to quite a corresponding degree, in which fine ladies and gentlemen played the principal parts, and she chanced to be the initiated one.

And now the conversation had turned upon something so interesting that Silla listened with both her ears. There was to be dancing on Sunday evening up at the Letvindt, and the talk was of handkerchiefs, bows, and finery—which some possessed and others had to borrow—and of who danced best and treated most liberally. Kristofa was able to inform them that there was to be a violin and a clarionet, and that both students and ordinary people and ships' officers were to be there!

Some strangers who were going over the factory came up the room, and stopped and questioned and examined. And the young workwomen sat each in her place, with head bent over her work, as if she had no thought for anything but her reels.

The morning light shone with a kind of dizzy stillness in from the great windows high up in the wall, over human beings, machinery and bales.

It was nearly twelve. The last hour always dragged so slowly, and the smell of oil and the heat from the engines seemed to increase and become almost stupifying.

Still a few more long stifling minutes. At last the bell rang.

And dressed, as if by a stroke of magic, the factory girls swarmed down the steps, with their breakfast-tins in their hands, in their neat aprons, handkerchiefs nicely tied under their chins, and knitted shawls crossed over their chests.

Oh, the bright spring air!—to take a good breath of it! Silla, hot and thirsty, knocked off a bit of frozen snow from the fence with her tin and ate it.

With her head full of all that Kristofa had held out to her about the dance at the Letvindt, she wandered down arm-in-arm with a long row of her companions. The road out from the factory was quite crowded; lower down it widened out, with a street-like pavement.

"Look, look, Kristofa! Veyergang has come back from England already!" The young girls nudged each other, highly interested. "New topcoat; light, light brown!"

"Pooh! I saw him come by the steamer yesterday, him and a whole heap of English people. They were all brown together; I counted exactly seven different kinds of dirt-colour!" It was Josefa who was using her tongue; she had had practice at a milliner's.

"He'll have to take care of the oil!" tittered one.

"He's awfully handsome! Look what a grand forehead! Oh, what a lovely red silk handkerchief in his breast-pocket!" whispered Kristofa to Silla.

The row squeezed themselves up against the fence. The person in question came by humming carelessly, with his head held high and swinging his walking-stick. All the young girls stared respectfully and stupidly straight in front of them, though not without a glance out of the corner of their eye. He disappeared up the stream, cleaving it like a salmon.

"He parts his hair at the back of his head!"—"His hat is like a pudding-basin!"—"Don't breathe upon him, he is so thin!"—"He is his own father's son!"—"Oh, what a conceited stick!"

They had turned to look after him.

"He isn't nearly so stern as he walks there; but in the factory, you know, he has to be as firm as a rock. Johanna Sjoberg, who does clear starching, recognised him down at the masked ball at the fair; she told me so herself."

"You can just fancy," struck in Jakobina, "what a number of fine people come to the rooms in that way. You think you are only waltzing with a common man, and perhaps it is the son of the richest man in the town! But if you are a little careful you can easily tell by the way they dance, or by their watch, or their shirt-collar, or because they chew such fine tobacco."

"He looked at us, did you notice?" whispered Kristofa eagerly into Silla's ear.

"Yes, because he knows me," said Silla, a little confused at his having fixed his eyes on her.

There was a burst of laughter.

"Is that young crow going to caw too?"

The young crow grew hot beneath her handkerchief, but she did not answer. She knew quite well, that he did know her; he had been in the office when she went out with her mother to the Consul-General's to apply for a place in the factory.

A stream of girls from another factory fell like a tributary into theirs, and then through ramifications of streets and lanes, the whole flowed out into the irregular part of the town that was built of wood, below—through narrow entrances and up narrow flights of steps, into brown, red, white or grey houses, houses with slate roofs, with turf roofs, with tile roofs, and new houses that had barely been roofed.

Silla slipped into a narrow, damp entry. The sun shone through the cracks in the rotten woodwork full of bent rusty nails, and from time to time a dirty stream issued from beneath the gate, and disappeared into the gutter.

She stopped a moment as she heard her mother's righteous indignation venting itself within, in the familiar, dry, measured tones; and it was hesitatingly and with a depressed look that she opened the gate, behind which stood Mrs. Andersen's servant-maid, furiously red, and incapable of defending herself, while Mrs. Holman, her skirts fastened up, and her feet astride over the gutter-board, was rinsing and wringing out clothes. She was working calmly and deliberately; nothing in her cold grey eyes betrayed agitation.

"Mrs. Andersen ought at least to have the good sense to understand that clothes that had been used so long couldn't be got ready in one week. For that matter, you're welcome to tell her so from me. And I haven't been accustomed either, even in my humble position, to send clothes to the wash not patched or mended; and I can tell you that both Mother Nilsen next door and the people in this house have wondered to see the things that a person, who calls herself a chandler's wife, lets her husband and children wear! No, you needn't contradict me, my good girl; when I say a thing, it's the truth. And the stockings—we'll say nothing about them; for one heel was gathered up with a piece of twine, so that it was a disgrace to stand and wash them. People may look as high and mighty as they like—the wash speaks out!"

With slow, crushing significance she turned to her daughter.

"If you had come a little sooner, Silla, you might have saved me a great deal of work. But it's of no consequence; the sooner I'm dead and gone, the better. I've never wanted to live either, since your father went away."

"I'll help you wring, mother."

"Now it's all done? Many thanks! But it would have shown a little forethought, if you, who have only been sitting up in the factory, had hurried yourself a little to help your mother, who's had to stand and work hard all the morning."

"Thanks for the information, Mrs. Holman." It was Mrs. Andersen's servant, who had at last recovered her voice. "But I think you won't need to trouble yourself any more about our washing. It's much too plain and humble for such grand sentiments."

She dropped a curtsey, and then added, as she vanished quickly out of the gate:

"If only your soap-lye was half as sharp as your tongue!"

It was always Mrs. Holman's strong point, and one on which she prided herself, that she was always hungering and thirsting after righteousness in this world—in others. Inasmuch as part of this sentence also points inwards towards one's self, she was fortunate in finding her own doorstep well swept. She was also in the favourable position of being able to lay down both the law and the exceptions.

To every one comes a time when he is surrounded by a lustre, and that blockmaker Holman had existed was something which was really properly understood—perhaps by his wife too—only after he had disappeared from the scene.

The fact is, that it makes a great difference to a household whether it has the husband's work and weekly wages to subsist upon or not, and as a further aggravation of the situation, her dead husband's bill at Mrs. Selvig's thrust its extremely unexpected, unwelcome face into Mrs. Holman's room. Mrs. Holman could never get into her head that that bill was correct—why, Holman had had his fixed, regular pocket-money!

Mrs. Holman's bitter observations were numerous when she found herself compelled to choose between want and seeking work.

She had known to a pin's point how she would employ her husband's earnings in her own room, and occupied herself also with the way in which others might have things in theirs. During all these years, she had, so to speak, sat comfortably on the top of the load and driven; but now, unfortunately, the day had come when she herself must get down and draw—and that she felt herself less fitted for.

It was when brought into this critical situation that Mrs. Holman thought that if an exertion was ever to be made, it must be made now—by whom, she left unsaid. To this end she availed herself of her acquaintance with Consul Veyergang to get her daughter Silla taken into his factory. Unemployed hands must have something to do, and it would, at any rate, yield some small compensation for the weekly money lost with her husband. If she then stayed at home and kept house well, and in addition mended and took in washing when it came in her way, no one would venture to charge Mrs. Holman with not knowing how to do her duty during these hard days.

And she still discharged this duty of hers by strictly keeping Silla from passing her leisure time in idleness, which was dangerous for young people. Sewing and darning and patching all the evening—there could be no better way of being trained in steadiness.

But it was just while Silla sat and sewed and darned and patched in the evening by the low oil-lamp that the dancing and gaiety were best carried on in her head, and that all Kristofa's and her friends' word-pictures transformed themselves into actual experiences. Bubble after bubble, the one more wonderful than the other, floated up or burst right in front of Mrs. Holman's nose, while she sat knitting. She saw nothing, only wondered a little sometimes what there could be to smile and laugh at in the heel of a stocking.



CHAPTER VII

"THE WORLD IS RIGHT ENOUGH AFTER ALL"

Down in Haegberg's smithy it looked as if it were going to be not only blue Monday,[2] but blank Tuesday too. With the exception of one solitary figure, it was black and empty. Outside the door a row of iron picks, spades and crowbars, were waiting to be sharpened for the navvies on the new harbour works.

[Footnote 2: An extra day's holiday taken by workmen after the lawful bank holiday is called "blue Monday"; if still another follows, it is called "blank Tuesday."]

Haegberg was going about with his leather apron hanging down over one shoulder, as furious as a Berserk. There were no respectable men and apprentices to be had nowadays; but he would give them notice man by man, as sure as his name was Haegberg!

