initial commit of ebook 15588HEADmain

1 files changed, 7712 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/15588.txt b/15588.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7e8e2c6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/15588.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7712 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pilot and his Wife, by Jonas Lie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Pilot and his Wife
+
+Author: Jonas Lie
+
+Release Date: April 8, 2005 [EBook #15588]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PILOT AND HIS WIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, Jim Wiborg and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PILOT AND HIS WIFE
+
+
+
+_TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN OF_
+
+JONAS LIE
+
+BY
+
+G.L. TOTTENHAM
+
+
+WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
+EDINBURGH AND LONDON
+MDCCCLXXVII
+
+
+
+
+THE PILOT AND HIS WIFE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+On the stern, pine-clad southern coast of Norway, off the
+picturesquely-situated town of Arendal, stand planted far out into the
+sea the white walls of the Great and Little Torungen Lighthouses, each
+on its bare rock-island of corresponding name, the lesser of which
+seems, as you sail past, to have only just room for the lighthouse and
+the attendant's residence by the side. It is a wild and lonely
+situation,--the spray, in stormy weather, driving in sheets against the
+walls, and eagles and sea-birds not unfrequently dashing themselves to
+death against the thick glass panes at night; while in winter all
+communication with the land is very often cut off, either by drift or
+patchy ice, which is impassable either on foot or by boat.
+
+These, however, and others of the now numerous lights along that
+dangerous coast, are of comparatively recent erection. Many persons now
+living can remember the time when for long reaches the only lighting was
+the gleam of the white breakers themselves. And the captain who had
+passed the Oxoe light off Christiansand might think himself lucky if he
+sighted the distant Jomfruland up by Krageroe.
+
+About a score of years before the lighthouse was placed on Little
+Torungen there was, however, already a house there, if it could be
+dignified by that name, with its back and one side almost up to the eave
+of the roof stuck into a heap of stones, so that it had the appearance
+of bending forward to let the storm sweep over it. The low entrance-door
+opened to the land, and two small windows looked out upon the sea, and
+upon the boat, which was usually drawn up in a cleft above the sea-weed
+outside.
+
+When you entered, or, more properly speaking, descended into it, there
+was more room than might have been expected; and it contained sundry
+articles of furniture, such as a handsome press and sideboard, which no
+one would have dreamt of finding under such a roof. In one corner there
+stood an old spinning-wheel covered with dust, and with a smoke-blackened
+tuft of wool still hanging from its reel; from which, and from other
+small indications, it might be surmised that there had once been a woman
+in the house, and that tuft of wool had probably been her last spin.
+
+There sat now on the bench by the hearth a lonely old man, of a
+flint-hard and somewhat gloomy countenance, with a mass of white hair
+falling over his ears and neck, who was generally occupied with some
+cobbling work, and who from time to time, as he drew out the thread,
+would make some remark aloud, as if he thought he still had the partner
+of his life for audience. The look askance over his brass spectacles
+with which he greeted any casual stranger who might come into the house
+had very little welcome in it, and an expression about his sunken mouth
+and sharp chin said plainly enough that the other might state his
+business at once and be gone. He sought no company; and the only time he
+had ever been seen at church was when he came rowing over to Tromoe with
+his wife's body in her coffin. When the pastor sprinkled earth upon it,
+it was observed that the tears streamed down his cheeks, and it was long
+after dark before he quitted the churchyard to return. He had become a
+proverb for obstinacy for miles beyond his own residence; and people who
+dealt with him for fish in the harbour, if they once began to bargain,
+were as likely as not to see him without a word just quietly row away.
+
+All that was known further about "Old Jacob," as he was called, was that
+he had once been a pilot, and that he had had a son who had taken to
+drinking, through whose fault it had been eventually that the father had
+lost his certificate; and it was thought that on the occasion in
+question the father had taken the son's blame upon himself. Since then
+he had shunned society, and had retired with his wife to his present
+habitation, whither, after their son was drowned, they had brought their
+little orphan granddaughter, who now was his sole companion. His only
+ostensible means of living were by shoemaking, and by fishing, the
+produce of which he generally disposed of to passing ships, and, during
+the earlier period of his sojourn there, by shooting occasionally. But
+it was understood that he received a small regular contribution from
+several of the pilots, certificated or otherwise, of the district, for
+keeping a fire alight on his hearth during the dark autumn nights, and
+so giving them, by the light from his two windows, something to steer by
+when they arrived off the coast after nightfall. Whether the light was
+shown for their benefit particularly, or whether it was not rather
+intended for the guidance of smuggling vessels standing in under cover
+of the night to land their cargoes, it was not their business to
+inquire. Its friendly assistance was, at all events, not unacknowledged
+by these latter, and very acceptable presents, in the shape of kegs of
+spirits, bags of coffee, tobacco, meal, and so forth, would, from time
+to time, come rolling into the old man's room, so that upon the whole,
+he was well-to-do enough out there upon his rock.
+
+Of late years he had fallen into feeble health, and found it not so easy
+to row the long distance over to land. Even in his best days he had,
+owing to an old injury to one of his legs, found some difficulty in
+getting down to the boat; and now, therefore, he sat during the greater
+part of the day over the hearth, in his woolen jacket and leather
+breeches, with his indoor work. Now and then, when his granddaughter--a
+child with a thick crop of hair falling about her ears, and a rough dog
+constantly at her heels--would burst into the house with all the
+freshness of the outside air blowing round her, as it were, and deliver
+herself of her intelligence, he might be drawn, perhaps, to the window
+to look out over the sea, and afterwards, like a growling bear disturbed
+from its lair, even follow her with some difficulty out of the door with
+the spyglass. There he would station himself, so as to use her shoulder
+as a rest for his shaking hand, and with his never-ceasing directions
+and growling going on behind her neck, she would do her best to fix the
+glass on the desired object. His crossness would then disappear, little
+by little, in their joint speculation as to what ship it could be, or in
+whatever remarks it might suggest; and after giving his decision, the
+old man would generally hobble in again.
+
+He was really very proud of his granddaughter's cleverness. She could
+distinguish with her naked eye as clearly as he could through the glass.
+She never made a mistake about the craft, large or small, that belonged
+to that part of the coast, and could, besides, say to a nicety, what
+sort of master each had. Her superiority of sight she asserted, too,
+with a tyranny to which he made no resistance, although it might have
+tried a temper many degrees more patient than his was.
+
+One day, however, she was at a loss. They made out a crescent on the
+flag, and this caused even the old man a moment's astonishment. But he
+declared then, for her information, shortly and decisively, that it was
+a "barbarian."
+
+This satisfied her for a moment. But then she asked--
+
+"What is a barbarian, grandfather?"
+
+"It is a Turk."
+
+"Yes, but a Turk?"
+
+"Oh! it's--it's--a Mohammedan--"
+
+"A what!--a Moham--"
+
+"A Mohammedan--a robber on board ship."
+
+"On board ship!"
+
+He was not going to give up his ascendancy in the matter, hard as she
+pushed him; so he bethought him of a pack of old tales there-anent, and
+went on to explain drily--
+
+"They go to the Baltic--to Russia--to salt human flesh."
+
+"Human flesh!"
+
+"Yes, and sometimes, too, they seize vessels in the open sea and do
+their salting there."
+
+She fixed a pair of large, terrified eyes on him, which made the old man
+continue--
+
+"And it is especially for little girls they look. That meat is the
+finest, and goes by tons down to the Grand Turk."
+
+Having played this last trump, he was going in again, but was stopped by
+her eager question--
+
+"Do they use a glass there on board?" And when he said they did, she
+slipped quickly by him through the door, and kept cautiously within as
+long as the vessel was to be seen through the window-pane on the
+horizon.
+
+The moods of the two were for once reversed. The old man looked very sly
+over his work, whilst she was quiet and cowed. Once only she broke out
+angrily--
+
+"But why doesn't the king get rid of them? If I was captain of a
+man-of-war, I'd--"
+
+"Yes, Elizabeth, if you were captain of a man-of-war!--what then?"
+
+The child's conceptions apparently reached no further than such matters
+as these as yet. She had seen few human beings as she grew up, and in
+recent years, after her grandmother's death, she and her grandfather had
+been the only regular inhabitants of the island. Every now and then
+there might perhaps come a boat on one errand or another, and a couple
+of times she had paid a visit to her maternal aunt on land, at Arendal.
+Her grandfather had taught her to read and write, and with what she
+found in the Bible and psalm-book, and in 'Exploits of Danish and
+Norwegian Naval Heroes,' a book in their possession, she had in a manner
+lived pretty much upon the anecdotes which in leisure moments she could
+extract from that grandfather, so chary of his speech, about his sailor
+life in his youth.
+
+They had besides, in the little inner room, a small print, without a
+frame, of the action near the Heather Islands, in which he had taken
+part. It represented the frigate Naiad, with the brigs Samso, Kiel, and
+Lolland, in furious conflict with the English ship of the line Dictator,
+which lay across the narrow harbour with the brig Calypso, and was
+pounding the Naiad to pieces. The names of the ships were printed
+underneath.
+
+On the print there was little to be seen but mast-heads and
+cannon-mouths, and a confusion of smoke, but in this had the child lived
+whole years of her life; and many a time in fancy had she stood there
+and fought the Englishman. Men-of-war and their officers had become the
+highest conception of her fancy, and the dearest wish of her heart was
+that a man-of-war might some day pass so near to Torungen that she would
+be able to see distinctly everything on board.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+After old Jacob had fallen into ill health, lighterman Kristiansen used
+to come out oftener to Torungen with provisions and other necessaries;
+and his visits now became periodical.
+
+He was accompanied one autumn by his son Salve, a black-haired,
+dark-eyed, handsome lad, with a sharp, clever face, who had worked in
+the fishing-boats along the coast from his childhood almost, and had, in
+fact, been brought up amongst its sunken rocks and reefs and breakers.
+He was something small in stature, perhaps; but what he wanted in
+robustness he made up in readiness and activity--qualities which stood
+him in good stead in the many quarrels into which his too ready tongue
+was wont to bring him. He was eighteen years old at this time; had been
+already engaged as an able seaman; and was in great request at the
+Sandvigen and Vraangen dances,--a fact of which he was perfectly well
+aware. Old Jacob's granddaughter, being a little girl of only fourteen
+years of age, was of course altogether beneath his notice, and he didn't
+condescend to speak to her. He merely delivered himself of the witticism
+that she was like a heron; and with her thick, checked woollen
+handkerchief tied with the ends behind her waist, the resemblance was
+not so very far-fetched. At any rate, he declared on the way home that
+such a specimen of womankind he, for his part, had never come across
+before, and that he would give anything to see her dancing in the public
+room with her thin arms and legs--it would be like a grasshopper.
+
+The next time he came, she took out her grandfather's watch in its
+silver case and showed it to him, and some conversation passed between
+them. His first impression of her was that she was stupid. She asked
+questions about every sort of thing, and seemed to think that he must
+know everything. And finally, she wanted to know what it was like on
+shore among the great folk of Arendal, and particularly how the ladies
+behaved. It afforded him much amusement at the time to see with what
+simple credulity she took in everything he chose to invent on the
+subject; but after he had left he was not sure that he wasn't sorry for
+what he had done, and at the same time he made the discovery that the
+girl, in her way, was anything but silly.
+
+His remorse was to be brought home to him presently, for old Jacob had
+had duly recounted to him over again all his cock-and-bull stories, and
+was in high dudgeon. When he came again the old man was very snappish to
+him, and he found it so unpleasant in the house that he made all the
+haste he could to get his business done. While he was thus occupied, the
+little girl told him all about the Naiad, and the part her grandfather
+had taken in the action. Salve, who was ruffled, and thought the old man
+had been an ill-mannered old dog, followed the relation from time to
+time with a sneering remark, which in her eagerness she didn't notice,
+or didn't understand. But when he had finished what he had to do, he
+gave vent to his feelings in a way she did understand,--he laughed
+incredulously.
+
+"Old Jacob there on board the Naiad! This is the first time anybody ever
+heard of it."
+
+The individual in question unfortunately came out at the moment to see
+the boat off, and turning, to him, red with anger, she cried--
+
+"Grandfather! he doesn't believe you were on board the Naiad that time!"
+
+The old man answered at first as if he didn't deign to enter upon any
+controversy on the subject--
+
+"Oh, I suppose it's only little girls' prattle again."
+
+But whether it was wounded vanity, or a sudden access of irritation
+against the lad, or that his eye fell upon his granddaughter standing
+there, so evidently incensed and resentful, he flared up the next
+moment, and thrusting his huge fist under the youngster's nose, burst
+out--
+
+"If you want to know all about it, you young swabber, I may tell you I
+stood on the Naiad's gun-deck with better folk than _you_ are ever
+likely to come across"--he stamped his foot here as if he had the deck
+under him--"when, with one broadside from the Dictator, the three masts
+and bowsprit were shot away, and the main deck came crashing down upon
+the lower;"--the last sentence was taken from 'Exploits of Danish and
+Norwegian Naval Heroes,' and the old man was as proud of these lines as
+he would have been of a medal.
+
+"When the crash came," he pursued, always in the same posture, and in
+the manner of the sacred text, "he who stands here and tells the tale
+had but just time to save himself by leaping into the sea through a
+gun-port."
+
+But he threw off then the trammels of the text, and continued _in
+propria persona_, violently gesticulating with his fists, and steadily
+advancing all the time, while Salve prudently retreated before his
+advance down to the boat.
+
+"We don't deal in lies and fabricate stories out here like you, you
+young whipper-snapper of a ship's cub; and if it wasn't for your father,
+who has sense enough to rope's-end you himself, I'd lay a stick across
+your back till you hadn't a howl left in you."
+
+With this finale of the longest speech to which he had given vent for
+thirty years perhaps, he turned with a short nod to the father, and went
+into the house again.
+
+Elizabeth was miserable that Salve should go away like this, without so
+much as deigning to say good-bye to her. And her grandfather was cross
+enough himself; for he was afraid that he had done something foolish,
+and broken with the lighterman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Salve came out to the rock again the next autumn, after a voyage to
+Liverpool and Havre.
+
+At first he was rather shy, although his father and old Jacob Torungen
+had in the interval, in spite of that little affair of the previous
+year, been on the best of terms. The white bear, however, as he called
+him, seemed to have altogether forgotten what had passed; and with the
+girl he was very easily reconciled--she had learnt now not to tell
+everything to her grandfather.
+
+Whilst the lighterman and old Jacob enjoyed a heart-warming glass
+together in the house, Salve carried the things up to the cellar,
+Elizabeth following him up and down every time, and the conversation
+meanwhile going round all the points of the compass, so to speak. After
+she had asked him about Havre de Grace, where he had been, and about
+America, where he had not been,--if his captain's wife was as fine as a
+man-of-war captain's; and then if he wouldn't like one day to marry a
+fine lady,--she wanted at last to know, from the laughing sailor lad, if
+the officers' wives were ever allowed to be with them in war.
+
+Her face had of late acquired something wonderfully attractive in its
+expression--such a seriousness would come over it sometimes, although
+she continued as childlike as ever; and such eyes as hers were, at all
+events in Salve's experience, not common. At any rate, after this, he
+invariably accompanied his father upon these expeditions.
+
+The last time he was out there he told her about the dances on shore at
+Sandvigen, and took care to give her to understand that the girls made
+much of him there--but he was tired now of dancing with them.
+
+She was very curious on this subject, and extracted from him that he had
+had two tremendous fights that winter. She looked at him in terror, and
+asked rather hesitatingly--
+
+"But had they done anything to you?"
+
+"Oh, no! all dancing entertainments have a little extra dance like that
+to wind up with. They merely wanted to dance with the girl I had asked
+first."
+
+"Is it so dangerous, then? What sort of a girl was she?--I mean, what
+was her name?"
+
+"Oh, one was called Marie, and the other was Anne--Herluf Andersen's
+daughter. They were pretty girls, I can tell you. Anne had a white
+brooch and earrings, and danced more smoothly than ever you saw a cutter
+sail. Mate George said the same."
+
+The upshot of this conversation was, that she found out that the girls
+in Arendal, and in the ports generally where he had touched, were all
+well dressed; and the next time he returned from Holland, he promised he
+would bring with him a pair of morocco-leather shoes with silver buckles
+for her.
+
+With this promise they parted, after she had allowed him--and that there
+might be no mistake, twice over--to take the accurate measure of her
+foot; and there were roses of joy in her cheeks, as she called after him
+to be sure and not forget them.
+
+The year after Salve came with the shoes. There were silver buckles in
+them, and they were very smart; but if they were, they had cost him more
+than half a month's pay.
+
+Elizabeth was more carefully dressed now, and might almost be called
+grown up. She hesitated about accepting the shoes, and didn't ask
+questions about everything as she used to do. Nor was she so willing to
+stand and talk with him alone by the boat--she liked to have him up
+within hearing of the others.
+
+"Don't you see how high the sea is running?" he said, and tried to
+persuade her that the boat would be dashed to pieces on the rocks. But
+she saw that it wasn't true, and went up with a little toss of her head
+alone. He followed her.
+
+She must have learned all this in Arendal, where in the course of the
+autumn she had been confirmed, and where she had lived with her aunt.
+But she had grown marvellously handsome in that time--so much so,
+indeed, that Salve was almost taken aback when he saw her; and when they
+said good-bye, it was no longer in the old laughing tones, but with some
+slight embarrassment on his side--he didn't seem to know exactly how
+matters lay between them.
+
+After that she filled his head so completely that he had not a thought
+for anything else.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The old Juno, to which Salve belonged, was lying at that time at
+Sandvigen, and was only waiting for a north-east wind to come out. She
+was a square-rigged vessel, with a crew of nineteen hands all told,
+which had plied for many years in American waters, and off and on in the
+North Sea, and was reckoned at the time one of Arendal's largest craft.
+Her arrival or departure was quite an event for the town and
+neighbourhood; and to have a berth in her was considered among the
+sailors of the district a very high honour indeed--the more so that her
+master and principal owner, Captain Beck, was a particularly good chief
+to serve under, and a lucky one to boot.
+
+When at last, between ten and eleven o'clock one morning, she weighed
+anchor, and before a light north-westerly breeze, with her small sails
+set, glided out to sea, the quays were crowded with spectators, the
+majority of the crew belonging to the place, and it being generally
+known that they were bound on a longer voyage than usual. On board she
+had with her still the captain's son, Carl Beck, a smart young naval
+officer, with his sister and a small party of their friends, who meant
+to land out on the Torungens in the sailing-boat they had in tow. They
+wished to remain with her as long as possible, and for the purpose had
+made up a party to the islands, where the gentlemen proposed to shoot
+some of the sea-fowl, which are to be found out there on the rocks in
+swarms at the spring season of the year on their passage north along the
+coast.
+
+It was about four o'clock when they passed Little Torungen; and as there
+were swells then bursting in white jets upon the reefs, and a line of
+dark fire-fringed clouds about the sunset, which looked like heavy
+weather coming up, the pleasure party determined to leave the vessel
+here, instead of going on, as they had intended, to the larger of the
+two islands.
+
+As they went over the side Salve Kristiansen was standing out on the
+forecastle gazing eagerly over to where the barren mass of rock lay like
+a dipping hull in the distance, bathed in the evening sun, and with a
+fringe of foam round its base; and he could see old Jacob's
+granddaughter standing by the wall of the house with the glass. He had
+chosen on purpose a conspicuous place, and stood with his back against
+the stay, so heavy of heart and sad at having to go away, that it would
+have taken very little to make him burst into tears. It seemed to have
+dawned upon him all of a sudden that he was in love.
+
+To try whether it was upon him that she was directing the glass, or at
+the unusual discharging of freight into the sail-boat, he waved his hat,
+and his whole face lighted up with joy as he saw her return his signal.
+He took off his hat again, and received another wave of the glass in
+reply.
+
+He stood there then straining his eyes abstractedly in the direction of
+the rock until it disappeared behind them in the gathering twilight. He
+had been inspirited for the whole voyage; and the first thing he should
+do when they arrived at Boston would be to buy a dress and a ring; and
+when he came home he determined that his first business should be to
+make an expedition to the island, and put a certain question to a
+certain person whom he knew out there.
+
+He was roused from his abstraction by the boatswain bawling out his
+name, and asking if he was going to sleep there, and whether he wanted
+something to wake him up. The order had been given to make all snug for
+the night, as the breeze was freshening.
+
+The watches had been set at noon, and the starboard and larboard watch
+told off, as customary on the first day a vessel goes to sea. Salve had
+the middle watch; and by that time the sea was running high, and they
+were plunging through the darkness under a double-reefed mainsail, the
+moon every now and then clearing an open space in the storm--clouds that
+were driving like smoke before it, so that he could fitfully distinguish
+objects over the deck, even to the look-out man's looming figure out
+upon the forecastle.
+
+Upon the capstan bar sat a sailor in oilskin clothes, who had probably
+been on shore the previous night and not closed his eyes, and who was
+making great efforts to keep awake. His head, however, would still keep
+nodding; and from time to time he stood up and tried to keep himself
+warm by exercising his arms. He sang, or more often took up afresh upon
+each recovery of consciousness a verse of a half-Swedish ballad about a
+"girl so true," that he wished he then had by his side, for the time
+without her seemed so long. Now and then the spray of a sea would bring
+him more sharply to himself, but it did not last long; and so the ditty,
+which was melancholy to the last degree, would begin afresh.
+
+Salve was far too restless to have any desire to sleep, and as he paced
+to and fro by the fore-hatch, lost in his dreams, and listened to the
+song, it seemed to him a most touching one.
+
+The nodding sailor little thought that he was performing before a
+deeply-moved audience.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The party, meanwhile, that had left the ship, were passing the night
+with old Jacob on Torungen. They had tried first to beat out to the
+larger island, but the sea had risen, darkness had set in, and it had
+soon become evident that it was no longer pleasure-sailing for a boat
+with ladies in it. They had determined, therefore, rather than go about
+for home, and lose the whole sporting expedition, which was to have
+lasted for two or three days, to spend the night on Little Torungen and
+see what the morning would do for them.
+
+Great was old Jacob's astonishment, it may readily be supposed, when
+there came in the late evening a knocking at the door, and he saw by the
+light from the hearth no less than six grand folk come streaming in,
+with two ladies amongst them. He shaded his eyes with his hand, and
+looked at them in mute amazement.
+
+As for Elizabeth, if it had been a train of fairies that had suddenly
+appeared, they could not have occasioned her more terror and curiosity.
+It was getting near bedtime, and she had been sitting half-asleep over
+the fire, and perhaps her suddenly awakened excitement lent a more than
+usual animation and attraction to a pair of eyes and a face that would
+nowhere have passed unnoticed; for Carl Beck, who was at the head of the
+party, seemed positively fascinated, and could not take his eyes off
+her, until, reddening with confusion, she instinctively stretched out
+her hand for her bodice, that lay beside her on the bench.
+
+"Good evening, Jacob, old boy," cried Carl, in the frank, off-hand
+manner that became him so well, going up to the old fellow, and laying
+his hand cordially on his shoulder. "I'm afraid we shall be very
+troublesome to you, such a large party; but we want you to let us stay
+here till morning, till we see if the weather moderates a bit. We
+daren't go driving out in the dark to Great Torungen, on account of
+these women folk that we have on board,"--and he pointed, jokingly, to
+his sister and her friend.
+
+"I see you have to deal with womankind too, so you know what it is."
+
+The old man was apparently not insensible to this genial way of dealing
+with him. He rose from his seat and made room at the fire, begging that
+they would put up with what accommodation he had to offer, and telling
+Elizabeth at the same time to go out for more wood.
+
+While the party gathered round the fire, and made themselves as
+comfortable as they could, Carl Beck was outside with the boatmen,
+seeing about having the provisions brought up. He came in again with
+Elizabeth, also with an armful of wood. Throwing it down, laughing, he
+cried--
+
+"Now for a 'bowl,' as our friends the Swedes have it. But first, out
+with the food."
+
+There was no scarcity of eatables, which were discussed amid a running
+fire of conversation upon every kind of topic; and then came the "bowl,"
+a composition of various strong and spicy ingredients, of which Carl had
+the secret, and which finally was lighted, and ladled into the glasses
+whilst the blue flame was burning.
+
+Carl Beck was the life of the party; and very well he looked as he sat
+there astride over the bench, with his glass in his hand, and his
+officer's jacket with its anchor-buttons thrown open, and sang first one
+and then another of the rollicking drinking-songs that were then in
+vogue, the others joining in the chorus. He gave them, then, a cheery
+sailor-song, which brought in its train a series of anecdotes from the
+recent war.
+
+Old Jacob, under the influence of the prevailing good-fellowship and the
+good cheer, had become uncommonly lively for him, and would even put in
+a word now and then. But every attempt to make him tell a story himself
+failed. Only when the action at the Heather Islands came up for
+discussion for a while did he come out with a bit of a yarn, as he
+called it.
+
+"Yes," he said, putting carefully down the glass that was handed to him,
+"it was a great battle, was that. The country lost a fine ship there,
+and many a brave lad to boot. But God's curse hangs over the man that
+piloted the Englishman in to the Sand Islands--although none here, while
+he was alive, knew his name. It was said he soon after made an end of
+himself through remorse, like Judas Iscariot. However that may be, at
+the mouth of the channel there is a flat sunk rock that a man in his
+sea-boots can stand on at low water, and there they see him on moonlight
+nights making piteous signs for help, until the water at last comes over
+his head, and he disappears. God help the man that'll row out to
+him--it's always foul weather when he is to be seen."
+
+"Have you ever seen him yourself, Jacob?" asked Carl Beck.
+
+"I'll not say that I have, and I'll not say that I haven't. But I know
+that the last time I was off those islands, we had such tremendous
+weather that we thought ourselves lucky in making any port at all."
+
+For a while every one was busied with the thoughts which Jacob's recital
+had suggested, and there was a solemn pause, which was broken by Carl
+Beck's striking up another song to keep off sleep:--
+
+       "Before the wind and a flowing sail,
+         Vessels for every port!
+       In letters of gold a dear girl's name
+         On every stern inwrought!
+       The vessel may sail the world around,
+       But with her the girls will still be found!
+     Hurrah! then, boys, for the one of your mind,
+     That never, oh, never, you'll leave behind."
+
+He repeated the last couplet with a gay inclination of his glass to the
+ladies, who were sitting now tired and huddled together on the bench,
+and over their heads to Elizabeth, who was standing in the background,
+awake enough for both of them. The light from the fire fell upon his
+handsome brown face, with the raven black curly hair, and the dark eyes
+that it was said he had inherited from his recently deceased mother, who
+was from Brest; and with his flow of animal spirits, that sufficed for
+the whole party almost, he certainly was as manly and handsome a lad as
+you would wish to meet.
+
+The wind by this time had gone down considerably; and, as day was
+breaking, the whole party were in the boat once more and enjoying a
+quiet sleep as they sailed. It was long, though, before Elizabeth could
+get out of her thoughts the handsome young officer who had sat there by
+the fire. And many a time would she conjure up his form on the bench
+again--particularly as he looked when he held up his glass and glanced
+over to her while he sang--
+
+     "Hurrah! then, boys, for the one of your mind,
+     That never, oh, never, you'll leave behind."
+
+Subsequently to this, Carl Beck made repeated excursions out to Torungen
+to shoot sea-birds, and, by preference, alone in his sailing-boat. But,
+whether it was an instinct or not on her side, it happened somehow that
+he never had any further conversation with her without the old man being
+with them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+The Juno arrived in due course at Boston, where Salve invested a
+considerable portion of his wages in the material for a dress, a couple
+of silk handkerchiefs, and two massive rings with his own and
+Elizabeth's initials on them.
+
+From Boston she proceeded to Grimsby with a Canadian cargo; then on a
+short trip to Liverpool; then back to Quebec; and some ten or eleven
+months after leaving Arendal, they were on a voyage from Memel in the
+Baltic to New York, with a cargo of timber, planks, and pipe-staves--the
+intention being to call in at the home port, for which she had some
+general cargo, to take in provisions.
+
+During these voyages Salve, as one may say, had completed his
+apprenticeship to the sea; and in his blue shirt loosely knotted round
+the throat, his leather belt and canvas trousers, he had such a look of
+smartness and energy that it required no very great amount of
+discernment to perceive in him a sailor from top to toe. He had, sooner
+than most, risen superior to the dangers and temptations to which young
+sailor lads are exposed during the years of their novitiate, and with a
+break-neck recklessness of disposition he combined such a perfectly
+cat-like activity, that his superior smartness was recognised even among
+his comrades. His bearing, it is true, was rather arrogant, and his
+tongue not the most good-natured; but he was generally liked
+nevertheless, for he was kind-hearted, if he was only taken on the right
+side, and it did not seem to be his sailor-like qualities upon which he
+prided himself so much as upon the superior acuteness of his
+understanding, which he delighted to display in discussions with the
+red-bearded and somewhat consequential sailmaker, who had the reputation
+of being a well-read man, and who affected a proportionate importance.
+
+Up at Memel they had had great difficulties to contend with, owing to
+the condition of the ice; and their bad luck seemed to be going to
+follow them, for in the Skager Rack they found themselves suddenly
+wedged into a field of drift-ice, with the prospect of having to remain
+where they were for weeks perhaps. The cold had been unusually severe
+that winter in the Baltic, and out over the plain of ice by which they
+were surrounded they could see flags of all nations sharing a similar
+fate. There was nothing for it but to wait and hope; and if the ice did
+not break up soon, short rations would become the order of the day.
+
+It was wearisome; and to Salve above all, who was feverishly longing to
+get home, and whose temperament was little suited for the endurance of
+such agonies of Tantalus. He became the very embodiment of restlessness.
+A hundred times a-day he went aloft to look out for some prospect of a
+change, and to strain his eyes after the streak of land to the north
+which was to be made out on clear days from the maintop-gallant
+mast-head, and which of course would be the coast of Norway. The dress,
+the silk handkerchiefs, the rings, and what he should say to
+Elizabeth--whether he should formally request a private interview with
+her, or wait till an opportunity offered--were running incessantly in
+his head. And particularly what he should say to her seemed now, often
+as he had thought it over during the long voyage and settled it to his
+satisfaction, to present many points of difficulty. He must go down then
+to his seaman's chest and see if the things were still there all right,
+and whether the moths might not have got into them; the last inspection,
+when he unfolded the stuff in his bunk, being conducted with uncommon
+precautions.
+
+At last there came a prospect of release in the shape of thick weather,
+and a southerly gale setting on the Norwegian coast. The ice too had for
+a day or two previously begun to show blue patches of water here and
+there, and when it was dark that evening they felt themselves free once
+more.
+
+In spite of the salt water and the rain, which he had to wipe off his
+face every minute, Salve went to his look-out post forward that night,
+and stood there humming to himself, whilst the rest of the crew who were
+on duty slopped up and down on the deck-cargo below, in sea-boots and
+dripping oilskins, or sheltered themselves, as best they could, under
+the lee of the round-house or forecastle. They had been hard at work all
+day, making openings in the ice; and now the groaning and whistling
+among the blocks and ropes, that were increasing every minute, gave
+little promise of rest for the night.
+
+The captain stood upon the poop in his thick overcoat and drenched fur
+cap, with his trumpet under his arm, looking anxiously through the
+night-glass from time to time, and his voice sounded unusually stern.
+There lay before him in the dark, blustering, winter night a veritable
+David's choice. The strong southerly current, aided by the gale, was
+fast carrying him in under the Norwegian coast; while on the other hand,
+if he tried to beat to windward, he risked coming into collision with
+the ice-floes. Added to that, he was not very clear as to his position;
+and as the gale increased, he began to pace restlessly backwards and
+forwards, addressing, every now and then, a word down to one of the
+helmsmen, whose forms could be seen by the gleam from the binnacle.
+
+"How's her head, Jens?"
+
+"Sou'-west, sir; she'll lay no higher."
+
+"H'm! more and more on land!" he muttered, the perspiration coming out
+upon his forehead under his fur cap, which, in spite of the rain, he had
+to push back to get air. Both life and ship would soon be at stake.
+
+"What says the look-out-man, mate?" he asked of the latter, who came up
+the steps at this moment from taking a turn forward.
+
+"Black as pitch. If we stuck a lantern out on the flying jib-boom, we
+should see that far at any rate. But the lead gives deep water."
+
+"Does it?" was the rather scornful rejoinder.
+
+"The blockhead doesn't seem to know yet," growled the captain, as the
+other turned away, "that the lead will give you deep water here until
+your vessel has her nose upon the cliff."
+
+There was no chance of a pilot on such a night as this promised to be;
+but still, in the hope that the wind might carry the sound in under
+land, a few shots were fired from the signal-gun.
+
+At last there was no longer any choice left. If they were not to end
+upon the rocks that night, they must crowd on more sail, and try at all
+hazards to haul off the coast.
+
+The order was accordingly given to shake a reef out, followed by "Haul
+in the topsail bow-lines--clap on the topsail halyards, and hoist away!"
+and in the darkness might be heard occasionally "halimen-oh!-oh hoi!" as
+the sailors worked at the tough and heavy sail, with the cordage all
+stiff and swollen with ice and slippery with the rain, the spray driving
+in their faces, and the vessel rolling so that sometimes they were
+hanging on by the ropes only, when the deck went from under their feet.
+
+Under the fresh weight of sail the vessel careened over, and shot
+foaming forward with new life for a moment. The next, the topsail had
+burst away from the bolt-ropes with a report as of a cannon-shot, and
+she had fallen away into the trough of the sea. The mainstay-sail sheet
+parted at the same time, and a deluge of water carried overboard, with
+part of the bulwarks, a large portion of the deck cargo, which consisted
+of heavy timber, leaving the remainder tossed about in the wildest
+confusion, and much of it standing on end against the railings and
+capstan.
+
+It was some time before she could be brought up in the wind again, and
+the old Juno had then to go through a trial such as her joints even in
+her younger days had never been equal to. She was like many another
+vessel that is a good sailor enough, a little broken-backed from the
+weight of the cargo amidships; and as she gave to the strain, the ladder
+that stood in the hold began to saw up and down in the coaming forward,
+while the water came oozing in through the staring bow timbers, and the
+pumps had to be kept continually going. The hatches were all battened
+down, and many of the crew had lashed themselves to the lower rigging as
+preferable now to the deck.
+
+"Ready about!--tacks and sheets!" &c.; "luff now, and keep her close to
+the wind!"--the same monotonous words of command all through the night
+every time they lay over upon a new tack, while at the same time they
+would generally ship a heavy sea, and the vessel would shake through all
+her frame.
+
+Day broke and passed in a fog, that left them in much the same
+uncertainty as before about their position. For one moment it had
+lifted, and they fancied they had seen "Homborgsund's Fald," a high
+landmark up the country above Arendal, and from its lowness and dimness
+on the horizon, they had been encouraged to hope that they had
+appreciably increased their distance from the coast. About noon they
+passed an English brig that had been through the same struggle as the
+Juno was now engaged upon, whose signals of distress they had already
+occasionally heard faintly upon the wind, and which now seemed on the
+point of foundering. The crew had climbed into the after-rigging, which
+was all that now remained standing, and they made despairing signs for
+help; but it was impossible to render any. They had enough to do to keep
+themselves afloat.
+
+The gale showed no signs of moderating, and that night, as Salve
+Kristiansen and another were taking their turn at the wheel, there
+gleamed suddenly out of the pitchy darkness to leeward of the
+fore-rigging the white crest of a tremendous eddy wave, which a moment
+after came crashing down upon the deck, carrying clean away the
+round-house, binnacle, and long-boat, damaging the wheel, and leaving
+many of the drenched and half--suffocated sailors deposited in the most
+unexpected places, and only glad to find that they still had the deck
+under them.
+
+"Ugly sea on the lee-bow!" was heard again from forward, and all in that
+direction seemed suddenly to have become a mass of white.
