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She remembered as she sat in front of the glass, while the maid dressed her hair, that her husband had said she was more beautiful than the girl he had married. She went back to the drawing-room where Shot lay, stretched on the skin-rug before the fire, now and again lifting his head to look at her. The Poms were in their baskets either side of the fireplace. It was very quiet.
Then the morning, the thoughts of my coming fate, the recollection of the night-alarm which seemed to have put an end to what must have been intended for a night-attack, even the sense of pain all these died away, and I was soundly asleep once more; this time without a dream. I was roused up by the great skin-rug being jerked off me.
Will it be to make our escape when the attention of the Boer sentries is taken off us by the coming attack upon the fort?" Then I was listening to a low tearing sound as of the knife passing once more through the skin-rug, and directly after I heard Denham begin to breathe hard. I understood what that meant.
Next day the Troen folk were sitting at their dinner when the eldest son looked out of the window and said: "There's Peer coming." "Mercy on us!" cried the good-wife, as he came in. "What is the matter, Peer? Are you ill?" Ah, it was good that night to creep in under the old familiar skin-rug once more. And the old mother sat on the bedside and talked to him of the Lord, by way of comfort.
No words were spoken, the men's intention was plainly enough expressed; and a very short time afterwards each lad was lying down in the angle of the rough wall, snugly rolled in his skin-rug, with a French musket for companion; and to both it seemed as if only a few minutes had elapsed before they were gazing across a beautiful valley where mists were rising, wreath after wreath of half-transparent vapour, shot with many colours by the rays of the rising sun.
He lay awake night after night up in the loft, listening to the talk about him going on in the room below the good-wife crying and saying: "No, no!", the others saying how hard the times were, and that Peer was quite old enough now to be put to service as a goat-herd on some up-country farm. Then Peer would draw the skin-rug up over his head.
I observed that at night he took off his new clothes, and merely threw his skin-rug over him; probably he would otherwise have been unable to go to sleep. But I must now hurry on, and merely give the chief incidents of our journey. Having housed in the boat, and hidden such provisions and goods as we could not take with us, we commenced our journey.
And the eldest son gave him a pair of stockings, and made him sit down and put them on then and there; and the same night, when he went to bed, the eldest girl came and tucked him up in a new skin-rug, not quite so hairless as the old one. His father a captain! It seemed too wonderful to be true. From that day times were changed for Peer. People looked at him with very different eyes.
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