“I wish it may be Hund. If it be Rolf, I shall go with him. O, Ulla! I cannot lose sight of him, after what happened last night. Did you hear? I do wish Oddo would grow wiser.”
Ulla shook her head, and then nodded, to intimate that they would not talk of Nipen; and she began to speak of something else.
“How did Hund conduct himself yesterday? I heard my husband’s account: but you know Peder could say nothing of his looks. Did you mark his countenance, dear?”
“Indeed, there was no helping it, any more than one can help watching a storm-cloud as it comes up.”
“So it was dark and wrathful, was it,—that ugly face of his? Well it might be, dear; well it might be!”
“The worst was,—worse than all his dark looks together,—O, Ulla! the worst was his leap and cry of joy when he heard what Oddo had done, and that Nipen was made our enemy. He looked like an evil spirit when he fixed his eyes on me, and snapped his fingers.”
Ulla shook her head mournfully, and then asked Erica to put another peat on the fire.
“I really should like to know,” said Erica, in a low voice, when she resumed her seat on the bed, “I am sure you can tell me if you would, what is the real truth about Hund, what it is that weighs upon his heart.”
“I will tell you,” replied Ulla. “You are not one that will go babbling it, so that Hund shall meet with taunts, and have his sore heart made sorer. I will tell you, my dear, though there is no one else but our mistress that I would tell, and she, no doubt, knows it already. Hund was born and reared a good way to the south, not far from Bergen. In mid-winter four years since, his master sent him on an errand of twenty miles, to carry some provisions to a village in the upper country. He did his errand, and so far all was well. The village people asked him for charity to carry three orphan children on his sledge some miles on the way to Bergen, and to leave them at a house he had to pass on his road, where they would be taken care of till they could be fetched from Bergen. Hund was an obliging young fellow then, and he made no objection. He took the little things, and saw that the two elder were well wrapped up from the cold. The third he took within his arms and on his knee as he drove, clasping it warm against his breast. So those say who saw them set off; and it is confirmed by one who met the sledge on the road, and heard the children prattling to Hund, and Hund laughing merrily at their little talk. Before they had got half-way, however, a pack of hungry wolves burst out upon them from a hollow to the right of the road. The brutes followed close at the back of the sledge, and—”
“O, stop!” cried Erica; “I know that story. Is it possible that Hund is the man? No need to go on, Ulla.”