+
+"Ready about!--hard a-lee!" and with a great lurch the old craft went
+about once more, the renewed shrieking in every kind of pitch in the
+rigging, and the blinding dash of spray, showing to what a hurricane the
+gale had risen.
+
+Salve had been too much occupied with the damaged wheel at first to have
+a thought to spare for anything else; but it recurred to him very soon
+that when that first dark sea had broken over them so unexpectedly from
+leeward, he had seen for a moment the glimmer of two lights on its
+crest, and a world of associations was at once aroused in his mind: it
+seemed to the lad's romantic fancy that he was keeping an appointment
+with Elizabeth Raklev. As he glanced hurriedly back, the two light-dots
+again appeared. He had seen them too often before to be mistaken, and he
+shouted over his shoulder to the captain, who noticed them now for the
+first time, "Those lights behind to leeward are from old Jacob's hearth
+on Torungen!"
+
+"Are you sure of that?" muttered Beck, coming nearer to him at the same
+time over the sloping deck with the help of a rope. "If they are, it
+will not be long before we are dashed to atoms on the rocks."
+
+A conversation ensued between them, in which Salve declared that he had
+known the water under Torungen from childhood as well as he did his
+father's garden; and the upshot was that Beck, pale and hesitating,
+determined to go in under land with him as pilot.
+
+"It is much that is being intrusted this night to two young shoulders,"
+said he; "and see you think twice, young man, both for your own life's
+sake and ours."
+
+They kept away then, and stood in under land with the least sail they
+could carry in the tremendous sea that was now breaking in their wake,
+and soon the thunder of the breakers became audible.
+
+Salve was pale, but perfectly calm, as he stood there with the
+speaking-trumpet, after having taken over the command, and with the
+captain and mate by his side. But all of a sudden great beads of
+perspiration came out on his forehead. There was something curiously
+irregular about the light. It had become dim and red, and then seemed to
+go out altogether. Had he by any possibility made a mistake? and was he
+now sailing the Juno with all on board straight for the rocks?
+
+The uncertainty lasted for a quarter of an hour, and never in his life
+had Salve seen so heavy a countenance as that with which Beck, whose
+expression discovered a trace of doubt, looked at him, evidently
+hesitating whether he should not take the command again himself.
+
+But in the mean time the gleam of light shone forth again--whatever
+might have been the cause of its obscuration--and that night Salve
+Kristiansen brought the Juno safely into Merdoe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Out on Little Torungen meanwhile noteworthy events had occurred, which
+were now the talk of the town.
+
+Old Jacob had had a stroke the week before, and had died the same night
+the Juno had had her wrestle for life. In the preceding two days of fog
+and storm they had heard many signal-guns of distress, and his
+granddaughter had during that time kept up the fire alone at night. It
+was only as he was drawing his last breath, and she sat by his side and
+bent over him, forgetful of aught else, that it was for a while
+neglected; and it was this little moment that had caused Salve such a
+_mauvais quart d'heure_ on board the Juno. On the following day, in her
+despair, she had attempted a perilous journey over the drift ice to
+bring people out to her assistance, and had been taken up by a boat and
+brought in by it to Arendal.
+
+The poor girl was far too much occupied with her grief for the loss of
+her grandfather to think in the remotest degree of making her story
+interesting. But Carl Beck, in his enthusiasm, knew very well how to
+give the incident a colouring of romance, and she was very soon exalted
+into the heroine of the hour. It was talked of at the Amtmand's--a house
+with two handsome daughters, where Lieutenant Beck was a daily
+visitor--and it was in everybody's mouth how, all alone out on Torungen
+with her dying grandfather, she had been the means of saving the Juno,
+and had since risked her life on the ice. Every one could see by a
+glance at her that she must have a remarkable character; but as to her
+uncommon beauty there prevailed different opinions in feminine circles.
+It was, at all events, a pity that she was so forlorn; and the Becks, it
+was thought, were now morally bound to look after her.
+
+For the present she had gone to live with her aunt up in one of the
+narrow streets at the back of the town, and there came pouring in, with
+and without the owners' names, all sorts of friendly advice, with black
+dress materials and ornaments from the young men and shop lads; and a
+couple of the bustling ladies of the town even came in person to see her
+aunt and talk over the girl's future. When Carl Beck, however, gave out
+that he looked upon these presents as slights upon himself, they ceased.
+He had only been up there once, and then his eldest sister was with him:
+but his manner on that occasion had been most attractive, he had
+sympathised with such winning sincerity, and at the same time so
+unassumingly, in Elizabeth's grief; and when leaving assured her, with
+emotion which he made no attempt to conceal, that they owed it to her
+that their father was still alive.
+
+When he was gone, his sister had proceeded to the real matter of her
+visit. She had come to propose to the aunt that Elizabeth should live
+with them for the present with the view of qualifying herself for a
+housekeeper's place, as she must not be exposed to the necessity of
+going out as a common servant-girl. It was her brother, she added, who
+had made this plan for Elizabeth's future.
+
+The offer was a highly desirable one for persons in their position, and
+was accepted by the aunt with unmixed satisfaction. Over Elizabeth's
+face, however, there passed a momentary cloud. She felt, without knowing
+why, a sense of oppression at the prospect of coming into closer contact
+with the young lieutenant; but at the same time she would not for a
+great deal have refused the offer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+As for Salve, during the first few days after coming home he was a happy
+man. He was in love: he had received from his captain a hundred-daler
+note, accompanied by a promise that as soon as he had learnt navigation
+he should be third mate on board the Juno; and he heard himself admired
+on all sides by his equals and associates. There was so much work to be
+done, though, in discharging the cargo and getting the vessel into dock
+for repairs--they had managed to get her up as far as Arendal--that it
+would be Saturday evening before he could get his so longed-for
+home-leave.
+
+On the day before, as he was sitting on watch in the early morning under
+the lee of the bulwark, he accidentally overheard a conversation going
+on upon the slip below that set his blood on fire.
+
+The carpenters had just come to their work, and one of them was telling
+the story of old Jacob's death, and of the heroism which his
+granddaughter had displayed.
+
+"They say," he went on, "that Captain Beck is to have him buried on
+Monday next, and that he is to provide for the granddaughter--the navy
+lieutenant has seen to that."
+
+The noise and the clinking of the hammers that were now at work made
+Salve lose a good deal of the conversation here.
+
+"There is good reason for that, mind you," was the next observation he
+caught, made in a somewhat lower tone, and accompanied by a doubtful
+laugh. "It is not for nothing that he has been out so constantly
+shooting sea-fowl about Torungen."
+
+"Would she be a--sea-bird of that feather? Old Jacob, I should have
+thought, was not the kind of man--"
+
+"Well, perhaps not that altogether; but the first thing she did was to
+come straight over here; and he has had her already taken into his own
+house. I have that from the aunt. The old woman had no suspicion of
+anything, but told me quite innocently that now she was to be a sort of
+housekeeper with the Becks."
+
+A slight noise above him here caused the speaker to look up. A deadly
+pale young sailor was staring down at him over the ship's side with a
+pair of eyes that struck him as resembling those he had once seen in the
+head of a mad dog. Their owner turned away at once and crossed the deck.
+
+"That must have been the lover!" he whispered over to the other, as he
+set to work with his adze upon the pencilled plank. Shortly after he
+muttered in a tone of compunction--
+
+"If I saw that physiognomy aright, some one had better take care of
+himself when he gets leave ashore."
+
+Salve had sprung to his feet in a fury when he heard about young Beck,
+but the desire to hear more had kept him spellbound. What further had
+been hinted of his relations with Elizabeth, and that the latter had
+even taken refuge in his house, seemed all only too probable. He knew
+both the men who had been speaking; they were respectable folks, and the
+one besides had had the news from the aunt herself.
+
+There was hard work that day on board, but his hands were as if they had
+been benumbed. It was impossible for him to give any assistance, except
+in appearance, when any hauling was to be done;--he did everything
+mechanically.
+
+"Are you sick, lad, or longing after your sweetheart?" said the mate to
+him in the course of the afternoon. He saw that there was something
+wrong with him.
+
+That last, "after your sweetheart," had a wonderfully rousing influence.
+He felt himself all at once relieved of his heavy feeling of exhaustion,
+and worked now so hard that the perspiration poured down his face,
+joining in the hauling song from time to time with a wild, unnatural
+energy: he was afraid to leave himself a moment for thought. When the
+day was over, however, he took the anchor watch for a comrade, who was
+overjoyed at the unexpected prospect of getting a quiet night in his
+hammock, and at escaping from his turn of "ship's dog"--that watch
+consisting of one man only, whose business it is to keep the ship from
+harbour-thieves.
+
+He paced up and down the deck alone in the pitchy darkness, that was
+only relieved by a lantern or two out in the harbour, and a light here
+and there up in the town--sometimes standing for long minutes together,
+with his cheek on his hand, leaning on the railing. He could, without
+the slightest scruple, murder young Beck--that he felt.
+
+At two o'clock he crossed over to the boards that were sloped against
+the vessel's side, slid down them in the dark to the slip, and from
+there made his way ashore. Elizabeth's aunt lived in one of the small
+houses above; and he had determined to wake her and have a talk with
+her.
+
+Widow Kirstine was a portly, somewhat worn perhaps, but otherwise
+strong-looking, old woman, with a good broad face, and thin grey hair
+drawn down behind her ears. She was not unused to being disturbed at
+night, one of her occupations being to nurse sick people; but she always
+grumbled whenever she was. When she held up the candle she had lit, and
+recognised Salve Kristiansen, she thought, from his paleness and general
+appearance, that he was drunk.
+
+"Is that you, Salve?--and a pretty state to be in at this time of
+night!" she began, severely, in the doorway, not caring to let him in at
+first. "Is that the way you spend your wages?"
+
+"No, mother, it's not. I've come off my watch; I wanted to have a word
+with you about Elizabeth."
+
+His tone was so strangely low and sorrowful, that the old woman saw that
+there must be something unusual the matter; and she opened the door.
+
+"About Elizabeth, you say?"
+
+"Yes--where is she stopping now?"
+
+"Where is she stopping?--why, with the Becks, of course. Is there
+anything the matter?"
+
+"You ought to know that best, mother Kirstine," he said, earnestly.
+
+She held up the light to his face, and looked at him in vague anxiety,
+but could make nothing out of it.
+
+"If I ought to know it, tell me," she said, almost in a tone of
+entreaty.
+
+"Young Beck, I hear, has been out about Torungen the whole
+year--shooting sea-birds--or--do you really think he means to marry
+her?" he broke out wildly, and raising his voice.
+
+It was only now that she caught his full meaning; and setting down the
+candlestick hard upon the table, she dropped into the chair by the side
+herself.
+
+"So--that is what they are saying, is it?" she cried at last. Her first
+fear was over; but anger had succeeded to it, and she rose now from her
+seat with arms akimbo and flashing eyes. She was not a woman to offend
+lightly.
+
+"So they have fastened that lie upon Elizabeth, have they!--it's a shame
+for them, so it is! And you, Salve, can soil your lips with it? Let me
+just tell you, then, for your pains, that the Becks' house is as
+respectable a one as any in Arendal; and it isn't you, and such as you,
+that can take its character away. Never fear but Elizabeth shall hear
+every word of your precious story--ay, and the captain, and the
+lieutenant, and Madam Beck, too; and you'll be hunted from the Juno like
+a dripping cur. So you thought that Elizabeth was to be beholden to the
+lieutenant for a character--?"
+
+"Dear mother Kirstine!" Salve cried, interrupting her in the full
+torrent of her indignation, "I didn't think about it--I couldn't think.
+Only, I heard Anders of the Crag down on the slip this morning say it
+all so confidently.
+
+"Anders of the Crag? So it was from him you heard it?--the pitiful,
+wheedling rascal! That is his gratitude, I suppose, for my being with
+his wife last week!--I shall know where to find him. But the receiver in
+the like is no better than the stealer," she resumed, indignantly; "and
+I'd have you know, it was just Beck's own daughter who came here and
+offered Elizabeth a respectable place in a respectable house, and it was
+to me she talked, my lad," pointing self-consciously with quivering
+forefinger at her own bosom; "so Elizabeth has not begged herself in
+there at all. You didn't need to desert your watch to bring such tales
+here; and Elizabeth shall hear of it--that she shall," she repeated,
+excitedly, striking one hand into the other with a loud smack--"she
+shall hear what fine faith you have in her."
+
+"Dear mother Kirstine! I didn't mean any harm," he said, entreatingly,
+feeling as if a weight had been taken off his heart--"only please don't
+tell Elizabeth."
+
+"You may depend upon it I will."
+
+"Mother Kirstine!" he said, in a low voice, and looking down, "I brought
+a dress with me for her that I had bought in Boston. And then I heard
+all this, and I couldn't contain myself." He said nothing about the
+rings.
+
+"So!" rejoined the old woman after a pause, during which she had
+examined him through her half-closed eyes, and in a somewhat milder
+tone; "so you brought a dress for her! and at the same time you come
+running up here in the middle of the night to tell me that she has
+become a common baggage for the lieutenant,"--and her anger rose again.
+
+"But, Mother Kirstine, I don't believe a word of it."
+
+"It wasn't to tell me that, I suppose, you came up here in such haste,
+my lad."
+
+"I was only mad to think such a thing could be said of her."
+
+"Well, be off with you now! Anders of the Crag shall go farther with his
+lie--if I go with him before the Foged and the Maritime Court."
+
+For the matter of that, she might as well have threatened to go with him
+to the moon; but Salve understood her to mean by the Maritime Court the
+bloodiest course she knew.
+
+As she opened the door to let him out, she said with a certain
+confidential seriousness--"Tell me, Salve! has anything passed between
+you and Elizabeth?"
+
+He seemed uncertain for a moment what reply he should make to this
+unexpected invitation of confidence. At length he said--
+
+"I don't know, Mother Kirstine, for certain; two years ago, I made her a
+present of a pair of shoes."
+
+"You did!--well, see now and get on board again without any one noticing
+you--that's my advice," she replied, without allowing herself to be
+brought any further into the matter, and pushed him then rather
+unceremoniously out of the door.
+
+After he had gone she sat for a while with the light in her lap, staring
+at it and nodding her head reflectively.
+
+"He's a good and a handsome lad that Salve," she said at last, aloud.
+"But on the whole it will be better to tell Elizabeth, and then she can
+be on her guard there in the house;" and having come to this decision
+she rose from her seat and prepared to go to bed again.
+
+Salve, notwithstanding this interview, was far from being at ease next
+day, and he felt the courage he had mustered up, to go straight to
+Elizabeth with the dress and ring, altogether gone.
+
+In the evening, when all the crew were given leave from the ship for
+three weeks, he went off to his father instead, to see if he could learn
+more of the situation through inquiries from him; and on the following
+Monday both were present at old Jacob's interment in Tromoe churchyard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+All these events had come upon Elizabeth with overwhelming suddenness.
+It seemed to her like a confused dream. Yet the fact remained that there
+she was, dressed in black, an inmate of one of those handsome houses,
+the interiors of which she had so often pictured to herself out on
+Torungen.
+
+Captain Beck was married to a second wife, a woman of stern principles,
+full of decision and respectability, who had brought him a considerable
+fortune, and, under her lynx-eyed rule, had restored that order in
+household matters which, during the period her husband was a widower,
+had been far too much neglected; and though his power might still be
+absolute on board the Juno, it had long since ceased to be so in his own
+house. By her grown-up step-children Madam Beck was in the highest
+degree respected, though not exactly loved, owing to the various
+unaccustomed restraints to which they now found themselves subjected;
+and as to Carl, his easy tact, notwithstanding the independent position
+which he enjoyed in his home as salaried member of a coast commission,
+enabled him to keep on the best of terms with his imperious stepmother.
+His duties would detain him about home for another year, to be still
+feted by the town, and idolised by his sisters, who were never tired of
+speculating upon eligible matches for him.
+
+From the very first, Elizabeth, who, in her utter ignorance how to
+behave, committed one egregious blunder after another, had perceived
+with her strong sense that it would require all the cleverness and
+patience she possessed to enable her to maintain the situation; and she
+began by following Madam Beck about untiringly like a lamb. Many a
+painful scene had she to go through during the earlier period of their
+connection, and she bore them with a quiet gentleness which Madam Beck
+took for modest docility, but which had its real origin in a fixed
+determination to succeed. Every now and then, however, she would give it
+up as hopeless, and would seat herself disconsolately by the window with
+her cheek upon her hand, and gaze wistfully out over the harbour. She
+longed so for cold fresh air, and would end by throwing up the window
+and stretching herself with her heated face as far out of it as she
+possibly could, till Madam Beck would come in, and in a stern voice call
+her back. Madam Beck, in her irritation, used to say that it was almost
+as if they had taken a wild thing into the house.
+
+Carl Beck understood very well what she was going through, and would
+occasionally throw her an encouraging look; but Elizabeth affected
+always not to understand it. On one occasion, however, when she was
+corrected in his presence, she hurriedly left the room, and throwing
+herself on her bed, lay there and sobbed as if her heart would break.
+
+She had been trusted one afternoon, shortly after, to bring in the
+tea-tray, on which, without thinking what she was doing, she had placed
+the chafing-dish with the boiling teakettle. It fell as she was carrying
+it in; but although its hot side and the boiling water burnt and scalded
+her arm and hand, she carried the tray quite quietly out again without
+allowing a muscle of her face to change--she was not going to be
+corrected before him again.
+
+Madam Beck herself bound up her hand in the kitchen, where she stood
+white with pain; while Carl, who had been sitting on the sofa, and had
+seen how the whole thing happened, forgetting his self-command, had
+jumped up in great excitement, and had shown such uncommon sympathy that
+his sister Mina, afterwards, when they were alone in the room together,
+said, with a look that was more searching than the joking words seemed
+to require, "It is not possible you are fond of the girl, Carl?"
+
+"No fear, Mina," he answered quickly, in the same tone, chucking her
+under the chin as he spoke. "There are as handsome girls as her in
+Arendal; but you can see as well as I can that she is a girl in a
+hundred. That business with the tea-tray is what very few others would
+have been capable of; and we mustn't forget that if it had not been for
+her--"
+
+"Oh yes," rejoined Mina, with a toss of her head, a little tired of the
+eternal repetition of this stock observation. "She didn't know all the
+same that it was papa who was out there."
+
+It was a game of hypocrisy, thought out with no inconsiderable subtlety,
+that the handsome lieutenant was carrying on in this matter: under his
+apparently so entirely frank sailor-bearing there was hidden a real
+diplomatist. By trumpeting about the town the service which Elizabeth
+had rendered them in saving the Juno, he had, one may say, forced his
+family to take her up, though to them he made it appear that public
+opinion left them no alternative. On the other hand, he was uncommonly
+cautious in his attitude towards Elizabeth herself; for he knew he must
+win her without attracting the attention of his stepmother and sisters.
+He believed he had made a sort of impression upon her; but at the same
+time he felt that he had a wild swan to deal with, that might at any
+moment spread its wings and fly away--there was such a strong,
+independent individuality about her.
+
+In his home, however, she had become a different creature, scarcely to
+be recognised as the same Elizabeth,--so quietly did she go about,
+hardly conscious of his presence apparently--and so slavishly did she
+follow the directions of the mistress of the house. This new aspect of
+her had put him in doubt for a while, but it was not very long before he
+satisfied himself that he understood what it meant; and that little
+affair with the tea-tray, that was set down to awkwardness by the
+others, had quite a different significance for him. He flattered himself
+that she subjected herself to all this restraint for his sake; and
+whatever the _denouement_ might be, the situation was, at all events, an
+interesting one.
+
+But there was, on the other hand, something in her manner that kept him
+at a certain distance, and left him in uncertainty as to what line
+exactly he should take. The same had been the case whenever they had
+been together out on the island, and had in fact been the principal
+cause of his becoming more deeply in love with her every day. He had
+once out there encountered a look in her steel-grey eyes which had given
+him the impression that the opinion she entertained of him could in a
+moment be reversed, and that least of all dare he allow her to feel that
+he was appearing in the character of a lover; and it was for this reason
+he had scarcely ever talked with her grandfather, and only casually with
+herself. The fact was, old Jacob had very well understood that the smart
+young navy-lieutenant did not come out there for his sake; and as he
+could not very well shut the door in his face, he had very sensibly
+warned his granddaughter against him. He explained to her that people of
+his class were not in the habit of marrying a common man's child,
+although it happened far too often that they might play at love with
+them. "Such a lad as Salve Kristiansen, now," he remarked, in
+conclusion, "that is the sort of stuff that will not disappoint you;"
+and he thought he had played the diplomatist there with some skill.
+
+"I didn't understand you to mean that exactly, grandfather, that time
+you were going to beat him," she said.
+
+The old man was rather nonplussed for the moment, but he growled out
+something about youngsters requiring correction occasionally, and went
+on, "He's a god lad, I tell you; and if he came and made up to you, he
+should have you without a moment's hesitation; and then I should be easy
+in my mind as to what would become of you when I'm gone."
+
+Elizabeth made no further observation, but a certain expression about
+her mouth seemed to denote that she reserved to herself the liberty to
+have an opinion of her own in this matter. Salve Kristiansen had been
+very dear to her as the only friend and confidant she had ever had; but
+since she had seen the lieutenant, it had been he who had exclusively
+occupied her thoughts. All that had formed the ideal of her young
+enthusiasm had suddenly in his person appeared upon the rock; but
+whether it was his uniform, or the bravery of the fleet, or himself,
+that was the object of her admiration, she had never asked herself,
+until hurt and rendered thoughtful by that warning of her grandfather.
+Now, it was unmistakably himself, the handsome, brilliant embodiment of
+it all. But at the same time there sprang up in her nature an
+unconquerable feeling of pride, in obedience to the dictates of which
+she absolutely resigned him, though still retaining her enthusiastic
+admiration; and it was this double attitude of mind which her eyes
+expressed, and which puzzled her admirer. When she heard afterwards from
+her aunt in Arendal that people had been talking about them, she felt it
+deeply, and more than ever then had become sensible that there was an
+invisible barrier between them.
+
+Carl's father meanwhile had been trudging daily over to the dry-dock to
+see after the Juno, which had had to have her bottom scraped, her gaping
+seams caulked, and to undergo a general repair: he was hardly at home to
+meals. It was a case of urgency, as the delivery of her cargo at its
+destination could not be delayed beyond a certain time.
+
+About a month after Elizabeth had come into Captain Beck's house the
+Juno was ready for sea again; and Carl's sister came into the room
+smiling one day then, and said--
+
+"Elizabeth, there is a young sailor out in the porch who wants to speak
+to you; he has a parcel under his arm. Perhaps it is a present."
+
+Elizabeth, who was bringing in the tea-things at the time, turned red,
+and Carl Beck, who was standing by the window, a little pale. She knew
+very well that it was Salve, and for a moment she was almost frightened
+at his audacity. She had seen him a couple of times before, and had
+allowed him to feel that she was not particularly anxious for his
+company, in consequence of what her aunt had told her, and as she went
+out to see him now she trembled.
+
+He looked at her for a moment or two without saying a word.
+
+"Will you take this dress, Elizabeth?" he said at last, almost harshly.
+
+"No, that I won't, Salve. Such things as you have been saying about me!"
+
+"So you won't take it?" he said, slowly and dejectedly. "It is no use
+saying anything more, then, I suppose."
+
+"No, Salve, it is no use saying anything more."
+
+The desolate expression of his face as he stood and looked at her, while
+he asked, "Am I to take it to sea with me, Elizabeth?" went to her
+heart, and the tears rushed into her eyes. She shook her head
+negatively, but with an almost despairing look, and disappeared into the
+house.
+
+They could see in the sitting-room that she had been crying. But Carl
+Beck was a cold-blooded man, and merely lay at the window and looked out
+after his rival, to see if he had the parcel under his arm as he went
+out of the gate.
+
+That night Elizabeth lay awake. She had cried in her sleep, and had
+dreamed that she had seen Salve standing down at the quay so wretchedly
+clothed and so miserable, but too proud to ask assistance of any one,
+and that he had given her such a bitterly reproachful look; and she lay
+tossing about, unable to get the dream out of her head. Presently there
+came the noise of a riotous mob outside, and she got up and went to the
+window. The police were taking some one with them down the street. As
+they passed, she saw by the light of the street-lamp for a moment that
+it was Salve. He was resisting with all his might, pale and infuriated,
+with his blue shirt all torn open in the front, and there was an
+expression in his face that--at any rate, she slept no more that night.
+
+There had been a general _melee_, she heard next morning, among the
+sailors over in Mother Andersen's, on the other side of the harbour. It
+was said that knives had been used, and that Salve Kristiansen had been
+the originator of the whole disturbance--without a shadow of protest,
+Carl Beck said; and proceeded then to put various interpretations of his
+own upon the affair. Elizabeth left the room, and for some days after
+was pale and worn-looking, and more than usually reserved, Carl thought,
+in her attitude towards himself.
+
+Captain Beck had paid Salve's fine and procured his release, and the
+afternoon before the Juno was to sail his father and younger brother
+came on board to say good-bye to him. There was something strange in his
+manner that struck them both; it was as if he thought he would never see
+them again. He offered his father his hundred-daler note, and when the
+latter would not take it, made him promise, at all events, to keep it
+for him. The father attributed his unusual manner to distress of mind
+and depression on account of his recent adventure with the police; but
+as he was going ashore he said, in rather a husky voice--
+
+"Remember, Salve, that you have an old father expecting you at home!"
+
+That evening and a great part of the night Salve passed in the Juno's
+maintop, gazing over at Beck's house as long as there was a light in the
+attic window. And when that went out it seemed as if something had been
+extinguished in himself with it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+The outer side of Tromoe, which lies off the entrance to Arendal, has
+only the ordinary barren stone-grey appearance of the rest of the
+islands along the coast; a wooden church, with a little belfry like a
+sentry-box and serving as a landmark, which lies drearily down by the
+sea, and under which on Sundays a pilot-boat or two may be seen lying-to
+while service is going on, is the only feature for the eye to rest upon.
+The land side of the island, on the contrary, presents a scene all the
+richer and livelier for the contrast. The narrow Tromoe Sound, with its
+swarm of small coasters, lighters, pilot-boats, and vessels of larger
+build, suns itself there between fertile or wooded slopes and ridges,
+over which are scattered in every direction the red cottages of the
+sailor population, skippers' houses, and villas; and in every available
+spot, in every creek or bay where there is barely room for a vessel, the
+white timbers of ships in course of construction come into view. It is
+an idyllic dockyard, a very beautiful and very appropriate approach to
+Norway's principal seaport town; and whoever steams up it on a still
+summer's day must enjoy a surprise that will not easily be effaced from
+his recollection.
+
+At the period of our story, indeed, the picture was far from being so
+complete or rich: but even then were becoming manifest the germs of the
+bustle and life which now pervade the place.
+
+On one of the most beautiful points of the Sound peeped into view a
+small one-storeyed house with two small-paned attic windows projecting
+from its steep tiled roof, and with a pine-wood climbing the hillside
+behind, which was the property of Captain Beck; and here, until, as he
+proposed to do in a couple of years' time, he retired from the sea and
+invested his fortune in the shipbuilding yard which he had in view, his
+family generally took up their residence during the summer months.
+Hither in the early part of this summer, too, they had repaired.
+
+It was no life of idleness, though, which they lived out there: Madam
+Beck always made work for everybody, and had her own spinning-wheel in
+the sitting-room. Her step-son had his occupation on land, and as much
+as he could do, as member of the coast commission. But he used generally
+to come over on Saturdays in his pretty sail-boat and remain over
+Sunday; and on that day, too, some one or other family of their
+acquaintance in the town would make them an object for a pleasure party,
+and would usually spend the afternoon with them.
+
+Carl Beck was always in great force on these occasions. His brown face
+and frank sailor bearing and good looks would have been sufficient in
+themselves to make him a favourite with the ladies. But, in addition to
+these claims upon their interest, he had been known to most of the
+younger ones among them from his schoolboy days, when he used to come
+home on leave as a cadet, and he seemed to enjoy particular confidential
+relations with nearly every one of them, or, at all events, to be in
+possession of some secret or other which only they two knew. They had
+all kinds of jokes and expressions from their younger days which were
+unintelligible to the rest; and what is vulgarly called "chaff" formed,
+perhaps, the staple of his conversation with them, varied now and then
+by a touch of sentiment, which was intended, by chance as it were, to
+open up to them for a moment the real deeper nature which they might not
+have suspected him of possessing. They used to twit him about his
+inclination to stoutness, and he used to joke about it too, and say he
+had too good a time of it.
+
+Among the Becks' most frequent visitors out there was postmaster
+Forstberg's family, which included, besides the parents, a hobbledehoy
+son and their daughter Marie, a fair-haired girl some eighteen years of
+age, of quiet manners, and with an uncommonly clever face. Nobody said
+that she was pretty, but nearly every one who knew her had the
+impression that she was; and there was a certain indefinable harmony and
+grace, not only about her perhaps rather small figure, but about
+everything she did. But if she was not considered pretty, it was agreed
+on all sides that she had great sense; and among her friends she was
+always the one they elected to confide in, whenever they had anything on
+their minds. That she never confided anything to them in return had,
+curiously enough, never struck them; and for that matter, she was too
+correct and proper, they imagined, to have any heart affairs herself.
+She was a confidential friend of Carl Beck's sisters, and especially of
+Mina, who declared that she put her before all the rest of her
+acquaintance, and thought in her own heart that she was exactly the
+match for her brother.
+
+The only one of the young girls in the circle with whom Carl Beck had
+had no youthful acquaintance was Marie Forstberg; and it had been some
+time before he discovered that the quiet girl was worth talking to. He
+used to be secretly annoyed then that the conversation when she was
+present should lapse so easily into empty trifling; her mind was so
+clear and true, and she had such a beautiful smile for whatever she
+approved. Before her, therefore, he always displayed now the broad,
+manly side of his character--which he could do with so much grace--and
+the coquetry which was at the bottom of this was not without its effect.
+She had always made rather a hero of him in her own mind, and he had
+created the flattering impression now that the light and flirting manner
+which he adopted towards young ladies, and which had rather qualified
+her admiration of him, had been due to his not having before found among
+them any one that was worthy of a man's serious attention. He had begun
+consequently to occupy a much larger share of her thoughts than she
+would herself have been willing to acknowledge; and many of the
+confidences of which she was the recipient at this time would, if her
+friends had had a little more penetration, have been brought last of all
+to her.
+
+Marie Forstberg's attention had very soon been attracted to Elizabeth;
+and knowing her history, she tried very often to help her, and put her
+in the right way of doing things. At first she found her rather short
+and unapproachable, and could get nothing but "yes" or "no" from her;
+and there was something almost offensive in the brusque way in which she
+would turn with an impatient flush from her mentor when she sometimes
+didn't understand what was meant, and would do the thing in her own way.
+She wouldn't see at first the various little good turns which the other
+did her in her quiet, considerate way; but they were acknowledged at
+last with a look that made amends for all her former obtuseness; and in
+spite of their different natures and unequal social position, these two
+women soon came to feel, if not exactly drawn to one another, mutually
+interested in each other. At the same time, as Elizabeth was not blind
+to the diplomacy of the house, she had soon perceived that of all the
+young ladies who came there, Marie Forstberg was the one who had the
+best chance, and who indeed best deserved to be the young lieutenant's
+bride; and although she tried to believe that she was merely a resigned
+looker-on herself, she seemed to feel every Sunday, when Marie Forstberg
+came, that a certain disagreeable impression had grown up in her mind
+about her during the week which it took some time to thaw. When it did
+thaw, however, which in time it always did, she would feel attracted to
+her with redoubled warmth; and though their conversation might be
+ostensibly occupied only with such subjects as laying the table or
+dishing the dinner, she would contrive to introduce into it anything and
+everything concerning the lieutenant which she thought might interest or
+recommend him to her friend. Marie Forstberg couldn't help sometimes
+fixing her clear blue eyes searchingly upon her, to ascertain if there
+was not some object underlying this communicativeness; but Elizabeth
+would look so unconscious, as she stood there with her sleeves tucked
+up, busy with her work, that she dismissed the idea from her mind.
+
+In this country life, although without a moment to call her own,
+Elizabeth felt freer at all events than she had done in the town; and
+she had made such rapid progress under Madam Beck's tuition, that the
+latter's supervision was in many things no longer required. One part in
+particular, the one which she might have been expected to find the most
+difficult of all--that of parlour-maid--she filled to perfection; and
+her upright figure and expressive face attracted many an admiring glance
+on Sundays, when in her becoming striped chintz dress and white apron,
+and with her luxuriant hair turned up in the simplest manner, she
+carried the tea or coffee things out to the guests in the summer-house.
+She could feel that Carl Beck's eyes were never off her as long as she
+was in sight, and she seemed to know that it was she whom his eye
+wandered in search of first whenever he came home. In a hundred small
+ways he made her conscious of the interest which he felt in her; and
+whenever there was a commission to be particularly remembered, he never
+gave it to his sisters alone, but to her also.
+
+His pretty pleasure-boat--a long, light, sharp-built yawl, with a red
+stripe along its black side, and two sloping masts--which he had lately
+had built, lay often the whole week through moored in the bay under the
+house. He was very particular about the boat, and during his absence it
+was to Elizabeth's sole care that she was intrusted. There was always
+something or other to be looked after; and when he came home he would
+generally subject her, in a jokingly harsh tone, to an examination,
+which he called holding a summary court-martial.
+
+Sometimes on Saturdays he would come up the path waving in his hand a
+letter covered with post-marks. It would be from his father to his
+stepmother; and Madam Beck would generally read it by herself first, and
+then it would be read aloud, Elizabeth listening with strained
+attention--she was always so afraid that there might be something bad
+about Salve.
+
+One Sunday she remarked that Carl wore in the buttonhole of his uniform
+a wild flower which she had thrown away. It might have been the purest
+accident; but she knew that he had seen her with it in her hand. The
+same day they had wild strawberries at dinner, and there were no
+strangers, and he broke out all in a moment, "Yes, I'd sooner ten
+thousand times have wild strawberries than garden ones. They have quite
+another taste and smell."
+
+It was a natural remark for any one to make. But she thought he had
+looked with peculiar earnestness at her as he made it, and afterwards he
+had fixed his eyes upon his plate for a long while without raising them.
+She felt that the remark had been meant for her, and altogether that day
+there was something about him that made her uneasy--he gazed at her so
+often.
+
+Madame Beck happened to have just then a long list of household
+necessaries required from Arendal, and Carl said that if some one would
+go with him in the boat the next morning to help him with the parcels,
+he would execute her commissions himself. When Madame Beck suggested
+Elizabeth he eagerly assented; but the colour rushed into Elizabeth's
+cheeks, and with an angry toss of her head, which she didn't make any
+attempt to conceal, she left the room.
+
+As he was standing alone outside some little time after, she came up to
+him, and said, looking him straight in the face--
+
+"I don't go into Arendal with you, Herr Beck."
+
+"No?--and why not, Elizabeth?" he asked, with affected indifference, and
+trying to meet her look.
+
+"I don't go," she repeated, her voice trembling with pride and
+anger--"that is all I have to say;" and she turned from him, and left
+him gazing after her, partly in confusion, and partly in admiration of
+the magnificently proud way in which she crossed the turf to the house
+again.
+
+The expedition was given up; and in spite of Carl's _finesse_, it came
+out inadvertently that it was on account of Elizabeth having refused to
+go alone in the boat with him, which Madam Beck found very commendable
+on her part. Indeed she ought to have known herself, she said, that it
+was scarcely proper; but at the same time, she was decidedly of opinion
+that the more becoming course for Elizabeth would have been to speak to
+her mistress first.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+The house in the town was undergoing repairs this year, which kept the
+family out in the country until rather late in the autumn. But the
+glorious September days prolonged the summer, and they could still sit
+out on the steps in the evening and enjoy the beauty and the sentiment
+of the season, and the rich variety of the autumn tints reflected on the
+still waters of the Sound.
