Chapter VIII
Jörgen must start on his journey before the sleighing disappeared, for the bad roads when the frost was coming out might last till St. John's Day, and to harness the horses in such going would be stark madness. If he were not to lose a whole year, he must go early and be prepared privately for admission to school.
Jörgen was lost in meditations and thoughts about all that from which he was about to be separated. The gun, the sleds, the skis, the turning-lathe, the tools, the wind-mill, and the corn-mill left behind there on the hills, all must be devised with discretion—naturally to Thea first and foremost, on condition that she should take care of them till he came home again.
If he had been asked what he would rather be, he would doubtless have answered "turner," "miller," or "smith;" the last thing in the world which would have presented itself to his range of ideas, to say nothing of coming up as a bent or a longing, would have been the lifting up to the loftier regions of books. But Greece and Latium were lying like an unalterable fate across his path, so that there was nothing to do or even to think about.
On the day of his departure, the pockets of his new clothes, which were made out of the captain's old ones, were a complete depository for secret despatches.
First, a long letter of fourteen pages, written in the night, blotted with tears, from Thinka to Inger-Johanna, in which with full details she gave the origin, continuation, and hopeless development of her love for Aas. She had three keepsakes from him—a little breastpin, the cologne bottle which he had given her on the Christmas tree, and then his letter to her with a lock of his hair on the morning he had to leave the office. And even if she could not now act against the wishes of her parents, but would rather make herself unhappy, still she had promised herself faithfully never to forget him, to think of him till the last hour.
The second despatch was from Ma to Aunt Alette, and contained—besides some economical propositions—a little suggestion about sounding Inger-Johanna when Captain Rönnow returned from Paris. Ma could not quite understand her this last time.
The captain had never imagined that there would be such a vacuum after Jörgen was gone. In his way he had been the occasion of so much mental excitement, so many exertions and anxieties, and so much heightened furious circulation of blood, that now he was away the captain had lost quite a stimulating influence. He had now no longer any one to look after and supervise with eyes in the back of his head, to exercise his acuteness on, or take by surprise—only the quiet, unassailable Thea to keep school with.
The doctor prescribed a blood-purifying dandelion tonic for him.
And now when the spring came—dazzling light, gleaming water everywhere, with melting patches of snow and its vanguards of red stone broken on the steep mountain sides—Thinka, with a case-knife in her numb hands, was out in the meadow gathering dandelion roots. They were small, young, and still tender, but they were becoming stronger day by day.