One was standing there grinding. And he had stood there quite alone, filing with all his might at his journeyman's probation work, the whole of St. John's day yesterday. That's how it is: one goes on the spree, and another pinches and is so stingy about his money, that he would willingly lay his soul in the fire for it. The fellow was a good enough workman, to be sure, and if he had not had that affair with the police, then—yes, no—no, yes, to be sure, he was acquitted of that, so he was!

The person in question was Nikolai, who had entered Haegberg's smithy again to complete his years of apprenticeship.

Ah, at last! There came two men sauntering over the yard to the smithy.

Haegberg turned round and pretended not to see them; on consideration, it was not the time to part with one's men. He only went up himself and took one of the crowbars out of the forge; and when the two culprits arrived, he stood there, tall, lean, strong, and grey-haired, hammering so that the sparks flew.

This piece of work, unworthy of the master, spoke louder than the angriest reproaches, and when in silence he flung the crowbar down, and began sharpening a pick, it was sufficiently evident that there was thunder in the air.

By degrees during the morning they arrived, with staring eyes, beating temples, and faces either pale or red from being up all night, one with a swollen eye, another with a plaster across his nose. Their voices were hoarse, and they each went silently to work. They must exert themselves if they were to get through all the tool-work that remained.

Work went on uninterruptedly almost the whole afternoon, without a word being spoken over the whole smithy. By that time most of the work had been got through, and Haegberg himself went out to do business in the town.

Those who were left at work shone with perspiration, and either because work had been the best cure for the excesses of the preceding Midsummer Day and Midsummer Eve, or it was the general relief at the departure of the master, one man began suddenly to sing, a couple more to yawn and stretch themselves lazily in the enjoyment of their pleasant recollections; and then the talk began about the way they had each spent their holiday.

Only Nikolai went on undisturbed; he cared more about a screw-hole in the hinge on his probation work than all their Midsummer Eve outings, and if he only worked away now, it would be finished by the end of the month.

His small hammer sounded above their talk,—the tar-barrels, wood-stacks and old house-walls that they had burnt, and their drinking and merriment until they had not a penny left,—haw-haw!

The hammer rang above it all.

Jan Peter had gone in a boat over to the islands, and seen so many bonfires,[3] both there and on the hills round, that it was impossible to count them.

[Footnote 3: It is the custom in Norway on Midsummer Eve to burn large bonfires, which can be seen for many miles round.]

Yes, when a fellow's drunk!

The hammer went on again.

One man stretched himself and yawned with the whole Midsummer holiday in his jaws. "Up on Grefsen ridge, cold punch had flowed down the hill as good as free. Veyergang's son had given the girls at the factory an old boat from Maridal Lake and half a barrel of pitch; heard the cuckoo and had larks all night—came down again when it was nearly eight o'clock."

The hammer rang no longer.

"Veyergang's son—the girls at Veyergang's factory!" Nikolai stood, anxious and uncertain, listening, and now and again glancing quickly and sharply over at the man who was speaking.

Then he washed off the soot, and disappeared.

* * * * *

Silla had been down to the Valsets' cottage to fetch the customary evening pint of milk, when at the gate she met Nikolai. He said he had seen her go in, but she knew quite well that he had been watching for her.

"You can't think what fun I had on Midsummer Eve, Nikolai!" she said, holding out the can by the handle towards him. "If you only knew! No, never in all my life!"

"Up on Grefsen ridge?"

"How did you know; tell me, how did you know?"

"Oh, I—one of the smiths was up there. But I can't understand how you could get away from her at home."

"No, it was a near chance, too, I can tell you!" She looked round, and said in a cautious whisper: "Mother doesn't know but that I lay and turned over in my bed at home all Midsummer night. She went to eat St. John's porridge with aunt out at Asker, and I was to stay at home, and iron; but at nine o'clock, I said good-bye and went my way. Oh Nikolai!"—she clapped her hands, laughing—"you should have heard how she scolded yesterday morning when she came back, because I was still in bed! Did you hear that we were treated to punch, too?"

"Who gave it you?"

"Ah, wouldn't you like to know! But, Nikolai, you won't tell. It was a certain person who treated us."

"Indeed!"

"He came up to see that they did not light the bonfire too near the wood. Yes, you must know, Nikolai, that it was no less a person than young Veyergang! There was a Midsummer party at his father's, and they were to see the fire from the stairs at exactly half-past eleven.

"And then he treated them to punch? You too?"

"It was just me! 'Her with the black eyes,' he said."

"Perhaps he has spoken to you before, too?"

"Yes, indeed; he knows perfectly well that my name is Silla. I meet him every single day, you must know."

Nikolai made a movement as if he were bringing down a hammer on the hillside. "Indeed!"

"Last Saturday in the office, when he had reckoned a krone too much in the pass-book, he said I could keep it and spend it on cakes."

"Ha! ha! Did he say that? Wonderful, how kind he is!" Nikolai said this with something that was meant for laughter. "The cook is very kind, too, when she feeds the goose so as to get hold of it!"

He stood with one arm round the gate-post, looking at her; she had grown so pretty and elegant, and almost taller since he had seen her last. "A young girl who doesn't even know that she is pretty."

Silla pouted; her whole expression was one of supercilious disavowal.

"If they offer her a cake, or a handkerchief, or a little fun, she stretches out her neck and runs up. I should think you might understand that, Silla, from all you see round you! How many of them, I should like to know, will ever come to be the wife of an honest working-man? They manage to dance a few times, and then it's all over. And they wanted to be just as kind to you now, Silla! That Veyergang is on the watch for you! If I'm not on the watch for him——" He suddenly looked pale and ugly.

"What are you thinking of, Nikolai? Don't go on like that!"

"You may well say what was I thinking of, to stand there grinding and filing away the whole month at my probation work, and then let you go up there among that pack of wolves. But I was born like that—that everything should go wrong with me!"

Silla stood, as she always did when Nikolai put on this tone, downcast and dispirited, her slender figure bending forwards, and her eyes on the ground.

"We two, Silla," he continued at length, with a shake as if of resolution, but his voice trembled—"we two have been, as it were, brought up together. And with things as they were, if they could make me go wrong, it would have been still easier for you to be twisted by them, for I was strong, you see; but you were weak, and had always to creep like a cat among lies and difficulties. And so—so—I thought that we two—who have always stood by one another—and I haven't had anyone else I could trust, as you know, Silla, and neither have you—that we should join hands. And if you're of the same mind, then——"

He had clasped his broad hands round the gate-post, and was squeezing it with all the strength of his square-set figure, while he waited for her answer. He gazed at her bent head, but she did not look up; and he drew a deep breath, for he felt that he must go on.

"And now I've got together a little money, and not bought anything, and have filed and filed away at my probation work; because when I become journeyman, and another year has passed, and I've laid by a little, then—then it might be that you could get away from the factory dirt and the ordering at home both at once, and be a real smith's wife, Silla. You've never had any one to take care of you as I've done, you know; and you don't know how good I'll be to you! For a fellow who hasn't had either father or mother, and since I was up at the police-station I haven't had many companions either—" But here his emotion overpowered him.

"Such an uncommonly pretty smith's wife you would make, Silla! If any one has eyes for a smith, it's you; they are like sparks in the fire! And then to come home and see only the top of your pretty little black head at the room door! In spite of having always been treated like a dog, and worse than that—like a thief, it would all be nothing at all, if that was how it could end. One's own room with a lock on the door and the chest, that would be something better than being dragged round a dancing-hall, Silla, by fine fellows and sailors."

The last words, which were uttered in warm excitement, would have been better left unsaid; for, from standing melted and overcome, with tears in her eyes, she suddenly fired up against the accusation.

"Do you want to deny me a little pleasure, too, Nikolai? I'm not to see any one, not to go anywhere. Oh no! I'm to be a girl who has never danced, a regular queer bird, that's first been kept in a cage by her mother, and then by——" her voice quivered, and she began to cry. "Is that what you call being kind to me, Nikolai? You must be trying to make me afraid of you, too!"

"Afraid of me?—of me, Silla?"

"Don't they all look upon me as a baby that's tied to her mother's apron-strings? And now you come and want to help her, Nikolai. That's right! That's right! Only keep me in! Oh yes, you and mother! It's only a question of who gets the power over me. But you'd better take care, Nikolai!"

She began to cry bitterly in impotent rage.

"Oh, well, cry away! I won't say anything. You've got some one else to comfort you for a little while," he added moodily.

She suddenly sprang up, went up to him, and laid her arm confidingly on his shoulder.

"Don't you know that I'll be your wife, Nikolai?" she said, looking full and ardently into his eyes; there were still tears on her dark, freckled face.

"Well, if you will, Silla, you shall see who can work."