+
+The members of Carl's commission, with their president, were invited out
+there one day, and it was made a great occasion, all the resources of
+the house being brought into requisition to do them honour.
+
+Carl, although the youngest member of the Commission, and really only
+included in it to make up the required number, had been fortunate enough
+to distinguish himself upon it; and his sisters even thought that there
+might be a question of an order for him--that distinction so coveted in
+Norway--if they made love sufficiently to the president. Carl professed
+to be quite superior to a mere external decoration of the kind, though
+longing for it in his heart; and Marie Forstberg, whom he had not taken
+into his confidence in the matter, was highly indignant with his sisters
+for supposing that it should depend upon the president, and not upon
+Carl's own merit, whether he received it or not. Mina, however, had
+declared, with a great air of knowledge of the world, that people
+couldn't trust to merit alone, and that, besides (and here she had laid
+her hand flatteringly on her friend's shoulder), they were not all so
+strict and high-principled as Marie Forstberg; and so she paid her court
+to the president accordingly.
+
+In the evening, when the gentlemen were sitting together out in the
+wood, and Elizabeth came out to them with a fresh supply of hot water
+for their toddy, the said president thought proper to make a joke that
+brought the colour to her cheeks. She made no reply, but the water-jug
+trembled in her hands as she put it down, and as she did so she gave the
+speaker such a look that for a moment he felt cowed.
+
+"'Sdeath, Beck!" he broke out, "did you see the look she gave me?"
+
+"She is a proud girl," said Carl, who was highly incensed, but who had
+his reasons for restraining himself before his superior.
+
+"A proud girl indeed!" returned the other, in a tone which implied very
+clearly that in his opinion impudent hussy would have been the more
+correct description.
+
+"A good-looking girl, I mean," said Carl, evasively, by way of
+correction, and laughed constrainedly.
+
+Elizabeth had heard what he said. She was hurt, and for the first time
+instituted a comparison between him and Salve. If Salve had been in his
+place, he would not have got out of it in that way.
+
+Later on in the evening Carl met her alone, as she was putting things to
+rights out on the steps after the departed guests, and he said
+half-anxiously--
+
+"I hope you didn't mind what that blustering old brute said, Elizabeth.
+He is a very good fellow really, and doesn't mean anything by his
+nonsense."
+
+Elizabeth was silent, and tried to avoid answering by going in with what
+she had in her hands.
+
+"Come, I won't stand your being offended, Elizabeth," he broke out
+suddenly, firing up in a moment, and trying to catch her by the arm.
+"That hand you work with is dearer to me than the hands of all the fine
+ladies put together."
+
+"Herr Beck!" she exclaimed wildly, and with tears in her eyes, "I leave
+this house--this very night--if you say a word more."
+
+She disappeared into the hall, but he followed her.
+
+"Elizabeth," he whispered, "I mean it in earnest." She tore herself
+hastily from him, and went into the kitchen, where his sisters were
+talking together over the fire.
+
+Carl went out for a solitary walk over the island in the glorious
+starlight night, and didn't come in till past midnight.
+
+He had not meant what he said quite so decidedly in earnest; but now
+after seeing her standing before him so wondrously beautiful, with tears
+in her eyes--now he meant it in real earnest. He was prepared to engage
+himself, if necessary, in spite of every consideration.
+
+The next morning he left in his boat for Arendal, having whispered to
+her, however, in passing, before he left, "I mean it in earnest."
+
+The repetition of these words threw Elizabeth into dire perplexity. She
+had lain and thought over them the night before, and had thrust them
+from her with indignation, for they could mean nothing else than that he
+had brought himself to dare to tell her that he had conceived a passion
+for her, and she had quite determined to execute her threat and leave
+the house.
+
+But now, repeated in this tone!
+
+Did he really mean to ask for her hand and heart--to ask her to be
+his--an officer's wife? There lay before her fancy a glittering expanse
+of earlier dreams that almost made her giddy; and the whole week she was
+absent and pale, thinking anxiously of Sunday, when he was to return.
+What would he say then?
+
+And--what should she answer?
+
+He didn't come, however, his duties having required him to make another
+journey that he had not reckoned upon.
+
+On the other hand Marie Forstberg did appear, and felt at once that some
+change or other must have come over Elizabeth, as she pointedly declined
+all assistance from her; and in the look which Marie Forstberg
+intercepted by chance, there was something even hard and unfriendly. She
+laid her hand once gently upon Elizabeth's shoulder, but it produced,
+apparently, absolutely no impression--she might as well have caressed a
+piece of wood; and when she returned to the sitting-room again, she
+couldn't help asking, "What has happened to Elizabeth?" But the others
+had not observed anything unusual.
+
+Carl Beck, contrary to his custom, came not on the following Saturday,
+but before it, in the middle of the week; and he strode with hasty steps
+through the rooms when he didn't see Elizabeth.
+
+He found her at last up-stairs. She was standing gazing out of the
+window on the landing, out of which all that was to be seen was the
+wooded slope of the hill and the sky above it. She heard his step--she
+knew that he was coming up-stairs--and felt a sudden indefinable sense
+of apprehension--a sort of panic almost--as if she could have jumped out
+of the window. What should she answer?
+
+When he came and put his arm round her waist, and asked in a low voice,
+"Elizabeth, will you be mine?" she felt, for the first time in her life,
+on the point of fainting. She hardly knew what she did, but pushed him
+involuntarily away from her.
+
+He seized her hand afresh, and asked, "Elizabeth, will you be my wife?"
+
+She was very pale, as she answered--"Yes!"
+
+But when he wanted again to take her by the waist, she sprang suddenly
+back, and looked at him with an expression of terror.
+
+"Elizabeth!" he said, tenderly, and tried again to approach her, "what
+is the matter with you? If you only knew how I have longed for this
+moment."
+
+"Not now--no more now!" she pleaded, holding out her hand to him.
+"Another time."
+
+"But you say 'Yes,' Elizabeth--that you are my--?" But he felt that she
+wanted him to go now.
+
+After he had gone, she sat there on a box for a long time in silence,
+gazing straight before her.
+
+So it had actually come to pass! Her heart beat so that she could hear
+it herself, and she seemed to feel a dull pain there. Her face, little
+by little, acquired a fixed, cold expression: she was thinking that he
+was then telling his stepmother of their engagement, and fortifying
+himself for her reception of the announcement.
+
+She expected to be called down. But no summons came; and at last she
+decided to go without being called.
+
+In the sitting-room they were all quietly intent upon their several
+occupations. Carl was pretending to read a book; but he threw her a
+stolen, tenderly anxious look over the top of it when she entered.
+
+Supper was brought in, and everything went on as quietly as usual, even
+to his customary banter. To Elizabeth it seemed as if there was a mist
+over them all; and when Mina once asked if there was anything the matter
+with her, she could only answer mechanically, 'No.' The question was
+repeated later on, and received the same answer. She brought the supper
+things in and took them out, as usual, and it seemed as if she could not
+feel the floor under her feet, or what she carried in her hand.
+
+The evening passed, and they went to bed without anything happening. But
+in the partial darkness of the stair-landing, he seized her hand
+passionately, and said--"Good-night, my Elizabeth, _my--my_ Elizabeth!"
+
+She was not in a condition to return the pressure of his hand, and when
+he approached his lips to her forehead, she hastily drew herself away.
+
+"I came out here alone to tell you this, dear, dearest Elizabeth," he
+whispered, with passion trembling in his voice, and making an effort to
+draw her to him. "I must be on land again to-morrow. Must I go without
+one sign that you care for me?"
+
+She bent her forehead slowly towards him, and he kissed it, and she then
+immediately left him.
+
+"Good-night, my beloved one!" he whispered after her.
+
+Elizabeth lay for a long while awake. She would have given anything to
+have been able to cry, but the tears would not come; and she felt as if
+she was freezing internally. When at last she did fall asleep, it was
+not of him she dreamt, but of Salve--the whole time of Salve. She saw
+him gazing at her with that earnest face--it was so heavy with grief,
+and she stood like a criminal before him. He said something that she
+could not hear, but she understood that he condemned her, and that he
+had thrown the dress overboard.
+
+She rose early, and tried to occupy her thoughts with other dreams--with
+her future as an officer's lady. But it was as if all that had before
+seemed to be pure gold was now changed to brass. She felt unhappy and
+restless; and it was a long time before she could make up her mind to go
+into the sitting-room.
+
+Carl Beck did not leave that morning. He had perceived that there was
+something on Elizabeth's mind.
+
+During the forenoon, when his sisters were out, and his stepmother was
+occupied, he found an opportunity to speak with her alone: she was in a
+fever, always waiting for him to have spoken to Madam Beck.
+
+"Elizabeth," he said, gently smoothing her hair, for she looked
+dispirited, and stood with her eyes fixed upon the ground, "I couldn't
+leave without having spoken to you again."
+
+She still kept her eyes upon the ground, but didn't withdraw herself
+from his hand.
+
+"Do you really care for me?--will you be my wife?"
+
+She was silent. At last she said, a shade paler, and as if with an
+effort--
+
+"Yes--Herr Beck."
+
+"Say 'du' to me--say Carl," he pleaded, with much feeling, "and--look at
+me."
+
+She looked at him, but not as he had expected. It was with a fixed, cold
+look she said--
+
+"Yes, if we are engaged."
+
+"Are we not then?"
+
+"When is your stepmother to know it?" she asked, rather dragging the
+words out one after the other.
+
+"Dear Elizabeth! These people at home here must notice nothing for--for
+three months, when I shall be--" But he caught an expression now in her
+face, and something in the abrupt way in which she drew her hand from
+him, that made him keep back what he had originally intended to say, and
+he corrected it hastily.
+
+"Next week, then, I'll write from Arendal and tell my father, and then
+let my stepmother know what I have written. Are you offended,
+Elizabeth--dear Elizabeth? or shall I do it at once?" he broke out
+resolutely, and seized her hand again.
+
+"No, no--not now! next week--let it not be till next week," she cried,
+in sudden apprehension, returning the pressure of his hand at the same
+time almost entreatingly--it was the first he had had from her.
+
+"And then you are mine, Elizabeth?"
+
+"Yes, then"--she tried to avoid meeting his eye.
+
+"Farewell, then, Elizabeth! But I shall come back on Saturday. I can't
+live for longer without seeing you."
+
+"Farewell!" she said, in a rather toneless voice.
+
+He sprang down to the boat that lay waiting for him below; but she
+didn't look after him, and went in with bowed head the opposite way.
+
+Small things often weigh heavily in the world of impressions. Elizabeth
+had been overpowered by what seemed to her the magnanimity of his nature
+when he had declared that he would elevate her into the position of his
+wife; she felt that it was her worth in his eyes which had outweighed
+all other considerations. That he should shrink from the inevitable
+conflict with his family she had on the other hand never for a moment
+imagined. She had no doubt felt herself that it would be painful, but
+had stationed herself for the occasion behind his masculine shield. When
+he now so unexpectedly began to press for time, at first even proposing
+to be away himself when the matter came on in his home, a feeling took
+possession of her which in her inward dread she instinctively clutched
+at as a drowning wretch at a straw, as it seemed to suggest a
+possibility even now of reconsidering her promise.
+
+She had a hard and heavy time of it during the two days until Carl
+returned; and the nights were passed in fever.
+
+On Saturday evening he came, and the first he greeted was herself: he
+seemed almost, as she passed in and out of the room quiet and pale, as
+if he didn't wish any longer to conceal the relations now existing
+between them.
+
+He had with him a letter from his father, which was read aloud when the
+meal was over. It was dated from a South American port, and mention was
+made in it of Salve among others. Off Cape Hatteras they had had stormy
+weather, and had their topmast carried away. It remained attached by a
+couple of ropes, and with the heavy sea that was running, was swinging
+backwards and forwards, as it hung, against the lower rigging,
+threatening to destroy it. Salve Kristiansen had come forward in the
+emergency and ventured aloft to cut it adrift; and as he sat there the
+whole had gone over the side. He fell with it, but had the luck to be
+caught in a top-lift as he fell, and so saved his life. "It was pluckily
+done," ended the account, "but nevertheless all is not exactly right
+about him, and he is not turning out as well as he promised."
+
+"I never expected very much from him," remarked Carl, with a
+contemptuous shrug of his shoulders; "he's a bad lot."
+
+He didn't see the resentful eyes which Elizabeth fixed upon him for
+these words, and she sat for a long while afterwards out in the kitchen
+with her hands in her lap, silent and angry, thinking over them. A
+resolution was forming in her mind.
+
+Before they retired to rest, Carl whispered to her--
+
+"I have written to my father to-day, and--to-morrow, Elizabeth, is our
+betrothal-day!"
+
+Elizabeth was the last in the room, putting it to rights, and when she
+left she took a sheet of paper and writing materials with her. She lay
+down on her bed; but about midnight she was sitting up by a light and
+disfiguring a sheet of paper with writing. It was to this effect:--
+
+"Forgive me that I cannot be your wife, for my heart is given to
+another.--Elizabeth Raklev."
+
+She folded the paper and fastened it with a pin for want of a wafer, and
+then quietly opening the door of the room where Madam Beck was sleeping,
+placed her lips close to her ear, and whispered her name. Madam Beck
+woke up in some alarm when she saw Elizabeth standing before her fully
+dressed, and apparently prepared for a journey.
+
+"Madam Beck," Elizabeth said, quietly, "I am going to confide something
+to you, and ask for your advice and assistance. Your step-son has asked
+me to be his wife. It was last Sunday--and I said yes; but now I have
+changed my mind, and am going back to my aunt, or farther away still, if
+you can tell me how; for I am afraid he will follow me."
+
+Madam Beck stared at her in mute amazement, and at first put on an
+incredulous and rather scornful expression; but as she came to feel that
+it might all be true, she raised herself involuntarily higher up in the
+bed.
+
+"But--why do you come with this now, particularly in the middle of the
+night?" she said, with a suspicious and searching look.
+
+"Because he has written to his father about it to-day, and means to tell
+you and the rest to-morrow."
+
+"So--he has already written? That was his object, then, in bringing you
+into the house here," Madam Beck added, after a pause, with some
+bitterness.
+
+It seemed to strike her then that there was something noble in
+Elizabeth's conduct; and looking at her more kindly, she said--
+
+"Yes, you are right. It is best for you to go away--to some place where
+he will not find it so easy to reach you."
+
+She lapsed into thought again. Then a brilliant idea occurred to her,
+and she got up and put on her clothes. She had a man's clearheadedness,
+and her habits of management stood her in good stead on the present
+occasion. The Dutch skipper Garvloit, who had married her half-sister,
+happened just a day or two before to have been inquiring for a Norwegian
+girl, who would be able to help in the house; and here was just the
+place for Elizabeth. She had only to go on board his vessel, that lay
+over at Arendal ready to sail.
+
+Madam Beck went into the sitting-room at once, and wrote a letter to
+Garvloit, which she gave to Elizabeth, together with a good round sum of
+money--wages due, she said; and half-an-hour afterwards Elizabeth was
+rowing over alone in the quiet moonlight night to Arendal.
+
+The smooth sound lay full of shining stars between the deep shadows of
+the ridges on either side, with a light from a mast here and there
+denoting the presence of vessels under the land. A falling star would
+now and then leave a stream of light behind it; and she felt a sense of
+joyous exultation that she could only subdue by rowing hard for long
+spells. She was like one escaped--relieved from some oppressive burden.
+And how she looked forward to seeing Marie Forstberg now!
+
+She arrived in the town before daybreak, and went straight up to her
+aunt's, to whom she announced that Madam Beck wished her to take a place
+in Holland with Garvloit, who was on the point of sailing. She showed
+her the letter--there was no time to lose.
+
+The old woman listened to her for a while, and then said abruptly--
+
+"There has been some difficulty with the lieutenant, Elizabeth?"
+
+"Yes, aunt, there has," she replied; "he made love to me."
+
+"He did--"
+
+"And first I said as good as yes. But I don't mean to have him--and so I
+told Madam Beck."
+
+"So you wouldn't have him?" was the rejoinder, after an astonished
+pause; "and the reason, I suppose, was that you would rather have
+Salve?"
+
+"Yes, aunt," in a low voice.
+
+"And why in the world didn't you take him, then?"
+
+The tears came into Elizabeth's eyes.
+
+"Well--as people make their beds so they must lie," said the old woman,
+severely--and betook herself then, without any further observation, to
+the preparation of the morning coffee.
+
+As Elizabeth went down to the quay, to get a boat to take her out to the
+merchantman, she looked in at the post-office, where she found Marie
+Forstberg already up, and busy in the sitting-room in her morning dress.
+She was greatly astonished when Elizabeth told her of her new
+destination.
+
+It was such an advantageous offer, Elizabeth explained--an almost
+independent place in the house; and Madam Beck had herself advised her
+to take it.
+
+But though she used all her wit to keep the other off the scent, Marie
+Forstberg found a want of connection somewhere, and Elizabeth could see
+it in her eyes. She asked no further questions, however; and when they
+took leave of each other they embraced, in tears.
+
+Out at Tromoe the surprise was great when it was found that Elizabeth had
+gone. Carl Beck had found her letter under the door, but had never
+imagined that she had left, and had gone out with it in violent
+agitation of mind and did not come home again till late in the
+afternoon. Madam Beck had in the meantime confided the matter to her
+daughters, and they would understand, she said, that not a word of it
+must be mentioned outside the house.
+
+Although his eyes sought for her unceasingly, Carl made no express
+inquiry after her till the evening, and when he heard that she was gone,
+and was perhaps by that time already under sail for Holland, he sat for
+awhile as if petrified. Looking scornfully at them then, one after
+another, he said--
+
+"If I thought that I had any of you to thank for this, I'd--" here he
+seized the chair he had been sitting on, dashed it down upon the floor
+so that it broke, and sprang up-stairs.
+
+But her letter was unfortunately clear enough--she loved another, and he
+knew, too, who it was.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+It was some months after. The Juno lay ready to sail in the roads of
+Monte Video, where she had taken in hides as part of her home cargo. The
+remainder, of coffee, she was to load at Rio, and in the meantime she
+had filled up with coals for that port. She was lying in tropical
+costume, with awnings over the fore and after deck as a protection
+against the fierce rays of the sun; and the crew were going about in
+correspondingly airy clothing, with open shirts and tucked-up canvas
+trousers, brown and shiny with perspiration, and gasping after every
+breath. It was the hottest season of the year. The pitch was melting in
+the chinks between the planking of the decks, and the tar running down
+her sides.
+
+They had lain thus for a couple of days, hoping to receive before
+starting the post, which they had been disappointed in not finding on
+their arrival. And what a disappointment this can be, only those who
+have been in one of these ships that go on long voyages can understand.
+In foreign ports there may be many a wild pleasure to be enjoyed, but
+the longing to hear from home is the strongest feeling among sailors
+after all.
+
+The mate had gone ashore to make one last inquiry before they sailed;
+and as the jolly-boat came alongside again, it was seen that he had the
+precious packet in his hand. He sprang up the accommodation-ladder and
+disappeared aft without a word to where the captain was sitting by a
+small table with a carafe and glass before him, mopping his bald head in
+the heat.
+
+"You've got them at last, then," he said, as the mate laid the packet on
+the table before him, and retired a few paces while he opened it.
+
+Almost the first letter that caught his eye was one to himself from his
+son, and his face brightened. He ran rapidly over the others, making a
+comment here and there according as he was acquainted with the
+circumstances of the men to whom they were addressed, and gathering them
+up in a bundle, handed them over then to the mate, with a cheery "Here
+you are, Mr. Johnson--letters for every one, from wives and sweethearts,
+and I don't know whom besides."
+
+The news that the post had come had spread like wildfire over the ship,
+and by the time the mate began to call out the addresses by the main
+hatch, the whole crew were assembled, with the exception of a straggler
+or two who had happened to be aloft, and who were now to be seen
+hurrying down the ratlines.
+
+The only one who neither expected news, nor cared apparently whether he
+received a letter or not, was Salve Kristiansen. While the parcel was
+being distributed, he remained standing by the wheel, intent apparently
+upon watching the movements of the two men who were hoisting up and
+making fast the jolly-boat. His lips were compressed; and when he gave
+the men a hand now and then, it was not a very willing one, and was
+generally accompanied by some bitter or sarcastic remark. His nature
+since they last sailed from Arendal seemed to have turned to gall; and
+when the captain had casually mentioned in his letter home that he was
+not so well satisfied with him, he had had good reason for saying so.
+There had been all sorts of unpleasantness between them; and if any
+discontent or difference between himself and the crew prevailed, Salve
+was sure to be at the bottom of it. He had found a rancid salt-herring,
+set up on four legs with a tail, as he was walking on the poop one
+evening in the moonlight; and as complaints had been recently made about
+the food, a good deal of which had become worse than bad from the
+effects of the hot climate, he had at once attributed to Salve this
+pointed method of drawing his attention to the subject again. It seemed
+almost as if he had some cause for bitterness against himself
+personally; and as he had always treated him with marked favour, he was
+at a loss to comprehend the reason for it.
+
+With the exception of the captain, who had retained his seat at the
+after-end of the poop, Salve was soon the only human being to be seen on
+deck. The whole crew had disappeared, and might have been found poring
+over their letters two and two, or singly, in the most out-of-the-way
+places, from the main and fore top even to the bowsprit end, where one
+had erected a pavilion for himself out of a fold of the hauled-down jib.
+
+Captain Beck's letter, to judge from his gestures and half-audible
+exclamations, was not giving him the pleasure which he had anticipated.
+His whole face, up to the top of his head, had become red as a lobster,
+and he sat now drumming with one hand on his knee, and casting an
+occasional fierce look over at Salve, in the attitude of a man beside
+himself with anger. At last he brought the hand in which he held the
+letter down upon the table with a force that sent the decanter and glass
+flying, and thrusting the fragments aside with his foot, he strode up
+and down the deck for a couple of minutes and then came towards Salve as
+if he meant to say something; and as the latter could very well perceive
+that it was not going to be anything pleasant, his countenance assumed
+an expression of defiance accordingly. He changed his mind, though,
+before he reached him, and turning short round shouted instead--
+
+"Where is the second mate? Where is the whole watch?" and he looked
+furiously about him, as if surprised, although he knew very well how
+they were occupied, and that it had been decided not to weigh anchor
+until later in the day, when they would have the evening breeze.
+
+"Ay, ay, sir!" was heard from the mate in the long-boat; and he raised
+himself and came forward with the letter he had been reading in his
+hand.
+
+"Stand by to man the windlass! Pipe all hands!" ordered the captain, and
+roared the command again gratuitously through the trumpet.
+
+The crew turned out from their several retreats with sour looks. They
+had expected to be left alone until after tea-time, when there would
+have been a general interchange of news on the forecastle; and now there
+came instead a hail of orders from the speaking-trumpet, as if the
+captain had all of a sudden become possessed.
+
+There was already a good deal of discontent prevailing among the crew,
+both on account of the bad food which they had to put up with, and on
+account of their leave ashore at Monte Video having been, as they
+thought, capriciously refused; and it was therefore something more
+nearly approaching to a howl than a song that was now heard from the
+capstan and from the party who were hoisting the heavy mainsail. The
+customary English chorus--
+
+    "Haul the bowline,
+     The captain he is growling;
+     Haul the bowline,
+     The bowline haul"--
+
+was sung with offensive significance; and though, at the last heavy
+heave with which the enormous anchor was catted up to the bows, the mate
+tried to create a diversion in the feeling by a cheery "Saat
+'kjelimen--hal' paa," the concluding words of the song--
+
+     "Aa hal i--aa--iaa--
+     Cheerily, men!"--
+
+were delivered in a scornful shout.
+
+"You'll have a chance of cooling yourselves presently, my lads," said
+Salve, coming up at the moment from his own heavy work with the
+cross-jack; "when we weather the point, all the lee-sails have to be
+set"--and the remark had the effect which he desired of intensifying the
+prevailing irritation.
+
+In spite of the vertical heat, the hail of orders from the captain's
+trumpet continued, accompanied by reprimands and fault-finding all
+round, until the crew were nearly in a state of mutiny, and it was not
+until late in the evening that he showed any signs of exhaustion.
+
+His temper had not improved next day. He looked as if he had a
+determination of blood to the head; and every time he came near Salve,
+he glared at him as if it was all he could do to control himself from an
+outburst of some kind or another. He knew that Salve had made love to
+Elizabeth, and had wished to make her presents since she had come into
+his house; and that the same girl was now to be his son's wife--the idea
+was absolutely intolerable!
+
+At last he could contain himself no longer. Salve had just deposited a
+coil of rope aft, and the captain, after watching his movements with
+evidently suppressed irritation, broke out suddenly, without preface of
+any kind--
+
+"You, I believe, had some acquaintance with that--that Elizabeth Raklev
+I took into my house."
+
+Salve felt the blood rush to his heart. He seemed to know what was
+coming.
+
+"The post," the captain continued, in a bitterly contemptuous tone, "has
+brought me the delightful intelligence that my son has engaged himself
+to her."
+
+"Congratulate you, captain," said Salve. His voice almost failed him,
+and he was deadly pale, but his eyes flashed with a wild defiance.
+
+He went forward, and the captain growled after him to himself, "He can
+have that to fret over now instead of the food;" and as the mate was
+coming up the cabin stairs at the moment polishing the sextant, he
+turned away with a look of grim satisfaction to take the altitude.
+
+When the Juno last sailed from Arendal she had changed two of her crew.
+One of the new hands was a square-built, coarse-featured,
+uncouth-looking creature, from the fjord region north of Stavanger, who
+called himself Nils Buvaagen, but whose name had been changed by the
+others to Uvaagen (not-awake), on account of his evident predisposition
+to sleep. He was incredibly _naive_ and communicative, especially on the
+subject of his wife and children (of which latter he apparently had his
+nest full), and had soon become the butt of the ship. Salve was the only
+one who ever took his part, and that only because he saw all the others
+against him; and having also been the means of saving his life when he
+had been washed overboard one dark night in the English Channel, he had
+inspired the simple fellow with a perfectly devoted attachment to him.
+
+They were up on the mainyard together that evening, where they had been
+helping to carry out an order with the mainsail. The rest had gone down
+again, but Salve, who felt a longing to be alone, had remained aloft,
+and was standing on the foot-rope, with his elbows resting on the yard.
+Nils's sympathetic eyes had perceived from his behaviour and whole
+appearance that day that there was something unusual the matter with
+him; and when he saw that Salve remained behind, he remained too,
+observing that it would be pleasant to cool for a while before going to
+their hammocks in the close air between decks.
+
+The sky above them blazed like a cupola "inlaid with patines of bright
+gold;" obliquely from the horizon the Southern Cross was rising, and the
+evening star shone in the warm night, before the moon had yet risen,
+with a silver gleam that threw clear light and shadow upon the deck
+below; while the vessel seemed to plough through a sea of
+phosphorescence, leaving in her wake a long trail of bluish glittering
+light.
+
+From the forecastle below came wafted up a sentimental sailor's song,
+the burden of which was pretty well summed up in the two concluding
+lines:--
+
+     "But never more her name I'll utter till I die,
+     For rosy though her lips were, her heart it was a lie."
+
+It sounded melancholy at that hour, and Nils, to judge from the
+occasional sighs with which he had accompanied it, was moved. When it
+came to an end, Salve turned suddenly to him.
+
+"You are distressing yourself for another's sweetheart now, Nils. What
+would you have done if it had been your own?"
+
+"My wife!" He had evidently not for the moment taken in the idea, and
+looked with all his heavy countenance at Salve.
+
+"Yes. Wouldn't you have liked to see her sunk to the bottom of the sea?"
+
+"My Karen to the bottom of the sea! I'd go there myself first."
+
+"Yes; but if she had been unfaithful to you?" persisted Salve, seeming
+to take a fiendish delight in bringing home the idea to the poor fellow.
+
+"But she is not," was the rejoinder.
+
+Nils had no genius for the abstract, and no more satisfaction was to be
+got out of him. But at the same time he had been shocked, and went down
+shortly after without saying a word.
+
+Salve still remained aloft, the dull consciousness of Elizabeth's
+engagement with the captain's son alternating with a more active desire
+for revenge upon the captain himself for the manner in which he had
+conveyed the information; and the result of his brooding up there upon
+the yard was a determination to desert as soon as the Juno arrived at
+Rio. He would never go back to Arendal; and he would no longer tread the
+same deck with the father of Carl Beck.
+
+Later on in the night, when the moon had risen, Nils, who had not been
+able to sleep in his hammock, came up to Salve again, and drew him aside
+behind the round-house, as if for a private conversation.
+
+"What would I have done? you asked. I'll tell you," he said, after a
+short pause, and his honest face seemed to express a vivid realisation
+of the whole misery of the situation. "I would have died upon the
+doorstep!"
+
+Salve stood and looked at him for a moment. There came a strange pallor
+over his face in the moonlight.
+
+"Look you," he said, ironically, laying his hand upon the other's
+shoulder, "I have never a wife; but all the same, I am dead upon the
+doorstep--" Then, in the next breath, and with a sudden change of tone,
+he said, "Of course I am only joking, you know," and left him, with a
+hard, forced laugh.
+
+Nils remained where he was, and pondered, not knowing exactly how to
+take it. It was possible Salve had only been making fun of him. But
+another feeling eventually predominated. It told him that he had had a
+glimpse into a despairing soul; and he was profoundly moved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+They stood slowly away to the north-east along the coast of Brazil.
+Every morning, towards the end of the dog-watch, when the sun rose in
+its gorgeous majesty from the sea, there came a refreshing breeze off
+the land, bringing with it the perfume of a thousand aromatic herbs;
+albatrosses and sea-gulls circled round the ship; flying-fish were to be
+seen in shoals; and all nature, animate and inanimate, seemed to be
+freshened for the time into activity and life. But gradually the breeze
+would become warmer and lighter, and then die away altogether, so that
+before noon the sails would hang flapping against the mast. They
+scarcely made five knots in the watch, and the heat during the greater
+part of the day was unbearable--as unbearable almost as the captain's
+temper, which showed no signs of improvement, and which vented itself in
+a systematic grinding of the crew, who, Captain Beck declared, were
+getting into intolerable habits of idleness.
+
+Strange things occurred on board just at this time, which, taken in
+connection with the captain's mood, produced an uncomfortable feeling
+that there was some evil influence at work by which both the ship and
+the captain were possessed. Groans had been distinctly heard down in the
+hold among the coals; and the sailmaker affirmed that on several nights
+in succession he had seen a man go from amidships aft along the bulwark
+railings, stand still and point with his hand to the compass, and then
+disappear in the wake of the ship. Another declared that he had seen the
+ship's genius proceed in the same direction and jump overboard--cap and
+all he was no higher than a half sea-boot; and when the genius deserts a
+ship, it betokens in the sailors' superstitious creed that she is about
+to founder.
+
+The unaccountable sounds in the hold continued, and changed one day when
+the hatch was battened down to a kind of wail, which ceased, however,
+when, for fear of an explosion of coal-gas, it was taken off again. On
+the following day the cook, who had gone down for water, came hurrying
+back with a scared face, and declared that he had seen a man sitting
+there in a red jacket.
+
+"It is the ship's genius lamenting the ship," was hesitatingly suggested
+by some. But when the cook objected that the creature was at least as
+large as Big Anders the boatswain, and proceeded besides to endow him
+with sable colouring and claws, the terror reached its height.
+
+The captain had hitherto replied to these, as he conceived them, fresh
+attempts to provoke him, by still further grinding; but when this last
+observation of the cook was communicated to him, he broke out
+scornfully, pointing at the same time with the bitten mouthpiece of his
+old meerschaum pipe at the speaker--
+
+"I think there is a sufficiently stupid devil in the hold sticking in
+every one of you rascals. Isn't there one of you with courage enough to
+go down into the coal-hold? or must I go myself?"
+
+The first mate proposed to accompany him; but Salve now came forward and
+declared that he, for his part, would as soon go down into the hold as
+up aloft. "A man won't sweat half as much at that work," he added, with
+sarcastic significance.
+
+He went down accordingly with a light, and after a few moments' search
+came upon a miserable, half-famished wretch, who had squeezed himself in
+behind the water-butt. He was as black as a negro from the coal-dust,
+and declared tremblingly when he came up on deck, that he had deserted
+from his regiment in Monte Video, which was an offence punishable by
+death, and that he had thought he might remain concealed until the
+vessel arrived at Rio; that he had come on board in the dark on the last
+evening they lay in the harbour, and had hidden himself under the coals;
+and that when they had battened down the hatch he had been nearly
+suffocated with coal-gas, and had lain and groaned. Occasionally he had
+found an opportunity at night in the dark to climb up into the
+jolly-boat astern, and had lain there and breathed fresh air until
+nearly sunrise. Once or twice he had been into the caboose and got
+something to eat; and sometimes he had stopped by the compass, as it
+seemed to him their journey was never coming to an end, and he wanted to
+assure himself that the vessel was really steering a northerly course to
+Rio, as he had heard from some one in the harbour she intended to do.
+
+He was a young, slightly-built man, with small quick eyes, about Salve's
+height, and apparently a Spaniard or Portuguese, but could make himself
+understood in English.
+
+The captain had some doubts as to the truth of his story, as his rank
+appeared to be superior to that of a common soldier; and from his
+anxiety not to betray his presence in the ship, even after they had got
+out into the open sea, he concluded that he was a political refugee, who
+at that time would not be very safe even at Rio. He ordered food to be
+given him, and promised that he should make his way ashore as best he
+could, but that he was not to expect help from him, as the captain had
+no intention of involving himself with the authorities on his account.
+
+Salve, who, like the generality of sailors, could talk a good deal of
+English, gradually attached himself to the Spaniard, and found him an
+entertaining and clever fellow.
+
+Before a light afternoon breeze they glided at last from the sea into
+the narrow channel that runs up to Rio de Janeiro--one of the loveliest
+in the world, with majestic granite mountains on either side, one of
+which was already blazing in the ruddy light of the evening sun, while
+the other in shade stood out a deep violet against the clear blue of the
+sky above. On the one side, at the foot of the Sugarloaf Mountain, they
+had the fortress of Praja; on the other, the Castle of Santa Cruz; and
+facing them on the highest point in the harbour, the slender
+signal-tower that announces every ship as it appears at the entrance of
+the channel.
+
+So beautiful was the scene that under its softening influence Salve felt
+almost inclined to regret his determination to desert. The feeling,
+however, lasted no longer than the beauty which produced it. The soft
+lights died away upon the hills, and with them the softer feelings which
+had crept in upon his heart. Night settled down upon the outer world,
+and with it returned the gloomy thoughts that now for many days had made
+his mind their home.
+
+It had occurred to him that the Brazilian would have it in his power to
+assist him in effecting his purpose, when they arrived in the harbour,
+and he had, therefore, found opportunities of rendering him indebted to
+him for many small services. He lent him clothes now to appear among the
+other sailors when they were mustered before the authorities, who came
+on board immediately after the ship entered the harbour, and it thus
+escaped their notice that there was one over the number returned by the
+captain as his crew.
+
+The harbour pilot, however--a consequential Mulatto in a Panama hat and
+red feather, and decorated with a badge and staff--was more
+sharp-sighted, and soon perceived, from the irritable tone in which the
+song at the capstan was sung again as they warped the vessel round to
+her anchorage in the Ilha das Cobras basin, that there was discontent
+prevailing on board; and it was no doubt owing to a hint from him that
+already the same evening there were "runners" waiting about near them on
+the quay.
+
+Captain Beck was out of humour both with himself and with his crew. Down
+in a warm climate he was always irritable, and now that he believed his
+authority weakened he had become a perfect tyrant. The prospect of
+another voyage under his command was more than many of his crew could
+face, and preparations were made by many of them to leave the ship as
+soon as they should have received whatever portion of pay on account the
+captain proposed, as is customary when a vessel is in harbour, to
+distribute. Salve, however, did not wait for this, and already, the
+second night, he and the Brazilian had disappeared.
