“If you aren’t kind to little Marie, I shall tell Uncle Kalle,” said Pelle warningly.
She spat contemptuously. “Then you can tell him. Yes, I wish to God you’d do it! Then he’d come and take her away, and delighted I should be!”
But now Due was heard stamping on the flags outside the door, and they could hear him too consoling the child. He came in holding her by the hand, and gave his wife a warning look, but said nothing. “There, there—now all that’s forgotten,” he repeated, in order to check the child’s sobs, and he wiped away the grimy tears from her cheeks with his great thumbs.
Anna brought him his food, sulkily enough, and out in the kitchen she muttered to herself. Due, while he ate his supper of bacon and black bread, stood the child between his knees and stared at her with round eyes. “Rider!” she said, and smiled persuasively. “Rider!” Due laid a cube of bacon on a piece of bread.
“There came a rider riding
On his white hoss, hoss, hoss, hoss!”
he sang, and he made the bread ride up to her mouth. “And then?”
“Then, pop he rode in at the gate!” said the child, and swallowed horse and rider.
While she ate she kept her eyes fixed upon him unwaveringly, with that painful earnestness which was so sad to see. But sometimes it happened that the rider rode right up to her mouth, and then, with a jerk, turned about, and disappeared, at a frantic gallop, between Due’s white teeth. Then she smiled for a moment.
“There’s really no sense shoving anything into her,” said Anna, who was bringing coffee in honor of the visitor. “She gets as much as she can eat, and she’s not hungry.”
“She’s hungry, all the same!” hummed Due.