“Yes, it’s that Tom Noddy there. Here, come out so that we can see you properly, you calf! Oh, the boy’s gone. Very well. Does your boy often get a thrashing?”
“Oh yes, sometimes,” answered Lasse, who was ashamed to confess that he never chastised the boy.
“I don’t spare mine either. It’ll take something to make a man of such rubbish; punishment’s half what he lives on. Then I’ll send him up here first thing to-morrow morning; but take care he doesn’t show himself in the yard, or there’ll be no end of a row!”
“The mistress can’t bear to see him, I suppose?” said Lasse.
“You’re just about right. She’s had nothing to do with the making of that scarecrow. Though you wouldn’t think there was much there to be jealous about! But I might have been a farmer’s wife at this moment and had a nice husband too, if that high and mighty peacock up there hadn’t seduced me. Would you believe that, you cracked old piece of shoe-leather?” she asked with a laugh, slapping his knee with her hand.
“I can believe it very well,” said Lasse. “For you were as pretty a girl as might be when you left home.”
“Oh, you and your ‘home’,” she said, mimicking him.
“Well, I can see that you don’t want to leave any footmarks behind you, and I can quite well pretend to be a stranger, even if I have held you upon my knee more than once when you were a little thing. But do you know that your mother’s lying on her deathbed?”
“Oh no! Oh no!” she exclaimed, turning to him a face that was becoming more and more distorted.
“I went to say good-bye to her before I left home rather more than a month ago, and she was very ill. ‘Good-bye, Lasse,’ she said, ‘and thank you for your neighborliness all these years. And if you meet Johanna over there,’ she said, ‘give her my love. Things have gone terribly badly with her, from what I’ve heard; but give her my love, all the same. Johanna child, little child! She was nearest her mother’s heart, and so she happened to tread upon it. Perhaps it was our fault. You’ll give her her mother’s love, won’t you, Lasse?’ Those were her very words, and now she’s most likely dead, so poorly as she was then.”