+
+There was a sharp search instituted, with the assistance of the harbour
+police, especially in the house of one particular runner who had been
+seen talking with the crew. But he gave them such full liberty to search
+his house, and showed such a clear conscience in the matter, that the
+police had to admit that they were off the scent this time.
+
+The captain after this intrusted the nightwatches only to those among
+the crew upon whom he could place reliance, hauled off from the quay
+every evening, and absolutely refused all leave on shore. He had only
+received the thanks he deserved, he remarked bitterly, for having helped
+that red-jacketed thief, who, by way of return, had taken from him his
+best man. Salve's desertion, indeed, irritated him more than he cared to
+admit to himself. He had, according to promise, had him taught
+navigation by the first mate on the voyage out; and had settled in his
+own mind that when he himself retired from the sea Salve should command
+the Juno for him. He certainly never would find another of equal
+capacity, and at the same time so thoroughly to be depended upon; and
+now all his comfortable plans were upset.
+
+Before leaving the vessel Salve placed his silver watch, on which he had
+scratched with the point of his knife, "In remembrance of Salve
+Kristiansen," in the waistcoat pocket of Nils, who was snoring loud and
+long in his hammock alongside; and then, unobserved by the watch on
+deck, the two friends clambered over to the quay in the silent night by
+means of the shore rope, and disappeared at once into the darkness of
+the neighbouring alleys. The Brazilian appeared to be well acquainted
+with the localities, and anxious at the same time; for he avoided the
+lighted streets, and often stopped at dark corners to reconnoitre, and
+see that the way was clear of the night police.
+
+After picking their way for an hour among narrow lanes, they came out
+into a suburb where the houses began to alternate with garden walls,
+over which hung orange-trees diffusing their heavy perfume through the
+quiet night. They had to cross an open place to the other suburb, Mata
+Poreas, and upon the rising ground to one side of them they saw a
+building that looked like a fortress enclosed by a stone wall, which
+caused Salve's comrade considerable perturbation. It was the house of
+correction, before which there was always a sentry on duty.
+
+They passed it, however, unchallenged, and after half-an-hour's further
+walking, the Brazilian halted at last before a garden wall, in which
+there was a small wicket gate. He looked cautiously round him and said
+excitedly--
+
+"We must climb over here, and then--we are safe."
+
+He climbed up on Salve's back, and so on to the top of the wall; drew
+Salve up beside him, and then sprang down into the little garden and
+began to roll about on the grass as if he had taken leave of his senses,
+crying, "Salvado! Salvado!"
+
+He rushed up then to the little villa that lay half overshadowed by
+trees, and knocking in a particular manner at the door, called out
+"Paolina! Paolina!"
+
+A female in night-dress, with a young, but rather deep voice, opened the
+shutter from within, and put out her head.
+
+"Federigo!"--she said, tremblingly; and there followed then a rapid
+interchange of questions and answers in Spanish which Salve did not
+understand. He gathered merely that she was surprised to see a stranger
+with him, and that he calmed her apprehensions with the word "amigo,"
+followed by a short explanation.
+
+She opened the door, and fell impulsively on Federigo's neck, kissing
+him on both cheeks, and sobbing. After the custom of the place, then,
+she offered her cheek to Salve, and was a little surprised when he
+seemed not to understand her meaning, and nodded merely, as he said,
+half in English, half in Spanish, "good evening, senorita." It seemed to
+remind her, however, that in her eagerness she had forgotten her
+mantilla, and she left them hastily.
+
+She came back to them again in the sitting-room almost immediately with
+bread, wine, fruit, and lights upon a tray; and stationed herself then
+in a sympathetic attitude with her arm on her brother's shoulder, while
+he, with lively gestures, recounted his adventures. Federigo's story
+seemed to be reflected from her face as from a living mirror. At one
+point her face became pale with passion; her black eyes flashed, and she
+made a sudden movement with her clenched hand in the air, as if she were
+giving some one a stab with a dagger. She threw her head back then with
+a triumphant, scornful laugh that showed her dazzling white teeth; and
+Salve inferred that her brother must have killed some person or other in
+Monte Video, probably in self-preservation, and that he was afraid the
+police here, in Rio, should have had information of it.
+
+He sat and gazed at her. She was a lithe, supple-looking woman, at once
+graceful and fully developed; a dark beauty of the style peculiar to the
+South, with wonderful animation in her face, and dark flashing eyes. At
+the same time the play of her features was not pleasing, Salve thought.
+It reminded him too much of her brother--it was not feminine; and he was
+further repelled by the way in which she repeatedly allowed her eyes to
+rest upon him. He didn't know why, but Elizabeth's deep, true northern
+face came so vividly before him then, that he felt he could have drawn
+it to the life.
+
+The not very flattering expression which this comparison had caused his
+face unconsciously to assume as he looked at her, was caught,
+unfortunately, by Paolina, as she was on the point of tendering him her
+thanks in her impetuous way for what she heard he had done for her
+brother. She stopped short in surprise, and evidently repressed a
+vehemently resentful impulse, while a look unpleasant for him came into
+her eyes. She went over then and took him by the hand in the same way
+she had seen him take her own on his arrival, and spoke coldly enough a
+few words which were meant to convey her thanks. She didn't look at him
+again, not even when she presently said good-night to him, after having
+woke up the old mulatto woman who, with herself and her mother, were the
+only other inhabitants of the house, and told her to make up a couple of
+mat beds in the adjoining room. Federigo had before that gone in to his
+mother, and they could be heard in eager conversation.
+
+In Salve's mind a new impulse had been unexpectedly given to thoughts
+from which the novelty of his situation should have afforded him at
+least a temporary relief; and he lay long awake, thinking drearily about
+Elizabeth. When he did fall asleep at last, he dreamed that he had come
+into a serpent's nest, and that he was engaged in a life and death
+conflict with a huge snake, that was thrusting its forked tongue at him
+from walls, from roof, from every side; and in the gleam of its
+vindictive eyes, he seemed all at once to recognise Paolina.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+With a view to bring himself into harmony with his surroundings, he
+appeared next day in his suit of fine blue cloth, which he had brought
+with him in his bundle, together with sundry other articles, and what
+money he had still remaining from the pay which he had received at Monte
+Video. That he looked well in his handsome sailor dress was evident
+enough, from the surprised look with which he was greeted by Federigo's
+mother, when he was presented to her. She had evidently expected to see
+in her son's friend something in the style of the raw Brazilian sailor,
+a class of men who down there were generally drawn from the lowest dregs
+of the populace.
+
+She herself was a withered old woman, yellow as parchment, with a mass
+of thick grey hair gathered in a single knot at the back of her head.
+She wore heavy rings on her fingers, and large earrings; her small
+piercing eyes had a look of burnt-out passion; and her countenance wore
+in a stronger degree the furtive, ratlike expression which her son's
+occasionally displayed.
+
+As regards her further characteristics, Salve soon perceived that she
+was addicted to drink. She used to remain during the greater part of the
+day on the shady side of the house, or on the little veranda, with
+acachacas and water by her side, and incessantly smoking and rolling
+cigarettes; and she was often quite drunk as she mumbled her Ave Maria,
+and told her beads on her knees before going to bed in the evening.
+Still the other inmates of the house appeared to have great respect for
+her; and it was evident that she held the threads of whatever business
+they might have on hand.
+
+The senorita was out all the morning with the old mulatto woman, making
+purchases for the house, Federigo said, and informing herself as to what
+activity was being shown in their pursuit. When she returned, she
+avoided addressing herself directly to Salve; and he observed that she
+handed over a quantity of money to her brother, which had the happy
+effect of bringing into his countenance a more cheerful look than it had
+hitherto worn that morning.
+
+"What have you done to my sister?" Federigo asked one day, laughing;
+"you are not in her good graces. She is dangerous," he said, seriously;
+and added then, as if speculating on possibilities, "as long as you are
+in this house, at all events, you are safe. But mind, you are warned."
+
+Federigo soon began to weary of their enforced confinement to the house,
+and in spite of his sister's efforts to dissuade him, began to go out in
+the evenings, coming home very late, and in a gloomy, irritable
+humour--evidently, from the casual remarks he let fall, having lost all
+his money at play.
+
+The second morning of his stay in the house Salve had perceived that
+there was a want of money; and having heard the brother and sister
+quarrelling one day when both were in a bad humour, he thought it best
+to carry out, at the first convenient moment, the determination at which
+he had arrived, and handed over to Federigo what money he had, with the
+exception of a single silver piastre, saying, "That it was only right he
+should pay for his lodging and board."
+
+The money, though deprecatingly, was still accepted, and in the evening
+Federigo was out once more, his sister remaining at home.
+
+She and Salve, on account of their ignorance of each other's language,
+could not hold much conversation together, and Salve was rather glad of
+this wall of separation between them, as it left him more at his ease.
+She had, however, recently looked more often at him with a sort of
+interest, and on several occasions had put questions to him through her
+brother. Her range of ideas was apparently not extensive, as her
+questions always turned upon the same topic--namely, what the women were
+like in his country; so that he soon came to know by heart all the
+Spanish terms which related to that subject.
+
+They were out on the veranda together that evening, and as she went past
+his back while he was leaning over in his seat, she drew her hand as if
+by accident lightly through his hair. If it had had the electricity of a
+cat's, it would have given out a perfect shower of sparks, so enraged
+was he at the advance.
+
+When Federigo came home he flung his hat away angrily on to a chair, and
+drank down at a gulp a glass of rum that was standing on the table. He
+no longer wore the smart cloak he had on when he went out.
+
+"I have gambled away all your money!" he cried, in English, to Salve, as
+if careless of further reticence, and made some remark then with an
+unpleasant laugh to his sister, who had evidently by her expression
+perceived at once how matters stood.
+
+"There's my last piastre for you," said Salve, throwing it over to him.
+"Try your luck with it."
+
+"He is successful in love," said Paolina, tearfully, and with a _naive_
+affectation of superstition--"he is engaged."
+
+When her brother, who was balancing the piastre on his forefinger,
+laughingly translated what she had said, Salve replied snappishly, with
+an impatient glance at the senorita--
+
+"I am not engaged, and never shall be."
+
+"Unsuccessful in love!" she broke out, gleefully; "and the last piastre!
+To-morrow we shall win a hundred, two hundred, Federigo!"
+
+It was clearly the conviction of her heart; and she seized a mandolin
+and began to dance to her own accompaniment, her eyes resting as she did
+so upon Salve with a peculiar expression.
+
+"Quick, Federigo!--why not this evening?" she cried, breaking off
+suddenly with a laugh, and throwing the mandolin from her on to the
+sofa. "To-morrow his luck may be gone."
+
+She seized her brother's hat, crushed it down upon his head, and pushed
+him eagerly out of the door, going with him herself to open the wicket.
+
+She came back then to Salve, and as they sat _tete-a-tete_ in the
+lamplit room with doors and windows thrown wide open, the moonlight
+gleaming on the dark trees outside, and the night air perfumed with the
+scent of flowers, she endeavoured to ingratiate herself with him by
+pouring out his rum-and-water and by rolling his cigarettes, an art in
+which it appeared from her laughter and gestures that she thought him
+awkward. She was in a state of feverish excitement, and kept darting off
+to the wicket and back again.
+
+Salve sat and smoked, and sipped his glass unconcernedly, whilst she
+rocked herself backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair, with her head
+thrown back, and her eyes steadily fixed upon him. He heard a sigh, and
+she said in a low, ingratiating tone--
+
+"I am afraid Federigo is unlucky."
+
+Salve was not so stupid as not to comprehend her meaning. He was quite
+aware that she was handsome as she sat there with her hand on her knee,
+and her well-formed foot gracefully brought into view; but his feeling
+was exclusively one of indignation that such a common Brazilian baggage
+should presume to bring herself into comparison with Elizabeth. He flung
+away his cigar impatiently, and went down into the garden, without
+attempting to conceal his aversion. He hated all women since the one he
+had fixed his heart on had disappointed him, and he strode backwards and
+forwards now in more than usual indignation against the sex.
+
+He was still pacing the garden when Federigo came back, heated and
+triumphant, with his cloak on his shoulder and a bag under his arm.
+
+"Nearly three hundred piastres!" he cried, clearing the garden in a
+succession of bounds.
+
+His sister had been asleep on the sofa, and sprang up in ecstasy at the
+intelligence; and they proceeded then with childish glee to spread out
+the silver on the table, and divide it into three. When Salve absolutely
+refused to take more than his one piastre back again, there came
+actually a look of humble admiration into the senorita's eyes. She could
+not comprehend such an act of self-sacrifice, although she seemed to
+vaguely feel that there was something noble about it. After a moment's
+consideration she held out her hand and said--
+
+"Senor, give me the piastre you have in your hand, and I will give you
+another in return for it."
+
+He did so, and she took it and kissed it repeatedly.
+
+"I shall play with this one to-morrow evening," she cried joyfully, and
+put it into her bosom.
+
+She carried out her intention, and came home beaming, with a whole
+bagful of piastres.
+
+It seemed that the family lived only by play. The son, it is true, was
+in connection with one or other of the political parties of the town,
+with the prospect of an appointment as officer in a volunteer corps if
+any rising took place; but that did not in the meantime bring in money,
+and how they managed to get along when luck went against them it was not
+easy to see.
+
+Salve meanwhile was becoming rather tired of being on land. The
+seclusion had suited him well enough at first, until the senorita had
+begun to pay him attentions; but now that she evidently remained at home
+all day solely on his account, to dress at him, and play off all sorts
+of coquetry upon him, he began to find it intolerable; and when the Juno
+at last had sailed, he announced one day that he meant to go down to the
+harbour and look for employment.
+
+The senorita turned pale, but soon recovered her self-possession, and
+even joked with him about it; and later on her brother persuaded him to
+defer his intention for three days, until he had attended a gathering of
+Federigo's friends, which was to take place one night down in one of the
+suburbs.
+
+That evening, when her brother had gone out as usual to play, the
+senorita sat down in the window of the room where Salve was, and through
+which he would have to pass to go into the garden. She had undone her
+luxuriant hair, and had put on a languishing look, and every now and
+then thrummed absently on her guitar, humming gently to herself as she
+fixed her black eyes upon him. Salve saw himself in a manner besieged,
+and felt half inclined to brush past her and escape into the garden; but
+it would have seemed too deliberately unfriendly. The only sign which
+betrayed his consciousness of the situation was the somewhat hasty way
+in which he puffed his cigarette.
+
+"You really mean to leave us?" she said at last sadly, in almost a
+beseeching tone.
+
+"Yes, senorita," was the reply, and evidently it came from the bottom of
+his heart; he was angry, and weary of her importunity.
+
+He had hardly said it before, thrusting her hand into her bosom, she had
+sprung to her feet, and a stiletto whizzed past his ear, and stuck
+quivering in the wall close to his head. Her supple body was still in
+motion, her face was pale, and her eyes were flashing: then with a
+sudden transition she threw herself back and laughed.
+
+"Were you frightened?" she cried. But Salve showed no sign of it. He was
+provoked, but cool; and not being the kind of man who would deign to
+engage in a conflict with a woman, he left the stiletto sticking in the
+wall, though at first he had thought of seizing it.
+
+"Look here!" she said, suddenly darting over and drawing it out, and
+then practising with it, laughing all the while, at various spots on the
+walls of the room, which she hit every time to a nicety.
+
+"You were frightened--confess that you were," she said, teasingly,
+sitting down opposite to him, heated with the exercise she had gone
+through. She gazed into his face with her cheek resting on her hand and
+her elbow on the table. "You were afraid; and now you are angry. The
+women in your country don't do such things!"
+
+Salve turned to her with a look of icy rebuff. "No, senorita," he
+replied, curtly, and went down into the garden.
+
+Thereupon she seized the guitar again, and began strumming an
+accompaniment apparently to her thoughts. It was no longer lively music
+she played, but something of a menacing strain, in keeping with the look
+in her eyes, and she seemed in a manner to hiss the air through her
+teeth.
+
+Later on in the evening she came tripping over to him with a coquettish
+smile, and after the custom of the country offered him a cigarette,
+which she had begun to smoke herself. When he rather ungallantly
+declined it, she exclaimed furiously, stamping her foot--
+
+"Senor!"
+
+But she recovered herself in a moment, and said laughing, with at all
+events apparent good-nature, something which meant that she understood
+that this might perhaps not be a custom in his country.
+
+Salve felt much relieved when her brother came home, and told him that
+the meeting he was waiting for was to take place on the following
+evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+It was into a badly-lighted tavern, with two or three rooms leading out
+of one another, that his friend then conducted him. Men of the most
+various social positions, many with a military look, and in
+half-threadbare uniforms, filled the inner rooms; and in the outer one
+he had seen upon entering a number of seafaring men, who looked like
+Americans, and who nodded to him on the strength of his sailor's dress.
+There were several women, more or less well dressed, moving about among
+them, and others standing with eager faces over the gambling-table in
+the inner room. All were drinking acachacas, and the whole place was
+pervaded with a cloud of tobacco-smoke, out of which there came a
+deafening clamour of talk.
+
+Salve had a seat found for him by his friend at a long table, amongst a
+number of bronzed, bearded men, with large hats, leather breeches, and
+spurs, whose company he by no means cared about. They looked like
+mounted bullock-drivers, such as he had seen at Monte Video, or still
+more, perhaps, like brigands, or banditti.
+
+"They belong to Mendez's volunteer corps," whispered Federigo, as he
+presented him then to the chief of the party, who sat at the top of the
+table--a powerful fellow, with a weather-beaten complexion, heavy black
+mustachios, and a pair of small active eyes, which, more than once
+afterwards, when Salve was not looking, were turned critically upon him.
+
+Every now and then they clinked their glasses together to some party
+toast; but otherwise they were quiet enough at first. People of the same
+calibre sat round other tables in the immediate neighbourhood; and at
+another were intermingled well-dressed persons from the town, who were
+carrying on a whispered conversation, and who appeared anxious.
+
+The shouting, and the noise, and the laughter kept increasing. There
+were already drunken faces at the table, and in several directions
+quarrelling and the sound of blows were beginning to be heard. Federigo,
+who seemed to be known to many in the rooms, had mixed with the crowd,
+and Salve's neighbours on either side were now playing eagerly with
+dice, diving from time to time for small silver pieces into heavy
+leathern purses, that seemed to have been destined for sums very
+different from what their present meagre contents represented. So many
+debased, avaricious countenances as he saw around him he had never
+imagined that it would be possible to collect in one spot, and he made
+up his mind to have no more to do with them than he could possibly help.
+He might congratulate himself, he thought, if he escaped from them with
+a whole skin, and he felt in his breast-pocket to see that his knife was
+there.
+
+One of the North Americans who had nodded to him, in virtue of his
+sailor's dress, when he entered, came over to him now and asked him to
+come and sit with them; but as he rather felt himself under Federigo's
+charge, he declined just then. Shortly after, to his surprise, he saw
+the senorita standing at the gaming-table, with her head, which was all
+he could see, beautifully dressed; and he observed that the eyes of the
+keeper of the tavern--a tall, lean Portuguese, with a long, sallow face,
+and hardly any hair on his head, who himself presided at the table--were
+turned towards her continually with a look of humble, tender concern.
+She was playing excitedly, and losing every time. At last she stopped,
+in evident irritation, and beckoned him to one side, with a certain
+authority, in spite of his having the table to attend to.
+
+They spoke eagerly together, and Salve caught a rapid glance directed
+towards himself by the senorita, which he did not at all like. She was
+unnaturally pale; and he saw that she finally gave the other her hand,
+which he kissed with an enraptured expression, and she then disappeared
+from the room.
+
+The landlord's face beamed the whole evening afterwards, and he bowed
+politely to Federigo as he passed the table. The latter, the next time
+he came near Salve, whispered rather scornfully--
+
+"I believe my sister has bartered away her soul this evening, and
+promised to marry that old money-bag there who keeps the tavern.
+Congratulate us, _amigo mio_!"
+
+Salve observed that the said money-bag conferred now more than once with
+the man at the head of his own table, and was apparently making terms
+with him; and that the latter also, when he thought he was not observed,
+glanced over at himself in a way that was very far from putting him at
+his ease.
+
+The American who had spoken to him before--a tall, athletic-looking man,
+with a fair beard round a hard Yankee face, and with a remnant of gold
+lace on the sleeve of his jacket--had since been at the gaming-table,
+and had been losing one doubloon after another.
+
+"They don't play fair, my lad!" he cried in English to Salve, to whom he
+seemed anxious to make up.
+
+"I daresay not," was the reply; "it's a vile den."
+
+"What country do you hail from?"
+
+"Norway."
+
+"Ah! Norwegian. Good sailors."
+
+"Deserted at Rio?" he asked then, with a laugh, as if he expected, as a
+matter of course, an answer in the affirmative.
+
+"Shall I play for you?" he asked presently.
+
+"No money."
+
+"Here's a guinea on account of your wages on board the 'Stars and
+Stripes,' for Valparaiso and Chinchas!" he cried, with a laugh that was
+heard above the surrounding din; and flinging a gold piece on the table,
+he lost it.
+
+He turned, and putting his hand to his mouth, shouted--
+
+"One more on account!" and another gold piece shared the fate of the
+first.
+
+"One more on account!" there came again, and with the same result.
+
+Salve had by this time had about enough of this free-and-easy and
+undesired playing on his account. The man's face, moreover, with all its
+joviality, by no means attracted him, and he shouted to him in a
+sharply-protesting tone--
+
+"Play for yourself, Yankee."
+
+The American seemed not to be able to hear on that side, for he
+repeated, coolly nodding to him--
+
+"One more on account!"
+
+Salve's patience was exhausted. He had been sitting all this time
+squeezed up in the narrow space between the bench and the wall with
+people on both sides of him, preventing his getting out; but now
+grasping his neighbour violently by the shoulder, he sprang all at once
+across the table and over to the unabashed Yankee, with an irresistible
+feeling that, come what might, he would get out into the freedom of the
+open air once more.
+
+Just then there came from the furthest room a cry of "police." The
+lights in that room were at once extinguished; and a moment after, those
+in the room where Salve was on the point of falling foul of the American
+(who, to his great surprise, found him all of a sudden confronting him)
+went out also.
+
+Their hostile relations, however, were almost immediately turned into
+friendly ones. For Salve, who had seen the landlord making a rush
+towards him, felt himself suddenly, in the midst of the confusion caused
+by the darkness, seized by two men and forced towards a door leading in
+another direction than that in which he saw the stream was setting, and
+which no doubt was the way out.
+
+"Help, Yankee! there's some villany on here; the small door to the
+right!" he shouted, with great presence of mind, and at the same moment
+the door was slammed behind him. A handkerchief was tied over his mouth;
+he was tripped up and brought heavily to the ground, where his feet and
+hands were tied, and he was then shot into a dark side-room, which
+seemed to be at the back of a press, that was unlatched to pass him
+through.
+
+"H'm!" said the Yankee coolly, to himself. "I am not going to lose his
+pay, if I know it," and he set out accordingly in search of the police,
+with whom he had no outstanding account.
+
+Salve was certain he had heard the senorita's voice whispering in the
+outer room; and not long after he heard the latch in the press raised,
+and she stood before him with a light. She looked at him mischievously,
+and spilt some oil out of the lamp on to his face with a little scornful
+laugh. But her expression changed then to that of a tigress burning for
+revenge that is compelled to put off the gratification of her fury, and
+she darted out again, clapping down the latch behind her.
+
+Salve lay tightly bound with his hands behind his back. But his cat-like
+suppleness enabled him eventually to wriggle his sheath-knife out of his
+breast pocket, and he found no great difficulty then in freeing himself
+from his bonds.
+
+He stood now with his knife in his hand and listened.
+
+Before long he heard the American's voice, with the police, and they
+appeared to be searching. He shouted to them; and the next moment he was
+released.
+
+"He is one of our crew--belongs to the Stars and Stripes," said the
+American, arresting Salve, who, as long as he got out of this accursed
+town now, did not care in what capacity it might be, and offered no
+opposition.
+
+"You have not improved your beauty, my lad," said his rescuer,
+derisively, as he held up the light to his face.
+
+"I should like to have one word with the tavern-keeper before I go,"
+said Salve.
+
+"And that is what we have not the slightest inclination for," said the
+American--who, it now appeared, was boatswain on board--in a dry tone of
+authority. "We are not going larking with the police. Besides, having
+once recovered that trifle of wages, I don't mean to risk losing it
+again."
+
+The Yankees made a close ring round their prisoner, and there was
+nothing for it but to follow as he was directed. A look, however, at the
+boatswain gave him to understand that that question of the wages would
+be settled between them when they got on board.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+The Stars and Stripes lay in the roads with the Union flag at her gaff.
+She was a long, black, and, at the water-line, well-shaped vessel, with
+a crew of thirty-two men; and Salve was so taken with her appearance
+that as they came alongside he silently congratulated himself on his
+luck in getting a berth in her. They were so obliging, moreover, as to
+give him a berth to himself in a separate cabin below. But, to his
+intense indignation, no sooner had he entered it than the door was
+latched on the outside, and when he tried to kick it open, it was
+signified to him that during the short time they had still to be at Rio,
+he was to remain in confinement, that they might be sure of him. The
+heat was intolerable down there; and to add to that, there was incessant
+crying and groaning going on in the hold beside him, as if it were full
+of sick people. It was the vilest treatment he had ever been subjected
+to.
+
+The work of taking in the cargo went on uninterruptedly the whole night,
+as if they were in a particular hurry to get out of the harbour, and
+about noon the anchor was weighed while the contents of the last lighter
+were being taken on board.
+
+When Salve, some hours after, was set at liberty, they were already out
+in the open sea off the mouth of the channel. The captain, the three
+mates, and several of the inferiors in command, when on deck, wore
+gold-laced caps and a kind of uniform, as on a man-of-war, and the
+officer of the watch was armed. The crew, on the other hand, were almost
+to a man shabby, and they seemed to consist of men of every
+nationality--English, Irish, Germans, and Americans, not to mention half
+a dozen negroes and mulattoes. As no one took any notice of him, he went
+about as he pleased for a while; and presently saw, with a disagreeable
+sensation, no less than three corpses carelessly sewed up in sail-cloth
+dropped over the side of the ship that was turned from the land, without
+the slightest ceremony. The uncomfortable feeling which this incident
+had aroused was anything but allayed when he heard presently from a
+little pale cabin-boy with whom he had entered into conversation that it
+had been successfully concealed from the harbour authorities that there
+was yellow fever on board; that there were many more lying sick below;
+and that one of those who had just been heaved overboard, had died the
+day before in the very berth in which Salve had slept that night.
+
+In the evening he was called aft to the captain, who was standing with
+the boatswain at his elbow. He was a spare, energetic-looking man, of
+about forty years of age, with thick black whiskers, marked features,
+and rather hollow cheeks, and with carefully dressed, glossy hair. He
+was smoking a handsome pipe with a long stem inlaid with
+mother-of-pearl, and took a sip from time to time from a cup of black
+coffee that was standing on the skylight.
+
+"What is your name?" he asked, nodding in reply to Salve's salute.
+
+"Salve."
+
+"Salve," repeated the captain, with an English pronunciation of the
+name; "and Norwegian?"
+
+"He looks too respectable for the pack he'll have to herd with," he
+muttered to the boatswain.
+
+"Able seaman?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You have had three guineas on account?" he went on, after a couple of
+puffs to keep his pipe alight, as he looked into his ledger; "a month's
+wages."
+
+"No, sir," said Salve, firmly, "I have had nothing on account,"--and he
+proceeded then to relate the circumstances under which the supposed
+payment had been made. "I have not been regularly engaged till this
+moment, if I am so now; but up to this I have been treated like a dog,
+and worse."
+
+The captain took no notice of his last observation, and merely said
+shortly and sternly--
+
+"The three guineas are owing to him, boatswain Jenkins. His place will
+be in the foretop. A steady hand will be wanted among all that rabble
+there."
+
+"Another time you'll perhaps play on your own account, and not on the
+sailors'," he observed, turning to the boatswain; but Salve caught the
+remark.
+
+With this the conference came to an end, the boatswain's expression
+prophesying that when the opportunity offered Salve should pay for his
+triumph. He went about nursing his prominent chin, and twisting his
+yellow whiskers, and found a victim for the present in a wretched
+Mulatto, who was scouring for the cook. After first correcting him
+sharply for nothing, he coolly felled him to the deck with a handspike,
+and left him lying there unable to move.
+
+Salve's blood boiled at the sight; but his indignation gave way
+presently to astonishment when he saw the poor fellow get up and go on
+indefatigably with his work, after first quietly wiping his own blood
+off the saucepan. There was a limit to brutality, he thought, and in his
+disgust he almost envied him the blow he had received.
+
+He provided himself now from the purser with a suit of seaman's clothes
+in lieu of the rather damaged cloth ones which he wore; and the
+sailmaker gave him out hammock clothes, to be paid for out of his wages.
+He proceeded then to hang his hammock from one of the beams between
+decks; and while he was doing so observed another man in a canvas suit
+like his own, similarly occupied, not far from him. He couldn't be
+mistaken--it was Federigo.
+
+The latter had, as Salve afterwards heard, been taken by the police
+during the affair in the tavern. He had seen how Salve had been rescued
+by the boatswain of the Stars and Stripes; and having managed to escape
+from his captors on the way to the guard-house, he had sought a similar
+refuge.
+
+Salve's indignation at his sister's baseness was still too fresh for
+Federigo's reappearance to be in any way agreeable to him, although he
+believed him to be innocent of any complicity in that business. At the
+same time, the latter's conscience was apparently not entirely clear in
+the matter, for there was a certain conscious sense of humiliation in
+his expression, combined with something which made Salve feel that he
+must be upon his guard. Neither spoke to the other, and it might have
+been supposed from their bearing towards one another that they had never
+met before.
+
+It very soon became clear to Salve that he could not have hit upon a
+more unfortunate ship. The crew was composed of the dregs of the New
+Orleans and Charleston docks--men with every species of vice and
+degradation stamped upon their countenances, and amongst whom every
+second word was some infamous oath or blasphemy. Blows with handspikes
+were of common occurrence, and brutality and violence generally were the
+order of the day. There was no court of appeal, and the immunity which
+any one individual might enjoy depended entirely upon how far he was
+protected by the officers--who, however, in a general way, did not
+interfere in the quarrels forward--or had formed a league with others.
+
+The Americans and the Irish banded together, and being the most
+numerous, practised a shameless system of tyranny against any who could
+not defend themselves--a miserable sickly Spaniard, who had been forced
+to work until he had actually dropped, having recently been more
+especially the object of their attentions. Their supremacy, however, was
+contested by a party of seven or eight tattered countrymen of the
+latter, with one or two Portuguese, who were always ready with their
+knives, and who formed a sort of opposition. To this party Federigo had
+attached himself.
+
+Salve stood alone. The Americans and Irish had at first reckoned upon
+having him with them, but had gradually turned against him. They had
+taken offence at his apparent disinclination to associate with them more
+than he could help. He seemed to think himself too good for them; and in
+addition to that, the seaman-like qualities which he displayed made them
+dislike him out of envy. But their hostility was perhaps mainly due to
+the boatswain, who encouraged the idea among the rest of the crew that
+he was favoured by the officers. Federigo came out now in an
+unexpectedly friendly light; and Salve perceived that it was only owing
+to him that all the Portuguese were not against him also. The result was
+that the two gradually approached such other again.
+
+There were of course in such a collection of riff-raff, individual
+bullies whose hands were against every man, but who to some extent kept
+each other in check. The one most feared of these was a huge,
+copper-coloured, scarred Irishman, who seemed periodically to be
+possessed by a very demon of violence, and to be actually running over
+with bad blood. He had been in irons for some time before the vessel
+arrived at Rio, for having one day sworn on deck that he would murder
+the captain. It was with this ruffian that Salve had first to measure
+himself, the boatswain being the immediate cause.
+
+One day when the large bell forward had rung for dinner, the boatswain
+gave an order which detained Salve for some time after the others had
+taken their places at the long table in the round-house, and when he
+came in everything was eaten up, and he lost his dinner. The following
+day exactly the same thing happened, and he had to content himself with
+his breakfast and supper rations for the day. He perfectly understood
+the meaning of it. In smartness and activity he was so far beyond
+comparison superior to any of the other foretop hands, that the
+boatswain had not been able to find any excuse for subjecting him to
+punishment: he was going to try and hit him in another way. On his
+lonely watch that night Salve decided what he should do if the trick was
+practised a third time upon him. It would be better to bring things to a
+crisis at once than have his strength gradually exhausted by continued
+insufficiency of food.
+
+The same order being given at the same time next day, he carried it out
+as speedily as he could, and hurried on then to the round-house, where
+the others were already at their dinner, with a bowl of meat and soup to
+every two men.
+
+He sat down by the side of the Irishman, who he saw had a bowl to
+himself.
+
+"Put the bowl this way," he said, coolly.
+
+The Irishman merely looked at him contemptuously. He was evidently
+astonished at his audacity, but went on eating composedly.
+
+Salve felt that he must not be beaten.
+
+"Life for life, Irishman," he cried, springing to his feet, and as the
+other also rose, giving him a blow in the face that sent him backwards
+on the bench against the wall.
+
+A fierce conflict now ensued. The Irishman got up like a bleeding ox,
+and catching up a marline-spike that was hanging from the beam, gave
+Salve a deep wound in the cheek, the scar of which he carried his whole
+life through. They drew their knives then; and Salve's coolness and
+activity soon gave him the superiority over his furious and unwieldy
+opponent. His movements were like those of a steel spring; and pale and
+smiling, he delivered every blow with such well-calculated effect, that
+the affair ended with the Irishman, bleeding profusely and
+half-unconscious, tumbling out of the narrow doorway to save himself.
+
+There were not a few who were glad enough that the dreaded Irishman
+should have been worsted, and it was to this feeling Salve was indebted
+for being allowed to fight it out alone with him. He stuck his knife now
+into the table by the side of his dish, and, looking round him, asked,
+"Is there any one else now who would like to keep me out of my meat?"
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"While I am about it," he continued, without noticing the blood that was
+running down his face and over his hands, "I'll settle this matter once
+for all. I have two days' rations owing to me. Very well. For the next
+two days I shall keep one dish to myself. I shall see then what the
+Irishman or any one else thinks of it."
+
+The Irishman was confined to his hammock the whole week with
+wound-fever, and Salve had for the first time won the respect of the
+crew. He felt at the same time that he had commenced a desperate
+struggle, and that if he was to enjoy any sort of security in this
+company of ruffians whom he had now set at defiance, he must take the
+game into his own hands, and make himself at least as much feared as the
+Irishman had been. Accordingly, instead of waiting to be challenged, he
+deliberately became the aggressor, and set himself to dispense justice
+as he pleased.
+
+The one who, next to the Irishman, was most dreaded, was a
+broad-shouldered mulatto, who carried on a petty system of pillage
+against any one that was not supported, unluckily for him, by any party;
+and Salve himself had been obliged one evening to put up with having his
+hammock taken down, and the mulatto's hung in its place. He had seen him
+in several fights, and had observed his peculiar tactics; the result of
+his observations being the conviction that the man had not the strength
+which he was anxious to make the others think he had. In pursuance of
+this policy, he had picked a quarrel with him on the head of that matter
+of the hammock, and with a similarly decisive result. The mulatto
+rejoiced in the name of Januarius, and Salve accordingly requested him
+to remember that there was something still owing to him for the eleven
+other months of the year. He was a cur by nature, and never seemed to
+have the slightest desire to renew the struggle afterwards, which was
+not the case with the Irishman, with whom Salve perceived, directly the
+man came on deck again, that a fresh trial of strength was inevitable.
+
+An opportunity was not long in offering, and Salve seized it at once, so
+that the challenge might come from him. The Irishman had taken a fancy
+to the boots of the wretched Spaniard who was ill, and was now wearing
+them.
