"It is wonderfully like her!" said the stranger.
The family from the cottage now came out, Nono leading Karin, who had all the while been in the secret, and the rest eagerly following.
"Is this your work, Nono?" said the colonel.
Nono modestly bowed, and murmured an answer, while his eyes glowed as if they were on fire.
The sound of little Decima sobbing broke in on the conversation. "That is a cold white princess!" she said. "She can"t take me on her knee and tell me pretty stories. I don"t like the cold white princess!"
Jan took Decima in his arms, while the colonel said pleasantly: "But we like her, Decima; and we loved the princess, both of us; and this gentleman"s wife has her name; and he has written a letter to her that we want taken to the post-office at once, that she may get it on her name-day.--Can you go, Nono?"
Nono was glad to spring away with the letter, full of happy thoughts--that every one knew that it was the princess, his dear snow princess, that he had made with his own hands! The gentlemen liked it, too!
While Nono was joyously bounding along the road to the village, the group round the statue could not get through admiring it.
"He"s a wonder, that boy!" said Karin, as she went into the cottage.
"That he should come to me to bring up, when I can"t cut out a gingerbread baby so that it looks like anything!"
"G.o.d knows why he sent him to you, Karin," said Pelle, "and G.o.d will know what to do with him in the time that is coming. He is a wonderful boy, that is sure!"
While the simple people at the golden house were talking in this way about Nono, the colonel and his guest had driven away. The stranger had promised to come in the afternoon and take a photograph of the snow statue, and of Nono too, the very best he could get, and of the whole family group just as he had seen them.
As the gentlemen drove on together they talked of the princess, beloved by rich and poor, and of the visitor"s wife, one of the pure in heart worthy to bear the name of her honoured friend.
Nono, too, was the subject of conversation. His whole story was told, and listened to with intense interest. It was agreed that Nono should, with Karin"s permission, come for some hours every day to Ekero to wait upon the stranger, who was a sculptor, and was making a marble bust of the colonel"s wife from the various likenesses of her, a.s.sisted by her husband"s vivid descriptions of her ever-remembered face and her person and character.
"I must know that boy, and take him to Italy with me in the spring if I can," said the sculptor. "There is an artist in him, I am sure, and it will only be a pleasure to train him."
When, later, Pelle heard the plan that was proposed, he said quickly,--
"Those artist fellows are not always the best to be trusted with the care of a boy. It would be better for Nono to work in the fields, with good Jan to look after him, than to make figures in a far country under the greatest gentleman in the world who was not a good man."
Karin looked relieved, and turned to hear what Jan would say on the subject; for, after all, in important matters it was always Jan who decided.
"The colonel said, when he talked to me"--and here Jan paused and looked about him. He did not object to having it understood that the colonel considered him the head of the family, a fact which Jan himself sometimes doubted--"the colonel said," he continued, "that artist was a Christian man, and he had a wife just fit to be called, as she was, after the princess, and he couldn"t say any more. And he didn"t need to! They haven"t any children of their own, so she just goes where he goes, everywhere, and she"s the kind of a woman to be the making of Nono, such a boy as he is. Nono will go with him in the spring; I have made up my mind on that matter."
Karin began to cry. "To bring him up, and such a nice boy as he is, and such a wonderful boy, too; and to love him so, and then have to give him to people who hardly know him at all!" and Karin fairly sobbed.
"You are partial to Nono, Karin," said Jan sternly. He never held back a rebuke for Karin when he thought she deserved it. "You never took on so when your own boys went away, three of them, over the sea."
"_Our_ boys _are our_ boys," said Karin, "and that makes a difference.
They can"t belong to anybody else. I should be their own mother, and they"d feel it, and so should I, if they lived in the moon. But Nono, off there, he may find his own father and mother and never come back.
They may be tramping kind of people. Most likely they are, and there"s no knowing what ways they might teach him. They have a right to him and I haven"t. That"s what I feel. I love him just like my own. He wouldn"t turn the cold shoulder to his own father and mother if they were poor as poverty or just fit for a prison, I know that. It wouldn"t be in him. Not that I think he would forget me. It would be a shame to say it, such a good child as he has always been to me!"
Jan put his hand on Karin"s shoulder and looked helplessly at her, as he generally did when she had a flood of tears and a flood of talk at the same time.
Pelle came to the rescue, as he had often done before. "Karin wants to be Providence," he said. "She wants to take things into her own hands.
That"s the way with women, especially mothers. There was my mother, when I was a sailor, almost sure I would go to the bad; but G.o.d just lays me up in a hospital, and turns me square round, and sets my face to the better country. I just went home, and made up my mind to stay by my mother, and do for her as long as she lived; and I did, G.o.d bless her! It is good sense, Karin, to let the Lord manage his own way.
Your way might not turn out the best after all."
"Yes, I know it," said Karin, wiping her eyes. "But things do come so unexpected in this world, one can"t ever be ready for them."
