The Road Leads On | Page 3

golden floral design, and the walls of the
other were hung with pure silk. But nowhere was there to be found a
solitary chair to sit upon. After he had become burgomaster, Theodore
put one of these salons to good use as a council chamber and went far
to impress his fellow townsmen with this meeting-place straight out of
wonderland....
A daughter was born to them and the mother was overjoyed. The father
had taken the trouble to order some fireworks from Trondhjem but
declined to set them off. The following year they had another daughter,
a blessed new creation which again brought joy to the mother, though
the father, viewing the situation with a practical eye, failed to share her
elation. Again no fireworks were set off. But at length, when the father
was over forty and the mother was barely half his age, they had a son
who pleased them both, a ten-pound baby with much hair on his head
and real strength in his grip, a robust little chap. That evening the father
got out a certain sky-rocket he had hidden away and tried to touch it off.
Nothing happened, however. He struggled with live coals and direct
flame, but the thing refused to go off. Oh well, all that meant was that
the powder had gone mouldy with the years.
The boy was christened Gordon Tidemand, a name which the mother
with all her book-learning--she was the sexton's daughter, bear in
mind--had run across some place or other. As a name that was quite all
right, there was nothing worth arguing about there, and the lad did not
die; on the contrary, he throve, ate and drank like any healthy child, but
in time he developed brown eyes. No one was able to understand
it--brown eyes! And that was quite all right, too; his blue-eyed parents
regarded the situation as an interesting freak of nature and mentioned it
quite openly to others: "Will you simply look at what brown eyes he
has!" they said. They did nothing to conceal the fact of those sparkling
brown little eyes.
But then one day the father was assailed by frightful misgivings.
Had it been back in the days of his hot-blooded youth, Theodore paa
Bua would surely have held his wife responsible for those brown eyes.

But as things now were with him, taken up every minute of his day
with that enormous business of his and all his other affairs, to say
nothing of his repeated exasperation over being the father of all those
little girls--an endless procession of girls--he again made the best of the
situation and used sound common sense. On one or two occasions he
had thumped the table at his wife, and he had gone so far as to squint
searchingly into her face each time she called for help from the
warehouse to slaughter a calf or smoke some salmon, but further than
that he had never gone. Nor had he even for a moment considered
dismissing that handsome devil of a Gypsy lad who worked for him
down at the warehouse and who was such an able hand with the salmon
net.
A practical, superior sort of chap, that Theodore paa Bua, even though
he was hardly the man for such an attitude, hardly one of those whose
tombstone's are forever cluttered up with fulsome inscriptions. No, he
was simply an honest fellow with a slightly twisted sense of ethics. His
fireworks had failed to go off; not a single rocket had he been able to
despatch with a blazing thrust at the stars. But what of it? In truth, the
stars are well beyond the reach of mortal man! And was it, after all,
worth while to get rid of the Gypsy and thus only lose a good servant?
Who could trap the salmon as cleverly as he? Who would bring in an
unexpectedly large profit in fish at the expense of getting his hands all
covered with blisters from handling jellyfish, as he? Who would turn
out at all hours of the day or night to meet the steamers and ferry ashore
all those piles of freight for the store, as he? Furthermore, didn't that
Gypsy lad, Otto, come of good people in their own way, too? He
belonged to the great family of Alexanders who were from Hungary
and who were known all through Nordland, wherever they went with
that houseboat of theirs.
Moreover, how could Theodore tell? What proof did he have? None
save a pair of shining brown eyes and a certain suspicious way his wife
had had about her ever since that Gypsy had come to Segelfoss. It was
something, was it not, that a new light had kindled in her eyes, that she
tiptoed up and