+
+"Irishman," said Salve, as the other passed him, when they were lounging
+about after dinner, "that is an awkward pair of boots you have on there.
+If you take my advice you'll return them to their owner, or--I shall
+have to pull them off you."
+
+The Irishman glared at him, but turned pale at the last threat; and
+Salve's eye seemed to light up at the prospect of carrying it out. The
+former made the mistake of preparing to defend himself instead of taking
+the aggressive, and in a moment was knocked down and stunned for an
+instant by a couple of unexpected blows from Salve, who flew at him like
+a tiger-cat. The crew gathered round. The Irishman seized a heavy iron
+pump-handle as a weapon, and Salve a handspike; and Salve kept his word.
+He pulled the boots off as the other lay senseless on the deck, and took
+them down to the Spaniard.
+
+In point of physical strength, Salve was far from being the equal of
+many of these men, who, he knew very well, were now only looking out for
+an occasion to get the better of him. His only chance was to take the
+initiative on all occasions, and to seem the most reckless and the most
+careless of life, and the most eager to fight of them all. He therefore
+flew at his man without hesitation on the slightest provocation, and
+whenever he threatened took care to keep his word.
+
+The constant strain upon his energy became at last like a fever in his
+blood, and the life he was leading began to show itself in his face. He
+had come to be reckoned on board as one of those stubborn, unruly
+spirits that are common enough among the dregs of humanity to be met
+with in ships' holds in that quarter of the globe, and who usually end
+their career at the yard-arm, or by a bullet from the captain's
+revolver. In this very ship, before they came into Rio, at the time the
+Irishman had been put in irons, the captain had, without any hesitation,
+shot down from the yard one of the crew, whom he supposed to be the
+ringleader of the mutineers. He looked upon Salve now with increasing
+distrust, wondering how he could ever have been so mistaken in a man as
+he had been in him. "But put a man to herd with rabble, and it's hard
+for him not to become one of them," he said; and, deteriorated though he
+was, Salve was still the smartest sailor he had on board.
+
+The boatswain kept out of his way now as much as possible, for he had
+heard that Salve had sworn to tear his entrails out if he gave him any
+fresh cause for offence. The latter knew very well, though, that he was
+meditating something against him, and was not surprised therefore at
+being called aft one day to stand a formal trial before the captain for
+the expression which he had used with regard to the boatswain, and which
+he did not affect to deny, "as the boatswain," he said, "had wished to
+take his life."
+
+"I mean to leave the ship," he said, "the moment we come to Valparaiso.
+I am only engaged so far. But, indeed, I care little what becomes of
+me," he ended, gloomily.
+
+The captain probably had his own notions with regard to the boatswain,
+as Salve escaped the severe punishment he had expected, and was only
+condemned to solitary confinement for fourteen days on bread-and-water.
+
+"That will take you down a bit, my lad," said the captain.
+
+The boatswain, however, made up for the leniency of his superior by a
+little ingenuity of his own; and every day, when Salve was enjoying his
+meagre fare in his place of confinement, the mulatto, whom he had
+triumphed over, by the boatswain's orders, took his dinner of hot meat
+and ate it outside the door, close to the hole through which the light
+was admitted, that the savoury smell might make its way in and tantalise
+him.
+
+At first, Salve rather enjoyed the repose which his confinement afforded
+him; but as his hunger increased he grew irritable, and at dinner-time
+one day he approached his face to the opening.
+
+"Mulatto!" he began; and the other looked up and grinned with his white
+teeth, pleased to see some sign at last that his attentions had not been
+thrown away--"that's good food you have there."
+
+"Excellent," replied the other, mischievously, and with an inward
+chuckle.
+
+"It makes me picture to myself your future," Salve continued, placidly,
+"how it will be with you when I come out again. You will be like that
+lobscouse, my friend. Had that never occurred to you?"
+
+The mulatto went on eating, but grew absent. His nature, as before
+observed, was not a courageous one, and it was obvious that his food at
+last began to stick in his throat.
+
+"It is much the same as if you were sitting there and feeding on
+yourself," said Salve, after a longer pause, during which he had watched
+the other's lengthening countenance. "That's just what it will be, my
+dear friend, unless--"
+
+"Unless--?" repeated the mulatto, pricking up his ears.
+
+"Unless you take good care to pass your dinner in here to me every day
+from this time. There are only five days more, and I have fasted for
+nine, while you have been feeding away, so you are getting off cheaply
+enough. If the boatswain sees you passing in food to me, you'll be
+punished, so you will have to be cautious, and hold up the plate
+yourself before the opening, that he may think you are eating right in
+my face."
+
+These were humiliating terms; and the mulatto made no immediate reply.
+He merely sat with his woolly head bent down in a thoughtful attitude.
+But the next day he stationed his broad person with the plate in his
+hand up in front of the opening, and Salve mercilessly took every morsel
+there was on it.
+
+It was a matter of the last importance to him not to be reduced in
+strength, as he knew his life was in his own hands; and that he was
+anything but taken down, and was as ready as ever for a fight, he
+showed, when he came out, in a sanguinary encounter which he engaged in
+gratuitously for Federigo with one of the Americans, and in which it
+would otherwise undoubtedly have gone hard with the Brazilian.
+
+It was not out of any respect for him that Salve took his part. He
+looked upon him as false, treacherous, and entirely unprincipled; there
+was nothing he did or said that did not seem pervaded with these
+characteristics. But he helped him on the strength of that comradeship
+which among these reprobates has its inviolable laws; and further than
+that, there was something akin to a personal friendship existing between
+them. Federigo was decidedly interesting. He could talk more or less on
+almost every subject, and he was full of theories which he propounded
+during their watches together, and to which Salve eagerly listened.
+There was, he said, among other remarks, and in a superior manner, no
+such thing as religion, no such being as God. Such ideas were only for
+dunderheads, who, moreover, in every country had their own particular
+form of belief for the clever people and the priests to turn to their
+own purposes. In reference to that, he told many stories of the
+impositions practised by the priests in Brazil; and had many agreeable
+anecdotes, too, about the beliefs of the wretched little race whose Sun
+land they were passing at the time. He pronounced, in a word, for the
+right of the strongest, and for piastres, women, and freedom as the
+great objects of existence. What other god than Salve, he once asked
+ironically, had prevented the Irishman from taking the life of the
+miserable Spaniard down there in the hold? or what god other than Fear
+prevented the boatswain from felling Salve himself to the deck with a
+handspike? Although Salve despised the speaker, his arguments made no
+slight impression upon him. What god, he asked himself, would save him,
+if he did not take care of himself among all these ruffians who
+surrounded him? and had there been any such controlling Power in the
+world, he thought with bitterness, a great deal in his life would have
+been very different. Conversations of this kind always made him feel
+thoroughly bad.
+
+"What do you suppose," he suddenly asked, one evening as they were
+talking together on their watch, "your sister meant to do with me,
+Federigo, if I had not escaped?"
+
+Up to this they had avoided touching upon this tender subject, and
+Federigo answered, evasively--
+
+"I'm sure I don't know. She takes wild notions sometimes."
+
+"Yes--but what do you think? I know you had no hand in the matter."
+
+"H'm! I had rather not say," replied Federigo, obviously relieved, but
+with a peculiar smile, as if his fancy was ranging not without enjoyment
+through the region of possibilities. "She scalded a monkey once, that
+had bitten her, slowly to death with boiling-water. But her ingenuity
+was endless."
+
+Salve felt a shudder run through him, and something in his face told the
+other that he had better not indulge his fancy any further; and he
+hastened, therefore, to add half in joke and half by way of
+consolation--
+
+"Poor Antonio Varez will pay for her having been obliged to marry him,
+never fear. Yes, she is rich and happy," he concluded with a sigh, as if
+he envied her; and the subject dropped.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+They doubled Cape Horn, and came to Valparaiso. But, on the morning they
+were to enter the harbour, Salve, to his intense exasperation, was put
+under arrest. The captain found him too useful in keeping the crew in
+order forward, and therefore took the most effectual means of preventing
+him from putting into execution his declared determination to leave the
+ship on their arrival at that port.
+
+After leaving Valparaiso they called at the Chincha Islands, took in a
+cargo of guano for China, and shaped their course then eastward across
+the calm southern ocean, whose lonely monotony was only broken by the
+occasional appearance of one of the larger kind of sea-birds, or by the
+distant spouting of a whale. On board, however, the same peace was far
+from prevailing. That little nut-shell that crept like a dot across the
+limitless expanse of waters was a little floating hell, where every evil
+passion raged from morning until night; and it was only by secretly
+fomenting discord and divisions among the crew that the officers could
+sleep with any sense of security in their berths. As it was, a large
+section of them, with the Irishman at their head, had a project on hand
+for murdering their officers, and converting the ship into a whaling
+vessel. And even Salve, in moments of bitterness and indignation at the
+tyranny to which he was subjected by these men, whose lives were at the
+mercy of the crew, would sometimes entertain the thought of joining with
+the mutineers, who were restrained from carrying out their designs
+mainly by the fear which he had inspired, and by the refusal of his
+sanction. Many a desperate struggle with himself he went through when
+one of his tyrants passed him on deck in the dark, and the temptation to
+stick a knife into his back would rise strong within him, and almost
+master him. The other's life hung upon a hair, and Salve knew it; but
+that hair was stronger than he thought. Elizabeth's face, and the still
+unexhausted might of early impressions, made him always shrink from the
+thought of having a murder on his conscience, and to that depth he never
+fell, deteriorated though his character gradually became, from daily
+association with everything that was vile, to that degree that he lost
+all power of believing in the existence of good amongst his
+fellow-creatures, or in a higher Power.
+
+We need follow no further this dark period of his life. After a year and
+a half on board the Stars and Stripes, and many a wild scene of
+turbulence and riot, he brought his connection with her to a close at
+last at New Orleans, where the accumulation of his wages was handed over
+to him.
+
+The life on board the other vessels in which he afterwards served did
+not differ greatly from that which he had left; but he had become
+accustomed to it, and his sensibilities were blunted by long habit. It
+was not until some four years had thus passed that he again began to
+feel a longing for Europe--he would not acknowledge to himself that it
+was Norway exactly that he wanted to see again;--and after looking out
+then for some time for a suitable ship for the home voyage, he found
+himself at last with his Brazilian friend on board a large barque that
+was homeward bound from Curacoa, with tobacco and rum, for Rotterdam and
+Nieuwediep.
+
+Federigo had been his inseparable companion through all the vicissitudes
+of his southern life; the secret of his faithful attachment, as Salve
+suspected, being that the latter had saved money, which he had turned
+into gold pieces and kept in a belt round his waist. He had never, like
+Federigo, sought occasions to squander his pay on land in gambling or in
+other diversions. He hated women; and in the taverns which were
+frequented by sailors he was looked upon as a dangerous customer, to
+whom it was prudent to give as wide a berth as possible. Federigo, he
+fancied, looked upon him as his reserve cash-box; and when on one
+occasion, after they came into port, the Brazilian proposed that they
+should desert and put their money into some mines that were very
+favourably reported of just then, and share the profits, Salve remarked
+with perfect composure that he thought it highly probable that if they
+started upon any expedition of the kind, his friend, if he got him alone
+some fine night in a lonely place, would quietly stick his knife into
+him and make off with the whole. He therefore declined the proposition,
+but their relations nevertheless continued as friendly as before. Money
+was the only power, Salve reflected with bitterness, and this
+satisfaction at least he could now enjoy in life.
+
+It had become so obvious to him that Federigo's attachment was more to
+his money than to himself, that he determined to get rid of his irksome
+attentions. Accordingly, when they arrived at Nieuwediep, he made all
+his arrangements for leaving the vessel, legally this time, without
+saying a word to him of his intention; and Federigo only heard of it at
+the last moment when he met him coming up with his hammock clothes. He
+turned pale, and tears came into his eyes,--whether from a feeling of
+injured friendship, or from disappointment, Salve could not quite make
+out. The expression of his face, with his restless small black eyes,
+resembled that of a disturbed rat. At last he fell on Salve's neck in
+his impetuous way, and broke out--
+
+"But at any rate we must have one parting glass together this evening. I
+don't know how I shall ever do without you--it is so long now since we
+two have chummed together."
+
+Against his better reason Salve allowed himself to feel a little
+softened at the thought; and the remembrance of all the attachment this
+scoundrel had shown for him aroused something that almost resembled
+emotion.
+
+"It is no use, my friend," he replied; "what is done can't be undone.
+But I'll give you this evening, at all events. You'll find me waiting
+for you in the Aurora."
+
+As usual at this season of the year, there were a great many vessels in
+the harbour, and the Aurora tavern was full that evening of seafaring
+folk laughing and talking and singing, and renewing, or laying the
+foundations of, acquaintanceships over brandy or gin; while in the
+little room over the bar, dance music was going on uninterruptedly, and
+the boards were creaking under alternate Dutch schottische and English
+hornpipe.
+
+To properly appreciate a genuine sailors' reel or hornpipe, one should
+see it danced by men who for a whole year at a time have been battling
+with the waves and storms in every corner of the world, and who during
+all that time have hardly set eyes upon a female form. They come on
+shore bursting with a full masculine longing for the society of the
+other sex, with a year's stored-up feeling to let out; and there is a
+positive intoxication to them in the mere dance--in the mere holding at
+Nieuwediep Anniken or Bibecke, or at Portsmouth Mary Ann, by the waist;
+and Mary Ann and Bibecke perfectly understand this, and for the moment
+feel themselves persons of no small importance. There is no element of
+coarseness in the feeling. The sailor is more given to sentiment proper
+than perhaps any other class of men, and generally speaking a more
+romantic feeling for woman is cherished on board ship than anywhere else
+in the world. If we wish to find in these times quietly romantic
+enthusiasm, we must be the companion of the sailor on his lonely watch,
+or listen to him as he lies on the forecastle and talks with _naive_
+simplicity about his wife or his sweetheart--how their attachment came
+about, and what he means to buy for her when he gets into port. Love on
+board ship is a more naturally rich and varying theme than it is in the
+peasant's monotonous life; and being in love, by reason of separation
+from the object of his love, is a different thing to the sailor, a
+something more entirely of the heart and the imagination, which does not
+lose its ideal hue in the wear and tear of everyday use. A married
+sailor is always an object of quiet respect to his comrades who have not
+had means to take the same step themselves; and without exaggeration it
+may be said that woman is present in her truest sense in the midst of
+the often outwardly rough life on board ship--warm, loving, and
+venerated, and surrounded by all the enchantment which distance can
+supply. If we are tempted to think otherwise, we have not penetrated to
+the simple, childlike nature which underlies the sailor's rough
+exterior.
+
+The exteriors, indeed, in the dancing-room of the Aurora that evening
+were rough enough. Through the cloud of steam and tobacco-smoke, men of
+the most various physiognomies were to be seen, the majority tanned and
+bearded, with their hats on the back of their heads, and short clay
+pipes in their mouths, and all in the wildest state of enjoyment,
+dripping with perspiration and dancing indefatigably. There were French
+and Swedish sailors in their red woollen shirts, Norwegians and Danes in
+blue, with white canvas trousers, Yankees and English all in blue; and
+as they swung the gracefully dressed Dutch girls with their small white
+caps and little capes, and petticoats fastened up to do justice to the
+neat shoes and white stockings below, vying with each other who should
+dance the best and longest, the foundation of many a friendship or
+enmity was laid, to be prosecuted later on in the evening over a bottle
+of brandy or in a stand-up fight.
+
+Salve and Federigo were sitting over their gin in a side-room which
+opened into the dancing-room, and was filled with men talking and
+drinking, or with couples who came in to rest for a moment. Neither took
+part in the dancing. Salve was gloomy and out of tune for pleasure,
+although, for Federigo's sake, he made his humour as little apparent as
+possible. Federigo looked very disconsolate, and during the early part
+of the evening sat and sipped his glass abstractedly. But as the time
+wore on he kept filling Salve's glass unconsciously as it were, and
+getting apparently more and more drunk himself, until he several times
+spilt the contents of his own glass on the floor. He became very
+talkative, recalling incident after incident of their life together. "I
+shall never forget you," he cried, with open-hearted impulsiveness,
+"never!" And as he repeated the word, there was a gleam of suppressed
+feeling of some kind or other in his eye.
+
+Salve's attention was preoccupied at the moment. He had heard two voices
+speaking Norwegian by the window at his back, and it made his heart
+knock against his ribs--it was so long since he had heard his
+mother-tongue. They were two men belonging to timber ships, and one of
+them, very red and excited, was singing the praises of one of the girls
+in the other room.
+
+"Ah!" broke in the other, a Tonsberger, "you should have seen handsome
+Elizabeth in 'The Star' at Amsterdam. But she wasn't for such as you to
+dance with, my lad."
+
+Salve's interest was awakened at once. He listened with strained
+attention for what might come next.
+
+"And why not?" asked the other, a little on his dignity.
+
+"Well, in the first place, they don't dance there; and in the next, you
+would want to be a skipper at least to pay court in that quarter, mind
+you. I saw her in the spring of last year, when we were lying there with
+the Galatea; she was talking to the captain, for she's Norwegian--and a
+proud one she is, too; with hair like a crown of gold on her head, and
+so straight rigged that it makes a man nervous to come alongside her."
+
+Salve sat rapt in thought, and more absent than was polite to his friend
+for the rest of the evening. An idea that it might be Elizabeth had shot
+through him, and he could not divest himself of it, although the more he
+reflected the more certain he knew he ought to be that she had been
+married long ago to young Beck. His mind was in a ferment, and a wild
+longing now possessed him to get home to Arendal and find out for
+certain how matters actually stood.
+
+When the time came for breaking up, Federigo was drunk, and Salve was
+obliged to accompany his inconsolable friend in the darkness over the
+long narrow dam down by the dock, where there was water on both sides,
+Federigo clinging to his arm the whole way, and leaning heavily upon it.
+
+When they had reached the middle of the dam, Salve saw him make a sudden
+movement, and almost at the same moment he received a thrust in the
+region of the heart, of such force that he staggered two or three steps
+backwards. At the same time he heard Federigo say, in a voice trembling
+with vindictive passion--
+
+"Take that for Paolina, you hound!"
+
+The object of his cupidity, the belt of money, had saved Salve, who now
+felled him to the ground with a blow that sent him rolling over the
+embankment into the sea.
+
+"Help! help!" came up to him from the water.
+
+"You shall have it," replied Salve, derisively, "for our fine
+friendship's sake. Throw up your knife, though, first;" and he made a
+noose in his handkerchief then to reach down to him. "You and your owl
+of a sister," he muttered as he did so, "have taught me a thing or two.
+I should only have had exactly what I deserved if I had been both stuck
+and plundered, after being fool enough to put faith for one moment in
+you or any one else."
+
+"Now, up with you!"
+
+When he saw Federigo's form scrambling up over the edge, he said,
+scornfully, "Now then, at last we part. Good-bye, my old and faithful
+friend!"
+
+With that he went his way, and heard the Brazilian screaming and
+stamping with rage down on the dam behind him in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+An opportunity offered almost immediately for taking a passage home with
+the Tonsberger before alluded to, and Salve gladly availed himself of
+it, calculating upon being taken off by one of the pilot boats off the
+coast of Arendal.
+
+It was with a strange deep feeling that he once more trod the deck of a
+home vessel, and as he went about and listened to the people's talk,
+felt himself an object for their curiosity. The southern brown of his
+face, the foreign cut of his clothes, and his whole exterior, marked him
+as coming from a much higher condition of sailor life than any with
+which they were acquainted, and he passed for an Englishman or an
+American; for he purposely avoided being recognised by them as a
+countryman, and had made his agreement with the skipper in English.
+
+It was certainly a long time since he had been on board a craft so
+miserably found in every way as this leaky old galliot was. She had been
+bought by auction for a small sum at Faerder; and in shape resembled an
+old wooden shoe, in which her skipper venturesomely trudged across to
+Holland through the spring and winter storms, calculating that he and
+his crew could always lash themselves to something to avoid being washed
+overboard; that their timber cargo would keep them afloat; and that as
+long as the rigging held they could sail. He carried no
+top-gallant-mast, so as not to strain her; her sails were all in holes,
+as if they had been riddled with bullets; and where ropes had broken in
+the rigging, they had been tied in clumsy knots, instead of being
+spliced in proper sailor-like fashion. There was not much to boast of in
+the way of navigation either; the captain keeping his log by the simple
+method of spitting over the side, or throwing a chip of wood overboard,
+and making his calculations according to the pace it drifted past. The
+food, too, was on a par with all the rest, and the cook could be heard
+beating the dried fish with the back of an axe to make it tender. Salve
+seemed to have dropped all at once into home life and ways again.
+
+The crew were dressed in thick winter clothing, and had the appearance
+of navvies rather than of sailors, but they were all fearless,
+hardy-looking fellows, as most of the men who risk their lives on these
+timber vessels are; and what immediately struck him with a feeling of
+pleasure, was the honest expression which every countenance, without
+exception, wore. It was long since he had seen a sight of the kind, and
+he felt ashamed of himself for going about with his knife ready to hand,
+as had been his custom for so many years, and put it away in his chest
+the very first day. He took a pleasure in leaving his watch and money
+out on the top where they might easily have been taken, and was filled
+with surprise and admiration when he found that they were not stirred.
+
+He had not been able to get out of his head the idea that Elizabeth was
+now in Amsterdam, in spite of the almost certain feeling which he had
+that she had been long ago married to young Beck. His thoughts kept
+returning to, and dwelling upon, this subject, and he began to sound the
+skipper as to whether the trade with Holland was a paying one, and to
+post himself up generally in all particulars. Their conversation was
+carried on in a kind of jumble of English chiefly, and he gathered, at
+all events, that it was a lucrative business, and an occupation which
+seemed likely to suit him in every way. It was adventurous, and that was
+a recommendation; and a way of living at home in which he would be under
+nobody's orders but his own, fell in exactly with his nature. He had
+more than money enough to purchase some old craft or other, and--in
+fact, it was decided; he would be the owner of a timber ship, and ply to
+Holland.
+
+He began now to look out more impatiently than ever for land, and longed
+so to catch the first streak of the Norwegian coast above the horizon,
+as if it was something he hardly dared hope that he should live to see.
+He paced up and down for hours together, anathematising through his
+teeth the old tub with her slack sails and rolling motion--they seemed
+to be drifting, not sailing; and from the restlessness and impatience he
+exhibited, it began to be whispered among the crew that the Englishman
+must have a screw loose somewhere. When the dim outline of Lindesnaes
+became discernible at last in the far distance, there was not a
+palm-clad promontory in all the southern seas that could compare with
+it, he thought; and the pleasure he experienced was only dashed by the
+apprehension of what he might have to learn about Elizabeth on landing.
+
+They were hailed shortly after by a pilot boat from Arendal, and he
+arrived there after dark the same evening, and went to Madam Gjers's
+unpretending lodging-house until the morning.
+
+The following day was Sunday. And as he listened to the bells ringing,
+and watched the townspeople, great and small, going decorously up the
+street in their best clothes to church--most of them he recognised, and
+among them Elizabeth's old aunt going up by herself, with her psalm-book
+and her white folded handkerchief in her hand--an indescribable feeling
+came over him, and his eyes filled so that he could hardly see. Here
+passing before him were all the gentleness and the purity that he had
+once believed in, when his young faith had as yet received no shock, and
+when he was as joyous and credulous as the rest; and he could not resist
+the temptation of joining the stream, trusting to the alteration in his
+appearance to save him from recognition.
+
+Beside him, almost, there walked a respectable family--he knew well who
+they were--with a couple of handsome daughters, in light dresses, who
+had grown up since he last saw them, and a younger brother whom he did
+not remember. The foreign, black-bearded sailor, with his fine cloth
+clothes, and his patent gold watch-chain, seemed to excite their
+curiosity; while he on his side was thinking how they would fly from
+him, as if a wolf had suddenly appeared in their midst, if they had any
+conception of the life that he had been leading for years, half-a-day of
+which would have filled them with more horror than they had ever
+imagined. They would not understand it if it was described to them, and
+the description would be too foul for their ears. As he quietly followed
+the stream up the hill, it seemed as if all the sunny houses in his
+beautiful native town were crying out against him, and asking whether it
+was possible that a man from the Stars and Stripes could be permitted to
+go to church as well as other people; and on entering the building he
+had to summon up all his self-command--he had a feeling that he was
+violating the sanctity of the place.
+
+He took his seat in the last pew close to the door, and watched the
+people passing up the aisle. It was like a dream; they all seemed
+creatures of a purer world than his. The organ commenced to play, the
+singing was begun, and he leaned his head forward on his hands,
+completely overcome, and trying to conceal his sobs. In this position he
+remained during the greater part of the service, his past life coming
+up, scene by scene, before him. What a gulf he felt there was between
+the present condition of his mind and what it had been in the days when
+as a boy or lad he had gone to church like the rest. He had been
+familiar with more murder and blasphemy than the whole congregation
+together could conceive; and the simple faith he had once possessed he
+had been robbed of, he feared irrecoverably. His eyes flashed then with
+a sudden wildness as he thought who it was that had brought him to this;
+and it was with a deep hatred in his heart to one of the two at least,
+that he left the church. In a couple who were coming out at the same
+time, he recognised Captain Beck and his wife, and the sight added fuel
+to the flames. He hastened on; and was hardly to be recognised as the
+same man who had gone up the same way so quietly two hours before.
+
+He had meant to go over at once to Sandvigen to see his father, but he
+thought that before going it would be as well to find out for certain
+all about Elizabeth; and his landlady seemed as likely a person to be
+able to satisfy him as any one. He remembered well that sharp,
+bright-eyed little woman, and knew that she was a regular magpie for
+chatter, and for repeating the gossip of the town.
+
+At that time of the day on Sunday there were no other customers in the
+house, and while she was busying herself with preparations for his
+dinner, he asked casually if Captain Beck's son, the one in the navy,
+was married?
+
+"To be sure he is," she replied, surprised to hear him speak Norwegian.
+"He has been married for--let me see--about three years."
+
+She looked fixedly at him.
+
+"But who are you?" she asked; and then, as if the thought had suddenly
+flashed upon her, she said, "It's never Salve Kristiansen, who--" She
+stopped here, and Salve dryly finished the sentence for her--
+
+"Who deserted from Beck at Rio?--the same."
+
+Madam Gjers was agog with curiosity, and whispered, "I'll say
+nothing--you may trust me;" and waited eagerly then for further
+particulars which she might take the first opportunity of retailing.
+
+Salve assured her that he knew of old that a secret was always safe with
+her, and resumed then absently--
+
+"So the lieutenant is married?"
+
+"This long while," she replied. "The wedding was at the house of the
+bride's parents; and they are living now at Frederiksvaern."
+
+"Elizabeth had no parents," said Salve, rather impatiently.
+
+"Elizabeth?--oh! you mean the girl the Becks took to live with them.
+That is quite another story," she said, significantly. "No, the
+lieutenant's wife was Postmaster Forstberg's daughter. The other was
+just a passing fancy--the end of it was that she had to go to Holland,
+poor thing! It was said she had got a place there."
+
+"Do you know anything for certain of this?" asked Salve, severely, and
+with an earnestness that put the little madam out of countenance, and
+made her be careful of her words.
+
+"It was all done very secretly, that's true," she replied. "But she went
+away in the greatest possible hurry, and the affair was well enough
+known, more's the pity--known and forgotten now, one may say."
+
+"What was known?" asked Salve, catching her up, angrily. "Did you see
+her, Madam Gjers?"
+
+"Not I, indeed, nor no one else neither. The Becks were living out at
+Tromoe at the time; and there was just very good reason for--"
+
+"Then neither you nor any one else who wants to take away her character
+know a jot more about the business than what you have chosen to invent,"
+said Salve, fiercely and contemptuously; for although he had slain
+Elizabeth himself in his heart, he must still defend her against the
+attacks of others. He felt quite sick and faint.
+
+"I happen to know the rights of the case," he said, with a short laugh,
+looking her coldly and sharply in the face, "and--" he sprang up
+suddenly here, and striking the table violently with his fist--"and I
+don't taste another morsel in such a scandal-mongering house," he cried.
+"Do you understand, madam? Be good enough to take what is owing to you
+out of that," and flinging down a handful of silver on to the table, he
+sprang over it, and proceeded to drag his chest down-stairs himself.
+
+Madam Gjers exhausted herself in a flood of deprecation, the gist of
+which was that she had only said and believed what she had heard from
+every creature in the town; but Salve was unappeasable, and slinging his
+chest over his back with a rope, he went down with it to the quay, with
+the intention of chartering a boat to take him over to his father. For
+the present, however, he remained sitting upon the chest, gazing out
+abstractedly over the harbour.
+
+The result of his reflections was that he gave up his idea of plying to
+Holland.
+
+He took a boat to Sandvigen, but while they were on the way, he suddenly
+made the boatman change his course, and put in to the slip on the other
+side of the harbour. He must talk to Elizabeth's aunt. There was
+something in his mind all the time that wouldn't let him altogether
+believe the worst.
+
+When he went in to the old woman, she recognised him at once.
+
+"How do you do, Salve?" she said, quite calmly. "You have been a long
+while away--half a century almost."
+
+She offered him a chair, but he remained standing, and asked abruptly--
+
+"Is it true that Elizabeth--left Beck's like that--and went to Holland?"
+
+"How do you mean like that?" she asked, sharply, while her face flushed
+slightly.
+
+"As people say," replied Salve, with bitter emphasis.
+
+"When people say it, a fool like you of course must believe it," she
+rejoined, derisively. "I don't understand why you want to come here to
+her old aunt for information when it seems you have so many other
+confidants about the town. But anyhow, she can tell you something
+different from them, my lad; and she wouldn't do it, if it wasn't that
+she knew the girl still loved you in spite of all the years you have
+been away, gadding about, God knows where, in the world. It's true
+enough she left Beck's one night and came here in the morning; but it
+was just for your sake, and no one else's, that she might get quit of
+the lieutenant. It was Madam Beck herself that got her a place in
+Holland, because she didn't want to have her for a daughter-in-law."
+
+A wild gleam of joy broke over Salve's features for a moment, but they
+relapsed almost immediately into gloom.
+
+"Was she not engaged to Carl Beck, then?" he asked.
+
+"Yes and no," replied the old woman, cautiously, not wishing to depart a
+hair's-breadth from the truth. "She allowed herself to be betrayed into
+saying 'yes,' but fled from the house because she didn't want to have
+him. She told me, with tears in her eyes, that she repented having said
+'no' to you."
+
+"So that was the way of it," he rejoined sarcastically. "The 'yes' and
+'no' meant that the Becks wouldn't have her for a daughter-in-law, and
+bundled her out of the house over to Holland; and you want me to believe
+it was for my sake she went. God knows," he added, sadly, and shaking
+his head slowly, "I would willingly believe it--more willingly than I
+can say; but I can't, Mother Kirstine. You are her aunt, and want of
+course to--"
+
+"I'm afraid it is your misfortune, Salve," she broke in severely, "not
+to have it in your power to believe thoroughly in any one creature upon
+this earth; you'll be always doubting, always listening to folks' talk.
+With the thoughts you have now in your mind, you have at any rate no
+business any longer inside my door. But there is one thing I'll ask of
+you," she said, with a look of mildly impressive earnestness in her
+strong, clever face. "I know Elizabeth's nature well, and don't you
+attempt to approach her or try to win her as long as you have a trace of
+those doubts about her in your heart--it would only bring unhappiness to
+both of you."
+
+He looked dejected; and as he said good-bye to her, offered to take her
+hand. But she would not give it to him, and merely added instead--
+
+"Remember that it is an old woman who has seen a good deal in the world
+who tells you this."
+
+He went away then; and while he was being rowed across to Sandvigen he
+changed his mind again, and determined that his plan of plying to
+Holland should be carried out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+Skipper Garvloit, into whose family Elizabeth had come, occupied one of
+the many-storeyed houses, with green window-shutters, narrow
+entrance-doors, and polished brass knockers, after the usual Dutch
+fashion, in the lively street leading down to the dock in Amsterdam,
+with the canal on the other side, with its various bridges, and vessels
+and barges of all kinds unlading, running up from it into the heart of
+the town.
+
+Madam Garvloit had four young children, and was not very strong, so that
+Elizabeth's robust, healthy nature had been a perfect godsend to her in
+the house, and she was content to overlook her occasional shortcomings
+of manner or temper in consideration of the assistance which she
+rendered in every department of the housekeeping.
+
+Elizabeth had always had a pretty strong will of her own; and here,
+where she virtually had the control of everything, her tendency to
+self-assertion had been considerably developed. The force and decision
+with which she gave her opinion about everything seemed to Madam
+Garvloit sometimes (although she said nothing) rather like a reversing
+of their relative positions; and on days when she was in a captious
+humour--and those were her days of most feverish activity--she would
+even go so far as to set aside her mistress's orders altogether. In a
+general way her moods were very uncertain: one day she would be in
+tearing spirits, racing up and down the stairs with the children, as if
+she had been inhaling the wild air of Torungen again; and another she
+would be so pensive and taciturn that they thought she must be pining
+after home.
+
+She had many admirers, both among young and old, her gay moods
+attracting the former, and her serious ones the latter. Among the former
+were two young gentlemen acquaintances of the house, relatives of
+Garvloit--one a smart young clerk from one of the larger counting-houses
+in the town, who rather affected the gentleman; and the other a
+light-haired, pink-complexioned, skipper's son from Vlieland. They both
+came regularly every Sunday, were frantically jealous of one another,
+tried to outbid each other whenever an opportunity offered, and were
+both fully convinced that they sighed in vain. She was so different,
+they felt, from the other specimens of femininity of their acquaintance
+to whom their weak attentions had sometimes proved acceptable. There was
+something almost imperious in Elizabeth's manner at times that made them
+feel quite small beside her; and however careless she might be of the
+_convenances_ in her way of speaking to them, they had very soon found
+that wherever she chose to draw the line, so far could they go and no
+farther.
+
+Madame Garvloit would take her to task sometimes for the scant courtesy
+with which she treated the young clerk. Elizabeth would answer that he
+bored her; and Madame Garvloit would insist that a young girl ought to
+have tact enough not to make this evident. Elizabeth, however, was not
+deficient in tact, but disliked putting a restraint upon her feelings;
+and it seemed to her on the whole unreasonable that a person should
+pretend that a thing was pleasant when in reality it was wearisome.
+
+During the second autumn of her service with the Garvloits, the skipper,
+on his return from a trip to Norway, brought the intelligence that
+Lieutenant Beck was engaged to Postmaster Forstberg's daughter in
+Arendal, and he had many messages for Elizabeth from the latter. They
+were to be married in the spring.
+
+Elizabeth was overjoyed to hear it, for the thought had often weighed
+heavily on her mind that Carl Beck might be making himself miserable on
+her account. She judged so from her own feeling for Salve: and as she
+sat alone by her window at bedtime that night, gazing out over the canal
+and the shipping in the calm moonlight, the quiet afterglow of a holiday
+evening seemed to have shed itself over her thoughts. She knew from her
+friend's message that she was ignorant of what had passed between
+herself and Carl Beck; and although it was a relief to think that he had
+not taken his disappointment more to heart, the smile that played about
+her lips for a moment showed at the same time that his love had been
+duly appraised. As the shadow, then, of the window-frame in the
+moonlight, crept slowly over the wall above her bed, her thoughts glided
+off in the direction they loved best to take--over the world and far
+away to Salve.