"But mother, Nikolai! Oh, I'm so frightened—so frightened only that she'll get to know that we sometimes meet. She looks at me so hard every time I've been an errand, and I've always been gone so long. But when I sit darning and patching of an evening, I sometimes imagine that you come in so fine and rich, and that you own the whole of Haegberg's smithy, so that mother has to give in."

"No, do you think about that, Silla? Then I will come. She'll have to give in like smoke, if I come only with my credentials, and my honest trade as well."

What was it that had happened that light, hazy, summer evening, when the waterfall thundered out beneath the bridge, when the trees seemed to swell with new budding leaves, and the sun glittered on the windows here and there? Was he intoxicated, or was it the evening that had taken an extra Midsummer carouse? The last he saw of Silla was that she hurried homewards with her can, and that she had looked round at him, as she turned into the road among the houses.

The world was right enough after all. When he reckoned it up properly, it was not at all so unreasonable, even if the lock did sometimes get out of order; and then—well, then one had to be both strong and neat-handed to get it open again.

No, it was right enough. You only see that when you get inside, and so there must be police and masters and order in everything, so that it can lock.

Nikolai stood riveting and meditating down in the smithy. He had now got his journeyman's credentials, and everything was rose-colour. The fact that he and the world were becoming reconciled showed in shining characters over the whole of his broad face. His short, strong figure moved with a newly-acquired, quick confidence at his work.

He worked now for journeyman's wages, and could save up a nice little sum each week. One fortunate circumstance in the case was that he never dared make Silla a present of anything, neither handkerchiefs nor anything else, because of Mrs. Holman. A penny saved is a penny gained, and she should have it all in good time.

On Saturday evenings, as soon as he had had a little wash in the cooling-water, he took his way up towards the manufacturing part of the town. He carried his hammer and pincers, and an iron plate or a lock in his hand; he must look as if he were engaged in his lawful work. And then came the chance whether on his way up or down he caught a glimpse of Silla.

It was quite a chance, and it sometimes happened that he just met Mrs. Holman instead. He must put up with that; at any rate, he looked right into the street there, in the cluster of houses where Silla walked several times a day. But what he found more difficult to put up with was, that on those occasions when he was fortunate, she was walking arm-in-arm with two or three other factory-girls, so that he scarcely got more than the one glimpse and short nod from her before they turned in now here, now there.

What did she want to go loitering about in the evening with those dissipated girls for? Was that the sort of thing for Silla? She was neither old enough nor wise enough to understand what she was getting mixed up in, and what a fine gentleman meant who nodded to her—for the sake of her pretty eyes. Amuse themselves? Yes, go round in the mill, until they come out crushed and ground!

No! She must come out of this.

And so he must work away with his file, and add one week's earnings to another, until he had made the silver hook large enough to draw her to him.

Yes, once she was with him!—he forgot himself in thoughts about house-rent and wedding outlay.



CHAPTER VIII

AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL

Some time after Nikolai had got his credentials, he was pleasantly surprised by a visitor—he could hardly believe his own eyes—none other than his mother, who was watching for him one Saturday afternoon, outside the basement where he dined.

She had heard that he had become a journeyman, and could not rest until she got a lift on one of the plank-loads which was going in to town, and paid him a visit. She was so glad. If he knew how many sighs she had heaved for his sake, and how many bitter tears she had shed—the big, handsome, half peasant-clad woman was red in the face, and wept and dried her eyes incessantly on her folded pocket-handkerchief, while she gave expression to her emotion and joy over the way in which everything had turned out, as if by special guidance.

She had been so unfortunate for a long time; but now that she had got her son again, everything looked different for her. Oh, how big and broad and fine he had grown—a regular smith! He had a frock-coat now for Sundays, hadn't he? And he must have a hat, too. He must let her advise him; she knew all about it from what she had seen in the world.

It was with quite strange, at first almost mixed, feelings that Nikolai thus suddenly saw a mother fall down to him—some day a father might come tumbling down too!

It was so many years since he had thought of her, and the picture he really had of her was buried in the bitter salt slough of tears in the depths of his recollections, which he was far from being in the mood to stir up. There were things within him, which he avoided from an instinctive feeling of safety in the whole of his new, happy existence; but such a thing as finding his mother again must surely belong to the happiness of the new Nikolai, the journeyman smith! Yes, of course, he was fond of her, and it was immensely affecting.

And while he walked beside her, and was glad too, and kind and obliging, and gave up his Saturday afternoon with half a day's pay, he had, without exactly intending it, spent on a present—an exceedingly large, gay, flowered silk handkerchief—as much as it had taken him a fortnight to scrape together; and, besides that, had paid for some fine bread and a ham, which she had to take back with her, and of which she even tried a few goodly slices down in the town by way of afternoon refreshment.

She had an appetite, and she could not be very much accustomed to economising either;—this was about the sum of the happy, filial comments that Nikolai made to himself after the meeting. In addition to this, he felt himself unexpectedly lightened of a good deal of money; and it was in a rather dispirited mood that he went up in the evening in the hope of seeing Silla, and telling her of his new happiness.

The whole of that side of the town up under the hill already lay in shadow, and in the oppressively warm evening, labourers were walking with their coats over their shoulders, while sounds of life and noise rose here and there from the shops in the manufacturing district below.

Nikolai had traversed in vain the district surrounding the Valsets' cottage, keeping constant watch at the same time down the broad high-road, which went past the gate, and the footpath that crept straight across the field down behind it. Silla was not to be seen. A girl went with a bucket from the cowshed into the pent-house. She looked up towards him and laughed, and the consequence was that Nikolai continued his way towards the factory without once turning round. They must be able to see through the walls in there! And they had already begun to wonder at his coming there so often.

The waterfall was turned off, so that only a white streak ran over the dam and fell drop by drop upon the wheel. A cart was rattling along the road in front of him. Now it stopped to unload; the load was tumbled off with one tilt. It was mould that they were driving to the garden outside the office building at the factory.

Within the fence were a number of women and girls busily at work. They were raking, pulling up and planting, while a man followed with a hose; and out of the open window, with his straw hat on his head, hung young Veyergang, and talked.

There stood Mrs. Holman, with arms akimbo, beside one of the black flower-beds, inspecting some plant that she had patted down with her hand; and—Silla! on her knees, pulling up weeds into her apron from a bed close to the house. It was with her Veyergang was joking from the window, and she shook her head and laughed, and looked up for a moment—she dared not answer because of Mrs. Holman.

It was as if a pair of pincers with many claws had suddenly taken hold of Nikolai's heart, and he all at once remembered so vividly the day when he had had Ludvig Veyergang under his fists.

He went back with a weight like lead upon his breast, and sat down on the edge of a ditch in the field, whence he could, unseen, keep an eye upon all who came down the road.

She had looked so much too pretty when she raised her head with that suppressed merriment in her glance. This was what his thoughts would return to, and he only saw before him what he suffered from.

An hour had passed. Almost stupidly he had watched one after another come down the road; but all at once his face changed colour. Ludvig Veyergang was sauntering past, dashing and easy, with his stick held loosely in his hand. He had red cheeks like a girl, and fine black whiskers beneath the straw hat, and he half closed his grey eyes to look about him, while he hummed softly.

Nikolai gazed despondently after him, as he disappeared down the road.

Again this same old hopelessness before a superior force, this feeling for which he could never find words and vent, unless it some day happened that—he closed his eyes, and there was a compressed, violent expression about his mouth and chin.

There came Silla by Mrs. Holman's side, with bent head, like a willow that is bowed by its growth. Sometimes she stole a glance around, like a school-girl who avoids her teacher's eye.

They separated at the Valsets' cottage; Silla went in after the evening's milk.

She came out again with the can, and took the path over the meadow. She went quickly, smiling to herself, and an almost frightened expression came into her face when Nikolai rose out of the bush by the ditch.

"Do you start when you see me, Silla?"

"How fierce you look!" she answered jestingly.

"You did say you'd be my wife, didn't you, Silla?"

"What makes you say that now, Nikolai? It's such a long time to then."

"I may need to hear it once more. When you aren't more sure than I am, you like to feel twice whether the strap you are holding on to is firmly fastened, or if it will give way. You have got so much into your head since you came up here to the factory."

"Take care! Just you take care, Nikolai. You have become so dreadfully afraid for me lately," she said, laughing saucily; "but I've become a little grown-up too. It's only you who don't see it, and stand there like a post! But you can't think how awfully busy I am now. As soon as ever I've swallowed my supper, I go up to the factory again. I and Kristofa and Kalla and Josefa have got the whole of the weeding and tidying up in the office garden, down all the peas and carrots, and cabbage-beds as well; and when it grows over in the autumn, we shall have that too."

Nikolai only stood reckoning. Twenty-seven dollars, subtracting what he had spent on his mother to-day—the ham, too, for he would not get that back—that was what he owned, and he needed at least twice as much again before he could get the most necessary things for his room. Only to get her out of this, even if he had to work day and night.

