“Could you not just as well give up the whole thing? You are no longer young, Mattsson.”
The clergyman must not be too surprised. He knew well enough that he was too old, but he was obliged to be married. There was no help for it.
So he came again week after week for a half year, until at last the permission came.
During all that time old Mattsson was a persecuted man. Round the green drying-place, where the brown fish-nets were hung out, along the cemented walls by the harbor, at the fish-tables in the market, where cod and crabs were sold, and far out in the sound among the shoals of herring, raged a storm of wonder and laughter.
“So he is going to be married, he, Mattsson, who ran away from his own wedding!”
Neither bride nor groom were spared.
But the worst thing for him was that no one could laugh more at the whole thing than he himself. No one could find it more ridiculous. His mother’s portrait was driving him mad.
It was the afternoon of the first time of asking. Old Mattsson, still pursued by talk and wonderings, went out on the long breakwater as far as the whitewashed lighthouse, in order to be alone. He found his betrothed there. She sat and wept.
He asked her whether she would have liked some one else better. She sat and pried little bits of mortar from the lighthouse wall and threw them into the water, answering nothing at first.