Tönne worked, glowing with eagerness, certain that Jofrid would
understand his meaning, if only the house were ready. He did not wonder
much about her; he had enough to do to hew and shape. The days went
quickly for him.
One afternoon, when Jofrid came over the moor, she saw that there was a
door in the cottage and a slab of stone for a threshold. Then she
understood that everything must now be ready, and she was much
agitated. Tönne had covered the roof with tufts of flowering heather,
and she was seized by an intense longing to enter under that red roof.
He was not at the new house and she decided to go in. The house was
built for her. It was her home. It was not possible to resist the
desire to see it.
Within it was more attractive than she had expected. Rushes were
strewed over the floor. It was full of the fresh fragrance of pine and
resin. The sunshine that played through the windows and cracks made
bands of light through the air. It looked as if she had been expected;
in the crannies of the wall green branches were stuck, and in the
fireplace stood a newly cut fir-tree. Tönne had not moved in his old
furniture. There was nothing but a new table and a bench, over which an
elk skin was thrown.
As soon as Jofrid had crossed the threshold, she felt the pleasant
cosiness of home surrounding her. She was happy and content while she
stood there, but to leave it seemed to her as hard as to go away and
serve strangers. It happened that Jofrid had expended much hard work in
procuring a kind of dower for herself. With skilful hands she had woven
bright colored fabrics, such as are used to adorn a room, and she
wanted to put them up in her own home, when she got one. Now she
wondered how those cloths would look here. She wished she could try
them in the new house.
She hurried quickly home, fetched her roll of weavings and began to
fasten the bright-colored pieces of cloth up under the roof. She threw
open the door to let the big setting sun shine on her and her work. She
moved eagerly about the cottage, brisk, gay, bumming a merry tune. She
was perfectly happy. It looked so fine. The woven roses and stars shone
as never before.
While she worked she kept a good look-out over the moor and the graves,
for it seemed to her as if Tönne might now too be lying hidden behind
one of the cairns and laughing at her. The king’s grave lay opposite
the door and behind it she saw the sun setting. Time after time she
looked out. She felt as if some one was sitting there and watching her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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