Aloud he only said cautiously: "If we are only wise, and careful, and look well ahead, perhaps we may be sitting in our own room by next spring, Silla. But so many things may happen in between," he added huskily, with a deep-drawn sigh.

"I really believe there'll be neither life nor courage in you until you're married, Nikolai," she said, laughing; "you're so horrid to meet now, that it's enough to make one quite sad and uncomfortable the whole evening. A nice sweetheart you are!" She swung roguishly round on her heel, with the can extended, and ran down the road, nodding a farewell.

He had not got so far as to tell her what he had originally gone up there for—the news about his mother, and, to tell the truth, he had completely forgotten it; but it would be time enough next time he met her. And it must not be too long to that, things looking as they did now.

* * * * *

A few weeks afterwards some one inquired for him.

A peasant carter, in a state of great uncertainty about his load, had stopped outside the eating-house. Part of the load was made up of his mother's big chest, which the man had undertaken to drive to town, and leave for the meantime at Nikolai's. Barbara herself was to follow in a day or two.

She must have some project in her head! Perhaps she was thinking of going out to service again.

And one evening when he came home he found a red wooden box and a pair of laced boots upon the chest. His mother must have been there!

Half an hour later she appeared. She had only been out to buy a little new rye-bread, cheese, and butter to take up to her lodgings this evening.

In the meantime she cut some for herself and offered some to him.

Her ample figure, in addition to her effects, almost filled Nikolai's narrow little bedroom. She had become rather short of breath, and acquired a double-chin with so much sitting indoors; the lower part of her face, which, in the brilliancy of youth, had been covered with pure, healthy mountain roses, now, as it moved in the process of eating, gave only the impression of powerful crushing with still solid teeth, in which, however, toothache, from many scalding cups of coffee, had made here and there serious inroads. While she sat on the chest and he on the bed, she gave expression to the following:

The farmer with whom she had bargained to live—for eighteen dollars a year and help at the busy seasons, while she found herself in coffee—was so pinching and mean about the board, that she had been obliged to buy one thing and another herself; well, he had seen the ham himself, and knew what she had been accustomed to at the Veyergangs'. She could truly say that she had swallowed her food with tears many a time, when she thought of all that she had done for Ludvig and Lizzie, that she had carried them in her arms and been more to them than their own mother. And then to think that the reward of all this should be hard work in the hay and corn harvest! No, she was praised by too many mouths for that!

She had waited patiently, too, thinking they would remember old Barbara. Oh no! one would have to remind them one's self, if that were to be!

But now that she had Nikolai there, she had thought and meditated and reflected about setting up a little shop in the town. And she had been out to the Consul's to-day.

He was cross when she went into the office, and snappish; but she knew him, and began talking cleverly:

"How is mistress and Mr. Ludvig and Miss Lizzie, might I be so bold as to ask? Bless me, they must have grown so tall and so grand now, that they couldn't be expected to know a poor servant again!"

"'Thin—thin as laths,' he laughed. 'You might easily hold them one in each arm now! But you must have eaten up the whole barn up there; I didn't remember that you were so big, Barbara. I should think he's had to give up house and lands, that farmer?' he said, to tease me.

"'Thank you, I wasn't accustomed to cattle fodder at the Consul's house,' said I; 'and it's me, rather, that's in such circumstances that I must leave. That man takes pretty good care that he is not cheated.'

"And then I talked about Ludvig and Lizzie until I began to cry.

"'And that harum-scarum boy of yours?' he asked.

"'Thank you,' said I, 'my son Nikolai is now a finished journeyman smith in this city.'

"And then I told him my thoughts of coming to town to go into trade. 'I have always noticed that it has been better to be behind the counter than in front of it,' I said.

"Then he laughed. 'You want to make yourself a new storehouse in town, I see, Barbara.'

"'Yes, sir, when it can be done honestly, and with a little help; every one aims at their own maintenance.'

"And then he promised me right down a free room and kitchen in one of the houses up in the manufacturing part of the town for a whole year!"

As mother and son sat opposite to one another, they were not without a certain similarity; but where the leading of fate had turned the features of his broad, intelligent face into muscle and energy, it had in Barbara relaxed all the springs into dull, ponderous fat.

It was not, however, without a certain amount of enthusiasm that she now unfolded her plans for the little business, and how she should procure credit, a little at each place; she still had acquaintances at the shops in the neighbourhood, from the time she was at the Veyergangs'. Afterwards it was only to sell out, pay for the old, get new again; it all went round like a winch!

But she must have a little more ready money, for hers would not go far enough. Now, if Nikolai could help her with a little; it would all lie in the goods, so that, for that matter, it was the same whether he put his pence there or in his pocket—the same to a T!

Could he tell her where she could buy a counter cheap! Or rather, get it on credit; if there was anything she was hard up for now, it was ready money. Perhaps she might as well try to take out a little more at the carpenter's at once, only a fair-sized folding-table, two beds, and a few chairs. She had thought that when once she had got it started and into order, Nikolai might live with her. If she prepared all his meals for him besides, the one thing might be set off against the other, and part of his wages go towards it—he must himself reckon up and say how much he thought.

Barbara continued more eagerly to build up in her own mind, and emphasising now and then with a smack of her hand, how everything was to be.

But as she waxed warmer and more elated over her visions of the future, Nikolai sat doubtful, and softly beating a measure with his foot. All this about the shop might be right enough. His mother must surely understand it, she who had been at the Veyergangs', and had now, moreover, talked to the Consul himself. But the more she initiated him into her plans, and in them appropriated him entirely to herself, and talked away as if there could be no obstacle in any corner of the heavens, the wider did the gulf between their wills and interests open before him. She came with a mother's long-dispensed-with right, and just now he knew in his heart that he belonged still more to another, and must go his own way.

She could not know that she was coming upon nails the whole time in the wall, so he would have to speak out.

"Well, you see, mother"—he looked down at the floor—"you're welcome to my money, if only it's certain I get it back again by the new year, so there's nothing to hinder that. But, you know, why I must have it again is—is because I and Mrs. Holman's Silla have agreed to marry and settle down. And I'm quite determined about it, for I've worked and toiled for that, ever since Holman died; and it would be ill for me if I had to be without her."

His sharp, grey eyes shot a glance up at her, and the mother instinctively felt that here was a will that had escaped from her hands.

This was something that had never entered into her plans.

In order to remove her dissatisfaction, he let her have his thirty dollars before she went.

There is a branch of trade in the narrow streets and outskirts, whose position is one storey higher than the stall-woman. It sells its wares from a house, comprises, according to legislation, a great many more effects, and allows the individual concerned to lead a more comfortable existence, with a step farther from hand to mouth; that is to say, it gains, instead of a day's credit or a weekly settlement, a week's credit or a monthly settlement.

It was in this small trade that Barbara wanted to start, and if it can be said of America that whole towns and undertakings arise in a moment of time, something of the same kind might well be said of Barbara's shop.

Barely a week later she was in her house, and had in the window an exhibition of balls of cotton, bread, twists, sweets, stay-laces, needle-cases, snuff, clay pipes, steel pens, matches, etc., etc., while she herself sat behind the counter—which was a packing-case disguised under some print—and ground coffee, which she roasted in the kitchen beyond. In a drawer that would lock, which Nikolai had overlooked, stood the cigar-box that did duty as a cash-box, with a few coppers in it.

The acquaintance between Mrs. Holman and Barbara, too, was already renewed, with the secret about Silla preserved on Barbara's side.

Mrs. Holman—she lived only in the street below—had come up, while Barbara was standing on her steps in the evening, to look at her new surroundings by the light of the just completed shop-window. And then she must not pass an old acquaintance's door. She must come in and have a cup of coffee—it was standing clearing on the hob, if she would condescend.

Mrs. Holman might very well have had her own opinion about a good deal that she saw in there, but she preferred, while she drank her coffee, to give Barbara some idea of the series of dispensations which she had passed through since Holman died.

"Oh no, don't turn your cup up yet! One more, Mrs. Holman."

Mrs. Holman drank a third cup too, without becoming at all less melancholy. Her quiet, cold grey eyes had looked and explored while she talked, and sucked in observations of Barbara's open-handed, profuse management, like pipe-clayed fat. But when she left, she had, with many cautious reservations, and in the hope that Barbara's wares would stand the test in the long run, expressed her inclination to remove her custom to Barbara.

Mrs. Holman's Silla was just standing at the counter—she wanted a pint of groats to take home with her—when Barbara, who was measuring them out, suddenly saw Ludvig Veyergang at the door.

He had seen Barbara before, and as he passed the door twice a day now, he nodded to her whenever she showed herself on the steps. But so friendly as he was to-day! Barbara was quite softened, and very nearly called him Ludvig, he was so lively and playful about her shop. He stood looking with half-closed eyes, and laughing at Silla, who grew redder and more bashful, and only tried in her confusion to get the bag of groats out of Barbara's hand. He had taken his straw hat off his curly hair for the heat, and looked so nice and handsome.

