Bedstefar had been dead for three days, and it had been arranged that
the funeral was to take place a week after the night of his death.
Preparations had been going steadily forward, interrupted only by the
anxiety and excitement caused by Clifford's long absence in the
mountains and his supposed death. Bedstemor herself had been much
troubled about him, and had spent a good deal of time watching for him.
But when he returned safely, she felt free to continue her persecutions
in the kitchen; and it took a great amount of Knutty's craftiness to
entice her into the porch and keep her there. Bedstemor was
astonishingly well, seemed in excellent spirits, and in answer to
questions as to how she felt, she always said briskly:
"Bra', bra,' meget bra'" (Well, very well).
Indeed, she was not a little gratified to be once more the central
figure of circumstances, as in the old days, before she and her husband
had retired to the dower-house. But, spite of her cheerfulness, she
looked a pathetic old figure wandering about, relieved from constant
attendance at her sick husband's bedside, and thus thrown on the little
outside world for distraction and company. Tante was endlessly kind to
her, but had many a secret laugh over the old widow's unfunereal
attitude of mind, and over her stubborn determination to go and bully
every one in the kitchen. Tante herself was in great form again. She had
recovered from her fears and tears, and had, so she told Katharine,
regained her usual Viking bearing.
"Never shall I forget your tenderness, dear one," she said to Katharine.
"If I loved him even a hundred times more than I do, I should not grudge
him to you. He loves you, and you are the right aura for him. And some
day he will tell you so, although it will not be very soon, stupid
fellow! He will try and try many times, and leave off suddenly. I know
him well, my prisoner of silence. These reserved people! What a nuisance
they are to themselves, and every one else! But to themselves--ak, ak,
poor devils!"
Katharine, who was standing at the time on Knutty's bedroom-balcony,
looked out into the distance. She herself had been somewhat silent
since that sad morning at the Skyds-station.
"The end of it all will be, dear one," Knutty continued recklessly,
"that you will have to help him. This sort of man always has to be
helped, otherwise he goes on beginning and leaving off suddenly until
Doomsday. I know the genus well."
Katharine went away.
"Aha," said Knutty to herself, "I have said too much. And, after all, it
is premature. Oh, these parish-clocks! Why, Marianne has only been dead
about a year. How like her, only to have been dead about a year! Oh, oh,
what a wicked old woman I am!"
She called Katharine, and Katharine came.
"Kjaere," she said, as she stroked Katharine's hand lovingly. "I have
always been a free-lance with my naughty old tongue. No one with any
sense takes any notice of me. And am I not funny and human too? All this
time I have only been thinking that you are the right aura for my
Clifford. Not once have I asked myself whether my Clifford were the
right aura for you! I should have been an ideal mother, always on the
alert to snatch up all the best things for those I loved, regardless of
other people's feelings and interests. Ah, that is right, you are
smiling, and not angry with your Viking friend. And, dear one, that
reminds me again of how you comforted me when I was not behaving like a
Viking. Do you remember assuring me that his absence, and Alan's
anxiety for him, were working for their complete reconciliation? Your
words have come beautifully true, haven't they? Well, you have the great
heart that knows."
They were a small party at the Gaard now. Ejnar had gone off to
Kongsvold in the Dovre mountains, a district specially interesting to
botanists as the habitat of certain plants not found elsewhere. Gerda
would have gone with him, but that she had sprained her ankle. She
fretted for her Ejnar, although she pretended that his absence was a
great relief.
"It is grand to be free at last!" she said to Tante. "Free at last. I
can now take a long breath."
"Yes," said Tante, smiling mischievously, "freedom is delightful when it
does not make your nose red and your eyes moist!"
Alan had gone off with Jens to a mountain-lake to catch trout for the
funeral, and would not be back for a day or two; and Clifford was away
at the Skyds-station, helping the two strangers to make the necessary
arrangements for taking their sad burden home to England. All the other
guests except the Sorenskriver had left, and he was in a thoroughly
disagreeable mood, grumbling about the food, and annoyed because there
was going to be a funeral at the Gaard.
"Then why not go away?" Katharine suggested on one occasion, when his
martyrdom had reached an acute stage.
"Thank you, I choose to stay," he answered in his gruffest tone of
voice.
Katharine laughed. She liked the Sorenskriver even at his worst.
"Read this German newspaper, with a whole column of abuse against
England," Katharine said, teasing him. "That will make you feel
cheerful, Sorenskriver."
