One of Life's Slaves Part 19

Again an obstinate silence, with continued sobbing and drying of eyes on Barbara's side.

"It might be as well to consider whether the shop really paid?"

suggested Nikolai at last cautiously.

"Would he like her to give up like a cow to be slaughtered before Christmas," she exclaimed angrily--"and no more money than that was!"

"I only meant it would be better to stop in time."

But these words had the effect of fire on gunpowder. She got up, as red as a tile. Just so! Now _he_ wanted her to close!

She rushed--in a manner somewhat recalling the useful animal just mentioned by herself, when it is trying to get loose--into the shop and back again.

If Nikolai thought that she would give up and go bankrupt to be jeered at by everybody, when she only needed to go down and borrow that little of Ludvig, he was very much mistaken.

Barbara was quite flushed.

She would not let herself be ruined a second time for Nikolai's sake. It was quite enough that he had injured her welfare once before in this world. Yes, he need not sit and look at her with open mouth. What else was she turned out of the Veyergangs' house for, where she had been so important, if it was not because Nikolai had lifted his hand against the Consul-General's Ludvig. Oh yes, he might wonder as much as he liked, but that was why she had been driven out helpless into the world, from comfortable circ.u.mstances. And then when an opportunity came for Nikolai to support her a little, he had some one else to spend his money upon.

But the most vexatious part of it was that Nikolai also wanted to forbid her to apply to one who was as good as her own child, when there was the necessity for it.

She would pay no attention to that however. If _he_ would not help her, he must put up with her going to one who could, now that it was a question of closing the shop and the whole business.

No, she swore she would not go bankrupt. And she struck the table so that the coppers danced in the drawer.

It was a good thing that it was this week, for next week he was going abroad for two or three months; he had said so himself yesterday, so that both she and Silla heard it.

Nikolai sat quite pale. His mouth moved as if it were trembling, and he wiped his forehead once or twice with his sleeve.

He looked slowly up at his mother; it was as if he were afraid of getting to hate her.

"You shall have the money."

He felt he was on the point of bursting into tears, and must get away to have his rage out.

It was another postponement for him and Silla until the spring. And where was the end of it to be?

His hand shook and fumbled with the door-handle.

This fresh piece of information, which his mother had so unexpectedly given Nikolai, that it was he who had destroyed her well-being, was like yet another stone weighing him down.

It crushed him like a moral defeat. He could not rid himself of the thought that there was something in it. He felt his courage was weakened, and he went about disheartened.

He had lost another quarter as to his prospects of getting married, and if his mother required or rather claimed money from him again for her down-hill trade, what could he do?

It was like work without hope, and despondency began to take hold of him.

When he put his shillings away in the tin box on Sat.u.r.day, it was with bitter thoughts. At any moment his mother might come and swallow the whole of it--as she, of course, had a right to do, since he in his time had wasted all hers.

He had always thought that when it came to the point, it was he who had a reckoning to demand of his mother, because she had brought him into the world without being able to give him a father, and then let him go.

But now it seemed to be just the other way. His mother, with her all-consuming business, was the great, lawful gulf for all his happiness.

He began to be weary of it all.

Amid all this there sometimes dawned and smouldered a faint glow of rebellion within him, although, in his honest endeavour to come to the bottom of the truth, it was some time before it blazed up.

Should he let Silla go, too, into this same gulf?

The answer blazed up clearly, so that the flames shone and flickered:

"Not while there was a rag left of what was called Nikolai!"

And with reference to his mother, and his having perhaps brought misfortune upon her, should he not have hit out, but just let himself be insulted and trampled upon, as he was going to be again now? His mother, tall and big, would just squeeze them to death with that shop, both he and Silla. They were not even to have leave or the right to sigh.

But he would not have that.

He had thrashed Veyergang, and only repented that he had not hit harder.

As he had come into the world, he would be a human being, even if he were to have his head cut off for it afterwards.

The shop up there should not be fattened with another penny out of the tin box. If his mother ever came to want for food, she would always find a place in his room; but that she should put a stop to his ever getting a room of his own--no, thank you!

He was like another man when he had at last made this clear to himself.

Yes, his name was Nikolai, and he was foreman at Mrs. Ellingsen's.

CHAPTER XII

THE FAIR AND THE CONVICT

The winter was pa.s.sing.

It was at the time of the fair in the beginning of February. The streets swarmed with people and the snow in the thaw had turned to powdered sugar with the traffic.

A motley row of stalls stretched from market-place to market-place.

Trumpets brayed, buffoons shouted, the lottery-wheel went round, the cryers howled. Music filled the air in volleys of bl.u.s.tering flourishes, and amidst it all, over the whole town, pleasure-seeking, dancing and merriment, until far on into the night.

Dull noise and the sound of music penetrated up to the manufacturing part of the town. In the evenings the town lay beneath it in increased illumination.

There was a kind of intoxication in the air, and there was many an impatient, longing soul up there of such as look severely upon themselves, while plenty of the looser sort streamed down.

From year to year the accounts grew of the large fair-b.a.l.l.s, of the trumpets, the coloured lamps in the garden, and the matadores who stood treat. It was tempting and attractive.

As early as the second day Kristofa came, excited and eager, with a solution of the question as far as she and Gunda and Silla were concerned--money for tickets and cakes too, for all three!

She behaved most mysteriously, talked all the time of a certain person, whom she dared not, for all the world, mention.