Silla hardly dared look up at him, and only heard something about freckles not being anything to mind when one had such dark eyes, when, with head in advance, she rushed out of the door.

Barbara's opinion afterwards about Silla's behaviour—her having all at once turned crimson, and rushed away at a few innocent words from such a well-meaning and handsome man as Ludvig Veyergang—her son heard the same evening. A young girl ought to stand modestly, and not go on like that: if she did, it was a sure way of getting all that could be called man-folk at her heels.

Was she anything for Nikolai—that awkward, dark, long girl, who ran about in that bodice that was too short for her, looking like a half-peeled, bent prawn in the back, and went balancing along the edge of the gutter, as if she were going to be a tightrope dancer—without any education? Upon her word, if it had been any other than Ludvig Veyergang, she would have had him peeping after her at every corner.

"But, do you know, Nikolai, it suddenly came into my head while he stood there, that here was the person who both could and would help me with those fifteen dollars I still want so badly. But he was gone before I could collect myself."

"Him? N—no, mother! I'll get them for you, if you'll only wait a little; and I think you can use my money as well as his."

"Well, if I hadn't got you, Nikolai!" sighed Barbara, moved; "and now you shall have some coffee that's good, and new cinnamon-sticks with it, that I didn't get sold to-day."

"No, thanks all the same, mother," he answered, gloomily: he was already at the door.

Later in the evening he succeeded in meeting Silla. She was so merry and laughing this evening.

"I ran away; didn't look at him at all. Would you have liked me to stay, perhaps?" she said, playfully.

He was disarmed for the moment, she laughed so confidingly.

But as he went down, he still saw Veyergang's insolent, half-closed eyes, and the curl coming out beneath his hat, and—he could not help it—he felt as if it were twined round his finger!

That she chattered so gaily did not please him, nor yet that whenever he made time to go up in the evening she came down breathless from the garden, and was always full of whether young Veyergang had been there or not, what he had said, and what she had thought, and whether Kristofa had afterwards agreed or disagreed with her. It was as if she could not talk of anything else!

Yet it was not so bad, he supposed, so long as it was she herself who chattered and talked about it to him.

But the perspiration would stream from him in the smithy, when he stood and thought about it all up there. He felt as though he were under a screw.

Why should not the poor man's possession be left in peace? Here he was toiling away, and would give every drop of blood in his body to be able to marry; and that other one, who had his pockets full, and could have any fine lady for the asking—they were worse than wild beasts and murderers! And amidst all this the time was passing.

He had blessed both the autumn mud and darkness, which put an end to all the running about in the evening; and now winter days and snow had come. When he reckoned up—and he was always reckoning—he found that by the New Year he would be worth seventy-five specie-dollars—what he had almost starved himself to save—and of these his mother had had forty-five, and since then thirteen more. He had made a half bargain about a room with a kitchen at a fair price per month, and what he wanted for the house, too. The last time he had lent his mother money, she had said that he need not be afraid, she was selling the goods and sweeping in the profits.

Everything was in order, so the battle with Mrs. Holman had better be fought at once. And when he laid before her his journeyman's credentials, his seventy-five dollars, and his regular earnings, with the advance he was to have from the New Year at Haegberg's, she would have to be so kind as to give in.

It was on one of the days between Christmas and the New Year that he went up to his mother to let her know that he must have his money out in February. Then he would go to Mrs. Holman.

It struck him that his mother was rather confused and forgetful while she made the coffee.

She thought she was half crazy to-day, she said; but he should have his coffee, and Christmas should not pass without his having something good; it had not been the custom where she was brought up.

Oh, dear! So Nikolai wanted his money back already. She had grown so forgetful, that she had not remembered that it was so soon. And just before Christmas she had had to settle a bill for coffee and sugar which, upon her word, she had not thought or known would come in until after the fair or at Midsummer! But he need not be afraid; she knew well enough where she could get the money, if she liked to tie on her bonnet and go out after it.

"So drink, Nikolai; it's as strong as a rock. It isn't Christmas more than once a year, as they say in the country. I believe you're afraid. For your money? Oh, no; never you fear! If your mother, Barbara, has promised anything, she'll keep it; so you may be easy. So nice as Ludvig was to me the last time he was in here—it was only the afternoon of Little Christmas Eve.[4] Barbara needn't be at a loss for a few pence when I say my son wants them. Oh, dear no! Now, Nikolai, don't look like that. Don't you hear you shall have it? My goodness, how you do look at me!"

[Footnote 4: The day before Christmas Eve proper.]

He said nothing, only sat still a long time, and Barbara thought it was getting oppressively quiet. She tried first one thing and then another.

"I'll try it directly after New Year. I would never have borrowed your money if I'd known it would be like this."

"No, mother. You must pay me the money when you can; I won't press you for it. But if you try to beg it from Ludvig Veyergang, we are parted for this world, and as far as I get into the next, too! So now you know, mother. And many thanks for the wedding this time, both from me and Silla!" and he pulled open the door.



CHAPTER IX

AN IMPORTANT STEP TAKEN

If Silla had not come like a wedge between the bark and the wood, how comfortably and free from care Barbara could have lived now. She had no one but Silla to thank that she was now deprived of all the help she might and—it was her firm conviction—ought to have had in her son Nikolai, with the regular earnings he might have put, every single week, into the till; which, for some reason or other, never would exhibit the amount it ought to have done.

It was not improbable that Barbara, after the fashion of country people, forgot to take into account the articles that went towards the nourishment of her own weighty person. On the other hand her ever ready hospitality with the coffee-pot was not without its savour of trade-policy—what she gave away was only to be looked upon as seed which would bring forth a hundredfold in the shape of customers.

Barbara's room was thus becoming the meetingplace for all the gossiping forces of the neighbourhood.

* * * * *

The posts in the fences had snow hats on, and snow-drifts lay by the roadside and on the fields.

One afternoon, when the sledges were creaking outside in the cold, and the door too, whenever anybody came in, Mother Taraldsen, who cupped people and applied leeches, and tall Mother Baekken were sitting and enjoying a cup of steaming hot coffee with loaf-sugar.

Mother Taraldsen was holding forth on the subject of bad liquids and ruined times, and how every trade was going down-hill, while Mother Baekken, getting more and more full of objections, put her head on one side, and stirred up her cup.

"I can remember a little of the old times too, and I don't know if they were any better, though every one is welcome to have his opinion, of course," here the long, yellow face with the eyes blinking with their own meaning, was laid almost across the cup; "but the day has grown longer for workmen now. Just think how they sat in the dark in the farms and cottages with pine-torches in the fireplace to cut and spin by; and there lay the lads the whole long winter through, and idled and yawned in their beds from three or four in the afternoon until they had to go out with a lantern and see to the horses for the night. But paraffine has got them out of their beds. It's as if we had the sun the whole winter now, and people can see to earn a few pence."

"Yes, but everything hasn't got right in that way either, when they sit and play cards and gamble and drink at the public-houses."

"That's not oil, that's gas! But that's good for something, too, both in the street lamps and up in the factory."

"And for drunkenness and dancing and wickedness."

Mother Baekken made a bend down to her cup with the side of her cheek and her chin, and up again in order to contradict in her most ingenious manner. But just then Anne Graves came in to the counter—it was she who kept the churchyard in order—and then one must be careful what one says.

Thank you kindly! She had no objection to a warm cup of coffee in this cold. She had had a busy day to-day with the big funeral; they must have heard all the ringing at dinner-time. He was an excellent man. She enlarged, by the plundering of diverse fragments of the funeral sermon, upon his worth and importance as a man and a citizen of the town. There had been speeches and such countless black hats and flowers, that the coffin was quite hidden. Yes, that was the third they had taken in since the New Year, she uttered with a sigh.

"You never know what sort of people you have among you, until they are dead," remarked Mother Baekken. "If he had been the poor man's friend, they could have sung and trumpeted a little about it while he lived. Perhaps that's turned the wrong way, but—" she slowly, and with increasing expression, bent her face over her cup.

Mother Baekken must always have her own interpretations, so Mother Taraldsen discreetly warded off a disturbance of the peace by striking into the very middle of the manufacturing part of the town. She had come up the streets yesterday evening with a covered cup containing leeches, and you might really think that if, all that long way up from the chemist's, you had escaped rogues and robbers, you ought to go free up here. But there came those great, grown-up girls, flying one after another along a slide down the street, screaming and shouting, so that it was enough to knock people down. So she had dropped the cup with all five leeches in it, and if it had not been moonlight so that she could see to pick them up again on the snow, she would have lost every single one. It was that Josefa and Gunda and Kalla down the street, and that long Silla—she came along like a ghost. Ah, Mrs. Holman, who is so particular, should see what sort of a daughter she has, when it gets dark.

