Chapter X
Themore quickly and quietly the wedding could be arranged, the better, said the sheriff. It had its advantage in getting ahead of explanations and gossip. People submitted to an accomplished fact.
The third day of Christmas was just the right one to escape too much sensation; and it suited the sheriff exactly, so that he could enter upon his new state of household affairs with the new year.
Naturally, Kathinka was asked about every one of these points; and she always found everything that her father thought right.
The decision that the wedding should be arranged speedily and promptly was exactly after the captain's own heart. On the other point, on the contrary, that everything should be kept so quiet and still, he was in agreement with the sheriff and Ma, of course; but it really did not lie in his nature that the whole joyful affair should take place smothered with a towel before his mouth, and whispering on tiptoe, as if it were a sick-room they were having at Gilje instead of a wedding.
Some show there must be about it; that he owed to Thinka, and to himself also a little.
And thus it came about that before Christmas he took a little sleighing trip, when it was good going, down to the lieutenant's and to the solicitors,Scharfenberg and Sebelow, with whom he had some money settlements to get adjusted in regard to the map business that had been done in the last two suits.
And then, when he met the report that the banns had been published in church for his daughter and the sheriff, he could answer with a question if they would not come and convince themselves. Confidentially, of course, he invited no one but the army surgeon and those absolutely necessary. "But"—winking—"old fellow, how welcome you shall be, the third day of Christmas, not the second and not the fourth, my boy, remember that!"
And he took care that provisions as well as batteries of strong liquors should be stored up inside the ramparts at home, so the fortress could hold its own.
On Christmas Eve there came a horse express from the sheriff with a sleigh full of packages—nothing but presents and surprises for Thinka.
First and foremost, his former wife's warm fur cloak with squirrel-skin lining and muff, which had been made over for Thinka by Miss Brun in the chief parish; then her gold watch and chain with earrings, and rings, all like new, and burnished up by the goldsmith in the city, and a Vienna shawl, and, lastly, lavender water and gloves in abundance.
In the letter he suggested to his devotedly loved Kathinka that his thoughts were only with heruntil they should soon be united by a stronger bond, and that she, when once in her new home, would find several other things which might possibly please her, but which it would not be practical to send up to Gilje, only to bring them right back again.
He had not brought Baldrian and Viggo home for Christmas—and in this he hoped she would agree with him; he had sent them down to his brother, the minister at Holmestrand.
Never in Great-Ola's time had there been such a festive show in horses and vehicles, as when, on the third day of Christmas, they started down the hill to the annex-church; the harnesses and bells shone, and both the black horses glistened before the double sleighs, as if they had been polished up, both hair and mane.
Under the bearskin robe in the first sat the captain in a wolf-skin coat and Thinka adorned with the chains and clothes of the sheriff's first wife, with young Svarten. In the second Ma and Thea, with Great-Ola on the dickey seat behind and old Svarten.
There stood the subalterns in uniform paying their respects at the church door; and inside, in the pew, Lieutenants Dunsack, Frisak, Knebelsberger, and Knobelauch rose up in full uniform. So the sheriff could see that there was some style about it, anyway.
And when they turned towards home, after the ceremony was over, now with the captain and his wife in the first sleigh and the wedded couple in the other—there was such a long cortège that the sheriff's idea of celebrating the wedding quietly must be regarded as wholly overridden.
At Gilje dinner was waiting.
During this the powers of the battalion from the youngest lieutenant up to the captain developed a youthful courage in their attack on the strong wares, so wild and so regardless of the results, that it could only demand of the sheriff a certain degree of prudence.
All would drink with the bride and the bridegroom, again and again.
The sheriff sat contented and leaning forward with his great forehead thinly covered with hair, taking pains to choose his words in the cleverest and most fitting manner for the occasion.
And so long as it was confined to the speeches, he was the absolute master, unless he might possibly have a rival in the army surgeon's sometimes more deeply laid satire, which became more problematical and sarcastic after he had been drinking.
But now the small twinkling eyes, shining more and more dimly and tenderly veiled, devoted themselves exclusively to the bride.
She must taste the tower tart and the wine custard, for his sake! He would not drink any more,if he could avoid it, for her sake. "I assure you," for your—"only for your sake."
An inroad was made on the wares at Gilje with prolonged hilarity till far into the night, when some of the sleighs in the starlight and in the gleam of the Northern lights reeled homewards with their half unconscious burdens drawn by their sober horses, while as many as the house would hold remained over in order to celebrate the wedding and Christmas the next day.
