“Oh, that there is a great tall snow man who walks on the lake we have just come over.”
“Exactly! And who is always followed by a great bear! You have some imagination, child! Is the bear white, or black?”
“I don’t know, Monsieur Goefle.”
“We ought to know about that, though, before deciding to take supper in this room. What if they should come and sit down at the table with us?”
Nils saw plainly that M. Goefle was joking, and he began to laugh. The lawyer was congratulating himself upon his method of curing children of fear, when the little fellow, who had suddenly become serious again, said:
“Monsieur Goefle, let us go away from here. This is a very ugly place.”
“This is too much!” cried the lawyer, pettishly. “What plagues children are! I am good enough to explain to my young gentleman that the bear is a constellation, and he is more frightened then ever.”
Nils, seeing that his master was angry, began to cry. He was a spoiled child, yet timid. M. Goefle, who was thoroughly good-hearted, imagined, and took pleasure in saying, that he did not like children, and that if anything could console him for not having married at a proper age, it was the intellectual freedom that is enjoyed by those who have no children to take care of and be responsible for. The keen sensibility with which he was endowed, however, which his stirring and active professional life had developed without his knowledge, made it impossible for him to endure the tears and complaints of the weak. Accordingly he tried to console and encourage his little valet, at the very same time that he was grumbling at his folly, and while persisting in his passion for intellectual and subtle discussions, a style of argument that gains cases when you are trying to persuade men, but which is almost sure to lose them when you are dealing with children. He even went so far as to promise that he would run the great bear through the body with his sword, if it should come to the door of the room, rather than allow it to enter.
M. Goefle excused himself the more readily for his absurd condescension, as he called it, because he found that a witty account of his evening at Stollborg, with which he proposed to entertain his friends at Gevala, was involuntarily taking form in his mind.
In the meanwhile Ulph did not return. That he would require some time to get up a supper in M. Stenson’s modest establishment, the lawyer was prepared to anticipate; but he did not bring back the light, and this was an unpardonable piece of forgetfulness.