+
+She sat with her heavy hair falling loose over her well-shaped
+shoulders, and her face grew more and more sorrowful in its absent
+expression, and would twitch occasionally with pain. The bitter thought
+would recur that it was she who was the cause of Salve's going out into
+the world and becoming a desperate man. The thought haunted her; and
+yet, much as she wished to free herself from it, she found a pleasure in
+dwelling on it. She saw him, in fancy, miserable and proud, with his
+pale face and keen, clever eyes fixed upon her in hatred, as the cause
+of his unhappiness, and then the idea occurred to her to put on sailor's
+clothes and go and seek him out in the world. But if she were to find
+him, she knew, on the other hand, that for very shame she dared not show
+herself before him, having as good as belonged to another; and she would
+not for all the world read her hard dismissal in his eye. She laid her
+head upon her arms on the window-sill and sobbed convulsively, until at
+length she dropped off to sleep where she sat.
+
+She had been three years in the Garvloits' house when Garvloit had the
+misfortune to run his vessel aground out near Amland, where she became a
+wreck. He lost with her nearly all he had in the world, and what was
+worse, all prospect of livelihood for the future as skipper.
+
+An uncomfortable feeling prevailed now in the house, and Elizabeth saw
+with regret that she would have to leave. Garvloit, who in figure
+resembled some thick, short-legged animal of the sea, a seal or walrus
+come on land, had become perceptibly reduced in flesh, and went about
+all day long in his shirtsleeves, fanning himself with a large silk
+pocket-handkerchief. On one particular afternoon it was observed that he
+indulged in this exercise with more than his usual vigour and
+restlessness; and it was not without cause. He had had an inspiration.
+If he could no longer follow his old trade, he would try a new one; he
+would set up a house of entertainment for sailors. His house being so
+close to the dock, could not be more favourably situated for the
+purpose, and they had ample accommodation. On the ground floor they
+could have a room for common sailors, and on the floor above they had
+one where captains and mates could be served.
+
+He said nothing about it, however, to any one until the scheme had been
+fully matured; and then all of a sudden one day he came into the room
+where his wife was, with a bundle of printed placards and a large board
+in his hand.
+
+"Good gracious, Garvloit, what is that?" she cried.
+
+He turned the board round with an important air, and without saying a
+word. Upon it there stood in large gilt letters, "The Star."
+
+"This is our new means of earning our bread, wife," he said. "Next month
+this sign hangs over our door, and these bills are to post on the walls,
+and distribute among the ships down in the harbour. Garvloit is not on
+his beam-ends yet," he concluded, with self-conscious satisfaction; and
+proceeded then to explain how he intended to be landlord himself, and
+how Elizabeth was to help him in the management of the whole.
+
+Madam Garvloit only made one slight objection--
+
+"You know that you can't drink ale, my friend."
+
+Another objection, namely, what they would say at home in Norway when
+they heard that her husband had sunk into a mere tavern-keeper, she very
+wisely kept to herself. The important point was that they should find a
+way of living, and they had at all events the great consolation that now
+they would be able to keep Elizabeth. What feeling of pride still
+remained she got rid of in telling Elizabeth that at home they knew
+nothing of millionaires in wooden shoes such as were to be found in
+Holland; and her husband found her much more keen for his project than
+he had expected. Being accustomed to place great reliance upon her
+stronger understanding, he would not have been happy if she had been
+against the plan.
+
+Thus it came about, then, that in the crowded street by the canal one
+Monday morning there appeared over one of the entrance-doors a
+sign-board with "The Star," in letters of gold on a blue ground. It was
+set up at a fortunate time and in a fortunate place, and almost as soon
+as the house was opened, customers from the vessels in the harbour began
+to gather in, both into the down-stairs and up-stairs rooms, so that
+there was a prospect of a steadily increasing traffic. Garvloit
+generally presided himself in the bar behind the counter, at the lower
+end of which there stood an array of stone mugs with tin lids; while in
+a recess of the wall there stuck out from beside canisters of tobacco,
+long and short Dutch clay pipes, a new one filled being handed to every
+customer, with whatever drink he ordered. Out of sight under the counter
+where the stone mugs stood was the ale-barrel, with its bright tap over
+a vessel that caught the drip; and after the same cleanly Dutch fashion,
+spittoons filled with sand stood in every corner of the room. The
+shelves above were filled in rows with a regular apothecary's shop of
+bottles and jars of spirits, and among them a goodly array of
+securely-fastened, dark-green flasks of Dutch hollands.
+
+Elizabeth had as housekeeper quite as much as she could do, and did not
+directly busy herself with waiting, unless there was something
+particular required to be done for the up-stairs customers.
+Occasionally, however, she would come into the bar also, on some errand
+or another, or to make sure that nothing was wanted; and the fame of
+handsome Elizabeth of "The Star" contributed not a little to bring
+custom to the house.
+
+Such Norwegians as came to Amsterdam with timber--the majority unloaded
+their cargoes up at Puermurende or Alkmar--invariably patronised "The
+Star." Elizabeth used to talk to them as countrymen of her own; and if
+she heard that any of them had been across the Atlantic, she would
+quietly, and as if quite casually, ask if perchance they had come across
+or had heard anything of a sailor of her acquaintance called Salve
+Kristiansen who hailed from Arendal. No one had ever heard of him, and
+she had begun to fear that he might be lost to her for ever.
+
+One forenoon, however, when she had a great deal to do in the house, she
+was passing quickly through the room up-stairs, and there sat at one of
+the small tables, with an untouched mug of ale before him, a bearded man
+in a blue pea-jacket. In her hurry she had set him down as some mate or
+captain; but there must have been something about him that attracted her
+attention, for she turned again at the door for an instant, and looked
+at him before she went out. He was so pale--and he had sent her one
+look.
+
+As she stood outside the door she knew it was Salve, although she had
+always pictured him to herself as a common sailor. She stood there
+trembling all over, and fumbling with the latch of the door in the
+greatest agitation, evidently debating with herself whether she should
+dare go in again. She pressed upon the latch, in the certainty that it
+would go up before she had actually decided that she would go in; and it
+did so. The door opened again of itself, and Elizabeth entered with
+downcast eyes, and scarlet in the face, and passed through the room,
+making a slight inclination of her head, as if for greeting, as she
+passed him. She had reached the opposite door when she heard a quiet
+bitter laugh behind her.
+
+At once she turned, with pride in every feature of her face, and looked
+at him.
+
+"How do you do, Salve Kristiansen?" she said, firmly and quietly.
+
+"How do you do, Elizabeth?" he replied, rather huskily, getting up and
+looking confused.
+
+"Are you lying here in Amsterdam with some vessel?"
+
+He sat down again, for there was something in her manner that denied
+approach.
+
+"No; in Puermurende," he replied. "I only came in here to--"
+
+"You are in the timber line, then, now?"
+
+"Yes--Elizabeth," he ventured to add, in another tone, which had a whole
+volume of meaning in it. But she took her leave of him now in the same
+proud manner, and left the room.
+
+Salve sat for a while with compressed lips, looking down upon the table
+before him. When she turned round the first time at the door, something
+told him that she would come in again; but he had expected quite a
+different kind of scene. A good deal of the tyrant had been developed in
+him since they had last met; and when she had come in so quietly and so
+humbly, with the acknowledgment of the great wrong she had done him
+written upon her face, he felt himself at once, with a certain bitter
+and devouring pleasure, upon the judgment-seat. He must first see her
+crushed before him; then he would have forgiven her, and loved her with
+all the passion of his soul.
+
+But as she stood there by the door, looking so grand in her pride, and
+so pale with repressed mortification, and spoke so calmly, he had felt
+that in that moment he had been separated farther from her than ever he
+had been in all his wanderings at the other side of the globe.
+
+He sat there with his mind in a chaotic state of desperation and sorrow,
+and of anger with himself. What a grand creature she was! and he--how
+pitiful and petty! He set down the mug, which he had been absently
+toying with, hard on the table, and went out.
+
+For a long while he wandered about the quays in a state of gloomy
+indecision, stopping every now and then to run his eye over the
+shipping, and his expression becoming darker still every time he did so.
+From long practice he could tell by the appearance of every vessel what
+trade it was engaged in. One was a coffee ship from Java; the next
+carried general cargo to all parts of the world; there was another that
+brought sugar and rum from the West Indies; and a fourth, that from its
+square build and breadth of beam must be a whaler returned from
+Spitzbergen. He thought of their long voyages, and of the life without
+root or tie that was passed on board them--was he to go back to that
+life again? It depended on Elizabeth; and he had not much hope.
+
+To his impatient nature delay was intolerable; and he had half made up
+his mind to have his fate decided at once. In spite of his agitation,
+however, he could still think with coolness; and he knew that if he was
+to have any chance at all, he must wait until the first unfortunate
+impression had had time to pass off.
+
+It had been a grey, foggy autumn day, but was now clearing, and blue
+patches of sky were coming out; and as he crossed the bridge the
+afternoon sun shone out, and sent a ray of glittering light against the
+window-panes of the street along the canal. Up in Garvloit's house
+Elizabeth was standing at the open window--she, too, that day had needed
+to be alone with her thoughts. Salve saw her, and stood still for a
+moment contemplating her as she leant out over the window ledge.
+
+"That dear head shall be mine," he burst out then passionately, and
+without knowing it, aloud; and the next moment he was at Garvloit's
+door.
+
+Elizabeth heard the door of the room open behind her; and when she saw
+Salve unexpectedly standing before her, she sank down for a moment on to
+a chair, but got up the next with a scared look, almost as if he was
+some hostile apparition.
+
+"Elizabeth!" he said, gently, "are you going to send me out again into
+the world? God only knows how I shall come back if you do."
+
+She did not answer, but stood looking at him with a rigid expression,
+and pale as death; she seemed to have forgotten to breathe, and to be
+only waiting for him to say more.
+
+"Be my wife, Elizabeth," he asked, "and I shall grow up into a good man
+again. What a pitiful creature I have been without you, you have already
+seen sufficiently this morning."
+
+"God be my witness, Salve," she answered, the tears bursting into her
+eyes with emotion which she tried to control, "you alone have always had
+my heart--but I must first know in perfect truth what you think of me."
+
+"The same as I think of God's angels, Elizabeth," he said from his
+heart, and tried to take her hand.
+
+"Do you know that I--was once very nearly engaged to young Beck?" she
+asked, reddening, but with a steady look. "I didn't know my real self
+then, but was thinking only of folly and nonsense, until I was obliged
+to fly from it all."
+
+"Your aunt has told me all about it, Elizabeth. Don't let us mention the
+subject again."
+
+"And you haven't a doubt about me in your heart? For that I never will
+bear, Salve, like to-day,--I can't bear it, do you understand?" she
+said, with a shake in her voice, and looking as it were down into his
+very soul.
+
+"Doubt!" he said; and for that moment, at all events, he was evidently
+convinced that she had never given her real heart to any one but
+himself.
+
+A look of inexpressible happiness came into her face; he caught her into
+his arms, and they stood as if they never would let go of each other
+again, cheek to cheek, not speaking, not thinking even. There was
+something convulsive in their embrace, as if they could not believe in
+the reality of their happiness, and as if they felt an instinctive dread
+that they should lose it again.
+
+Unobserved by either of them the door had opened, and in the doorway
+stood pursy Garvloit, gazing in helpless bewilderment at the scene
+before him. At last Elizabeth caught sight of him, and--not with any
+confusion, but only eager to communicate her happiness--exclaimed--
+
+"It is my lover--"
+
+"Your lover!" and he fell back a step, as if he did not know what he was
+doing.
+
+"My name is Salve Kristiansen, master of the Apollo," added Salve,
+without letting her go, and feeling everything around him infinitely
+small at that moment.
+
+Garvloit turned round and shouted several times from the top of the
+stairs, raising his voice at each repetition, "Andrea! Andrea!" to his
+wife; and as she did not come immediately, he stumbled as fast as his
+corpulence would allow him down the stairs, pausing, however, with a
+vacant look upon the last step.
+
+Madam Garvloit came out with her work in her hand, and asked what the
+matter was.
+
+"The matter is," replied her husband, dismally, "that I am ruined. There
+is Elizabeth up there sitting with some skipper, God knows whom, who she
+says is her lover."
+
+"Is it possible?"
+
+"Go and see for yourself;" and as his wife hurried past him up the
+stairs, he added in the same dismal tone--"Who shall we get to look
+after the house now? we shall never have another like her;" and he
+sighed profoundly.
+
+When Madam Garvloit appeared at the door, Elizabeth finished her
+interrupted explanation.
+
+"I have known him ever since I was a little girl," she said.
+
+It was at once evident to her mistress that there must be a romantic
+story here; but though brimming over with curiosity, she deferred her
+questions until a more convenient season. In the meantime she manifested
+the most lively sympathy; and after winning Salve's heart by telling him
+what a treasure Elizabeth had been to her, she begged that as long as he
+remained in Amsterdam he would come in and out of the house as he
+pleased.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+When Madam Garvloit had made some excuse next morning to leave the two
+alone together in her sitting-room, Salve took out of his pocket a small
+parcel, and opening it deliberately, said, with a certain solemnity--
+
+"Five years ago, Elizabeth, when I was in Boston, I bought these rings."
+He took them out of the paper, and laid them in her hand. "I have had a
+good deal to bear since, but you see I have kept them all along
+notwithstanding."
+
+She threw her arms round his neck, hid her face upon his breast, and he
+could feel that she was crying. She tried them on then, both on the same
+finger, and holding up the hand to show him, said--
+
+"That is the first ring I ever possessed."
+
+A shadow passed across his face, and it flushed slightly; and she only
+then perceived what connection of ideas her remark might have suggested.
+
+He had three days to spare before he was obliged to be back at
+Puermurende on board the old brig of which he was now master, and with
+which, patched and leaky though she was, after his sailor's pride had
+been overcome, he had grown to be well satisfied enough--more
+particularly, perhaps, because she was his own. The happiness of these
+days was not marred by a single further incident to remind him of the
+past; and it was only on the day that he was to leave that the foul
+fiend Distrust was again awakened in his unlucky heart.
+
+It was a Sunday, and after the morning service there was to be a sort of
+popular _fete_ in Amsterdam. At the famous town-hall, where, in
+Holland's great days, when De Ruyter's and Van Tromp's guns were
+thundering in the sea outside, the great merchant princes used to sit
+round the republican council-board, was to be exhibited that day, for
+the first time, the new picture of the young Dutch hero, Van Spyck, who
+blew up his ship in the war of 1830 against Belgium.
+
+Salve and Elizabeth joined the stream, and even caught some of the
+national enthusiasm prevailing in the crowd that was swaying backwards
+and forwards in the courtyard, where a band was playing the stirring
+national air, "Wien Neerlands bloed door de aders vloeit."
+
+At last they found themselves before the canvas. It represented the
+young cadet of seventeen years on the gunboat at the supreme moment.
+
+Elizabeth stood with her hands clasped before her silently engrossed,
+while Salve kept her from being pressed upon behind.
+
+"Look!" she said, turning half round to him, but without taking her eyes
+off the picture,--"the Belgian captain is inviting him to surrender. He
+has no choice--they are too many for him. But don't you see the thought
+he has in his mind?--you can read it in his face. And what a fine
+fellow he looks, with his handsome uniform, and his epaulets, and his
+short sword!" she said, in a lower tone, with a revival of her old
+childish enthusiasm for that kind of show.
+
+Her last words were like a dagger's thrust to Salve. She still had a
+hankering, then, for all this, and he stood behind her pale with
+suppressed feeling, while she continued to gaze at the picture and think
+aloud to him.
+
+"Poor, handsome lad! But he never will surrender--one can easily see
+that; and so he must go down," she said, in a subdued voice,
+involuntarily folding her hands, as if in fancy she went with him; "and
+he blows up Belgian and all into the air, Salve," she said, turning to
+him with a fine spirited look in her face, and with moistened eyes.
+
+He made no reply; and supposing that, like herself, he was lost in the
+scene before them, she turned again to the picture. But while, after
+giving vent to her feelings, she stood there with a smile on her face,
+thinking that she knew one who would have been quite as capable as Van
+Spyck of such an exploit--the man, namely, who was then standing behind
+her--to him the picture had become a hateful thing; and he could have
+shot Van Spyck through the heart for his uniform's sake.
+
+The whole of the way home he was silent and serious, and it was not
+until late in the afternoon that he at all recovered his spirits.
+
+As this was to be his last trip for the year, the following spring was
+fixed for their marriage; and when he took his leave, it was with the
+gloomy presentiment that he had a dreary winter before him.
+
+Certainly, for the development of a morbid state of mind, no conditions
+could have been more favourable than the enforced inactivity to which,
+with many another, he was condemned for the long dark months during
+which the ice put a stop to navigation. To his restless, energetic
+nature, such prolonged inaction was little suited under any
+circumstances, and in his present condition of mind it was little less
+than disastrous.
+
+"If she was only here!" he would sometimes inwardly exclaim, as if
+crying out for help against himself and the thoughts which he felt to be
+unworthy, but which nevertheless he could not shake off.
+
+He often thought of writing to her, but was so afraid of saying
+something which he might afterwards regret, that he kept putting it off
+from time to time, until at last he could restrain himself no longer.
+
+His letter ran as follows:--
+
+
+"To much esteemed Miss Elizabeth Raklev--
+
+"As concerning the Apollo, she lies in a row of other ships up in Selvig
+Sound, and the ice is about a foot thick, and will be late in breaking
+up this year, they all prophesy: she is well looked after, and has a
+watchman on board, and storage room has been taken for her rigging in
+Pettersen's rigging-loft. But as touching her captain, to whom you said
+in Amsterdam you had given your full and first heart so firmly that it
+couldn't be moved by any might or power in the world whatsoever--he has
+thought much and often about this, and would like to hold out and see
+you again before all his shore cable is chafed away. It seems as if it
+was holding by its last threads, and these half-scraped through. But if
+I could see you, it would become so strong again that it could hold
+against any stream; and you must forgive me for my weakness when you
+think of those five years; but I won't say that it is your fault,
+neither make myself out better than I am, for I have confidence in you,
+Elizabeth, if I have not the same reliance upon myself, and I can't help
+it if I haven't. When you read this letter, Elizabeth, you must remember
+the poor sailor who is frozen up here, and not forget it afterwards till
+we meet again, which I would give half my life-blood or more for, if it
+was any use, as I am consuming away with impatience up here--I have such
+a longing to see you again. And now, farewell from my heart, and God
+bless you. I will trust you and hope in you till my last hour, come what
+may. Farewell, my dearest girl, with fond love from
+
+                                             "SALVE KRISTIANSEN."
+
+
+This letter cost Elizabeth many a tear. She sat over it in the evenings
+before she went to bed, and felt so poignantly that it was she who had
+brought him to this--that he could not trust her; for she understood but
+too well what lay between the lines. "If I could only be with him," she
+thought, and she longed to be able to send him an answer; but she had
+never learnt properly how to write or to compose a letter.
+
+With some difficulty, however, and after several ineffectual attempts,
+she managed to put two lines together which she remembered from the
+Catechism:--
+
+
+"To my lover Salve Kristiansen--
+
+"You shall put your trust in God, and after Him, in me before all
+others, who careth for you in all things, and have faith in me. That is
+the truth from your ever-unforgetting
+                                            "ELIZABETH RAKLEV.
+And in the spring,
+                                       "ELIZABETH KRISTIANSEN."
+
+
+She folded the letter, and got one of Garvloit's sons to write the
+address; but, that it might be certain to go, she went with it herself
+to the post-office.
+
+Salve received it one day with great surprise. He guessed from whom it
+came, and delayed opening it in the fear that it might contain a
+breaking off of their engagement occasioned by his own letter: he
+remembered that first morning in Amsterdam. What was his joy, then, when
+he found what the contents actually were; he seemed to have the thing
+now in black-and-white. He put the letter carefully back into his
+pocket-book every time after reading it, and for a while was quite
+another man. Still, it was high time that the ice should begin to break
+up, and that he should find occupation for his thoughts in work; he had
+begun to be afraid to be alone with them.
+
+His first voyage was to Puermurende, and thence to Amsterdam; and they
+determined to be married there and then, although he had but four days
+to stay while the brig was loading in Puermurende. Out of consideration
+for the Garvloits, whom they wished to spare the expense of the wedding
+as much as possible, they insisted that they would be married on the day
+they were to leave for Puermurende.
+
+The morning on which the wedding took place, Garvloit's house put forth
+all its splendour. Dress suits from former days of better circumstances
+were brought out from old boxes for the occasion; and Madam Garvloit
+appeared in a green-silk dress of stiff brocade, with a massive brooch,
+and a huge gilt comb that shone over her forehead like a piece of a
+crown. Garvloit, too, did his best; but his utmost endeavour had only
+availed to adapt one article of his grandfather's state dress to his
+corpulent person--a gold-laced waistcoat namely, which was much too long
+for him, and which appeared to occasion him extreme discomfort in the
+region of the buttons.
+
+A couple of old friends of the family and the children went with the
+pair to church, and also the skipper's son from Vlieland, over whose
+round soft cheeks there trickled a regretful tear or two as the bride,
+with her myrtle wreath and long white veil, was led up to the altar by
+Garvloit. Elizabeth wore that day a pair of particularly handsome shoes
+with silver buckles, which Salve, with glad surprise, recognised as the
+ones he had presented to her many years before.
+
+There was an entertainment provided by Madam Garvloit when they returned
+from church, which was not a very lively affair, the Garvloits not being
+in spirits at the prospect of losing Elizabeth, and she, notwithstanding
+all her present happiness, being really sorry to go.
+
+A couple of hours after, they were on their way to Puermurende, and later
+on in the mellow evening, were standing together on the deck of the
+Apollo, as she was being towed up the wide canal. The bells were ringing
+out from Alkmar as they passed--ringing a sweet old chime of other days;
+and as they stood together by the ship's side, silently listening to the
+changing tones from the tower as they mingled in the air above them,
+they pleased themselves with the thought that it was their wedding
+chime.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+In a small house at Tonsberg, at the entrance to the beautiful
+Christiana fjord, the first summer of their married life passed without
+a cloud upon its sky. The house and all about it, with its flowers in
+each window, were a model of neatness and Dutch polish; and with
+Elizabeth herself as a centre to it all, it was no wonder that Salve's
+crew found him indifferent to all weathers when it was a question of
+getting home.
+
+The charming young skipper's wife, however, during her husband's
+frequent absences, had attracted the notice of some of the leading
+families of the town, and had come presently to be if not exactly on
+intimate terms, at all events on a footing of acquaintanceship with many
+of them; and Salve's enjoyment of his home ceased then to be so
+perfectly unalloyed.
+
+When Elizabeth recounted to him the flattering proofs of appreciation
+which she received, he listened in silence; and her social successes,
+instead of giving him pleasure, had a precisely opposite effect. He
+would not for the world have said a word to express his dislike of her
+making such acquaintances; and he even, when they went to church
+together on Sundays, liked her to be as well-dressed as any of these
+fine friends who now seemed to share his wife with him. But if he said
+nothing, and was even angry with himself for thinking about the subject,
+still he did think about it, and with increasing irritation. He could
+not get the idea out of his head that Elizabeth must now be always
+contrasting him unfavourably with these people; and as he paced the deck
+of his brig alone out at sea, he would picture them to himself as
+constantly in his house, and always talking on the subject which he
+could least endure--the sacrifice which Elizabeth must have made to
+become his wife.
+
+When their son Gjert was born in the spring following their marriage, he
+had been sitting by Elizabeth's bedside unable to tear himself away from
+her and the cradle, until a small present arrived from one of her
+friends in the town, who with others had often sent to inquire after
+her, when he got up and went straight out of the house and paced
+backwards and forwards with his hands behind his back outside, as she
+could see through the window, thoroughly out of humour, though when he
+came in again he was even more affectionate and attentive to her than
+before.
+
+As she never for a moment imagined that he could think her deep love for
+him could be in any way affected by the slight surface interest which
+her new acquaintances afforded her, she looked upon his jealousy of
+them, of which she had had indications often enough before, as a
+weakness merely to which he ought to have been superior; and as he said
+nothing himself on the subject, she also let it pass without comment on
+her side, but determined at the same time that she would see less of
+them in future, at all events while he was at home.
+
+It happened however, unluckily, some weeks afterwards, that she had just
+been talking to some of them when he returned from an expedition to
+Notteroe to hire a crew for his next voyage to Amsterdam, on which she
+was to accompany him. "Herr Jurgensen and his wife," she said, "had just
+passed, and she had been talking to them; they were to start for
+Frederiksvoern on the following day."
+
+"And fancy!" she went on with animation, "Fru Jurgensen knows Marie
+Forstberg. So I asked her to remember me to her."
+
+"Marie Forstberg?--who is she?" asked Salve.
+
+"She who was so kind to me,"--she stopped here, and the colour came and
+went in her face as she continued--"it was she who married--Beck's
+son--the lieutenant."
+
+"You ought to have asked Fru Jurgensen to remember me to Beck then at
+the same time," he said, cuttingly, and went past her into the house
+without looking her in the face.
+
+Elizabeth followed him, feeling very uncomfortable, and after standing
+for a moment in indecision, went over to him, and sitting down on his
+knee, put her arm round his neck, saying--
+
+"You are not angry with me, are you? I didn't think you would mind, or I
+wouldn't have done it."
+
+"Oh! it's quite immaterial to me, of course, who you send your love to."
+
+"She was my best friend when I was--in Arendal," Elizabeth said,
+avoiding the mention of Beck's name again.
+
+"I don't doubt you are on the best possible terms with all these
+people," Salve said, impatiently, and making a movement as if he would
+get up from his seat.
+
+It was Elizabeth who rose first.
+
+"Salve!" she exclaimed, and was about to add more, when he pulled her
+down to him again, and said in a gentle tone of remorse--
+
+"Forgive me, Elizabeth. I didn't mean what I said. But I do so hate
+hearing you talk of these people."
+
+Elizabeth burst into tears, protesting against his want of confidence in
+her; and Salve, now thoroughly distressed at the result of his want of
+self-control, overwhelmed her with tenderness in his endeavours to
+appease her. He succeeded after a while, and the evening was passed in
+such sunshine as only succeeds to storm.
+
+After a quarrel of the kind, however, there must be always something
+left behind, and though Salve was doubly affectionate for many days,
+afterwards he grew more and more silent, and presently even irritable
+and moody, and would not go to church on any of the succeeding Sundays
+while he remained at home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Elizabeth carried out her intention of accompanying him to Amsterdam,
+where she paid a visit of several days to the Garvloits, and the
+pleasure of the trip was only alloyed for her by the change which had
+come over Salve's manner, and to which she had now to try and accustom
+herself as one does to a less brilliant light after having seen the sun.
+
+They were on their way home again, sailing before a light breeze, and
+under a soft blue sky, out of the busy, shallow Zuyder Zee. Elizabeth
+was sitting on deck with little Gjert, blooming as a rose, and asking
+animated questions of the pilot, whom they had been compelled to take on
+board, about the various flat sandy islands and towns which came in
+sight from time to time, Salve occasionally stopping in his walk to
+listen.
+
+By Terschelling the channel from the Zuyder Zee to the North Sea is
+marked out like a narrow strait with black and red buoys; and even in
+that calm weather there were foaming breakers the whole way close to the
+ship on either side. "What must it be like," Elizabeth asked, in a sort
+of terror, "in a storm, when the whole sea was driving in?"
+
+"That is a sight it's better not to see," replied the pilot.
+
+"But you have to be out, storm or not, pilot?"
+
+"It is my way of getting a living," he answered, shortly.
+
+Salve stood and listened, as the conversation took this turn.
+
+"We have pilots in Norway, too," she said, "who don't mind a wet jacket
+either. It is a fine life!"
+
+The Dutchman merely observed, coldly, in reply--
+
+"In two successive years--it is three years ago now--they lost out here
+off Amland a total of fifty pilots."
+
+"Still, it is a fine life!" she said; and Salve resumed his walk.
+
+A couple of evenings after, the Apollo was pitching out on the
+Doggerbank in the moonlight, with a reef in her topsails. Elizabeth had
+not yet gone below, and was sitting with her child warmly wrapped up on
+her lap, while Salve paced the deck and looked at her from time to time.
+A little farther off, near the main-hatch, Nils Buvaagen (whom Salve had
+met again at Notteroe, and persuaded to take service with him) and a
+couple of the crew who were off duty were engaged in story-telling, the
+others lounging about near them to listen. Elizabeth, too, was
+listening.
+
+They had crossed that day a long stretch of dead water, and the
+carpenter had several mysterious incidents, of which he declared he had
+been an eyewitness, to recount on the head of it. Meeting dead water
+like that out in the open sea generally meant that something was going
+to happen.
+
+Nils Buvaagen, like all fjord peasants, had a strong leaning towards
+every kind of superstition; and in his many voyages across the North
+Sea, he had had more than one experience of the kind in question. He had
+sat quite silent so far.
+
+"H'm!" he remarked now, thoughtfully taking a pull at his pipe. "I dare
+be sworn there's many a one out here on the Dogger. Where we are now, I
+tell you, is as it might be an old burial-ground."
+
+With that he retired into himself, and began to pull away vigorously at
+his pipe, as if he had unintentionally said more than he exactly liked.
+But being pressed to go on, he was obliged to satisfy the curiosity he
+had excited, and resumed accordingly in a hushed tone, after cautiously
+looking round first.
+
+"Do you know," he asked, mysteriously, "how all the old fish come by
+their deaths?"
+
+None of his audience were able to give an answer to this unexpected
+question.
+
+"You don't?" he continued; "nor no one else neither. But all the same,
+such myriads die every day that, if all was right, the whole surface of
+the sea would be covered with their white bellies--we should be sailing
+all day long through dead fish. It is a 'mystery,' the same as it is
+what becomes of all the old ships in the world." Coming from him, that
+word "mystery" had something very weird and uncanny about it.
+
+"Yes, the Dogger can be ugly enough, and may be so perhaps before we are
+clear of it," he concluded, and leant back against the spar behind him
+to look up at the clouds. Some scud was driving at the moment across the
+full moon.
+
+"But about the old fish and the old vessels, Nils?" said the carpenter,
+recalling him to the subject.
+
+"Yes, it is here, to the Dogger Bank, that they resort for the most
+part, and to one or two other places perhaps in the world besides. That
+is the reason that there is always a sort of corpse sand in the water
+here, and so many noises and things that one can't explain."
+
+There was a general start as he said this, and they looked at one
+another in silence; for it seemed as if the vessel had suddenly stopped
+with a shock in the middle of her course, and the spray from a heavy sea
+came pouring down over the deck.
+
+"She heard it," said the carpenter, involuntarily; "she is an old craft,
+and doesn't like going over the churchyard."
+
+Elizabeth thought that last proposition sounded so uncomfortable that
+she got up and went below to bed.
+
+The sea ran high in the night, and the vessel kept pitching with dull
+thuds as if they were in very shoal water, which, however, the lead
+showed not to be the case. In the morning the chain-cable of the anchor
+was found tossed by the force of the sand-laden seas right over the
+deck, and arranged there with a certain regularity. To many of the crew
+it seemed clear that other than natural causes must have been at work;
+there were evidently "dead hands" upon the bank, and this was a warning.
+Nils shook his head and said nothing.
+
+All the morning they were enveloped in a thick sea fog that surrounded
+them like a wall; but towards noon the sun began to appear like a sickly
+gleam above them, and by dinner-time they were sailing under a clear
+sky, and in a fresh green breezy sea, with sails on every side.
+
+It was an exhilarating sight, and reminded Elizabeth of the days of her
+childhood. She called Salve over to share her enjoyment of it.
+
+Of all the vessels in sight, the handsomest, without comparison, was the
+North Star, a Norwegian corvette, well known along the coast of Norway,
+and which had often aroused Elizabeth's enthusiasm in earlier days. She
+was crossing their course, and standing under full sail for the Channel.
+Elizabeth recognised her at once, and exclaimed decisively--
+
+"That is the North Star--isn't she a magnificent ship, Salve! See, they
+are taking in the topsails; they look like a flock of birds up there on
+the yard among those beautiful big sails. Did you ever see anything so
+grand as her shape? and how majestically she ploughs through the sea!
+When she has all her canvas spread like that, I could fancy Tordenskjold
+himself on board of her in full chase."
+
+Salve looked straight before him and didn't answer. He knew, what
+Elizabeth had not the faintest suspicion of, that Lieutenant Beck was on
+board the North Star, as third in command for that year's cruise in the
+Mediterranean, whither she was now bound; and a host of unpleasant
+associations were raised by Elizabeth's innocent admiration of her.
+
+"It was the North Star," she continued, "that beat through the straits
+of Gibraltar against the current when none of the others could." The
+North Star had long ago taken the place of the Naiad as her heroine
+ship, and she related the performance with a certain pride.
+
+"How would you like to be in command of a ship like that, Salve?" she
+asked, determined to wake him up and get an answer.
+
+"It would be a very different thing from having such an old tub as the
+Apollo under one--there's no disputing that," he replied bitterly; and
+quitted her side abruptly, as if to give orders to the crew.
+
+Elizabeth remained standing where she was, utterly puzzled. What could
+there possibly have been in what she had said to offend him? and
+offended he certainly was by the tone of voice in which he was giving
+his orders, and the expression of his face as he stood there by the
+wheel with his hand in the breast of his pea-jacket--she felt certain it
+was clenched there. It was really too unreasonable--the idea of his
+being jealous of a ship! This uncertainty about every word she spoke now
+was getting absolutely insupportable, and with a toss of her head she
+determined that she would stand it no longer, but would speak her mind
+to him once for all, whether it should lead to a scene or not.
+
+No opportunity, however, for carrying out her intention occurred during
+the remainder of the afternoon. There appeared to be bad weather coming
+up, and many of the sails had to be taken in; and afterwards he paced up
+and down by the round-house forward for a couple of hours, purposely, as
+she could see, avoiding her. The crew apparently had an impression, too,
+that it was as well to keep out of his way, as they left him that side
+of the deck to himself, and stood talking in knots about the capstan,
+with their oilskin coats and sou'westers on, in anticipation of dirty
+weather, and casting anxious glances from time to time at the banks of
+cloud that were rolling up darkly from the horizon to leeward, and
+sending already a whine through the old rigging above them. They waited
+impatiently for the word to take in more sail, as it was obvious that
+they must go with storm sails only for the night.
+
+It was only at the last moment apparently that Salve made up his mind,
+for when he suddenly shouted over to them to take in topsails and put a
+couple of reefs in the mainsail, the storm was already upon them. He
+sprang aft at the same time and seized the trumpet, saying shortly and
+harshly to Elizabeth as he passed her hurriedly, and almost without
+looking at her--
+
+"This is not weather for sitting up on deck, Elizabeth. You had better
+take the child below and lie down."
+
+Elizabeth saw that he was right, and went; but there was a look of
+pained surprise in her face as she lingered for a moment and looked
+after him. He had never spoken to her like that before.
+
+The crew had supposed that he would of course keep away and run before
+the gale, and not strain the old brig by beating to windward in such a
+night as they saw before them; and it was under mute protest, therefore,
+that they proceeded to carry out his orders to clap on preventer braces
+on the rags of sail which they were carrying. The old blocks creaked and
+screamed in the increasing darkness above the rattle of the hail
+squalls, and the vessel careened over and went plunging into the head
+seas with successive shocks that seemed likely very soon to shake her to
+pieces.
+
+Nils Buvaagen was standing in moody silence, with another, at the wheel,
+and he could see by the light from the binnacle, which occasionally fell
+upon Salve's face as he walked up and down near them to leeward, that he
+was ashy pale. He would have liked to say something, but it didn't seem
+advisable.
+
+"Topsail's flapping!" came from forward, "she'll be taken aback!"
+
+"She's an old craft, captain--her topmasts'll not bear a great deal,"
+Nils ventured to observe.
+
+"I'll show you that I can make the old tub go," muttered Salve between
+his teeth, affecting not to have heard what was said.
+
+"Keep her away, Nils--she must have more way--and so over on a new
+tack," was his reply in a peremptory tone.
+
+"Stand by to 'bout ship!"
+
+Nils sighed: such sailing was quite indefensible; and there was not one
+of the crew who had not the same feeling.