"Just take one day at a time, Karin, and don"t bother about what"s coming," said Pelle. "We can"t any of us say what is to become of Nono, not even Jan, who is so clear in his mind. We don"t any of us know what to-morrow may bring. He"ll have just what the Lord has planned for him. Women are better at bringing up "critters" than driving them when they are brought up. They are about the same with boys. Mothers should bring up their boys right, and then let the Lord do what he pleases with them afterwards. Isn"t it so, Karin?"
"Yes--maybe--I do suppose you are right, Pelle, and I"ll try to remember it. But a man don"t know how a woman feels."
"It"s well they don"t," said Jan curtly. "It wouldn"t have suited what I"ve had to do in life to be like them. Karin"s heart is bigger than her head; but things have worked well here so far, and it"s likely it will be so to the end," and Jan looked kindly after Karin as she went off to feed the chickens, with Decima in her train, evidently thinking her mother was the injured party.
At the bottom of his heart Jan was convinced that he had about the best wife in the world.
CHAPTER XIX.
PIETRO.
The statue of the princess had long since pa.s.sed away, and the thoughts of the pleasant scenes around it had melted into the cheerful memories of the past. In the cottage there were ever the photographs of the beautiful white figure and of the family group, and under them an almost perfect likeness of Nono.
The real Nono was far away in the land of his forefathers. He was sorely missed in the home where he had been so tenderly cared for.
Blackie was, as usual, wearing deep mourning, though he showed no emotional signs of feeling the absence of his master. Blackie, like many a precocious two-legged creature, had not developed into the wonder that was expected. Example and daily a.s.sociation had made him more and more like his fellows; and Nono had not been long away from the golden house before Jan began to talk about the little black pig as the pork of the future.
Karin had supposed that the parting with Nono would be like the parting with her other boys--a separation only lightened by letters coming rarely, merely to tell that the absentees were well and doing famously.
With Nono it was quite otherwise. The letters from him came weekly, almost as regularly as Sunday itself. And such letters as they were, written so clearly, and containing such a particular account of his doings, and, what Karin prized more, warm expressions of grateful affection for the dear friends "at home," as he still called the golden house, though it was plain that the once houseless little Italian had now two homes.
Nono wrote that the artist"s wife treated him as if he were her own son, and was teaching him carefully everything that would help him to understand all that was about him. Object lessons they seemed to be, with wonderful Rome for the great "kindergarten." He was learning Italian too, and that he thought charming. As for his work in the studio, it was only a pleasure, excepting that he was impatient for the time when he could make beautiful things himself. When he had walked in the streets at first, he had thought all the boys might at least have been his cousins, and some of them made him feel as if he were looking in the gla.s.s. Now and then he would meet a man that he felt sure must be his father, but he did not often dare to speak to such strangers. He had hoped and believed he should find his father in Italy, but now he was sure it would be harder to know him there than in Sweden. He had almost given up thinking about it lately, he had so much to do and so much to see, and everybody was so kind to him.
Karin did not feel that Nono was drifting away from her, though he wrote so openly and affectionately of his new friends. His thankful remembrance of all the love and care he had had at the cottage was expressed in every letter, and a deeper grat.i.tude for the kind instruction that had taught him from his childhood to love his heavenly Father, and to try to obey his holy laws.
Alma missed Nono, it was true, for she had really grown fond of the little friendly boy while he had been an inmate at Ekero; but she had a new deep content in the pleasure she was learning to find in the society of her brother. Together they were struggling heavenward, and were daily a help and joy to each other.
Alma was walking on the veranda one morning in early summer, when she saw what she thought two tramps approaching. She had no liking for such wanderers, and turned to go into the house. At that moment she caught sight of the worn face of the older man, and stood still. He looked so gentle, and yet so weary and weak, as he clung to the arm of his younger companion. They were not dressed like Italians, nor like any style of persons in particular, for their costume was evidently made up of cast-off garments that had seen better days. Their faces, though, were dark and thin, and there was a southern fire in the eyes of the younger man as he said at once in tolerable Swedish, "Pietro here is tired. He cannot get any further, miss. I told him he could not hold out for this trip, but come he would, and I had to let him.
Perhaps he could sit down somewhere a few moments and get a gla.s.s of milk or something like that."
"He looks very tired," said Alma. "Go that way to the kitchen, and I will see that you have something to eat."
The colonel, hearing voices, came out at the moment. He saw at once that the men were Italians, and addressed them in their own language.
The eyes of the one who had spoken flashed with pleasure, and a light came into the face of his companion, who now said in Italian, "I have been very ill. It is too cold for me up here. No summer, no summer!
The north killed my wife long ago, and I suppose it has killed me. I knew this man when I was here before. I only met him again yesterday.
He knows where the house is I want to find. I left my boy there, a baby, and I want to know if he is alive. It was Francesca"s baby, and she loved it before she went wrong," and he touched his forehead significantly.
The colonel looked meaningly at Alma, whose eyes were wide with intense interest, for she had understood enough to follow the conversation.
The colonel took the hand of the old man kindly, and said,--
"You must rest here a little, and then we will talk together."
When Pietro was refreshed by rest and food the colonel sat down beside him, and told him all about the happy life Nono had had at the cottage, and how he had made the snow statue of the princess, and was now far away in Italy, learning to be perhaps a great sculptor himself.