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And for something he called pocket-money, and something he called evening classes, where he learned drawing and gymnastics and other matters proper to his rank and position. Altogether, it was no light matter to keep Eleseus going in a berth in town. "Pocket-money?" said Isak. "Is that money to keep in your pocket, maybe?" "That must be it, no doubt," said Inger.
"No," Eleseus agrees, "she mustn't know." Sivert goes off, stays away for ages, and comes back with money, a heap of money. "Here, that's all he has; think it'll be enough? Count he didn't count how much there was." "What did he say father?" "Nay, he didn't say much. Now you must wait a little, and I'll get some more clothes on and go down with you." "'Tis not worth while; you go and lie down."
It would all come right in time, never fear. For the two in the hut, yes. But what about Eleseus? 'Twas worse with him; he found it hard to get over the shameful way Barbro had treated him. He knew nothing of hysterics, and took it as all pure cruelty on her part; that girl Barbro from Breidablik thought a deal too much of herself, even though she had been in Bergen....
Eleseus slipped round the corner of the house, like a pale ghost, found his mother, and begged her to tell Sivert to come. There was no help for it now. Sivert took the matter less to heart but then, he was not the chief culprit. The two brothers went a little way off and sat down, and Eleseus said: "If you'd say it was you, now!" "Me?" said Sivert.
He knew well enough that it had been a mere speculation, naming him after his uncle; he had no claim to anything there. And now he pressed Eleseus to take what there was. "It's to be yours, of course," said he. "Come along, let's get it set down in writing. I'd like to see you a rich man. Don't be too proud to take it!" Ay, they had many a laugh together.
Isak stopped; he realized that the more he talked the worse it would be. He was on the point of changing his clothes, getting out of his best things he had put on to go down to the village in; but no, he altered his mind, he would stay as he was whatever he meant by that. "You'd better say a word of it to Eleseus," he says then. And Inger answers: "Best if you'd say it yourself.
He screws up a nut here and there to bring the knives closer to the ground, and tries again. No, not right yet, all uneven; the frame with the cutters seems to be hopping a little. Father and sons discuss what it can be. Eleseus has found the instructions and is reading them. "Here, it says to sit up on the seat when you drive then it runs steadier," he says. "Ho!" says his father.
Eleseus stands looking after them as they go; then when they are lost to sight in the woods, he pays his score at the lodging-house again, and something over. "You can leave my trunk here till I come back," he tells Katrine, and off he goes. Eleseus going where? Only one place to go; he turns back, going back home again.
"Daler?" cried Eleseus suddenly, mimicking his brother. Oline, no doubt, thought this ill-timed jesting. Oh, she had herself been cheated of her due; for all that she had managed to squeeze out something like real tears over old Sivert's grave. Eleseus should know best what he himself had written so-and-so much to Oline, to be a comfort and support in her declining years.
Eleseus was named after the priest of her parish, and that was a fine name to be sure; but Sivert was called after his mother's uncle, the district treasurer, who was a well-to-do man, with neither wife nor child to come after him. They couldn't do better than name the boy after him. Then came spring, and the new season's work; all was down in the earth before Whitsun.
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