+
+Through the darkness and the blinding dash of the seas came then at
+intervals--
+
+"Haul in the boom--hard a-lee--brace forward--brace aft!" and here there
+was a longer interval, for one of the ropes on the foremast had
+apparently got foul, and there was a difficulty in bracing the yard, the
+sail flapping with a dull noise above and making the whole mast tremble.
+One of the crew had to mount the old rigging at the risk of his life,
+and feel over the unsteady yard in the dark for the rope and disentangle
+it, with the white tops of the seas breaking not far under his feet.
+
+"Sharp up aft--sharp forward!" came then again. "Haul the jib-sheet!"
+but no sooner was the jib hauled taut and made fast, than it broke loose
+and hung fluttering wildly about the stay until it gradually twisted
+itself up into a tangle.
+
+The sails filled on the new tack; but they were not much better off than
+before, the sea breaking over them with such violence that the deck,
+from amidships forward, was only passable with the greatest difficulty
+and danger. The crew began to think the captain must have taken leave of
+his senses; and, in fact, Salve was not himself that night. He was
+sailing in this reckless way in a mere fit of temper intensified by the
+consciousness of his own unreasonableness. Elizabeth made a mistake, he
+told himself by way of justification, if she thought that he on board
+his poor brig gave in to any officer in the navy, let him be who he
+might. She should see that he, too, was a man who could beat--he
+required no North Star under him, he would perform the same feat in a
+leaky old barge.
+
+A couple of times when the cook, who looked after Elizabeth's wants,
+came up the cabin stairs, Salve inquired how she was getting on, and
+heard each time that she was sitting up not yet undressed. The last time
+the good-natured cook had added--
+
+"She wants badly to see you, captain--she isn't accustomed to this sort
+of thing."
+
+He made no reply further than a scornful contraction of his features
+which was not visible to the other, and resumed his staggering walk to
+leeward, between the companion and the wheel.
+
+Elizabeth meanwhile had been sitting a prey to most distracted thoughts.
+When she went below with her child, she had a dull feeling at her heart
+that some great sorrow had come or was coming over her, and she had sat
+for some time almost without the power to think. He had never treated
+her like that before.
+
+She set about putting the child to bed then in her usual way, as if she
+had been a mere machine. For him the rolling berth was only a rocking
+cradle, and he was soon sleeping quietly without an idea of danger. She
+stood with her arm leaning over the edge of the berth, supporting him,
+and gazing on his dimpled face; the lamp that swung to and fro under the
+beam, shedding a dim light over the narrow cabin, with its small table,
+and pegs full of seamen's clothes, moving solemnly backwards and
+forwards on the wall. Between the creaking of the ship's timbers and the
+noise of ropes being dragged across the deck, Salve's voice could be
+heard in harsh tones of command, and every now and then there would be a
+sudden concussion that would make the whole vessel shake, and the floor
+would seem to go from under her feet, so that she had to hold on by the
+rail of the berth, and keep the child from falling out as best she could
+at the same time. Whenever they had had such weather before, Salve had
+always come down from time to time to see her. Now--she didn't know what
+to think. From what the cook had told her, she gathered that they were
+beating with unjustifiable recklessness, and from the tone of Salve's
+voice she knew that he was in a savagely defiant mood, and that she, for
+some reason or other, was the cause of it. Her expression gradually
+changed to one of deeper and deeper anxiety of soul.
+
+"But what have I done to him?" she exclaimed impetuously, and buried her
+face in the bedclothes.
+
+"What have I done to him?" she repeated. "What can he believe?--what can
+he possibly think?" she asked herself, as she stood now like a statue
+almost, lost in conjecture, until the thought which she had always tried
+to keep away came up before her in full, heavy, unmistakable clearness.
+
+"He doesn't trust me!" she whispered to herself, in despair. "He has no
+faith in me;" and she laid her head--her beautiful head--down upon her
+arm, just as her own child might have done, in an inconsolable fit of
+crying. But to her no tears would come, and she seemed to see an abyss
+of suspicion and distrust before her in which Salve's love for her was
+going to disappear.
+
+She heard no longer the creaking and the noise on deck--no longer cared
+about the lurching and the thuds against the head-seas--although she had
+often to hold on to the berth with all her strength. All the energy of
+her soul was now occupied with this one awful terror which had taken
+possession of her. All her defiance was gone. Her only source of courage
+now was to do anything or everything to keep his love. She felt ready
+for any sacrifice whatever--ready, without a sigh, to bear the burden of
+his suspicions all her life through if she might only keep his love. It
+was she who had made him distrustful, and it was upon her the punishment
+should fall, if she could not by persistent love bring him back to a
+healthy condition of mind again.
+
+Her instinct at once suggested to her how she should begin. He should
+see that she on her side had entire confidence in him--confidence as
+absolute as the child's there who was sleeping before her. And with a
+sickly smile upon her lips, she undressed and laid herself down beside
+little Gjert.
+
+Upon deck Salve had wanted the night-glass, which was down in the cabin.
+The look-out man had fancied that he had caught a glimpse for a moment
+of a light, in which case, against Salve's calculations, they must be
+under Jutland. His pride, however, would not allow him to send any one
+else to fetch the glass, and he couldn't make up his mind to go down
+himself. At last it became absolutely necessary, and he went hurriedly
+down the stair.
+
+When he opened the cabin door he stood still for a moment in surprise,
+and looked about him. He had expected to find Elizabeth sitting up, with
+the child on her lap, and looking frightened. In place of that all was
+quiet, and the lamp was nearly out. He strode on and took the glass from
+the wall; and after a couple of attempts, managed to light a match, in
+spite of the damp, and held it to the barometer. He remained then
+standing with it in his hand, and listened to hear whether she was
+asleep or not. Involuntarily he approached the berth, and looked into
+it.
+
+"Elizabeth," he whispered, softly, as if he was afraid of waking her.
+
+"Is that you, Salve?" was the reply, in a perfectly calm voice.
+
+"I thought you would be sitting up with the boy in this gale. She rolls
+so; and I--I haven't been down to see you," he said.
+
+"I knew I had you on deck, Salve," she replied. "The rest we must only
+leave to God. You have not had time to come down, poor fellow," she
+added, "you have been so busy."
+
+"Elizabeth!" he exclaimed, with a sudden pang of passionate remorse, and
+reached over impetuously into the berth to embrace her with his wet
+clothes.
+
+At that moment a crash was heard, accompanied by a violent trembling of
+the ship, and loud cries on deck. Something had evidently given way.
+
+With the same movement with which he had intended to embrace her, he
+lifted her quickly out of the berth, and told her to dress herself and
+the child, and come up to the top of the cabin stairs. The words were
+hardly out of his mouth when the vessel heeled over, and didn't right
+herself again.
+
+"Fore-topmast gone, captain; rigging hanging!" bawled Nils Buvaagen down
+the stair.
+
+Salve turned to her for a moment with a face full of mute, crushing
+self-reproach, and sprang up on deck.
+
+"Keep her away, if she'll answer her helm!" he shouted to the man at the
+wheel. "To the axes, men!"
+
+The brig lay over on one side, with her brittle rigging at the mercy of
+the wind and sea, the waves making a clean breach over her. Salve
+himself went up and cut away the topmast, which went over the side to
+leeward; and as the first grey light of dawn appeared, and made the
+figures of the crew dimly distinguishable, the axes were still being
+feverishly plied in strong hands among the stays, backstays, and topmast
+rigging. While the work was going on the fearful rolling caused first
+the main-topgallant sail to go, and then the topsail, with the yards and
+all belonging to it. The forestay snapped, the mainsail split, and the
+lower yards and foremast were damaged. And when at last, after desperate
+efforts, they had succeeded in freeing the ship from the encumbrance of
+the fallen rigging, she lay there more than half a wreck, and scarcely
+capable of doing more than run before the wind.
+
+They had only the boom-mainsail now, and the forecourse, left; and with
+these Salve kept her away--it was the only thing now to be done--until
+the growing light should show them whether they had sea-room, or the
+dreaded Jutland coast before them. The last, with this westerly gale
+blowing, would mean pretty nearly for a certainty stranding upon the
+sandbanks and the vessel becoming a wreck.
+
+When it was clear day, they made out Horn's Reef far down to the
+south-east; they lay about off Ringkjobing's Fjord, and would require
+now to do their utmost to clear the coast. With some difficulty they
+succeeded in rigging up a jury-mast, and managed by that means to keep
+up a little closer in the wind. But their only chance was that the wind
+might go down, or shift a little to the southward, or in the current,
+which generally takes a northerly direction here, unless it should set
+them in too much under land.
+
+Salve paced restlessly up and down his dismantled deck, where a great
+part of the bulwarks and the round-house forward were stove in, whilst
+the crew relieved each other two and two at the pumps. They had
+evidently sprung a serious leak, which was the more cause for anxiety
+that they were returning in ballast, and had no timber cargo to keep
+them afloat. He had confided their situation to Elizabeth.
+
+"I am afraid we may be obliged to beach her at some convenient spot," he
+said, adding, with a slight quiver in his voice, "we shall lose the
+brig."
+
+He laid emphasis upon this, because he didn't wish to tell her the
+worst--namely, that this convenient spot was not to be found upon the
+whole coast, and that their lives were unmistakably in danger.
+
+Whatever happened, it seemed sufficient for Elizabeth that he was near
+her, and there was a look of quiet trust in her face as she turned
+towards him that went to his heart; he could not bear it, and turned
+away.
+
+The brig and its possible loss did not occupy much of Elizabeth's
+thoughts. In the midst of their danger she was absolutely glad at heart
+at the thought that by her display of implicit confidence she had
+succeeded in winning a great victory with Salve. After what she had gone
+through that night, this was everything to her.
+
+There was a fine energetic look of determination in her face, and her
+eyes were moist with tears as she bent over the child in her lap and
+whispered--
+
+"If he cannot trust us, we two must teach him--mustn't we, Gjert?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+Towards dinner-time Salve and Nils Buvaagen were standing for a moment
+together by the ship's side.
+
+The storm had perceptibly lulled, but the weather was still dull and
+hazy, and the sea high. Two or three sea-gulls were circling drearily
+between them and the coast, where they could now see a long line of
+yellow foaming breakers like a huge wall, rising and falling on the
+sandbanks, with here and there a mast-high jet of spray from some reef
+outside. Although the wind was on shore they could hear the dull thunder
+of the breakers there, and a kind of dim rumbling in the air. The next
+three or four hours would obviously decide their fate.
+
+Neither spoke; each was occupied with his own reflections. Nils was
+thinking of his wife and children at home, and Salve of his future. It
+was hard to lose the brig; he had worked hard for the money she
+represented, and he would have now to begin again on the lowest step of
+the ladder--if he escaped with his life, that was to say.
+
+Less selfish thoughts succeeded then, and he turned to Nils.
+
+"What I feel most in this business, Nils," he said, earnestly, "is the
+thought that you or any of the others may perhaps pay the penalty for my
+mad sailing last night, with your lives. The brig is my own affair."
+
+"Oh, it will be all right, captain, you'll see," replied Nils,
+cheeringly. "If we can hang on to the old craft while she bumps over the
+banks, we shall manage somehow or other inside I expect."
+
+"God grant it!" said Salve, and turned away.
+
+Nils remained standing where he was for a moment, and something like a
+spasm passed across his heavy features. He believed their situation to
+be desperate, and the vision of his home again rose before him, and
+almost choked him.
+
+"Relieve the pumps!" was heard. It was his turn again, and he gave
+himself unweariedly to the work.
+
+Salve seemed like one conscience-smitten. His face wore an expression of
+strained uneasiness, and his look more and more, as the moments passed,
+betokened the consciousness that a struggle for life was before them.
+Through the glass a knot of people could be seen gathering on the downs
+which ran along the coast, with their jagged formations showing out in
+tones of dim violet and blue.
+
+He stood now in the companion with his wife and his child, and sighed
+heavily as he looked at them.
+
+"I would gladly give the brig, and be reduced to my own two hands once
+more, to have last night over again, Elizabeth!" he said.
+
+She pressed his hand with an expression of sympathy, which answered him
+better than words; and the next moment he was again the practical man,
+showing her how she might tie the child to her breast with a
+handkerchief.
+
+"I can't stay with you any longer now," he said. "I am responsible for
+the lives of all on board, and must do my duty by them."
+
+"Do your duty, Salve," she said.
+
+"And so," he concluded, as, trying to conceal his emotion, he stroked
+her forehead and then the child's, "you must keep a good heart. When the
+pinch comes I shall be at your side, and we shall win through it, you'll
+see."
+
+"With God's gracious help!" she answered; "remember that, Salve."
+
+He strode away then down the deck and called the crew aft to take
+counsel with him on the situation. The vessel was rapidly becoming
+water-logged.
+
+"Listen, my lads!" he said; "this is a serious business, as you can all
+very clearly see. But if we only have stout hearts we may get out of it
+yet, at all events with our lives. We have about three hours still
+before we run upon the sandbanks; but by that time it will have begun to
+get dark, and it may be difficult for the people on shore to come to our
+rescue. We must steer straight in and choose the likeliest place
+ourselves; and if you are of the same way of thinking we'll head for the
+shore now at once, rather than wait to have the old craft flung over the
+banks in the dark like a dead fish."
+
+The crew were silent, and looked anxiously over towards the land. But
+when Nils Buvaagen declared himself a supporter of the captain's plan by
+crossing over the deck to him, all the others followed.
+
+Salve went himself to the wheel, and gave the order to "Ease off the
+sheet."
+
+"Ease it is," was the answer; and that was the last order ever given on
+board the Apollo.
+
+Running now before the wind, they rapidly approached the land. Salve
+stood at the wheel, resting his knee from time to time on one of the
+spokes, with a concentrated look on his dark keen face, and his eye
+searching like a kite's along the coast for the place they were to make
+for. A couple of times he took up the glass and directed it towards the
+downs, where a group of people were moving about.
+
+The chalk-white wall of water, rising and falling, grew higher and
+higher as they approached it; the noise and the dull roar of the
+breakers became more and more deafening, and a feeling of faintness
+crept over Elizabeth as she looked towards the land, and began to
+realise their danger.
+
+The suspense was so painfully prolonged, a mist was coming before her
+eyes, so that she could scarcely see Salve over at the wheel; and she
+tried, in her terror, to keep them fixed upon the child in her arms. The
+seething, hissing sound in the air around her kept increasing, and made
+her giddy; a confusion of wild sounds, that grew louder and ever louder,
+seemed to fill her brain; and before her eyes there was nothing but a
+whirl of scudding flakes of white. A mass of sand-laden foaming water
+appeared then suddenly to rise before her with a towering crest; she
+heard one loud cry of terror from different voices; the brig seemed
+lifted high in the air; the mainmast tottered; and a suffocating deluge
+of water came crashing down upon her, nearly carrying her with it down
+the cabin stairs, where she was clinging. Again and again it came, and
+her one thought now was to hold fast.
+
+When she returned to consciousness again, Salve was by her side. They
+were fastened to the same rope, and all the crew had come aft, and
+lashed themselves there. The brig lay over on her side upon the inner
+bank, with her stern up, and with the mainmast lying over the side. She
+kept lifting and striking heavily against the bottom, while heavy seas,
+one after another, swept her forward.
+
+"The rigging to leeward must be cleared away, and we shall get off,
+lads!" shouted Salve, through his hollowed hand; and he sprang over with
+an axe to do it. Nils Buvaagen came to his assistance, and Elizabeth, in
+intense anxiety, watched the two men while they cut away rope after
+rope, holding on by the rigging all the time, the sea breaking over
+them, so that sometimes they were hardly visible through the drench of
+water. After one last stroke, which freed them from the mast, Salve was
+by her side again.
+
+The next moment they were carried over the bank by the yellow churning
+surge, and with a succession of jerks and bumps, over to the shoal
+inside, where the bow-timbers were stove in--"the best thing that could
+have happened to them," Salve said, coolly, "as it would relieve the
+vessel of the weight of water in the hold, and they might now be washed
+up nearer to the beach."
+
+At length, after a couple of long and terrible hours, as twilight was
+coming on, and the face of the downs was becoming darker in the gloomy
+atmosphere, it seemed as if the vessel had finally settled. The waves
+now broke less frequently over her, but left a heavy deposit of sand
+upon the deck when they did break. It seemed likely that she would go to
+pieces, plank by plank, if they remained as they were through the night,
+or else perhaps they would be buried in sand.
+
+On one side of the shoal--on the side where they saw people upon the
+beach--ran a channel with a strong current; and they, perceived that
+they had been fortunate to some extent in not having been washed right
+over into it, as in that case the brig must inevitably have sunk: on the
+other side there was navigable water, though with breakers here and
+there. Their signals, they knew, had been seen by the people on shore;
+but, to their despair, they saw them all at once disappear.
+
+Salve, upon that, set to work to lash some planks together for a raft;
+and the crew followed his example with whatever they could lay their
+hands upon that would float. His idea was, to try and get Elizabeth and
+the child to land by tying them securely to the raft, and trust to his
+own swimming powers and address to reach the shore with the line he was
+attaching to it; and the only question then would be, whether he would
+be able to haul it to land against the strong back-suck of the receding
+waves, that left every time a long stretch of dry sand behind them.
+Elizabeth was sitting meanwhile on the cabin-stairs, scarcely in a
+condition to comprehend what was passing.
+
+As Salve was occupied with this work, he suddenly heard a shout of joy
+round him. From behind a projection in the downs a group of men had
+appeared, carrying a large boat. They stopped at a corner of the beach.
+A number of them took their seats in the boat; and as a wave was curling
+over to break, the others ran her down, and the back flow carried her
+out to sea, the men setting to work at once with all their might at the
+oars.
+
+The plucky fellows evidently knew the water thereabouts; for they
+steered in a wide circle up behind a line of shoals, that acted like a
+mole in breaking the force of the waves, and bore down then obliquely
+upon the wreck, to leeward of which the water was comparatively smooth.
+
+"Now then, look alive, my hearties!" they shouted, as they hooked on;
+and the admonition was scarcely needed.
+
+Salve carried his almost unconscious wife down to the side, where they
+took her and laid her aft in the bottom of the boat; but she sat up with
+outstretched arms until her child had been passed to her from hand to
+hand, and was safe in them again, and then she watched anxiously for
+Salve to come too. He sprang down into the boat the last, and then she
+fainted.
+
+They put off, and stood in now on the crests of the waves straight for
+the beach, where a score of men in sea-boots and woollen jackets made a
+chain down into the water by holding each other's hands, and drew the
+boat ashore.
+
+They heard congratulations all round; and the man who had held the
+tiller exclaimed, as Salve silently grasped his hand--
+
+"It was resolutely done, Northman, to steer like that--only that you
+did, you'd have passed the night upon the bank."
+
+The invitation of their rescuers to partake of such hospitality as they
+could offer was gladly accepted by the famished party from the wreck;
+and they followed the steersman, Ib Mathisen, and his comrades in among
+the downs, where the wind was no longer felt. It was some miles to the
+fishing village; and they trudged on after it grew dark in silence,
+being too exhausted, and too dejected, to talk, their guides only
+keeping up a low conversation among themselves. Salve carried the child,
+sheltering it from the pricking sand that blew in their faces when they
+came out upon the flat downs farther on, and supporting Elizabeth at the
+same time.
+
+At last they saw the lights of a group of cottages. The largest of these
+belonged to Ib Mathisen; and into this Salve and his wife were
+conducted, while the crew were distributed among the others.
+
+Ib's wife, a robust-looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, with a bold,
+straightforward expression in her tanned countenance, was standing over
+by the fire with her sleeves tucked up baking, when they came in. She
+examined the incomers steadily for a moment without raising herself from
+her stooping position; but at the sight of Elizabeth and the child she
+exclaimed in a tone of compassion that was better than any more formal
+welcome, "The poor woman and her child have been cast ashore, Ib?" and
+set about caring for their wants at once, her grown-up daughter helping
+her to draw a bench to the fire for them, and putting a kettle on to
+make something warm for them to drink. This was evidently not her first
+experience of the kind; and before long they had all put on dry clothes,
+and Elizabeth and the child were in a warm bed. As she went about she
+put questions in a low voice to her husband; and Salve, who was sitting
+with his cheek in his hand staring into the fire, heard her say--
+
+"Perhaps he was the owner of the vessel himself?"
+
+"Yes, she was all the property we possessed," Salve answered, quietly.
+"But we are none the less grateful to your husband for rescuing us, and
+we have unfortunately very little to thank him with for venturing his
+life out on the banks in such weather."
+
+"So you've been at that game again, Ib," said the wife, turning to her
+husband reproachfully, but not seeming altogether sincere in her
+reproach.
+
+Turning to Salve then she said a little curtly, "For the like of that we
+take no payment," adding in a milder tone, "We have two sons ourselves
+who ply to Norway--there's a bad coast there too."
+
+Salve was pale and worn out with over-exertion, and after taking a
+mouthful of food he lay down to rest. But he could not sleep, and
+towards morning he was lying awake listening to the dull booming of the
+distant sea. Elizabeth was tossing about feverishly and talking in her
+sleep. Her brain was evidently busy with the terrors of the previous
+night, and from occasional words it seemed as if he had a share in her
+thoughts. He lay and listened, though there was not much to be made out
+of her disjointed utterances. She grew more restless, and began to talk
+more excitedly--
+
+"Never! never!" she said, vehemently; "he shall never hear a word about
+the brig," and she went on then in a confidential whisper--
+
+"Shall he, Gjert? He shall find us in our berth, or else he will think
+we are afraid."
+
+Salve kissed her forehead tenderly, but with a sigh. There had been a
+motive then, after all, at the bottom of that display of confidence
+which had occasioned him such pangs of self-reproach.
+
+A couple of hours after he was on the way down to the sea to look at the
+brig. The general aspect of the world about him was in harmony with his
+mood. The wind whistled over the dreary sand-hills, whirling the sand in
+clouds in among the downs that stretched away like a storm-tossed sea
+into the distance, in every variety of desolate and jagged outline. Upon
+the melancholy shore a sea-gull or two were circling round some old
+black stumps of wreck that protruded from the sand; while beyond lay the
+dismal expanse of the western sea, without a sail upon its leaden waste
+of waters, so shunned by all. Dreariness, wreck, and desolation were on
+every side; and it seemed to Salve that it was only a reflection of his
+own life. He had got to be the owner of a brig, and there it lay, what
+remained of it, buried in the sand. He had succeeded in making Elizabeth
+his own, but had he thereby added anything to the happiness of his life?
+
+He stood gazing at the remains of his brig, over which the yellow waves
+were breaking, in a state of gloomy abstraction, from which he was only
+aroused by the approach of Ib Mathisen and a party of his own crew, who
+had followed him to the shore to see if possibly they might retrieve
+some of their property. He joined them in the search, and with but small
+result; three ship chests and the compass being all the reward of an
+hour's labour among the timber-ends and bolts and pieces of rigging that
+strewed the beach, or made ripples in the sand for a long distance in
+either direction.
+
+They remained that day in the fishing hamlet; and when Salve had made
+his declaration before the authorities, and had paid the crew what he
+owed them with the greater part of the money he had saved, he and
+Elizabeth took passage for Christiansand in a corn ship from Harboere.
+
+He was very silent on the way, thinking about his future; and the
+prospect was not a bright one: he knew that there prevailed but one
+opinion among the crew about the loss of the brig, that he had his own
+folly only to thank for it; and as this, of course, would get about, his
+chance of being employed as a skipper by any shipowner would be very
+small. Elizabeth's popularity in Tonsberg might probably be of service
+to him, but he would sooner starve than help himself to a situation by
+means of it; and in her present circumstances she should not even return
+to Tonsberg.
+
+One only course remained open to him if he was not to begin again from
+the very beginning--he would become an uncertificated pilot for the
+Arendal district. No one knew the coast there better than he did; he had
+always had the idea in his mind, ever since the night when he brought
+the Juno into Merdoe; and out there, or in some other spot along the
+coast, he reflected gloomily that he could have Elizabeth all to
+himself.
+
+When he announced his decision to Elizabeth, she entered with animation
+into the project; and when he went on to add, that she would have to be
+content now with being only a common man's wife, she replied,
+intrepidly--
+
+"If he is only called Salve Kristiansen, I require nothing more."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+It was so arranged then; and though Elizabeth was rather disappointed to
+hear that she was not to see her tidy house at Tonsberg again, she
+allowed no indication of the feeling to escape her, and Salve went by
+himself to arrange their affairs there.
+
+When he had sold what property they had, and bought his pilot-boat, they
+had still a small sum left with which to begin housekeeping afresh, and
+Merdoe was chosen for their future residence.
+
+From the outside this island looks only like one of the desolate series
+which form the outworks of the coast for miles here in either direction,
+with many a spot of angry white marking the sunken rocks between. But
+the inner side forms the well-known Merdoe harbour of refuge, with its
+little hamlet of fishermen's and pilots' houses on the strand; and it
+was in one of these, a little red painted house with a small porch in
+front and a flagged yard and garden behind, and which presently became
+their own, that they eventually settled.
+
+The coast outside Merdoe is exceptionally dangerous, but the Merdoe pilots
+have also the reputation of being exceptionally brave and skilful. They
+are also perhaps the widest known. For having no defined district they
+take a wide range, and may to-day be lying off Lindesnaes, to-morrow
+under the Skaw or the Holmen, and the day after board a ship from
+Hamburg right away down at Horn's Reef. It is a common thing to meet one
+of them with his Arendal mark, his red stripe and number on the
+mainsail, trawling for mackerel far out over the North Sea, and even
+down as far as the Dogger Bank, where they get information from foreign
+fishing smacks of vessels from the Channel or from English or Dutch
+ports. If a skipper wants news from the North Sea or Skager Rack, he
+generally keeps a look-out for one of these pilot-boats, and finds a
+living shipping list, and the newest too, on board, which costs him, at
+the most, supposing he has nothing of interest to impart in return, a
+roll of tobacco, a bottle of spirits, or a strand of rope. But it is to
+the captain who, on some pitch-dark winter night, when the sea is
+running mountains high, has come in beneath bare poles under the
+Torungens, and who knows that he is doomed if he cannot get a pilot,
+that these Merdoe men are most familiar. When, perhaps, he has given up
+all hope, he suddenly hears himself hailed from the darkness; a line is
+thrown; and a dripping pilot stands upon the deck. When the sea is too
+rough to board a vessel in any other way, they do not think twice about
+taking a line round their waist and jumping overboard; and when it is a
+point of honour with them to bring in a ship, boat and home and life
+weigh but very little in the opposite scale.
+
+The black-bearded Salve Kristiansen soon came to be the best known in
+Arendal of them all. The dauntless look in his keen brown eyes, his
+sharp features, and his short, sudden manner and way of speaking, gave
+the impression of a character of uncommon energy; and it was said that
+not the very wildest weather would deter him from going to sea. He was
+known to have more than once stayed alone on board a water-logged vessel
+while he sent his comrade on shore for help; and in his little room at
+home, with its white-painted windows, and geraniums, and Dutch
+cuckoo-clock, there stood above the roll of charts and telescope on the
+wall a bracket with more than one silver goblet upon it, which, like the
+telescope, were presents in acknowledgment of his services in piloting
+vessels into port under circumstances of unusual difficulty and danger.
+But, notwithstanding the repute in which he was held, he had never yet
+received the medal for saving life, nor had he yet been made a
+certificated pilot of the district.
+
+He was not a man who gathered comrades round him; and as the years
+passed, his unapproachability of demeanour, which seemed intended to
+convey to people with a certain bitterness that he could do very well
+without them, increased. It was said up in the town that he had taken to
+drink. For after selling off his mackerel down on the quay, he would
+often now sit the whole day in Mother Andersen's parlour with his
+brandy-glass before him; and when evening approached, and his head had
+had as much as it could carry, it was just as well to keep out of his
+way. He did not talk much; and what attraction he found in Mother
+Andersen's parlour it was not easy to say. But they knew, at all events,
+how to treat him there; and he felt, from the casual questions that
+would be addressed to him after he had returned from sea, or from the
+way in which a newcomer would salute him, that he was in a sympathetic
+atmosphere, and that his name was in repute. It was even something more
+than respect, perhaps, which he inspired, for a sailor would think twice
+before sitting down beside him, unless it came natural to him to do so
+from the way in which they had greeted or spoken to one other.
+
+It was not, however, any attraction which he found in Mother Andersen's
+parlour which made him spend so much of his time there; it was that he
+was afraid of his own temper at home.
+
+When he had first set up on his own account, and had had his appointment
+as a duly certificated pilot for the object of his ambition, he had
+never made it his habit to stay in Arendal when he returned from sea
+instead of going home. But some two or three years after he had settled
+out at Merdoe, a couple of incidents had occurred which made a new
+starting-point, as it were, in his domestic life. They were the
+nomination of Captain Beck, who was now a wealthy man, to the post of
+master of the pilots of the district, and who, as such, became his
+superior; and the arrival of Carl Beck to live in Arendal and
+superintend his father's shipbuilding yard, for which purpose he had
+retired from the navy. Since the arrival of the Becks he had become more
+and more difficult to get on with; and Elizabeth's secret, self-denying
+struggle grew proportionately harder. Whenever she returned from a
+shopping expedition to Arendal, or from seeing her aunt, she would be
+sure to find him in an irritable humour, which would generally vent
+itself in contemptuous remarks upon old Beck's incapacity for the post
+he held; and at last, much as she longed to get a glimpse now and then
+of something different from the monotony of her daily life out on Merdoe,
+she gave up going altogether.
+
+Her patience and self-suppression had had the effect, as years went on,
+of making a tyrant of her husband. When in one of his dark moods now, he
+would not tolerate the slightest contradiction from her or from any one
+in the house, and all she could do was to be quietly cheerful and
+affectionate, and to try her best to avoid falling into any of the traps
+which he would lay to catch her, and to make her, by some chance word or
+other, or even by a slightly displeased or resigned expression, give his
+bad humour an excuse for breaking out. She had to weigh every word she
+uttered, and to take the most roundabout methods of avoiding his
+sensitiveness, and after all, she would perhaps commit herself when she
+least expected it; upon which a scene would immediately ensue, that
+would be all the more unpleasant from his never expressing himself
+directly. Sometimes Salve was really desperate, and would terrify her
+with all kinds of threats, not against her, but against himself--and she
+knew he was just the man to carry them out. It had often happened that
+for some unlucky word of hers he had gone to sea again an hour after
+coming home; and once in such weather that she had not the faintest hope
+of ever seeing him return.
+
+She would sit at home and weep for hours together, striving to repress
+the angry feelings of resentment which would rise from time to time when
+she thought how little return she received for all she gave; how less
+than little her happiness was considered; and how meagre a reward for
+all she had to endure were the two or three days perhaps of occasional
+happy calm and sunshine in her home, when she seemed to have him with
+her as he had been in the first early days of their married life, and
+when he would find it as hard to tear himself away from his home again
+as she knew he had often found it to return. What a heart he had in
+reality! She alone knew that--the others judged him only by his hard and
+harsh exterior. And how proud she was of him when she heard the others
+talking of the daring things he had done, and saw how they all looked up
+to him! But it was not enough. And in the dulness and loneliness of her
+life out there on Merdoe, she enjoyed to the full, during these many
+weary years, her woman's privilege of suffering for the man she loved.
+But it was not to be so always. Brighter days--little as she now
+expected them--were still in store for her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+We may leave for a moment the contemplation of a domestic history
+lighted up at present by such few and fitful gleams of sunshine, and
+glance at the married life of another pair who have figured in this
+story, and who have not been without their influence upon whatever there
+may have been of tragic in its development.
+
+The young Becks, as they were called in contradistinction to the
+master's family, were now among the first people in Arendal, and kept
+one of the best houses in the town, which they had ample means to do,
+for the shipbuilding business brought them in a considerable annual
+income. Carl Beck had lost none of his attractiveness as he grew older.
+His curling black hair had now an early sprinkling of grey in it, but
+was always arranged to the very best effect; and there was, people said,
+such a nobleness about him (his cleverness was undisputed) that when he
+rose to propose or reply to a toast, there was not a lady at the table
+who was not in a flutter of inward admiration. With his social
+advantages he could not, of course, fail to be in a position of
+considerable influence in the town, which again heightened his welcome
+in society.
+
+But if he was thus made much of, it was not altogether the same with his
+wife. The estimate of her which generally prevailed, that she was so
+perfectly "correct," was not intended perhaps to be complimentary, but
+implied at the same time a recognition of her social power. She was, in
+fact, her husband's timepiece, and without her tact he would not have
+kept himself as straight as he did in the midst of the gushing welcomes
+which he found on all sides.
+
+In his relations with his wife he was a pink of chivalry, never omitted
+the most trifling attention, and was always being complimented on being
+a pattern husband. Some few of the intimates of the house seemed to
+think, though, that there was something strange in their attitude to one
+another--a sort of coolness and reserve about both--and it was whispered
+that his wife did not appreciate him as she ought; it seemed as if the
+two talked together best when strangers were present. Fru Beck, too,
+always looked so uncommonly pale, and was so frigidly calm, that it
+might have been supposed she had no feelings at all; and in comparison
+with his overflowing warmth of nature she certainly did seem dreadfully
+precise and cold.
+
+When they first came to Frederiksvaern as a young newly-married couple,
+her colour had been fresh, and her expression showed that she was still
+in love; she was then completely under the spell of his attractive
+warmth of manner, and felt safe in the possession of his love. It was
+true, a couple of failings, which contrasted strangely with the idea she
+had formed of him from his manly bearing, had gradually disclosed
+themselves--namely, an extraordinary vanity, and an almost ridiculous
+dependence upon the opinion of the world. But so long as his heart was
+in the right place, and she could feel that he loved her, these
+disappointments were matters of but secondary consideration to her. She
+felt that she even loved him all the more for these weaknesses; and she
+trusted to the power which she was gaining over him more and more every
+day to get them presently corrected.
+
+The charming Lieutenant Beck became sought after everywhere, and his
+success with the ladies resulted in his having very soon established
+sentimental relations with nearly every member of the fair circle around
+him. He nearly always had a flower in his buttonhole when he came home,
+which had been jokingly given to him as a _gage d'amour_ by some one or
+other of his admirers; he received presents from all sides; and they, in
+fact, laid a sort of embargo upon him as an object of general
+admiration.
+
+There was nothing to say against all this--far from it; but the only
+person who felt left out in the cold was his own wife, who seemed to see
+this enthusiastic crowd gradually establishing, as it were, a
+prescriptive right of way between herself and her husband, and treading
+under foot the very flowers that should have grown only for their own
+two selves in the intimacy of their home. She became gradually a less
+animated, but was still, he thought, an interested listener, when he
+came home after being in the society of his lady friends, and recounted
+his triumphs. If this was so, she at all events began to be more
+particular about her own dress and appearance, and set to work now to
+systematically cultivate the social talent which she naturally
+possessed. She determined to conquer her rivals, who had the advantage
+of her in appearance, but were inferior to her in talent; and she
+succeeded. But she became naturally an object for their criticism in
+consequence.
+
+The only one with whom she did not succeed was her husband. His
+self-love was far too much taken up with the small flatteries of all
+kinds, and the homage of which he was the object, to have any eyes for
+the very great compliment indeed which was being paid to him by his wife
+in the line which she had adopted. To her he was married, and therefore
+of her he was always sure enough.
+
+It was from that time that she dated the influence which she usually
+acquired in the social circles she frequented, and which her husband's
+position and circumstances made it easy for her to maintain when they
+changed their residence to Arendal.
+
+But those first years of their married life had not passed without a
+serious, and to her completely decisive, _eclaircissement_. It was
+occasioned by his relations with the wife of an officer of rank, which
+had become really more intimate than her pride could stand, although she
+knew very well that on her husband's side it was only a sort of mixture
+of vanity and policy that prompted his affectation of devotion. She had
+treated the lady with marked coldness at a party where they had met, and
+her husband had taken her to task for it when they got home.
