The Emperor of Portugallia Part 13

"I wish to speak with Jan Anderson of Ruffluck," he said.

"That's him over there," volunteered the seine-maker, pointing at the bed.

"Is he sick?" inquired the senator.

"Oh, no! Oh, no!" replied half a dozen at the same time.

"And he isn't drunk, either," added Borje.

"Nor is he asleep," said the seine-maker.

"He has walked so far to-day he's all tired out," said Katrina, thinking it best to explain the matter in that way. At the same time she bent down over her husband and tried to persuade him to rise.

But Jan lay still.

"Does he understand what I'm saying?" asked the senator.

"Yes indeed," they all a.s.sured him.

"Perhaps he's not expecting any glad tidings, seeing it's Senator Carl Carlson who is paying him a call." This from the seine-maker.

The senator turned his head and stared at the seine-maker. "Ol'

Bengtsa of l.u.s.terby has not always been so afraid of meeting Carl Carlson of Storvik," he observed in a mild voice. Turning toward the table again, he took up a letter.

Every one was dumbfounded. The senator had actually spoken in a friendly tone. He could almost be said to have smiled.

"The fact is," he began, "a couple of days ago I received a communication from a person who calls herself Glory Goldie Sunnycastle, daughter of Jan of Ruffluck, in which she says she left home some months ago to try to earn two-hundred rix-dollars, which sum her parents have to pay to Lars Gunnarson of Falla on the first day of October in order to obtain full rights of ownership to the land on which their hut stands."

Here the senator paused a moment so that his hearers would be able to follow him.

"And now she sends the money to me," he continued, "with the request that I come down to the Ashdales and see that this matter is properly settled with the new owner of Falla; so that he won't be able to play any new trick later on."

"That girl has got some sense in her head," the senator remarked as he folded the letter. "She turns to me from the start. If all did as she has done there would be less cheating and injustice in this parish."

Before the close of that remark Jan was sitting on the edge of the bed. "But the girl? Where is she?" he asked.

"And now I'd like to know," the senator proceeded, taking no notice of Jan's question, "whether the parents are in accord with the daughter and authorize me to close--"

"But the girl, the girl?" Jan struck in. "Where is she?"

"Where she is?" said the senator, looking in the letter to see.

"She says it was impossible for her to earn all this money in just two or three months, but she has found a place with a kind lady, who advanced her the money, and now she will have to stay with the lady until she has made it good."

"Then she's not coming home?" Jan asked.

"No, not for the present, as I understand it," replied the senator.

Again Jan lay down on the bed and turned his face to the wall.

What did he care for the hut and all that? What was the good of his going on living, when his little girl was not coming back?

THE DREAM BEGINS

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 s.p.a.ce. 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."