Barbara nodded to herself, and thought that Nikolai should just hear what people said.

"I must really go out and look at them one evening, yes indeed. Well, that about the leeches I disapprove of entirely and altogether, I must confess. But young blood must have movement in some way, and may I ask,"—here Mother Baekken laid one fore-finger upon the other—"have they any way of amusing themselves, if they must not dance, and not slide, and not toboggan?"

But now Mother Taraldsen grew angry.

"If it's proper for respectable young girls to tear about and make a row, it must be the new fashion that Mother Baekken's preaching about. If you kept a careful watch at the corners, you might perhaps see that there were those who were out to meet the flock of geese."

"Then it would be better if you came down on them instead of the poor girls," replied Mother Baekken obstinately; "a man like that clerk down at the contractor's, and him at the Stores, and then that fine clerk, that Veyergang up at the factory and his friends."

Barbara was standing at the counter with a customer.

Nobody must say anything against her Ludvig. She knew him; she had been with him day and night for fourteen years. If she only had a halfpenny for every time he had cried and screamed for Barbara!

She would have enlarged upon the subject, if it had not been for the man at her back who was calling out for his soft soap.

So cup-and-leech-Mother Taraldsen went on, saying that the girls stood poking their heads out of every single gate the whole way up the street; she saw it so well when she came home from applying leeches of an evening.

She and Anne Graves then began to review the young people more closely. There were some they would not even mention, and some they named with all sorts of interesting doubts and opinions, and lastly some they only stopped to wonder that they had nothing whatever to say either about or against.

As to Barbara, she noticed carefully what was said about Silla, and made up her mind that Nikolai should be warned; he should at any rate know what he was doing when he went and took that girl.

And neither was it with a diminishing-glass she let him see it, as time after time she referred to all the dangers the young factory-girls up there were exposed to. She had sufficient instinct not to mention Silla, so that he should not think she was speaking against her. But every time she touched upon it, she saw well, that it went into Nikolai, and had fully the effect she wished.

Barbara had made some of these remarks this evening too, and Nikolai was sitting gloomily listening to the noise outside.

One party after another was flying past down the high-road on sledges, like shadows in the moonlight, with shouts and cries—half-grown lads and lassies, and now and then a party of fine people from the town below. One tall lad, with the rope over his shoulder and his heels digging into the hillside, was dragging a wood-sledge up, with a heavy load of girls upon it.

Nikolai could not help keeping watch through the kitchen window, and left his mother, who sat inside by the paraffins lamp, without any answer.

They were Kristofa and Kalla, those two who were standing there in the street talking, while they slid backwards and forwards the whole time on a little bit of ice. They were waiting for somebody—Silla perhaps; they were standing close by her street. It was a question which of them would dare to venture in and be so bold as to ask Mrs. Holman with many "dear, kind, goods" if she would allow Silla to go over to her for a little while this evening—always untruthfulness and disorder!

There was another sledge party with fine hats and glowing cigars standing laughing just outside.

Barbara stopped her knitting-pins to listen.

"We have this noise every evening till quite late," she remarked, "as long as the moon shines on the road."

He turned hot all over. If Silla were to get into this, then he might as well lay both himself and his hammer down.

Yes, there she was looking about at the corner for her two friends.

"Good evening, old lady," said he, suddenly coming out of the door.

"Is that you, Nikolai?" exclaimed Silla, in surprise. "Have you seen anything of Kristofa and Kalla? I did so want to speak to them! Haven't you? Do you know how I got out? I was only going to get the cat in for the night. I chased it out myself, and hid it so nicely under the wooden tub out in the shed. If only it doesn't mew."

She looked round again eagerly, while the elongated shadow across the snow imitated her slender figure and swaying movements.

"Oh, and they promised to wait for me!"

"Well, I suppose they've only gone."

"Only? They thought I was going out with them this evening, and if they haven't been here already, they may perhaps stand and wait, for I must go in, you see, or else I shall have mother coming out into the street after me. Listen, Nik! If you were nice "—she took hold of his jacket, and pushed him backwards and forwards—"you would find them and tell them—can you tell them properly?—that I must be good and stay at home this evening, but hurrah for a holiday to-morrow and the day after! Say that mother will be washing at the Antonisens' the whole of the end of the week, and they'll quite understand it. But be sure you find them, Nikolai, so that they won't blame me."

Nikolai was not insensible to her amiability, nor yet to her liveliness and prettiness; but it had just the opposite effect. While she stood pulling his jacket, he heard the voices on the high-road all the time.

"That's it, that's it! You want to get quite free now, Silla. Well, just let them drag you out among them! But that a respectable girl will let herself be drawn into such goings on!" he added, out of humour.

"A respectable girl? Respectable girl! May I ask what sort of fun she is to have then? I really wonder, Nikolai, that you didn't find a respectable girl for yourself who would walk with her back like a poker, and her arms under her shawl, and who only lets herself slide by accident as it were, when she comes to a slide—daren't even look out of the corner of her eye at a hand-sledge, because she's so well-behaved! It was a respectable one like that you ought to have had. And then, when you were standing hammering all day in the smithy, and she was deep in her work standing on all fours with her head behind the wash-tub at home, I suppose that would be as you would like to have it. But I can tell you, Nikolai, that if there isn't to be any fun in this world, then good-bye and be rid of it. I've had to sit shut up long enough at home."

He shook his head. "If only there weren't all those wolves howling away there on the road. But you see, they want to amuse themselves too; and—and the insignificant ones have to take care of what they have, it seems to me—and if you're of the same mind, Silla, we'll go in to your mother at once—this very moment." He took her by the hand to carry out his intention.

"You must be mad, Nikolai," she exclaimed in terror; the resolution was as terrible as it was unexpected. "No, no, let it be," she begged in an eager whisper. "Think of mother! Have you quite forgotten what mother is like? It will be time enough when we've got something to marry on."

"Time enough? No, it's not time enough for me, Silla. I must try and get it said now."

"And what will happen to me at home afterwards? And you're not dressed for it either, this evening."

"Oh, don't be afraid, Mr. Nikolai. I may as well see with my own eyes how highly my daughter condescends to respect her mother who is left a poor defenceless widow."

It was Mrs. Holman's own voice; she was standing in the gateway, looking preternaturally large.

"I thought I had gone through the worst that could be, when Holman died, and that I should be spared the pain of catching my own flesh and blood out, without leave, in conversation in the street, in the middle of the snow. Neither should I have thought that that person would ever presume to come so near my house. Just you come in with me, Silla. Come in, do you hear—at once!"

If any one could have gathered up the component parts of Mrs. Holman's last screaming treble, he would have found a wealth of emotions: injured motherly dignity, wrath, contempt, hatred, and something heavy, which was meant to have a crushing effect, and really did almost make Silla fall on her knees; she stood there without moving.

Nikolai had become a little hardened, however, since the old days; he knew now that there were others of whom he was more afraid than he was of Mrs. Holman. He was not affected by her.

"I must ask to be allowed to come in, however, ma'am, for I didn't come here this evening to stand out in the snow. It is to you yourself I want to speak."

"Perhaps it's no longer than can be said here where we stand," answered Mrs. Holman, rudely. "Come here, Silla!"

"Oh no, it's not very long; but then I must explain one or two things that belong to it."

As Mrs. Holman still continued to bar the gateway and only beckoned again to her daughter, Silla, in her despair and terror, suddenly made her choice. There was nothing for it but to shut her eyes and stand by Nikolai, and she took his arm boldly.

"Yes, ma'am, that's it, as you see. We hold together as we have done ever since we were little. And I came this evening to ask for her, and to ask if we could have the benefit of your leave and consent. For with my credentials and good wages, and when I never drink and—"

Silla now acted with the courage of despair; she pushed Nikolai so that they all three—Mrs. Holman yielding half involuntarily—came through the gate and from thence into the room where the battle was then fought.

While Silla sat with her hands before her face on a chair in the dark and Nikolai, with quiet persistency continued to plead his case, and make as manifest as possible how he now had a prospect of becoming foreman and could provide for Silla, Mrs. Holman assumed a mightily offended, repellant attitude. She employed her whole power; she bridled, and she was wrathful, and she exhibited the most extreme astonishment. It almost looked as if he thought he could really take her daughter from her, whether she said yes or no. What was there left for an elderly woman to live on, when her husband was dead, and her daughter who could keep her, refused, because she thought of marrying a smith who could not so much as show that he had a wedded father?

She was on the point of rising in defence to the death of her maternal rights, when a light suddenly dawned upon her. Her eyes began to gaze into a perspective of the future. If Nikolai ever came to justify the great words and promises he was now making, she might, in case of the worst, when the time came, claim an asylum with them.

This thought, however, did not prevent her from selling every concession, with deep sighs, as dearly as possible.

