“Don’t say to me that you can’t help it!” she cried, in her own amiably shrill tones. “You can help it well enough if you choose. You are always at it, morning, noon, and night; I’m quite sick of you, girl; I’m sorry I brought you here; I’d send you back to Greenland to-morrow if I could. If the ship sank with you on the passage, I’d rejoice—I would! There! don’t say it again, now; you’re going to—I can see that by your whimpering look. Don’t say you can’t help it. Don’t! don’t! Do you hear?”
“Indeed, indeed I can’t—”
“There! I knew you would,” shrieked Freydissa, as she raised herself from the wash-tub in which she had been manipulating some articles of clothing as if she were tearing Bertha to pieces— “why can’t you?”
“It isn’t easy to help weeping,” whimpered Bertha, as she continued to drive her spinning-wheel, “when one thinks of all that has passed, and poor—”
“Weeping! weeping!” cried Freydissa, diving again into the tub; “do you call that weeping? I call it downright blubbering. Why, your face is as much begrutten as if you were a mere baby.”
This was true, for what between her grief at the sudden disappearance of Olaf and Snorro, and the ceaseless assaults of her mistress, who was uncommonly cross that morning, Bertha’s pretty little face was indeed a good deal swelled and inflamed about the eyes and cheeks. She again took refuge in silence, but this made no difference to Freydissa, or rather it acted, if anything, as a provocative of wrath. “Speak, you hussy!” was usually her irate manner of driving the helpless little handmaid out of that refuge.
“What were you going to say? Poor what?” she asked sharply, after a few minutes’ silence.
“I was going to say that poor Snorro and—”
“Oh! it’s all very well to talk of poor Snorro,” interrupted her mistress; “you know quite well that you took to snivelling long before Snorro was lost. You’re thinking of Hake, you are. You know you are, and you daren’t deny it, for your red face would give you the lie if you did. Hake indeed! Even though he is a thrall, he’s too good for such a silly thing as you. There, be off with you till you can stop your weeping, as you call it. Go!”
Freydissa enforced her command by sending a mass of soapy cloth which she had just wrung out after the retreating Bertha. Fortunately she was a bad shot. The missile flew past its intended object, and, hitting a hen, which had ventured to intrude, on the legs, swept it with a terrific cackle into the road, to the amazement, not to say horror, of the cock and chickens.