"Sniksnak!" said the Sorenskriver, a little less roughly.
"Or come out for a walk with me and help me pick multebaer," she added.
"Mor Inga was saying she had not half enough as yet."
"Perhaps I will come," he answered, with a grim smile on his face. He
took pleasure in Katharine's company, and was secretly delighted that
Clifford was busy helping those Englishmen over at the Skyds-station. In
this way he got Katharine to himself, and he sat smoking his long pipe
in the porch, grumbling and disagreeable, but, in justice it must be
owned, gentle to Bedstemor. Tante declared that he was courting
Katharine.
"I am given to understand, dear one," she said, with a twinkle in her
eye, "that the Norwegian way of courting is to be extremely
disagreeable, and almost rude to the person whom you adore. In a day or
two you will have a proposal--and what then?"
"Tante thinks only about marriages," Gerda said reproachfully.
"Well, what else in the world is there to think about?" Tante asked
defiantly.
"Oh, Tante, you know you do not think that," Gerda said. "If you really
thought that, why didn't you get married yourself?"
"Because, kjaere, no one would have me, except a sea-captain, and he was
mad," Knutty answered. "And he killed his mate soon afterwards. I was
always glad I was not his mate!"
"It is not true," Gerda said, turning indignantly to Katharine. "She had
lots of admirers and lovers. You ask her Englishman. He knows."
"Ah," said Knutty, "perhaps I did have a few admirers in my time! You
may be sure no sane woman would ever say she had never had any, unless
there was some one at hand to deny her statement."
When Clifford came home that evening, Knutty herself broached the
subject again.
"Kjaere," she said, "did I have a few admirers in my time, or did I not?
I have forgotten. Not that a woman ever does forget, but tell me!"
"You had numbers, Knutty," Clifford answered, smiling at her; "and I was
jealous of them all. At nine I was jealous of the sea-captain, and at
ten I was jealous of the clergyman in Jutland, and at twelve of the
English architect, and at thirteen of the Swedish officer, and so on and
so on."
Later in the evening, when he and Katharine were sitting alone near the
great hay-barn, Katharine spoke of Knutty.
"She is the dearest old woman I have ever met," she said warmly. "I
don't wonder that you all love her."
"I can never tell you what she has been to me," he answered. "It was
always a great grief to me that----" He broke off.
"It was a great grief to me that----"
Again he broke off. He was trying to speak of Knutty's indifference to
Marianne; and even this was too hard for him to say. Up in the
mountains, he had felt that it would be easy for him to tell Katharine
everything that he had in his heart, beginning with the story of
Marianne and Marianne's death, and ending with himself and his love for
her. But now that he was near her, he could say nothing about his own
personal life and inner feelings. He could only bend forward and scratch
a hole in the ground with his stick. Katharine remembered how Knutty had
spoken of his "beginnings" and "breakings off," and she said:
"Knutty understands you through and through, Professor Thornton. Doesn't
she?"
"Yes," he answered simply. "But why should you say that just now?"
"Oh, I don't know," Katharine answered. "I was thinking of her, and it
came into my head. And I was so touched by her grief when she feared
that she--we--had lost you."
"I do not know what she and the boy would have done without you," he
said, still working with that stick.
Katharine was silent.
"And I cannot think what those men over at the Skyds-station would have
done without you," he said. "Their last words to me this afternoon
were, 'Tell her we shall always be wishing to serve her.'"
Katharine remained silent.
"There was this little packet which I was to give you," he said, after a
pause. "It was the poor fellow's South African service-medal. You were
to have it."
He watched her as she opened the packet and touched the medal. He
watched her as she put it in the palm of her hand and looked at it with
dim eyes. It would have been easy for him to have opened his heart to
her then and there, if he could only have known that she was saying to
him with speechless tongue:
"My own dear love, whilst I am looking at this soldier's medal, my heart
is giving thanks that the lightning spared you to me."
But he could not guess that, and the moment passed.
The next day, when they were again alone, he attempted to speak.
"Do you remember my saying up at the Saeter that I tried never to
dream?" he began.
"Yes," she said. "I have always wished to ask you why you should feel so
strongly about dreams."
"I should like to tell you," he said eagerly. "I want to tell you.
But----"
He broke off again, and turned to her with a pathetic smile on his face.
"Speech has never been easy to me," he said.