CHAPTER XVII.

Bedstefar had been dead for three days, and it had been arranged that the funeral was to take place a week after the night of his death. Preparations had been going steadily forward, interrupted only by the anxiety and excitement caused by Clifford's long absence in the mountains and his supposed death. Bedstemor herself had been much troubled about him, and had spent a good deal of time watching for him. But when he returned safely, she felt free to continue her persecutions in the kitchen; and it took a great amount of Knutty's craftiness to entice her into the porch and keep her there. Bedstemor was astonishingly well, seemed in excellent spirits, and in answer to questions as to how she felt, she always said briskly:

"Bra', bra,' meget bra'" (Well, very well).

Indeed, she was not a little gratified to be once more the central figure of circumstances, as in the old days, before she and her husband had retired to the dower-house. But, spite of her cheerfulness, she looked a pathetic old figure wandering about, relieved from constant attendance at her sick husband's bedside, and thus thrown on the little outside world for distraction and company. Tante was endlessly kind to her, but had many a secret laugh over the old widow's unfunereal attitude of mind, and over her stubborn determination to go and bully every one in the kitchen. Tante herself was in great form again. She had recovered from her fears and tears, and had, so she told Katharine, regained her usual Viking bearing.

"Never shall I forget your tenderness, dear one," she said to Katharine. "If I loved him even a hundred times more than I do, I should not grudge him to you. He loves you, and you are the right aura for him. And some day he will tell you so, although it will not be very soon, stupid fellow! He will try and try many times, and leave off suddenly. I know him well, my prisoner of silence. These reserved people! What a nuisance they are to themselves, and every one else! But to themselves--ak, ak, poor devils!"

Katharine, who was standing at the time on Knutty's bedroom-balcony, looked out into the distance. She herself had been somewhat silent since that sad morning at the Skyds-station.

"The end of it all will be, dear one," Knutty continued recklessly, "that you will have to help him. This sort of man always has to be helped, otherwise he goes on beginning and leaving off suddenly until Doomsday. I know the genus well."

Katharine went away.

"Aha," said Knutty to herself, "I have said too much. And, after all, it is premature. Oh, these parish-clocks! Why, Marianne has only been dead about a year. How like her, only to have been dead about a year! Oh, oh, what a wicked old woman I am!"

She called Katharine, and Katharine came.

"Kjaere," she said, as she stroked Katharine's hand lovingly. "I have always been a free-lance with my naughty old tongue. No one with any sense takes any notice of me. And am I not funny and human too? All this time I have only been thinking that you are the right aura for my Clifford. Not once have I asked myself whether my Clifford were the right aura for you! I should have been an ideal mother, always on the alert to snatch up all the best things for those I loved, regardless of other people's feelings and interests. Ah, that is right, you are smiling, and not angry with your Viking friend. And, dear one, that reminds me again of how you comforted me when I was not behaving like a Viking. Do you remember assuring me that his absence, and Alan's anxiety for him, were working for their complete reconciliation? Your words have come beautifully true, haven't they? Well, you have the great heart that knows."

They were a small party at the Gaard now. Ejnar had gone off to Kongsvold in the Dovre mountains, a district specially interesting to botanists as the habitat of certain plants not found elsewhere. Gerda would have gone with him, but that she had sprained her ankle. She fretted for her Ejnar, although she pretended that his absence was a great relief.

"It is grand to be free at last!" she said to Tante. "Free at last. I can now take a long breath."

"Yes," said Tante, smiling mischievously, "freedom is delightful when it does not make your nose red and your eyes moist!"

Alan had gone off with Jens to a mountain-lake to catch trout for the funeral, and would not be back for a day or two; and Clifford was away at the Skyds-station, helping the two strangers to make the necessary arrangements for taking their sad burden home to England. All the other guests except the Sorenskriver had left, and he was in a thoroughly disagreeable mood, grumbling about the food, and annoyed because there was going to be a funeral at the Gaard.

"Then why not go away?" Katharine suggested on one occasion, when his martyrdom had reached an acute stage.

"Thank you, I choose to stay," he answered in his gruffest tone of voice.

Katharine laughed. She liked the Sorenskriver even at his worst.

"Read this German newspaper, with a whole column of abuse against England," Katharine said, teasing him. "That will make you feel cheerful, Sorenskriver."

