As soon as they landed and reached the tradesman’s house, he was taken to Edith, who was waiting for him in the arbor.
The happy Petter Nord woke from his dreams when he saw her. She was a fair vision, this girl, withering away in emulation with the rootless birches around her. Her big eyes had darkened and grown clearer. Her hands were so thin and transparent that one feared to touch them for their fragility.
And it was she who loved him. Of course he had to love her instantly in return, deeply, dearly, ardently! It was bliss, after so many years, to feel his heart glow at the sight of a fellow-being.
He had stopped motionless at the entrance of the arbor, while eyes, heart and brain worked most eagerly. When she saw how he stood and stared at her, she began to smile with that most despairing smile in the world, the smile of the very ill, that says: “See, this is what I have become, but do not count on me! I cannot be beautiful and charming any longer. I must die soon.”
It brought him back to reality. He saw that he had to do not with a vision, but with a spirit which was about to spread its wings, and therefore had made the walls of its prison so delicate and transparent. It now showed so plainly in his face and in the way he took Edith’s hand, that he all at once suffered with her suffering—that he had forgotten everything but grief, that she was going to die. The sick girl felt the same pity for herself, and her eyes filled with tears.
Oh, what sympathy he felt for her from the first moment. He understood instantly that she would not wish to show her emotion. Of course it was agitating for her to see him, whom she had longed for so long, but it was her weakness that had made her betray herself. She naturally would not like him to pay any attention to it. And so he began on an innocent subject of conversation.
“Do you know what happened to my white mice?” he said.
She looked at him with admiration. He seemed to wish to make the way easier for her. “I let them loose in the shop,” she said. “They have thriven well.”
“No, really! Are there any of them left?”
“Halfvorson says that he will never be rid of Petter Nord’s mice. They have revenged you, you understand,” she said with meaning.
“It was a very good race,” answered Petter Nord, proudly.
The conversation lagged for a while. Edith closed her eyes, as if to rest, and he kept a respectful silence. His last answer she had not understood. He had not responded to what she had said about revenge. When he began to talk of the mice, she believed that he understood what she wished to say to him. She knew that he had come to the town a few weeks before to be revenged. Poor Petter Nord! Many a time she had wondered what had become of him. Many a night had the cries of the frightened boy come to her in dreams. It was partly for his sake that she should never again have to live through such a night, that she had begun to reform her uncle, had made his house a home for him, had let the lonely man feel the value of having a sympathetic friend near him. Her lot was now again bound together with that of Petter Nord. His attempt at revenge had frightened her to death. As soon as she had regained her strength after that severe attack, she had begged Halfvorson to look him up.
And Petter Nord sat there and believed that it was for love she had called him. He could not know that she believed him vindictive, coarse, degraded, a drunkard and a bully. He who was an example to all his comrades in the working quarter, he could not guess that she had summoned him, in order to preach virtue and good habits to him, in order to say to him, if nothing else helped: “Look at me, Petter Nord! It is your want of judgment, your vindictiveness, that is the cause of my death. Think of it, and begin another life!”
He had come filled with love of life and dreams to celebrate love’s festival, and she lay there and thought of plunging him into the black depths of remorse.
There must have been something of the glory of the kingly crown shining on her, which made her hesitate so that she decided to question him first.
“But, Petter Nord, was it really you who were here with those three terrible men?”
He flushed and looked on the ground. Then he had to tell her the whole story of the day with all its shame. In the first place, what unmanliness he had shown in not sooner demanding justice, and how he had only gone because he was forced to it, and then how he had been beaten and whipped instead of beating someone himself. He did not dare to look up while he was speaking; he did expect that even those gentle eyes would judge him with forbearance. He felt that he was robbing himself of all the glory with which she must have surrounded him in her dreams.
“But Petter Nord, what would have happened if you had met Halfvorson?” asked Edith, when he had finished.
He hung his head even lower. “I saw him well enough,” he said. “He had not gone away. He was working in his garden outside the gates. The boy in the shop told me everything.”
“Well, why did you not avenge yourself?” said Edith.
He was spared nothing.—But he felt the inquiring glance of her eyes on him and he began obediently: “When the men lay down to sleep on a slope, I went alone