She must say she had thought of something quite different for Silla. And, however it might be, she would not hear of any gadding about or sweet-hearting until Nikolai could show as much ready money as Holman had done.

He had had a hundred dollars and his good wages, and when Nikolai could lay as much money on the table in front of her eyes, it would be time to talk about it.

A hundred dollars—that was something decided at last. He held her in a vice with that.

That was the feeling which filled him when, a little while after, he sprang right across the snowdrift to shorten the way, and knocked at Barbara's door. He must have some one to tell it to—that Mrs. Holman had acquiesced in Silla's having in this way promised herself to him.

It was exactly the same view of her well-considered advantage that occurred to Barbara while she lay that night collecting herself after the news. She raised her large person up in bed under the influence of the brilliant idea:

Why, then, she could live with Nikolai!

This grocery business was completely eating her up—it did not enter her head that she was eating it up.

She suddenly felt quite clear as to her whole position; how it would be best both for her and Nikolai that she should give up the shop in time, and how instead she could be of unspeakable use in helping the totally inexperienced Silla to manage the house, and perhaps earn a few pence at other houses. And she had never heard but that a son was bound to provide for his mother.

The following Sunday Mrs. Holman drank coffee at Barbara's; but as Mrs. Holman was silent about what had taken place, Barbara was silent too. Only once she led the conversation up to her son Nikolai, and thought that possibly in the autumn, when the room next door was empty, he might move into it. It would not be too much, when it was remembered how they had always been separated.

Why Mrs. Holman at that moment became thoughtful, pursed up her mouth and said: "Thank you," she would not have any more coffee! and somewhat unexpectedly shortened her visit, shall be left untold. It can only be stated, that from that moment, a silent contest began between them under water—under the most friendly form, it must be added, for Mrs. Holman's sake if for nothing else.

The coffee visits continued, if possible, with greater frequency, and Barbara as well as Mrs. Holman discussed and talked over every possible subject, except the one that lay nearest to their hearts—their own personal plans in connection with Nikolai and Silla. On that point they watched each other in diplomatic silence, like two chess-players of whom the one dare not move until he has seen through the other one's intention; Mrs. Holman, in the middle of some strictly reserved opinion, taking in everything with her precise, little face and cold grey eyes, and seeing it all clear and small as if through the bottom of a tumbler; and Barbara, round, hospitable, large and fat, with great, overflowing features, and generally talking about her time at the Consul's.

But during all this, there was one thing upon which each of them became always more and more decided—if she could not live with them herself, she would at any rate put a stop to the other coming and filling up the house.

The two future mothers-in-law were each occupied to the best of their ability in making it impossible for the other; but of this quietly calculated conflict which was going on in the ground far below them, Nikolai and Silla had no suspicion.



CHAPTER X

A RISE IN LIFE

Since Mrs. Holman had seen what Silla could busy herself with—she was quite struck with amazement at her own blindness—she had become far more strictly attentive, and also much more on the lookout and watch against Nikolai.

The fruits of idleness had unfortunately revealed themselves, and there was no other remedy for them than to watch conscientiously and see that Silla worked. She must really set about something that there was some use and help in, all through the long light spring evenings, and not just run for the milk, or out when any one came and asked if she might.

Nikolai soon found that the situation was far from being improved after he was acknowledged in the quality of wooer. But notwithstanding that he saw no more of her than a short glimpse now and then, a great step in advance had actually been made. He had now only to work hard, and that he did manfully; the hammer worked, in his hands, as if by steam.

In some ways, too, he was re-assured, for if Mrs. Holman watched against him so carefully, this same watchfulness was a security against others, too. It was well to know that she was no longer to be found up there among those giddy girls in the evening. A cold shiver ran down his back when he one day met young Veyergang coming out of his mother's. He only looked indifferently at Nikolai with half-closed eyes, when they met in the doorway, as if he did not quite remember him, and then asked Barbara over his shoulder, with a nod at Nikolai: "Is that the fellow?" and went out:

"What's he been doing here, mother?"

"Nothing."

"Have you been borrowing money of him?" he continued sharply.

"Of course not. Not a penny, though I do need it so badly."

"What was he talking about?"

"He wanted to light his cigar, as he so often does when he goes down this way. Surely that can't do you any harm! And it wouldn't be much good forbidding him to do it either, I should think—either for me or for you!" She added the last words red with anger.

"No, I certainly can't forbid him, mother. But remember, if you borrow of him, everything is at an end between us!"

"Oh, Nikolai, you are so quick-tempered. No, of course not; I shouldn't think of borrowing!" As she spoke she turned round and pushed something she had in her hand into her bosom. "No, of course not!"

"I could hear he had been talking about me."

"No, indeed, how could you think so?"

"Yes he was, mother," he persisted, gloomily.

"About you? Oh, well, I was telling him a little about how hard you were working now to get together those few shillings for Mrs. Holman." Barbara talked rather confusedly.

"And perhaps about Silla, too?" he asked searchingly.

"Oh, no! he knew all about that before. I'm not the only one who knows about it in this gossiping place, and, upon my honour, Nikolai, it didn't come from me—not to-day," she added.

"I wouldn't have minded if you had said it then; it would be a good thing for that fellow to know that she is an engaged girl."

"Isn't that just what I said? Only he didn't believe it."

"No, I dare say not!" Nikolai stood at the window reflecting. This visit of Veyergang's!

He had enough noise and worry just now down at the smithy. It was just a question whether he should not be made a foreman. Old Mrs. Ellingsen had sent for him several times on this account, and it looked as if it were almost settled.

Things had been in this condition for some time; there was no great need of hurry in coming to a determination, as the situation was not to be filled until the autumn.

Lately, however, it had seemed to Nikolai that Mrs. Ellingsen was behaving rather strangely. He noticed, too, that they were talking and making a great deal of fuss in the smithy; but it did not strike him that it might be Mrs. Ellingsen's intention to draw back, until one day when one of the men remarked scornfully that he did not suppose there was any one in the smithy who would think of supplanting Olaves. If any one did, he would have to look out for himself, for they would all stick to Olaves.

Nikolai knew well that they frowned at him because he was always hard at work, saved up his pence, and firmly refused to join the others in a glass of beer or a dram.

He was without a companion. And now, when this foreman's question hung in the balance, he noticed that the whole of his past life was stirred and dug up again till it was as thick as the grounds in a coffee-cup—from the old police and fighting story right back to his childhood's days among the timber-stacks.

These old stories were Nikolai's smarting wounds. He was always thinking they were forgotten, and they were always coming up again, and now it was insupportable suffering. He endeavoured not to betray it by a look; but he was by no means in a good temper as he stood there.

The sooner he got to know from Mrs. Ellingsen how it was to end the better; and Nikolai was soon standing with his cap in his hand in her room, to ask what he might depend upon.

It took a long time, with many "h'ms" and "ha's" before she managed to get her spectacles off and the wires put properly into her hair again. Then at last it came out with some hesitation. She meant no offence; she knew he was a good smith enough; but there were so many who knew Olaves to be such an honest, good fellow, and she was an old woman who needed some one whom she could thoroughly trust—no offence meant to Nikolai—but she must consider the matter.

That was the answer he received, and with it his prospects, that he had counted upon and shown to Mrs. Holman when he asked for Silla's hand, were destroyed.

The next day when he came into the smithy they all smiled and tittered. They knew he had been to Mrs. Ellingsen and had got his answer. But if they thought they could tease or frighten him into giving it up, they were very much mistaken.

Olaves behaved as if nothing was the matter, and even civilly offered a helping-hand in breaking the bar-iron.

Nikolai only turned his back on him.

"I never meddle with any other man's work, and I don't advise any one to worm himself into my affairs," he said, "unless he wants a dressing that will make his back as hot as that red iron there!" he added, with a glance at Olaves.

There was a general silence.

But at dinner-time there was a great deal of talking and fuss about this affair. Every one had heard how Nikolai had threatened Olaves, and Olaves, as a precaution, found witnesses for his words.

"He looked as if he could use the sledge-hammer to something besides forging bolts, that fellow, if he could do it without witnesses!"

They might talk as much as they liked for all that Nikolai cared; he did his work, and never heard that Haegberg had anything to complain of. He was prepared for a disappointment now.

There was one thing, though, that he would do before he gave in—go straight to Haegberg and speak out, and then the master could give his testimony as to which he wanted, if Mrs. Ellingsen asked him.

The final answer from Mrs. Ellingsen was delayed week after week: at last it was two months.

What could the old woman mean? The whole smithy wondered—she must have a foreman by the autumn.

At last, one morning it appeared in the shape of a message.

* * * * *

It was drawing on towards evening one broiling hot summer day. In both floors of the grey wooden house in which Mrs. Holman lived, the small-paned windows stood open, drinking in the slight coolness there was in the air, while the dwellers within went about their occupations more or less lightly clothed. A faint breath only now and again stirred the half transparent curtains, or the white clothes hanging on lines across the yard.

