One of Lifes Slaves | Page 6

the servant upstairs, who put in her head to hear what the little imp had done now, as he was screaming so--that all the punishment she gave him, and all her attempts, both by letting him have no supper and by locking him in, were equally useless: he was just as defiant and unreliable as ever!
She had frightened him now by saying that the devil sat in the corner behind the bed and watched to see if he left the cradle!
He was almost beside himself with terror, and fancied all the time that he could see the aforesaid sinister personage putting up his head over Mrs. Holman's pillow. He could not help looking now and again towards the window--there was some one playing outside in the square. And, somehow or other, he came to be standing there, and stood until he once more remembered what was behind him. Then he darted back like an arrow, and sat staring in mortal fear into the corner.
From being made useful beside the cradle, Nikolai was advanced in course of time to mind the Holman's daughter Ursula, outside the cellar steps. To move farther, only as far as the trees over on the other side of the street, was a capital offence. The idea of what overstepping the bounds meant, was impressed upon him with full force. How could Mrs. Holman be sure otherwise that he did not take Silla right up to the basin round the fountain, where all the naughty boys played with their ships, and shouted and made a noise? His poor little body had received so many black and blue marks every time he had fallen into temptation that at last the limits stood instinctively before his frightened perception like an invisible iron grating. A foot's breadth beyond was, in his imagination, the blackest crime, an enormity which would draw down the fiercest retribution upon him.
That Silla was an uncommon and remarkable being of a higher order, so to speak, than himself, had been driven into him in so many ways ever since she came into the world, that he looked upon the assertion as raised above all doubt.
Notwithstanding everything that he had endured for her sake, or perhaps, by a strange contradiction, just because of these sufferings, the feeling that she was under his care was most highly developed. His admiration of her was unqualified; he thought her more than remarkable in her blue bow and an old red stuff rose in her hat, and he submitted to a wilfulness which was quite as despotic as even Mrs. Holman's. When he had sat long enough and let her fill his hair with dust, she would order him to pull off her shoes and stockings. If he did it, he got a beating; if he did not do it, she screamed, and then he got a beating too.
Insecurity was, so to speak, the soil on which he lived, and the hurried, shrinking glances he continually cast, as if from habit, towards the cellar door--even when his often guilt-laden conscience felt itself most guiltless--were only the fruit of daily experience.
"You could see the bad conscience in his face, a long way off," said Mrs. Holman; and it was true--the quick, watchful look up with the grey eyes was to see what sins he was guilty of now.
"Good neighbours and other good things," the catechism says. But in our times we have no neighbours; you do not know who lives on the floor above you or on the floor below, or even on the other side of the passage. And so it was that no one in the house had any ear to speak of for Nikolai's various untoward fortunes below in the cellar, although their character often asserted itself with no uncertain sound during their execution.
The neighbours had become accustomed to the continual screaming and howling of that naughty boy, just as one accustoms one's self to piano practising or the din of a factory; perhaps too, they comforted themselves with the thought that it was most fortunate that such a morally depraved child had come under discipline and correction.
When Nikolai and Silla wandered as usual up and down the pavement outside the cellar, the people of the house might often in passing give the little girl a friendly nod. To give Nikolai any encouragement in that way would have been a mistake.
Maren, the cook, who had come to the floor above last hiring-day[1], had naturally no conception of Mrs. Holman's strict, conscientious character, and was therefore to be excused in what now took place.
[Footnote 1: The days for changing servants in Norway are in the spring and autumn. In Christiania they are the second Friday after Easter, and the second Friday after Michaelmas.]
She went down into the cellar with the