The Great Hunger | Page 7

people shook their heads over her--the younger ones watched her with sidelong glances. And when she left, she kissed Peer, and turned round more than once to look back at him, flushed under her big hat, and smiling; and it seemed to Peer that she must surely be the loveliest creature in all the world.
But now--now she had gone to a place where the ungodly dwell in such frightful torment, and no hope of salvation for her through all eternity--and Peer all the while could only think of her in a light dress and a big straw hat, all song and happy laughter.
Then came the question: Who was to pay for the boy now? True, his baptismal certificate said that he had a father--his name was Holm, and he lived in Christiania--but, from what the mother had said, it was understood that he had disappeared long ago. What was to be done with the boy?
Never till now had Peer rightly understood that he was a stranger here, for all that he called the old couple father and mother.
He lay awake night after night up in the loft, listening to the talk about him going on in the room below--the good-wife crying and saying: "No, no!", the others saying how hard the times were, and that Peer was quite old enough now to be put to service as a goat- herd on some up-country farm.
Then Peer would draw the skin-rug up over his head. But often, when one of the elders chanced to be awake at night, he could hear some one in the loft sobbing in his sleep. In the daytime he took up as little room as he could at the table, and ate as little as humanly possible; but every morning he woke up in fear that to-day-- to-day he would have to bid the old foster-mother farewell and go out among strangers.
Then something new and unheard of plumped down into the little cottage by the fjord.
There came a registered letter with great dabs of sealing-wax all over it, and a handwriting so gentlemanly as to be almost unreadable. Every one crowded round the eldest son to see it opened--and out fell five ten-crown notes. "Mercy on us!" they cried in amazement, and "Can it be for us?" The next thing was to puzzle out what was written in the letter. And who should that turn out to be from but--no other than Peer's father, though he did not say it in so many words. "Be good to the boy," the letter said. "You will receive fifty crowns from me every half-year. See that he gets plenty to eat and goes dry and well shod. Faithfully your, P. Holm, Captain."
"Why, Peer--he's--he's-- Your father's a captain, an officer," stammered the eldest girl, and fell back a step to stare at the boy.
"And we're to get twice as much for him as before," said the son, holding the notes fast and gazing up at the ceiling, as if he were informing Heaven of the fact.
But the old wife was thinking of something else as she folded her hands in thankfulness--now she needn't lose the boy.
"Properly fed!" No need to fear for that. Peer had treacle with his porridge that very day, though it was only a week-day. And the eldest son gave him a pair of stockings, and made him sit down and put them on then and there; and the same night, when he went to bed, the eldest girl came and tucked him up in a new skin-rug, not quite so hairless as the old one. His father a captain! It seemed too wonderful to be true.
From that day times were changed for Peer. People looked at him with very different eyes. No one said "Poor boy" of him now. The other boys left off calling him bad names; the grown-ups said he had a future before him. "You'll see," they would say, "that father of yours will get you on; you'll be a parson yet, ay, maybe a bishop, too." At Christmas, there came a ten-crown note all for himself, to do just as he liked with. Peer changed it into silver, so that his purse was near bursting with prosperity. No wonder he began to go about with his nose in the air, and play the little prince and chieftain among the boys. Even Klaus Brock, the doctor's son, made up to him, and taught him to play cards. But-- "You surely don't mean to go and be a parson," he would say.
For all this, no one could say that Peer was too proud to help with the fishing, or make himself useful in the smithy. But when the sparks flew showering from the glowing iron, he could not help seeing visions of his own--visions that