At the window on the ground floor just above the entrance to the cellar, stood a slender, dark-eyed young girl with turned-up sleeves, busy at the water tap under which she had a wash-tub full of clothes. Her head could be seen now above, now below the short blind, cooled and refreshed by the cold rush of water.

Suddenly she stopped in surprise.

Nikolai entered with his flat cap pushed triumphantly on one side.

"The world's right enough, I can tell you, Silla. The only thing is to see that everything is properly in order from the very beginning. He who hasn't got a father, must be his own father, you know!"

"But Nikolai! Did you know mother was out?"

"Pooh! What is there that I don't know! My mother told me just now that it was one of the washing days at Antonisens. But you see, Silla, it's beginning to get late, and—if you'd like to know—I've been invited to-day to be foreman at Mrs. Ellingsen's. That'll be only ten dollars a month more!"

"Foreman? Is it true, Nikolai?" She retreated from the wash-tub, looking doubtfully at him. "Come here with your smutty face!" she said, hastily pulling the clothes out of the tub. "You are so awfully black! Foreman, did you say? No, is it really true? Oh, you must put up with a little splashing; I can't see the foreman for coal-soot! Then Mrs. Ellingsen didn't ask Olaves first?"

"No, she didn't."

"And no one put out their tongue or made Mrs. Ellingsen afraid of you, as they did before?"

"Oh, Haegberg must have let her know that he hadn't taken any harm from me."

"If only they don't begin again and do what they can. For your getting in front of them stings and chafes and torments every one of them, ever since that time when you had to do those wheel pivots over again for Olaves. And then they dig up all the old stories they can find."

"Oh no! The world's right enough, I tell you, and Mrs. Ellingsen must take the smith who works her smithy best. Besides it's as fixed as a vice, and the contract signed this morning. And it's pretty badly needed, for the money that mother borrowed last, it—it—whu!"—he whistled—"has gone the same way as the rest. It disappears like smoke with her. It seems to me she trades backwards instead of forwards, and that the profits go the wrong way."

"Now you're so nice and clean, that you shine. That way with your hair or else the cock's-comb will stand up too much."

"I rushed straight out of the smithy, you see, to come up here and cram it into you. I went in to mother first, and then I promised her to go down and buy some mackerel for supper. Two smacks have come in to-day, they say."

Silla's face showed that this was a great piece of news. They were both natives of the town, and the arrival of the mackerel brought with it a number of pleasant recollections and pictures from the time when they lived in the square down by the wharves.

She looked a little undecided.

"What if I put on my shawl and went with you!" she exclaimed. "Wait for me down below, Nikolai, so that we don't go together in the street up here!"

It was a proposal that it was not easy to resist, she was so eager about it. And then he had been made foreman to-day!

She was not long in putting on her blue-striped dress and a shawl over her head and following him.

They hastened down together; she chattering gaily as in the old days when they had stolen out, he quite taken up with looking at and listening to her. They walked in the middle of the road, anything but carefully; clouds of dust arose at every step, but Nikolai only saw Silla, dark-eyed, warm and gay in the middle of it all.

Down in the town that warm summer evening, the streets were unusually busy about the fish-place. There was evidently something that occasioned more life and movement than usual. The bridge was full of people hanging over the railings and looking down at all those who were pushing their way forwards amid noise, shouts and cries to get a mackerel for their supper.

This greenish-blue, shining fish, so round and strong and quick, sea-built for lightning speed, its head formed for cleaving the water, and an elastic arrow-feather as the termination to an almost dangerously slender tail—it had already been glittering for two days on the stalls in the fish-market.

Even as late as yesterday morning it was a rarity, and only for the tables of the wealthier, but later in the afternoon another smack came in,—there had been a large haul out by the Hval Islands—and to-day two more loaded vessels, so that the market was over-stocked.

Yes, indeed, the mackerel had come—that is to say, the mackerel that the working-man can buy. It was to be had now for two-pence or two-pence halfpenny apiece, both on the fish-market and up the river here. The women, who speculated, carried them in baskets up to all the most out-of-the-way parts of the town.

It found its way now everywhere, where there was only a hole for it to slip into, a kettle or a pan for it to be boiled or fried in—into all the galleys in the harbour, from the large, superior steamship or full-rigged vessel, down to the cooking-stoves on the timber sloops and the little decked barges, where people were resting, and broiling it in the summer evening, into all the back blocks and small streets from the cellars to the garrets. Workmen and small tradesmen, husbands and wives were going that sultry evening with one, two, or three in their hand, according to the number of mouths there were at home. There was a smell of fried and broiled mackerel over whole quarters of the town.

It must be sold, it was so confoundedly hot!

"Yes, indeed, it is a blessed warmth," answered deaf Mother Andersen, "that sends all this mackerel over the town."

This fish has had a prejudice to overcome, although in all modesty it has solicited nothing but the favour of being allowed to escape being eaten. It has the reputation of being the cannibal of the North Sea—in plain words, a man-eater, and that the dark part of its flesh comes from drowned sailors.

Nikolai and Silla were also down at the boats to seize their share of the glory of the evening. Silla had not lived near the wharves in her childhood for nothing, and to pick out the best fish from under the very nose of the old women, was an easy matter for her. She stood eagerly bargaining and stretching out over the boat.

"Thanks very much, mother, but you won't fool me into taking that sunburnt mackerel skin! Take some of those that are lying behind there under the thwart—those two—yes, just those."

She weighed them in her hand to see if they were firm and stiff.

Nikolai's hand was already in his pocket; but Silla threw the mackerel contemptuously into the boat again.

"Why, they're as old as the hills! Eyes as dead as horn!"

"Those beautiful—"

"Be quiet, Nikolai! If we are to be satisfied with these for supper, mother, you'll have to take off a farthing or two."

In the end they went for two-pence a piece.

"What a fine trader you are, Nikolai!" she said to tease him, on the way home. "But do you see how big and fresh they are?"

Barbara was standing on the steps, shading her eyes with her hand, and looking to see if Nikolai were not soon coming with the fish.

The person she did see coming quietly and sedately up the road was Silla, and she chatted with her from the steps until Nikolai also at last appeared with the two mackerel.

Of course Silla must come in and see how they tasted; there was no question of Barbara's honour and superabundant hospitality putting up with anything else.

In there on Barbara's cooking-stove the mackerel hissed and broiled that light evening. The peculiar, rather pungent smell of frying grew stronger and more appetising as it went on.

Then the pieces had to be turned with fresh fat in the pan—fresh hissing!

The scent floated out through the open window, and far into the street.

Barbara was big and slow in turning, while Silla, quick and ready, put now one thing, now another into her hands, and hurried away, and was over the fish both with her face and her opinions, long before Barbara could collect herself.

Nikolai's broad, pleased face followed the whole of the frying process with deeply interested attention.

"That mackerel's the right sort of fellow for frying!"

And then at last to take the pieces straight from the pan on to the bread!

The evening breeze began to blow cool between the warm house walls. The three who sat there enjoying the mackerel, felt as if it were a festive night.

And foreman too!



CHAPTER XI

THE WEDDING POSTPONED AGAIN

Confined as she was, and made to work through the long evenings, while her mother watched her like an eagle, Silla's only chance of indemnifying herself was up at the factory.

She went about there with a suppressed longing and eager interest, her eyes sparkling, in the midst of all the chattering, whispering and gossiping among her different ideals—Kristofa and Gunda, active Swedish Lena, and pert Jakobina. If she could not be with them herself, she might at any rate hear what fun they had had, and all that had happened. In this way she could live their life at second hand.

It was of course Kristofa who knew how to put everything in a captivating, magic light. A little walk, a possible engagement, an evening at a dance, everything was moulded by her busy imaginative power into events that never wanted a hero, that interesting, mystic being, who was seen, now with a cigar, now without one, who sometimes pretended he did not know them, sometimes nodded, or only smiled. The person in question might be some town gentleman or other, or some one from one of the offices up there, who often had not the faintest suspicion that his coming and going was seen in Bengal illumination, or that it caused such a flutter in their hearts; though this did not preclude others from both suspecting and taking advantage of it.

These, through Kristofa's habit of spinning, grew into little romances, which Silla took in with wide-open eyes, and afterwards continued at home.

Silla herself had a little romance which she kept to herself: she would not dare to tell it to Nikolai.

She had to take care, when she went at dinner-time to buy anything for her mother at Barbara's, that Veyergang had not gone in there on his way down to light his cigar.

The last time she had met him there, he laughed and asked whether the black-eyed maid wanted to run away from him? He was not so very terrible! She had completely vanished lately. He had heard that her mother kept her in a cage for the sake of a dangerous smith—was that true? When a young girl had two such black eyes, she ought not to hide them away.