About
midnight a carriage drove up to the door. "That's the bridegroom's,"
whispered a bystander. "He got those horses from Denmark!"
The street door opened, and a white figure, thickly cloaked, appeared
on the steps. "The bride!" whispered the crowd. Then a slender man in
a dark overcoat and silk hat. "The bridegroom!" And as the pair passed
out, "Hip-hip-hip--" went the voice of the general agent for English
tweeds, and the hurrahs came with a will.
The carriage moved off, and Peer sat, with his arm round his bride,
driving his horses at a sharp trot out along the fjord. Out towards his
home, towards his palace, towards a new and untried future.
Chapter V
A little shaggy, grey-bearded old man stood chopping and sawing in
the wood-shed at Loreng. He had been there longer than anyone could
remember. One master left, another took his place--what was that to
the little man? Didn't the one need firewood--and didn't the other need
firewood just the same? In the evening he crept up to his den in the
loft of the servants' wing; at meal-times he sat himself down in the
last seat at the kitchen-table, and it seemed to him that there was
always food to be had. Nowadays the master's name was Holm--an engineer
he was--and the little man blinked at him with his eyes, and went on
chopping in the shed. If they came and told him he was not wanted and
must go--why, thank heaven, he was stone deaf, as everyone knew. Thud,
thud, went his axe in the shed; and the others about the place were so
used to it that they heeded it no more than the ticking of a clock upon
the wall.
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