XVIIPETERKIN PROMISES
“AND so our valley has gone to rack and ruin,” concluded the blind man.
Peterkin was silent for some minutes after he had finished. Then he shook his head wisely, sadly.
“Can you wait four days until I rescue you?” he asked.
“Four days?” The man, his wife and little son all burst into a bitter laughter. “We have waited for half a century already. We can wait a century, if only in the end we gain our eyes again, and win revenge upon our toothless enemy. Four days, ho, ho!”
“You shall have both your eyes and your revenge,” promised the stranger. “It was only three days ago that I sped through the air in the cup of a sea-shell, in company with this toothless farmer. Oh, if I had only known, then!”
“What? In his company? Are you a friend of his?” The blind family rushed in about him, as if to capture him and flay him.
“No, no,” smiled Peterkin. “Not a friend at all. He tried to throw me hundreds of feet down to the ground. But he disappeared—and I do not know where he is. But I shall search the whole world over till I find him. And then—woe to him!”
So saying, he put his hand on the blind man’s shoulder and bade them all good-by. They gave him a few wild herbs to put into his blouse for luncheon—it was all they had for food. And then he went on his way, singing all sorts of promises to them as he went on down the hill.
As he walked along the shabby road, he came to other houses, broken down and unpainted, all tangled in high weeds and matted vines. Each house was poorer than the last; each one more deserted than the other. And from each of them trooped little groups of blind folk, groping in darkness, to question him and to complain to him of their hard fate. All along his way he met the sight of their tears andheard the sound of their weeping. But wherever he went, Peterkin gave the same promise of happiness within four days and left a smile of hope behind him.
At length he came to the last house of the valley. It was high on the slope of one of the boundary mountains, almost at the edge of the gleaming white glacier of the summit. It was fast in the shadow of a huge, bluish ice cave, and long icicles dripped from its eaves and glittered like jewels in the sunshine.
“And are you, too, blind?” he asked of the man who lived in this high house.
“Yes,” replied the old man, sorrowfully. “I am no better than all the others in this valley, no matter how high I live above them. I, like them, am awaiting the rescuer who shall return my sight and bring revenge upon our toothless enemy.”
“That is just what you shall have,” promised Peterkin, “if only you tell me what is in the next valley, on the other side of the white mountains; and how I may reach there the best.”
“Alas,” sighed the old fellow, “those are two riddles which I cannot answer. I only know that in that valley beyond the ridge of the boundary, there is just as much sorrow as there is here. There is something wrong there—though I have never known what it is—and the great barrier of glacier ice has hedged us from each other. So come and rest here for to-day, and to-morrow, bright and early, you may come upon some scheme to cross into that unknown valley over the mountains.”
So Peterkin took shelter there, in the green shadows of the ice cave, and slept a troubled sleep until the morning.
“A young peasant girl came toward him”
“A young peasant girl came toward him”
“A young peasant girl came toward him”