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The Emperor of Portugalia, a novel by Selma Lagerlof |
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Book Two - The Dream Begins |
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_ The first few weeks after the senator's call Jan was unable to do a stroke of work: he just lay abed and grieved. Every morning he rose and put on his clothes, intending to go to his work; but before he was outside the door he felt so weak and weary that all he could do was to go back to bed. Katrina tried to be patient with Jan, for she understood that pining, like any other sickness, had to run its course. Yet she could not help wondering how long it would be before Jan's intense yearning for Glory Goldie subsided. "Perhaps he'll be lying round like this till Christmas!" she thought. "Or possibly the whole winter?" And this might have been the case, too, had not the old seine-maker dropped in at Ruffluck one evening and been asked to stay for coffee. The seine-maker, like most persons whose thoughts are far away and who do not keep in touch with what happens immediately about them, was always taciturn. But when his coffee had been poured and he had emptied it into his saucer, to let it cool, it struck him that he ought to say something. "To-day there's bound to be a letter from Glory Goldie," he said. "I feel it in my bones." "We had greetings from her only a fortnight ago in her letter to the senator," Katrina reminded him. The seine-maker blew into his saucer a couple of times before saying anything more. Whereupon he again found it expedient to bridge a long silence with a word or so. "Maybe some blessing has come to the girl, and it has given her something to write about." "What kind of blessing might that be?" scouted Katrina. "When you've got to drudge as a servant, one day is as humdrum as another." The seine-maker bit off a corner of a sugar-lump and gulped his coffee. When he had finished an appalling stillness fell upon the room. "It might be that Glory Goldie met some person in the street," he blurted out, his half-dead eyes vacantly staring at space. He seemed not to know what he was saying. Katrina did not think it necessary to respond; so replenished his cup without speaking. "Maybe the person she met was an old lady who had difficulty in walking," the seine-maker went on in the same offhand manner, "and maybe she stumbled and fell when Glory Goldie came along." "Would that be anything to write about?" asked Katrina, weary of this senseless talk. "But suppose Glory Goldie stopped and helped the old lady up?" pursued the seine-maker, "and she was so thankful to the girl for helping her that she opened her purse and gave her all of ten rix-dollars--wouldn't that be worth telling?" "Why certainly," said Katrina, "if it were true. But this is just something you're making up." "It is well, sometimes, to be able to indulge in little thought feasts," contended the seine-maker, "they are often more satisfying than the real ones." "You've tried both kinds," returned Katrina, "so you ought to know." The seine-maker went his way directly, and Katrina gave no further thought to his story. As for Jan, he took it at first as idle chatter. But lying abed, with nothing to take up his mind, presently he began to wonder if there was not some hidden meaning back of the seine-maker's words. The old man's tone sounded a bit peculiar when he spoke of the letter. Would he have sat there and made up such a long story only for talk's sake? Perhaps he had heard something. Perhaps Glory Goldie had written to him? It was quite possible that something so great had come to the little girl that she dared not send direct word to her parents, and wrote instead to the seine-maker, asking him to prepare them. "He'll come again to-morrow," thought Jan, "and then we'll hear all about it." But for some reason the seine-maker did not come back the next day, nor the day after. By the third day Jan had become so impatient to see his old friend that he got up and went over to his cabin, to find out whether there was anything in what he had said. The old man was sitting alone mending a drag-net when Jan came in. He was so crippled from rheumatism, he said, he had been unable to leave the house for several days. Jan did not want to ask him outright if he had received a letter from Glory Goldie. He thought he would attain his object more easily by approaching it in the indirect way the other had taken. So he said: "I've been thinking of what you told us about Glory Goldie the last time you were at our place." The seine-maker looked up from his work, puzzled. It was some little time before he comprehended what Jan alluded to. "Why, that was just a little whimsey of mine," he returned presently. Then Jan went very close to the old man. "Anyhow it was something pleasant to listen to," he said. "You might have told us more, perhaps, if Katrina hadn't been so mistrustful?" "Oh, yes," replied the seine-maker. "This is the sort of amusement one can afford to indulge in down here, in the Ashdales." "I have thought," continued Jan, emboldened by the encouragement, "that maybe the story didn't end with the old lady giving Glory Goldie the ten rix-dollars. Perhaps she also invited the girl to come to see her?" "Maybe she did," said the seine-maker. "Maybe she's so rich that she owns a whole stone house?" "That was a happy thought, friend Jan!" "And maybe the rich old lady will pay Glory Goldie's debt?" Jan began, but stopped short, because the old man's daughter-in-law had just come in, and of course he did not care to let her into the secret. "So you're out to-day, Jan," observed the daughter-in-law. "I'm glad you're feeling better." "For that I have to thank my good friend Ol' Bengtsa!" said Jan, with an air of mystery. "He's the one who has cured me." Jan said good-bye, and left at once. For a long while the seine-maker sat gazing out after him. "I don't know what he can have meant by saying that I have cured him," the old man remarked to his daughter-in-law. "It can't be that he's--? No, no!" _ |
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