By New Year's the house was finally emptied of its guests, the sheriff and Kathinka were installed in their home, and the captain travelled down on a visit to them with Thea in order to have his New Year's Day spree there.
But then Ma was tired out and completely exhausted.
She felt, now the wheel of work had stopped all at once, and she sat there at home alone, on the day after New Year's, how tremendous a load it had been to pull. The trousseau all through the autumn and the household affairs before the holidays, Christmas, and the wedding, and all the anxieties.
It had gone on incessantly now, as far back as she could think. It was like ravelling out the yarn from a stocking, the longer she thought, the longer it was, clear back to the time when it seemed to her there was a rest the days she was lying in childbed.
But that was now long since.
She was sitting in the corner of the sofa half asleep in the twilight, with her knitting untouched before her.
Aslak and two of the girls had got leave to go to a Christmas entertainment down at the Skreberg farm, and except old Torbjörg, who was sitting with her hymn book and humming and singing in the kitchen, there was no one at home.
Bells jingled out in the yard. Great-Ola had come home with the two-seated sleigh and old Svarten, after having driven the captain and Thea.
He stamped the snow off in the hall and peeped in through the door.
When he drove past Teigen, the postmaster had come out with the captain's mail.
"When did you get there last evening? I hope Thea was not cold."
"No, not at all! We were down there in good time before supper. Ever so many messages from the young wife; she was down in the stable and patted and stroked Svarten last night. It was kind of a separation."
Ma rose. "There is a candle laid out for the stable lantern."
Great-Ola vanished again.
Old Svarten, still harnessed to the sleigh, stood in the stable door and neighed impatiently.
"It only lacked that you should turn the key also," growled Ola, while he took off the harness,and, now with the harness and bells over his arm, let the horse walk in before him.
"Why, if young Svarten isn't neighing also! That was the first time you have said a decent good day here in the stable, do you know that? But you will have to wait, you see."
He curried and brushed and rubbed the new arrival like a privileged old gentleman. They had been serving together now just exactly nine years.
In the kitchen the spruce wood crackled and snapped on the hearth, casting an uncertain reddish glow over Ma's newly polished copper and tin dishes and making them look like mystical shields and weapons hung on the walls.
Great-Ola was now sitting there making himself comfortable with his supper, Christmas cheer and entertainment—butter, bread, bacon, wort-cakes, and salt meat; and Torbjörg had been ordered to draw a bowl of small beer for him down in the cellar. Ola had heard one thing and another down there.
Thinka, she had gone out into the kitchen and would take charge of the housekeeping immediately. But there she found some one who meant to hold the reins.
Old Miss Gülcke wouldn't hear of that. She went straight up to the office, they said, and twisted and turned it over with her brother the whole forenoon till she got what she wanted.
And in the evening the sheriff sat on the sofa and talked so sweetly to the young wife. Beret, the chamber-maid, heard him say that he wanted her to have everything so extremely nice and be wholly devoted to him, so that—Horsch, the old graybeard! We can see now what he was doing here last year.
"And thereby," said Ola, with a mouthful between his teeth, while he cut and spread a new slice of bread, "she got rid of the trouble and the management too."
"It is of no use to pull the noose when one has his head in a snare, you see, Ola."
In the sitting-room Ma had examined the mail that had come, sitting by the stove door. Besides a number ofHermoder,The Constitutional, and a free official document, there was a letter from Aunt Alette.
She lighted the candle and sat down to read it.
In certain respects it was a piece of good fortune that Jäger was not at home. He ought to have nothing to do with this.
Dear Gitta,—I have taken the second Christmas day to write down for you my thoughts concerning Inger-Johanna. I cannot deny that she has come to interest me almost more than I could wish; but, if we can feel a certain degree of anxiety for the smallest flower in our window, which is just goingto blossom, how much more then for a human bud, which in the developing beauty of its youth is ready to burst out with its life's fate. This is more than a romance, it is the noble art work of the Guide of all, which in depth and splendor and immeasurable wealth surpasses everything that human fantasy is able to represent.
Yes, she interests me, dear Gitta! so that my old heart almost trembles at thinking of the life path which may await her, when rise or fall may depend on a single deceptive moment.
What can Nature mean in letting such a host of existences, in which hearts are beating, succumb and be lost in this choice, or does it thereby in its great crucible make an exact assay, without which nothing succeeds in passing over into a more complete development—who can unriddle Nature's runes? My hope for Inger-Johanna is that the fund or the weight of personality, which she possesses in her own nature, will preponderate in the scales of her choice in the decisive moment.
