It was several years later. Tede Haien's little house was now occupied by an active workman with his wife and children. The young dikegrave Hauke Haien lived with his wife in what had been her father's house. In summer the mighty ash rustled in front of the house as before; but on the bench which now stood beneath it generally only the young wife was to be seen in the evening sitting alone with her sewing or some other piece of work. There was still no child in this home and Hauke had something else to do than to spend a leisure evening in front of the house, for in spite of the help he had given the old dikegrave the latter had bequeathed to him a number of unsettled matters pertaining to the dike, matters with which Hauke had not liked to meddle before; but now they must all gradually be cleared up and he swept with a strong broom. Then came the management and work of the farm itself, increased as it was by the addition of his own property, and moreover he was trying to do without a servant boy. And so it happened that, except on Sunday when they went to church, he and Elke saw each other only at dinner, when Hauke was generally hurried, and at the beginning and end of the day; it was a life of continuous work and yet a contented one.
And then the tongues of the busy-bodies disturbed the peace. One Sunday after church a somewhat noisy gang of the younger landowners in the marsh and upland districts were sitting drinking in the tavern on the uplands. Over the fourth or fifth glass they began to talk, not indeed about the king and the government—no one went so high in those days—but about the municipal officials and their superiors and above all about the municipal taxes and assessments, and the longer they talked the less they were satisfied with them, least of all with the new dike assessments; all the drains and sluices which had hitherto been all right now needed repairs; new places were always being found in the dike that needed hundreds of barrows of earth; the devil take it all!
"That's your clever dikegrave's doing," shouted one of the uplanders, "who always goes about thinking and then puts a finger into every pie."
"Yes, Marten," said Ole Peters, who sat opposite the speaker; "you're right, he's tricky and is always trying to get into the chief dikegrave's good books; but we've got him now."
"Why did you let them load him onto you?" said the other; "now you've got to pay for it."
Ole Peters laughed. "Yes, Marten Fedders, that's the way it goes with us here and there's nothing to be done. The old dikegrave got the office on his father's account; the new one on his wife's." The laughter that greeted this sally showed how it pleased the company.
But it was said at a public house table and it did not stop there; soon it went the rounds on the uplands as well as down on the marshes; thus it came to Hauke's ears too. And again all the malicious faces passed before his inward eye and when he thought of the laughter at the tavern table it sounded more mocking than it had been in reality. "The dogs!" he shouted and looked wrathfully to one side as if he would have had them thrashed.
At that Elke laid her hand on his arm: "Never mind them! They would all like to be what you are!"
"That's just it," he answered rancorously.
"And," she went on, "did not Ole Peters himself marry money?"