This upset the plan we had agreed on, and left me alone once more. I could not understand a word of it all. Anyhow, I could think it over tomorrow. . . . By two in the morning I was still lying awake, shivering and thinking. All those hours I could not get warm; then at last it turned hot, and I lay there in full fever. . . . How frightened she had been yesterday — dared not sit down to eat with me by the roadside, and never opened her eyes to me once through all the journey. . . .
Coming to my senses for a moment, it occurs to me I might wake Falkenberg with my tossing about, and perhaps say things in my delirium. That would never do. I clench my teeth and jump up, get into my clothes again, scramble down the stairs, and set out over the fields at a run. After a little my clothes begin to warm me; I make towards the woods, towards the spot where we had been working; sweat and rain pour down my face. If only I can find the saw and work the fever out of my body —’tis an old and tried cure of mine, that. The saw is nowhere to be seen, but I come upon the ax I had left there Saturday evening, and set to work with that. It is almost too dark to see at all, but I feel at the cut now and then with my hands, and bring down several trees. The sweat pours off me now.
Then, feeling exhausted enough, I hide the ax in its old place; it is getting light now, and I set off at a run for home.
“Where have you been?” asks Falkenberg.
Now, I do not want him to know about my having taken cold the day before, and perhaps go making talk of it in the kitchen; I simply mutter something about not knowing quite where I have been.
“You’ve been up to see R?nnaug, I bet,” he said.
I answered: yes, I had been with R?nnaug, since he’d guessed it.
“’Twas none so hard to guess,” he said. “Anyhow, you won’t see me running after any of them now.”
“Going to have Emma, then?”
“Why, it looks that way. It’s a pity you can’t get taken on here, too. Then you might get one of the others, perhaps.”
And he went on talking of how I might perhaps have got my pick of the other girls, but the Captain had no use for me. I wasn’t even to go out tomorrow to the wood. . . . The words sound far away, reaching me across a sea of sleep that is rolling towards me.
Next morning the fever is gone; I am still a little weak, but make ready to go out to the wood all the same.
“You won’t need to put on your woodcutting things again,” says Falkenberg. “I told you that before.”
True! Nevertheless, I put on those things, seeing the others are wet. Falkenberg is a little awkward with me now, because of breaking our plan; by way of excuse, he says he thought I was taking work at the vicarage.
“So you’re not coming up to the hills, then?” I asked.
“H’m! No, I don’t think so — no. And you know yourself, I’m sick of tramping around. I’ll not get a better chance than this.”
I make as if it was no great matter to me, and take up a sudden interest in Petter; worst of all for him, poor fellow, to be turned out and nowhere to go.
“Nowhere to go?” echoes Falkenberg. “When he’s lain here the three weeks he’s allowed to stay sick by law, he’ll go back home again. His father’s a farmer.”
Then Falkenberg declares it’s like losing part of himself to have me go. If it wasn’t for Emma, he’d break his word to the Captain after all.
“Here,” he says, “I’ll give you these.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the certificates. I shan’t want them now, but they may be the saving of you at a pinch. If you ever wanted to tune a piano, say.”
And he hands me the papers and the key.
But, seeing I haven’t his ear for music, the things are no use to me; and I tell him so. I could better handle a grindstone than a piano.
Whereat Falkenberg burst out laughing, relieved to find me ready with a jest to the last. . . .
Falkenberg goes out. I have time to laze a little, and lie down all dressed on the bed, resting and thinking. Well, our work was at an end; we should have had to go anyhow. I could not reckon on staying here for all eternity. The only thing outside all calculation was that Falkenberg should stay. If only it had been me they’d offered his work, I’d have worked enough for two! Now, was there any chance of buying him off, I wondered? To tell the truth, I fancied I had noticed something before; as if the Captain were not altogether pleased to have this labourer about the place bearing his own name. Well, perhaps I had been wrong.
I thought and thought. After all, I had been a good workman, as far as I knew, and I had never stolen a moment of the Captain’s time for work on my own invention. . . .
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