I premise all this as a sigh from my innermost heart; for I follow with increasing dread how the path is made more and more slippery under her feet, and how delicately your sister-in-law weaves the net around her, not with small means to which Inger-Johanna would be superior, but with more deep-lying, sounding allurements.
To open up the fascinating prospect of makingher personal qualities and gifts count—what greater attraction can be spread out before a nature so ardently aspiring as hers? It is told of Englishmen that they fish with a kind of counterfeited, glittering flies, which they drag over the surface of the water until the fish bites; and it appears to me that in no less skilful manner your sister-in-law continually tempts Inger-Johanna's illusions. She never mentions the name of the one concerned, so that it may dawn upon her of itself.
Only the careless hint to me, in her hearing, the last time I was there, that Rönnow had certainly for some time been rather fastidiously looking for a wife among theéliteof our ladies—why was not that calculated to excite, what shall I call it, her ambition or her need of having a field of influence?
Perhaps I should not have noticed this remark to that extent if I had not seen the impression it made on her; she was very absent-minded and lost in thoughts.
And yet the question of whether one should give her heart away ought to be so simple and uncomplicated! Are you in love? Everything else only turns on—something else.
The unfortunate and fateful thing is if she imagines she is able to love, binds herself in duty to love, and thinks that she can say to her immature heart: You shall never awaken. Dear Gitta, supposeit did awaken—afterwards—with her strong, vigorous nature?
It is that which hovers before me so that I have been compelled to write. To talk to her and make her prudent would be to show colors to the blind; she must believe blindly in the one who advises her. Therefore it is you, Gitta, who must take hold and write.
Ma laid the letter down in her lap; she sat in the light, looking paler and sharper even than common.
It was easy for Aunt Alette, the excellent Aunt Alette, to think so happily that everything should be as it ought to be. She had her little inheritance to live on and was not dependent on any one. But—Ma assumed a dry, repellent expression—without the four thousand, old and tormented in Miss Jörgensen's place at the governor's, she would not have written that kind of angelic letter.
Ma read on:
I must also advance here some further doubts, so that you will certainly think this is a sad Christmas letter. This, then, is about dear Jörgen, who finds it so hard at school. That he has thus far been able to keep up with his class, we owe to Student Grip, who, persistently and without being willing ever to hear a word about any compensation, has gone over with him and cleared up for him his worst stumbling-blocks,the German and the Latin grammar.
And if I now express his idea in regard to Jörgen, it is with no small degree of confidence that it may be well founded. He says that so far from Jörgen's having a poor head, it is just the opposite. Only he is not made for the abstract, which is the requisite for literary progress, but all the more for the practical.
In connection with a sound, clear judgment, he is both dexterous and inventive. Jörgen would be an excellent mechanic or even a mechanical engineer, and would come to distinguish himself just as certainly as he will reap trouble, difficulty, and only extremely moderate results by toiling from examination to examination in his studies.
To be sure, I cannot subscribe to Student Grip's somewhat youthful wild ideas about sending him to be an apprentice in England (or even so far as to the American Free States!) inasmuch as a mechanic cannot here obtain a respected rank in society, such as is said to be the case in the above named lands.
Still, much of this, it seems to me, is worth taking into serious consideration.
I sometimes almost doubt whether, old as I am, nevertheless I might be too young. Call it the fruit of inner development or simply an attraction, but the thoughts of the young always exert an enlivening and strengthening influence on my hope of life. Still, I never reconcile myself to the thoughtthat our ideals must inevitably, by a kind of natural law, become exhausted and weakened and break from age like any old earthenware.
And when I see a young man like Grip judged so severely by the so-called practical men—not, so far as I understand, for his ideas of education, but because he would sacrifice himself and put them in operation—I cannot avoid giving him my whole sympathy and respect.
Now he has abandoned law and devoted himself to the study of philology; for, he says, in this country no work is of any use without a sign-board, and he will now try to get a richly gilded one in an excellent examination, seize hold of untrodden soil, like the dwarf birches upon the mountain, and not let go, even if a whole avalanche comes over him.
When it is considered that he must work hard and teach several hours daily only to be able to exist, I cannot but admire his fiery courage and—true, I have not many with me—wish him good luck.
Ma sat pondering.
Then she cut out the page which spoke of Jörgen. It might be worth while, if opportunity offered, to show it to Jäger. In the simplicity of her heart, she really did not know what to think.