"Sniksnak!" said the Sorenskriver, a little less roughly.

"Or come out for a walk with me and help me pick multebaer," she added. "Mor Inga was saying she had not half enough as yet."

"Perhaps I will come," he answered, with a grim smile on his face. He took pleasure in Katharine's company, and was secretly delighted that Clifford was busy helping those Englishmen over at the Skyds-station. In this way he got Katharine to himself, and he sat smoking his long pipe in the porch, grumbling and disagreeable, but, in justice it must be owned, gentle to Bedstemor. Tante declared that he was courting Katharine.

"I am given to understand, dear one," she said, with a twinkle in her eye, "that the Norwegian way of courting is to be extremely disagreeable, and almost rude to the person whom you adore. In a day or two you will have a proposal--and what then?"

"Tante thinks only about marriages," Gerda said reproachfully.

"Well, what else in the world is there to think about?" Tante asked defiantly.

"Oh, Tante, you know you do not think that," Gerda said. "If you really thought that, why didn't you get married yourself?"

"Because, kjaere, no one would have me, except a sea-captain, and he was mad," Knutty answered. "And he killed his mate soon afterwards. I was always glad I was not his mate!"

"It is not true," Gerda said, turning indignantly to Katharine. "She had lots of admirers and lovers. You ask her Englishman. He knows."

"Ah," said Knutty, "perhaps I did have a few admirers in my time! You may be sure no sane woman would ever say she had never had any, unless there was some one at hand to deny her statement."

When Clifford came home that evening, Knutty herself broached the subject again.

"Kjaere," she said, "did I have a few admirers in my time, or did I not? I have forgotten. Not that a woman ever does forget, but tell me!"

"You had numbers, Knutty," Clifford answered, smiling at her; "and I was jealous of them all. At nine I was jealous of the sea-captain, and at ten I was jealous of the clergyman in Jutland, and at twelve of the English architect, and at thirteen of the Swedish officer, and so on and so on."

Later in the evening, when he and Katharine were sitting alone near the great hay-barn, Katharine spoke of Knutty.

"She is the dearest old woman I have ever met," she said warmly. "I don't wonder that you all love her."

"I can never tell you what she has been to me," he answered. "It was always a great grief to me that----" He broke off.

"It was a great grief to me that----"

Again he broke off. He was trying to speak of Knutty's indifference to Marianne; and even this was too hard for him to say. Up in the mountains, he had felt that it would be easy for him to tell Katharine everything that he had in his heart, beginning with the story of Marianne and Marianne's death, and ending with himself and his love for her. But now that he was near her, he could say nothing about his own personal life and inner feelings. He could only bend forward and scratch a hole in the ground with his stick. Katharine remembered how Knutty had spoken of his "beginnings" and "breakings off," and she said:

"Knutty understands you through and through, Professor Thornton. Doesn't she?"

"Yes," he answered simply. "But why should you say that just now?"

"Oh, I don't know," Katharine answered. "I was thinking of her, and it came into my head. And I was so touched by her grief when she feared that she--we--had lost you."

"I do not know what she and the boy would have done without you," he said, still working with that stick.

Katharine was silent.

"And I cannot think what those men over at the Skyds-station would have done without you," he said. "Their last words to me this afternoon were, 'Tell her we shall always be wishing to serve her.'"

Katharine remained silent.

"There was this little packet which I was to give you," he said, after a pause. "It was the poor fellow's South African service-medal. You were to have it."

He watched her as she opened the packet and touched the medal. He watched her as she put it in the palm of her hand and looked at it with dim eyes. It would have been easy for him to have opened his heart to her then and there, if he could only have known that she was saying to him with speechless tongue:

"My own dear love, whilst I am looking at this soldier's medal, my heart is giving thanks that the lightning spared you to me."

But he could not guess that, and the moment passed.

The next day, when they were again alone, he attempted to speak.

"Do you remember my saying up at the Saeter that I tried never to dream?" he began.

"Yes," she said. "I have always wished to ask you why you should feel so strongly about dreams."

"I should like to tell you," he said eagerly. "I want to tell you. But----"

He broke off again, and turned to her with a pathetic smile on his face.

"Speech has never been easy to me," he said.