+
+Entirely wrapped up in himself as he was, it had never occurred to him
+that his wife could have any cause of complaint against him, and what
+she had been going through had been altogether lost upon him. She did
+not say much now in reply to his reproaches--she merely stood and looked
+at him in a way that made him feel rather uncomfortable, and then
+quietly left the room. He could hear her going with slow steps up the
+stairs.
+
+An hour or so after, she came down again into the room with a light in
+her hand. Her expression was cold, and she did not look at him as she
+set about putting the room to rights for the night as usual. He tried to
+pacify her, begged her not to take what he had said so much to heart,
+and was going to put his arm affectionately round her waist, but was
+stopped on finding himself suddenly confronted by the deadly pale face
+and flashing eyes of an infuriated woman.
+
+The time had come to speak out, and she did speak out; and Lieutenant
+Beck heard what he would have been very sorry to repeat to his best
+friend. For he felt in his heart that it was nothing but the truth,
+however soon he might forget it again.
+
+She called him a pitiful wretch, who would sell her and everything they
+jointly prized to the first comer for a little miserable flattery. He
+had distributed himself to that extent among his giddy acquaintance, she
+went on, with a movement as if she thrust from her something she utterly
+despised, that there was nothing left of him for a woman with a vestige
+of truth or honour to pick up.
+
+When her husband threw himself upon the sofa, and exclaimed in a
+sentimental tone that he was a miserable man, she repeated the last word
+twice in an inexpressibly contemptuous tone--
+
+"A man!--a man!--if you had been a man, you would still have had my
+love--at all events a remnant of it; but now, like this light
+here,"--and she puffed it out,--"all is extinguished between us."
+
+With that she left the room.
+
+Beck sat where he was, overwhelmed and stupefied at this sudden blow
+which had fallen upon his domestic happiness, and with a horrible
+apprehension that she might have meant what she said in real earnest.
+
+She sat in the room with her child the whole night, and he knew that he
+dared not disturb her.
+
+Notwithstanding the struggle which it cost his pride, he was almost
+humble in his manner towards her for some days after, and warmly and
+cordially acknowledged that he had been in the wrong. He even tried to
+show her that he was in earnest by assuming for a while an altered
+attitude towards the ladies, and actually succeeded so far that she
+appeared to have forgotten that anything had occurred between them, and
+was just the same in her intercourse with him as before--quietly
+friendly that is to say, as she had been of recent years.
+
+It never came to any real reconciliation on her side. She had seen too
+clearly that his nature was only that of a drifting cloud, glowing for
+the moment just as it was played upon by popular applause; and he was
+too profoundly selfish for any real earnest love to find a root in his
+composition, much less to give promise of a common life-growth. With his
+feeling and good-nature he would have treated any wife well, even if she
+had not made herself so necessary to him as she was; her social talent,
+she felt, was her great safety--it made him look up to her; and his vain
+nature required that she should be something to be proud of: but she was
+forced to acknowledge in her own heart with despair that she had been
+blinded by her love for him, that his nature was absolutely deficient in
+constancy and truth, and in every quality which she had once persuaded
+herself to see in him. She knew the secret about this man, so brilliant
+before the eyes of the world--that he was not a man. He lived and moved
+before her now like a defaced ideal, to which she was tied--to the end
+of her life. The bitterness of disappointment rankled in her mind, and
+was all the more poignant that she had to keep it shut up within herself
+and had no one to confide in. Her life had become a desert, and at the
+very moment when her husband would be making a brilliant little speech
+that called forth applause all round the table, she would seem to hear
+nothing but a rattle of emptiness. She always protested to her parents,
+when they could not understand why she looked so pale, that she was
+perfectly happy; and they had no reason to think otherwise, for she
+seemed to be well cared for in every respect. The only real interest
+which she possessed now in life was her son Frederick; but she brought
+him up with the utmost possible strictness, for she fancied she detected
+his father's nature over again in him.
+
+She had always retained her warm interest in Elizabeth, and the messages
+which she had received from her from time to time had always given her
+pleasure. She had never felt so attracted towards any one since as she
+had been to that girl; and now after her great disappointment,
+Elizabeth's features, so full of character and expression, were
+constantly before her. She had seen her sometimes in Arendal, and
+thought she knew the reason why Elizabeth always seemed to avoid meeting
+her; for she had found once, by chance, among some old letters in one of
+her husband's drawers, the note which Elizabeth had written to him.
+
+It had been no shock to her. By that time she had come to know his
+volatile nature, and had given up all hope of ever being more to him
+than another would be.
+
+On the occasions when she had caught a glimpse of the pilot's wife in
+the street, she had looked searchingly into her face to try and satisfy
+herself whether she looked happy. But she had not been able to do so;
+there seemed to be something on Elizabeth's mind. And taking this
+impression in connection with what she heard of the pilot, of his
+hardness and uncompanionable temper, she thought that it was clear
+enough that Elizabeth too, was unhappy in her married life, and longed
+to have a talk with her, to know whether she herself was not the more
+unhappy of the two.
+
+Nor had Fru Beck's uncommon pallor escaped Elizabeth's notice, and she
+also longed to have a talk again with her friend of former days; but
+Beck's house was for many reasons impossible ground for her. As she was
+standing one day with Gjert on the quay, about to start for home, Fru
+Beck passed a little way off, leaning on her husband's arm, and looked
+back with an expression so sad, and with eyes that seemed to linger so
+longingly, as if she had something she wanted to say, or to confide,
+that they nodded involuntarily to one another.
+
+Since then they had never met, for from that time Elizabeth had scarcely
+ever been in Arendal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+
+Gjert was now ten years old; and whilst his father was sitting over his
+glass in Mother Andersen's parlour, he used generally to amuse himself
+out in the harbour with a number of the Arendal boys with whom he had
+struck up an acquaintanceship, and who understood very little about
+differences of social position.
+
+The brown-haired, brown-eyed little lad, with his sharp, intelligent
+face, was the wildest of them all, and enjoyed a certain consideration
+among them at the same time as his father's son--an honour which he
+evidently thought it incumbent upon him to maintain by every kind of
+break-neck exploit. His proper business, of course, was to look after
+his father's boat in his absence; but as it was safely moored, and could
+be seen just as well from any of the yards in the harbour, he used
+generally to wait in some such conspicuous position till his friends
+came streaming down to the quay from school, and throwing their books
+down, sailed out in some punt or other to join him. Most of the boys had
+been expressly warned by their mothers against the reckless
+Kristiansen's son, but cross-trees and mast-heads became thereby only
+the more attractive.
+
+Old Beck's grandson, Frederick, who was going to be a naval cadet, had
+fancied one day that he would escape observation from the windows at
+home by climbing up to join his friend at the mast-head, on the other
+side of the mast; but the slender spar was not sufficient to protect him
+from the master-pilot's keen eye, and the latter came himself on board
+in full grandfatherly indignation against the skipper for allowing such
+pranks to be played on board his craft, thrashed Gjert for being the
+cause of his grandson's disobedience, and told him that it was very
+clear what he would come to some day--that he came of a bad stock, and
+took after it. His own little scion, although a couple of years older
+than Gjert, escaped punishment altogether--the other lads, however,
+determining among themselves that he should have it the next time they
+met. And he would have had it, if Gjert, who should have been the one
+more particularly to desire revenge, had not unexpectedly taken his
+part.
+
+It was only as they were sailing the cutter home that the pilot heard
+how Beck had thrashed his son, and cast his horoscope. His smurched face
+grew white as a sheet. But when Gjert went in to tell him how, all the
+same, he had taken Frederick Beck's part, his father looked at him in
+surprise, and then muttered something about "telling this to his
+mother."
+
+Elizabeth had seen the boat pass Merdoe for Arendal the day before, and
+she was sitting indoors now expecting her husband, having commissioned
+their youngest and only other son, Henrik, to keep a look-out, and come
+and tell her when he saw his father coming. Henrik, however, had
+entirely forgotten her injunctions in the more interesting occupation of
+catching shrimps in one of the salt-water pools which a recent high tide
+had left among the rocks; and there, in the bright afternoon, over the
+blue and gold sea, dotted with sails, was the boat with its stripe and
+number already close by, standing straight in for the harbour with a
+flowing sheet.
+
+With all her deep love for her husband, Elizabeth always awaited his
+return now with a certain dread; and as she sat there by the window with
+her work, in her rather foreign, Dutch style of dress, with the rays of
+the evening sun streaming in upon her through the geraniums, she did not
+look a happy woman. She was pale, and from time to time leaned her cheek
+for a moment on her hand, and closed her eyes with a wearied look, and
+then went on again determinedly with her sewing. When she heard his
+voice unexpectedly outside the door, she jumped up hurriedly, but
+stopped then with a half-frightened look, hesitating whether to go out
+and meet him or not.
+
+While she hesitated the door opened, and her expression changed at once
+to one of cheerfulness, and apparently glad surprise.
+
+"Well, mother, how goes it?" he cried, as he entered, in a light and
+cheery tone, which took in a moment a weight off her heart; "and where
+is the 'bagman'?"--a pet name he had for his youngest son, when he was
+in good humour.
+
+Gjert's adventure with Beck's grandson had made him a different man
+to-day, and had immeasurably lightened for the time his wife's task; but
+she was very careful not to let him see that she found him any different
+from usual. Still, as she helped him off with his pilot-coat he noticed
+that her hand trembled. His attention was diverted, however, at the
+moment by the appearance of Henrik in the doorway, looking very
+frightened and conscious, and with his trousers still tucked up over his
+bare legs, and with the tin cup, in which he had his shrimps, in his
+hand.
+
+Gjert came in now with some of the things for the house which his father
+had bought in Arendal, and impressing the doleful-looking "bagman" into
+the service, took him down with him to the boat to help him to bring up
+the rest. He had only given his mother a hurried kiss, as he had seen at
+a glance that all was right this time. When it was otherwise, he always
+kept by her, and, in look and manner, gave her all the help he could. He
+had seen from his childhood, and comprehended so much of the unhappiness
+of her relations with his father, that he had constituted himself her
+friend and support, although, at the same time, he was devoted to his
+father. When Gjert was in the boat, Elizabeth had a sort of security
+that Salve would at all events not be absolutely reckless; and Gjert
+always took care that she should have news of them by other pilots or
+fishermen from Merdoe, from the different places they put in to. If the
+boy was not with his father she would sometimes send him in to Arendal
+to look for him.
+
+This time the pilot made a long stay at home, and during the whole time
+not a single domestic jar occurred. For a couple, indeed, who had been
+married as long as they had, such unbroken harmony would, under any
+circumstances, have been remarkable. Little Henrik had even had his
+father as a companion on one of his shrimping expeditions; and much of
+Salve's time had since been taken up in rigging a little brig for his
+delighted son.
+
+The only point upon which a harmless little difference occurred was the
+question of Gjert's schooling. They were very fairly well-to-do people
+for their position, and his mother had one day, as if the idea had
+suddenly occurred to her, asked why they should not send him to school
+in Arendal; he would be able to lodge with her aunt there, she said. His
+father, however, would not hear of it, and dismissed the subject very
+shortly by saying that when Gjert was old enough, he intended him to go
+to Tergesen's rigging-loft in Vraangen and learn to rig.
+
+His mother could not, however, so easily dismiss the ambitious scheme
+from her mind, and it became, a few days after, the occasion of the most
+violent scene which had ever yet put her strength of purpose to the
+test, but from which there ensued eventually the very happiest results.
+
+A man-of-war had lately come up to Arendal from a cadet cruise to the
+Mediterranean, and Gjert had been allowed to go over with one of the
+other pilots to see her.
+
+Apart from the sensation which her lofty rig, the shining brass stoppers
+protruding from her gunports, her swarm of sailors, and the sound of the
+shrill whistle and occasional beat of drum on board, suggestive of
+man-of-war discipline, created, curiosity had been further excited by
+some rumours which were in circulation about her cruise having been a
+flogging cruise; and among Gjert's friends, and indeed among the harbour
+people generally, she was so much the object of awe, that whenever the
+whistle sounded, it would darkly suggest the thought that another
+flogging was going to take place, and any boats that were near at the
+moment would sheer off to a more comfortable distance. There was just so
+much truth in all this that there was one very hot-tempered officer on
+board who was very much hated by the crew, and who had been unfortunate
+enough to single out for flogging just the man whom, if he had been
+better advised, he would have left alone--the song-maker, namely, of the
+ship. The result had been that ever since a mystic refrain, sufficiently
+significant, however, had been sung at the capstan, and had found its
+way on shore, where it was in the mouth now of every boy about the
+harbour.
+
+Gjert's curiosity about everything connected with the vessel was
+unbounded, and Frederick Beck, with whom he had established a close
+friendship since that little affair with the other's grandfather, when
+Gjert had saved him from punishment, could not tell him half enough.
+"Fancy," he thought, "to be able to go about in a uniform all covered
+with gold like the officers there on board!" He could think and talk of
+nothing else all the time they were sailing home next day.
+
+The wind had risen to half a gale, and they had three reefs in the
+mainsail. His father, who for some days past had been wandering with
+increasing frequency up to the flag-staff, or down to the quay, where he
+would stand with his hand behind his back alone, and look about him in
+an eager, restless way--sure signs that he was getting tired of being on
+land--had been up several times to look out for the boy, and was now
+sitting in the house, pasting together an old chart, as his son came up
+from the quay shouting out the new song at the top of his voice against
+the wind. He stopped in the porch to collect his breath to give the last
+stanza with effect, and husband and wife as they listened exchanged
+glances.
+
+It was easy to see when he came in that he was bursting with the
+consciousness of having all sorts of wonderful things to relate. His
+mother had just laid the table for their evening meal, and as he greeted
+them in an off-hand sort of way, he drew a chair over to the table at the
+same time, that he might be ready to fall to the moment the food was set
+down.
+
+"Well, Gjert," said his mother, after he had sat and looked round him
+for a moment or two, evidently expecting to be invited to gratify their
+curiosity, "were you on board?"
+
+"Not myself; but I talked to others who had been. For that matter I saw
+everything that was to be seen," he assured them with a self-conscious
+nod, reaching over at the same time for a crust of bread--"from the
+topmast of the Antonia, a schooner that was lying close alongside. She
+barely reached up to the Eagle's bulwarks; she would just about make a
+long-boat for her--"
+
+"If she was a good deal smaller," said his father, drily, completing the
+sentence for him, as he went over and placed the chart upon the top of
+the small cupboard in the corner.
+
+Gjert began then, addressing himself to his mother, to support his
+assertion by a comparison of the height out of the water of the
+schooner's hull and of the corvette's, by assuring her that the vane at
+her mast-head had not reached higher than the man-of-war's mainyard,
+&c., but he was interrupted by his father--
+
+"What song was that you were singing out there?"
+
+"Oh, it was the one about the flogging cruise."
+
+"It really was one then?" said the pilot, with a searching look at his
+son. He did not easily give credence to gossip of the kind.
+
+To be addressed by his father in this interested tone was highly
+flattering to Gjert's self-love. It was this, in fact, that he had been
+eager all the time to tell them about; and he burst out now with the
+deepest conviction in his manner--
+
+"That it was, father! Some say six, others nine; but that they were all
+flogged within an inch of their lives and put in irons down in the
+Mediterranean is as certain as--as," he looked about him eagerly here
+for something that should be duly emphatic, and when no other more
+striking illustration suggested itself, had to wind up finally with this
+rather lame one--"as that the cuckoo is standing up there on the clock."
+
+The intelligence had the effect of bringing his mother to a seat, with
+the plate on her lap, while she looked apprehensively from her son to
+her husband. There was nothing, however, in the aspect of the latter to
+justify her apprehension.
+
+"Who did you hear this from, Gjert?" she asked.
+
+"Who did I hear it from? From everybody."
+
+But bethinking him then that in his incredulous home "everybody" would
+be reckoned about as valuable an authority as "nobody," he continued--
+
+"From Frederick Beck. He had talked himself with one of the sailors who
+was in charge of the officers' gig down by the landing-stairs while his
+chief was on shore; and that wasn't all he heard, but a lot of other
+queer things besides." Here he looked round him evidently with a
+satisfied feeling that he must have convinced them this time at any
+rate.
+
+"He seems to have been a credible kind of a chap, that sailor," observed
+his father with a mild irony, which escaped his son, however; while his
+mother looked at him in some anxiety lest he should be going to sit
+there and make a fool of himself. "Well, and what further did he tell
+him?"
+
+"Oh, lots of things."
+
+"Let us have them."
+
+"He said they had had such a hurricane down there, that they came across
+a whole town that had been blown away drifting out in the middle of the
+sea, with a minister praying in the midst of it;--then, that they had
+run so close in to the land in beating up the Straits of Gibraltar, that
+they had taken a palm-tree on board on the end of the bowsprit with a
+whole family of negroes sitting in it, whom they had afterwards to put
+ashore."
+
+Gjert would have delivered himself of still another curious incident if
+he had not been brought up by the laughter of his parents. The "bagman"
+too, was laughing, because he saw the others doing so, and received a
+crushing look accordingly from Gjert, who drew in his horns at once.
+
+"Perhaps you don't think it's true?"
+
+"Do you know what it is to spin a yarn, my boy? That lad down in the gig
+has been spinning you a fine one," said his father, as he sat down to
+the table.
+
+Gjert continued to talk all through the meal, and when it was over,
+while his mother came in and out of the room, and his father sat over at
+the window, partly listening and partly looking out at the weather. He
+described everything he had seen with such life and vividness,
+particularly all that concerned the officers and the cadets, that his
+mother sat down to listen, and his father, when there was a moment's
+pause, observed with a quiet laugh--
+
+"I daresay you would have liked to have been one of the cadets yourself,
+Gjert?"
+
+"Yes," said his mother, beguiled for a moment by the dazzling thought.
+"If he were only to go to school in Arendal no one knows what might
+happen. The clerk says that nothing is any trouble to Gjert."
+
+Something in this observation must have struck discordantly upon her
+husband's ear, for he changed colour and replied shortly after, somewhat
+sarcastically--
+
+"It's my opinion that Gjert is not too good for his father's station,
+and that we are not going to make interest with anybody to hoist him up
+into the company of his betters, as they call themselves."
+
+Gjert's previous animation had been very much heightened by the picture
+which such a glittering prospect presented to his fancy, and he cried
+now, without taking warning by his father's changed tone--
+
+"Mother was saying, though, the other day, that if I were to be a cadet
+I should cut a better figure in the world than as an ordinary common
+sailor."
+
+It was as if a match had been thrown into a gunpowder-magazine. His
+father's hard face flushed up wildly, and he threw over at his wife a
+look of inexpressible, cold scorn. Turning savagely away, he said in a
+cutting tone, that seemed to go through her--
+
+"Do you also despise your father's station, my boy?"
+
+When Gjert blundered out then in his eagerness--
+
+"Frederick Beck is going to be a cadet," it was followed simply by--
+
+"Come here, Gjert!"--and he received a blow that sent him staggering
+against the table. A second was about to follow, when his father
+happened to look up at his wife. She had sprung a couple of steps
+forward, as if to take Gjert from him, and was standing now before him
+with crimson face and flashing eyes, and with a bearing that made him,
+at all events, lower his hand. She then turned away at once, and went
+out into the kitchen.
+
+Salve stood for a moment uncertain how to act. Then he went to the
+kitchen door, and announced, shortly and sharply, that he and Gjert were
+going to sea that evening--they would want provisions.
+
+The wind and rain beat wildly against the black window-panes while
+Elizabeth was carrying out his orders; but when she presently came in
+with the ale-jar and what else they were to take with them, not a trace
+of anxiety, or of her former emotion, was to be detected. Her face was
+pale, and stony-calm; and there was something almost humble in her
+bearing towards her husband. But when, for a moment, she and Gjert were
+left alone together in the house, drawing him hastily towards her, she
+whispered, in a voice choked with repressed emotion--
+
+"Never let your father see that you are afraid, my boy."
+
+She bade her husband farewell at the door; and there was foul weather
+both within and without the pilot as he put to sea that evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+
+Elizabeth was more agitated even than usual after a scene of this kind.
+When he had struck her son, her indignation had almost mastered her; and
+it frightened her now to think how near she had been to an explosion.
+This time the so-often-repeated excuses which she had accustomed herself
+to make for him would not suggest themselves; and as she lay awake in
+the stillness of the night, and looked back through the years that were
+gone, it seemed as if she was struggling and labouring on for ever
+without any prospect of getting nearer to the goal, and that her
+patience was wellnigh exhausted. Had she no claim at all to
+consideration? or must she be for ever silent like this, till one of
+them should at last be laid in Tromoe churchyard?
+
+These thoughts, having been once roused, would not be repressed again.
+They held possession of her during the following day too; and she could
+settle down to no work of any kind. She dreaded that Salve might
+unexpectedly return, and did not know how she should receive him,--she
+no longer felt sure of being able to control herself. Her own house had
+all of a sudden become confined and suffocating, as if it were a prison
+in which she had sat for years: it seemed as if she could bear this way
+of living no longer.
+
+On one of the following days a neighbour came in with a message from her
+aunt. She was ill, and wished Elizabeth to come and see her.
+
+Leaving word, accordingly, for Salve when he returned, where she was
+gone, she took Henrik with her, and set out at once for Arendal. It was
+almost a relief to think that she would be away this time when he came
+home.
+
+That old Mother Kirstine should be laid up, was, in its way, an event in
+the place. Having been professed sick-nurse for so many years, she was
+connected by ties of grateful recollection with a number of families.
+Men who were now fathers themselves remembered well her face bending
+over them when as children they had tossed about in measles or fever;
+and when any more serious illness now occurred in any of their
+households, she appeared upon the scene as a matter of course without
+waiting to be sent for. And it was a comfort in itself to see that
+strong, self-possessed old woman, with her quiet experienced tact and
+untiring faculty of keeping awake, moving about the sick-bed, and giving
+her directions with a confidence that brooked no contradiction. Her
+position, in fact, was such, that when a new doctor arrived he soon
+perceived that the first thing he had to do, if he was to have any
+reputation in the town, would be to win the confidence of old Mother
+Kirstine.
+
+Young Fru Beck, amongst others, had constantly sent to inquire after
+her; and when she heard that Elizabeth was there, she could not resist
+the opportunity of going to see her.
+
+It was one evening before dinner--Mother Kirstine had fallen into a
+quiet sleep, and Elizabeth was sitting by her bedside, when she saw Fru
+Beck pass the window. Elizabeth knew she would come in, and sat with
+beating heart waiting for her knock at the door.
+
+Fru Beck must have stood a long while in the porch, for some minutes
+passed before the latch was stirred. Elizabeth went softly out and
+opened the door.
+
+They stood face to face. Elizabeth's eyes were full of tears, but Fru
+Beck's feelings were not at that moment so easily expressed. She
+silently pressed Elizabeth's hand, and her manner, and the expression of
+her pale face, showed that she was not the less moved of the two at
+their meeting again.
+
+Elizabeth showed her into Mother Kirstine's comfortable little kitchen,
+where a saucepan of broth for her sick aunt was simmering over the fire.
+She invited her visitor to take a seat. It was so quiet that they could
+hear the watch ticking in the next room where her aunt was sleeping.
+
+Neither spoke for a moment or two. Then Fru Beck asked in a low voice--
+
+"How is your aunt, Elizabeth?"
+
+It was a natural question to ask under the circumstances, but it was
+felt by both to be only a preliminary breaking of the ice; she had,
+besides, sent a messenger that morning already to make inquiries.
+
+"Thank you, Fru Beck, she is improving," Elizabeth replied. "She is
+asleep now, and that will do her good."
+
+"It is a long time since we saw each other--nearly eighteen years," said
+Fru Beck, and her eyes dwelt upon Elizabeth as if to find what traces
+time had left upon her. "But you have kept strong, I see--stronger than
+I have."
+
+"It was that morning I left for Holland," said Elizabeth, seeming to
+recall it with a certain pleasure.
+
+"I have often thought of that time," whispered Fru Beck, more to herself
+almost than to the person she was talking to. Her lip trembled slightly,
+and Elizabeth read an expression of mute sorrow in her face. She was on
+the point of telling Elizabeth that she knew the reason of her going;
+but after debating for a moment within herself whether she should or
+not, finally let it pass.
+
+"Ah! if we could only see into the future, Elizabeth!" she exclaimed
+with a sigh, and looked sadly at her, as if she thought she had given
+expression to a feeling that must be common to them both.
+
+"It is better as it is, Fru Beck. Many things happen in life that would
+not be so easy to bear if we were cast down beforehand."
+
+"Yes; but one could guard one's self," whispered Fru Beck, with a
+certain bitterness and hardness in her voice.
+
+Elizabeth made no reply, and there was a pause, which seemed to Fru Beck
+to have broken the thread of the conversation. She deliberated how she
+should take it up again so as to get at what she wanted to say, and
+taking Elizabeth's hand with sudden warmth, she said--
+
+"If there is anything your aunt wants, you know, I hope, that she has
+only to send to me." She would rather have made Elizabeth herself the
+object of her interest instead of her aunt, but felt that there was much
+in the relations in which they had stood to one another to make that
+impossible; but her meaning was just as clear.
+
+"And for yourself, Elizabeth?" she went on, looking searchingly into her
+eyes, with an expression of deep sympathy. "All is not right with you: I
+am afraid your marriage has not been a happy one."
+
+These last words brought a sudden flush into Elizabeth's face, and she
+involuntarily withdrew her hand.
+
+She looked at Fru Beck with an expression of wounded pride, as if it was
+a subject she declined to discuss.
+
+"That is not the case, Fru Beck," she replied. "I am"--she was going to
+say "happily," but preferred to say--"not unhappily married." She felt
+that that sounded rather weak, and added--
+
+"I have never loved, never wished for, any one but him who is now my
+husband."
+
+"I am overjoyed to hear it, Elizabeth, for I had heard otherwise," said
+Fru Beck, with some embarrassment--and there was another pause. She felt
+from Elizabeth's manner and bearing that she had wounded her
+self-esteem; and this last unlucky speech, she was afraid, had made
+matters worse.
+
+There was a movement in the adjoining room, and Elizabeth was glad of an
+occasion to break the rather painful silence, and went in to her aunt
+for a moment.
+
+Fru Beck looked after her with a rather surprised, but an unsatisfied,
+expression; she must have been mistaken: but still, happy in her home
+Elizabeth could scarcely be. And yet, she thought bitterly, what a gulf
+there was between them! She, at all events, loved her husband.
+
+When Elizabeth returned, Fru Beck, with the idea of effacing the
+impression she had already produced, and to satisfy, at the same time,
+her own longing to open her heart to somebody, said--
+
+"You must not be offended at what I said, Elizabeth. I thought that
+others might have sorrow too."
+
+"We all have our burden, and often it is very hard to bear," rejoined
+Elizabeth. She understood very well what Fru Beck's words had meant, and
+looked at her compassionately; but she avoided answering directly to
+what she thought had been blurted out unintentionally, and said--
+
+"You have a son. That should be a great happiness, Fru Beck, and much to
+live for."
+
+"To live for!" she exclaimed--"to live for! I will confide to you
+something that no one but you now knows. I am dying--dying every day. No
+one knows as well as I do myself how much is left of me. It is little,
+and it will soon be less." She spoke in a cold, pale kind of ecstasy.
+"You are the only creature I have told this to--the only one on this
+earth I really care about; hear it and forget it. And now, adieu," she
+said; "if we ever meet again in this world, don't let the subject be
+mentioned between us." She felt blindly for the door, and opened it.
+
+"Every cross comes from above, and the worst of all sins is to despair,"
+said Elizabeth, with an attempt at consolation; she said what most
+readily occurred to her at the moment.
+
+Fru Beck turned at the door, and looked back at her with a white, calm,
+joyless face.
+
+"Elizabeth," she said, "I found this in one of my husband's drawers. I
+tell it you, that you may not think that that has been in any way the
+cause of my spoilt life."
+
+She took from her pocket a scrap of paper, yellow with age, and handed
+it to her. The door closed behind her then, and she was gone.
+
+Elizabeth sat still for a long while in sad distress, thinking of her.
+Now she understood why Fru Beck was so pale. She had not a wrinkle in
+her face--it looked so noble; but oh how cold, how pinched it had
+become! Poor, poor woman! her burden was indeed a heavy one. It would
+have been difficult to recognise Marie Forstberg again in her.
+
+"That, then, it is to have married unhappily," she said to herself. She
+seemed to have gazed into some terrible abyss.
+
+Her friend's sorrows continued to occupy her thoughts as she sat by her
+aunt's bedside; and when at last her feelings of compassion had calmed
+down, another point in their conversation that had been hitherto thrown
+into the background came into increasing prominence. It lay in the words
+that had so suddenly and grievously wounded her.
+
+"So, that is what the world says of us," she thought: "that our marriage
+has been unhappy."
+
+She had time and solitude enough, while tending her patient and sitting
+up with her, to ponder the matter; and as she thought over her married
+life, and contemplated unflinchingly the constant, weary, fruitless
+struggle in which it had passed, and in which she had not advanced one
+single step, but rather had been going always, always back, more and
+more, she asked herself, could she say that there was happiness in a
+life like that? And was Salve himself happy? She saw him before her as
+he was in his early youth, and as he was now--gloomy, savage, and
+suspicious in his home; she thought how she welcomed him always with
+disguised dread instead of with a wife's joy, how they had last parted,
+and what feelings she had since entertained; and she dwelt long and
+bitterly upon the contrast. To think that it should have come to this
+between them! She began with dread to reflect, "Perhaps this is what
+they mean by an unhappy marriage." It had never occurred to her before
+that such a thing could be said of her--of her, who had married the man
+whom of all others in the whole world she wished to marry.
+
+She sat on far into the night with her hands folded on her knee, and
+gazing straight before her, the night-light from the glass behind the
+bed throwing its faint light over the room. Fru Beck's words, as she
+stood there so pale, and told her of her unhappiness, recurred to her
+again and again, more distinctly, it seemed, each time. "I am dying
+every day. I know best myself how much is left of me. It is very little,
+and will soon be less."
+
+It seemed then all in a moment to flash upon her--
+
+"That is just how Salve and I are living. We are wasting away--we are
+dying every day beside each other. That is what people do who are
+unhappily married."
+
+She sat for a long while, with her head bent forward, sorrowfully
+engrossed with this thought. In all the self-sacrifice she had
+practised, because she thought he could not bear to hear the truth, she
+saw now nothing but one long corroding lie. It was owing to the want of
+confidence in each other, of mutual candour--to their both having
+shunned the truth, the only sure ground of happiness, that their life
+together had been thus spoilt. She threw back her head with a look of
+wild energy in her face, and never had she looked more handsome than
+now, as she exclaimed decisively--
+
+"But there shall be an end of this! Salve and I shall no longer make a
+desert of each other's life!" and she rose from her chair in great
+agitation.
+
+"What are you saying, Elizabeth?" asked her aunt, whom she had
+unconsciously awakened.
+
+"Nothing, dear aunt," she answered, and bent over the invalid with a cup
+of broth, which she had been keeping warm over the night-light.
+
+"You look so--so happy, Elizabeth."
+
+"It is because you have slept so well, aunt; and if you drink this you
+will go to sleep again."
+
+There was a quiet smile on her lips now, and her whole bearing was
+changed. The burden of years was taken off her heart. At last the
+chilling, heavy, bewildering fog which had enclosed her whole life,
+making every footstep, every thought, every joy uncertain, had lifted,
+and she could clearly see her way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+
+Salve had been lucky; he had piloted an English bark into Hesnaes, and
+his services had been liberally acknowledged. He had, as usual, looked
+forward with dread to coming home again; but when he found his wife not
+there, and heard the reason, he had set off at once for Arendal to see
+after her.
+
+She received him out in the passage.
+
+"Good morning, Salve," she said, shaking hands with him. "I have been
+anxious about you, as you may suppose, and have been expecting you. You
+mustn't make a noise--come this way," and she showed him into the room
+at the side. "Where is Gjert?"
+
+He looked at her in surprise; this was not her usual way of receiving
+him. There was a confidence in her tone, as if she had taken upon
+herself to call him to account for his absence. It had hitherto been he
+always who had taken the initiative and been in a gracious humour or
+not, according as it pleased him.
+
+"Gjert," he answered, rather shortly, "is at home in the house. So you
+have been anxious about me--expected me?" he added, in a peculiar tone,
+as if he found something to remark upon in this way of addressing him,
+but deferred comment for the present.
+
+"Why, you know, goodman, that it can't be the same to me if you are lost
+out there at sea."
+
+"How is your aunt?" he asked, abruptly. "Is she seriously ill?"
+
+"She can see you. Come in with me, but step gently."
+
+Salve felt that he could not very well refuse, and followed her. He had
+always, as far as possible, avoided seeing Mother Kirstine, and had left
+his wife to represent him in that quarter. He was afraid of the
+penetrating eyes which the old woman turned upon him, and had never
+forgotten the warning she had given him not to go near Elizabeth as long
+as he harboured a doubt against her in his heart.
+
+It was with great deference that he now approached her bedside.
+
+"Oh, it's you, Salve," she said, in a weak voice. "It's not often I have
+a sight of you. Elizabeth has been such a blessing to me; and Henrik is
+so quiet and good. Where is Gjert? Have you not brought him with you?"
+And her eyes wandered in search of the boy.
+
+"He is at home taking care of the house, aunt. How are you?"
+
+"Oh, thanks--as you see. I think so often what will become of that boy;
+he is so wild, but with such a good nature, poor fellow!"
+
+"Oh, we shall make something of him, you'll see," said Elizabeth, who
+had been standing behind Salve, and now came forward. "But you must not
+talk so much."
+
+Salve's face grew stern; this was the most unfortunate topic which could
+have been suggested. And matters were presently made worse by Mother
+Kirstine saying, when there was a pause--
+
+"You looked so glad last night, Elizabeth! Who was it that was sitting
+with you talking yesterday?"
+
+"It was Fru Beck."
+
+"The young one?"
+
+"Yes. But you talk too much, aunt."
+
+"I am afraid so too," thought Salve; and as he saw Elizabeth, as if
+nothing had happened, motioning to him now to come away, he controlled
+himself for the moment, and said a little constrainedly--
+
+"You will be quite well, aunt, I hope, by the time I come again perhaps
+in a few days. Good-bye till then."
+
+He left the room rather brusquely, and his face was black as thunder.
+
+Elizabeth read his thoughts, and when they came out into the kitchen she
+forestalled him.
+
+"Listen, Salve," she said; "I must, of course, stay here as long as aunt
+is ill."
+
+"Of course," he replied; "and you have acquaintances here."
+
+"You mean Fru Beck? Yes, she has been so kind to me, and I am attached
+to her--she is unhappily married, poor thing!"
+
+Salve was astounded. Elizabeth seemed all in a moment to have forgotten
+a great deal--to have forgotten that there existed certain
+stumbling-blocks between them--was it perhaps because she was in her
+aunt's house? He looked coldly at her as if he could not quite
+comprehend what had come over her.
+
+"You will remain, of course, as long as you please," he said, and
+prepared to go; but could not help adding with bitterness--
+
+"I daresay you find it lonely and dull at home."
+
+"You are not so far wrong there, Salve," she replied. "I have indeed
+found it lonely enough out there for many years now. You are so often
+away from home, and then I am left quite alone. It is two years now
+since I have been in here to see my aunt."
+
+"Elizabeth," he burst out, trying hard to restrain himself, "have you
+taken leave of your senses?"
+
+"That is just what I want to avoid, Salve," she said, with freezing
+deliberation.
+
+He stared at her. She could stand and tell him this to his face!
+
+"So these are your sentiments, then," he observed, scornfully. "I always
+suspected it; and now, for what I care, you may please yourself about
+coming home, Elizabeth," he continued in a cold, indifferent tone.
+
+"You ought always to have known what my sentiments were, Salve; that I
+was, perhaps, too much attached to you."
+
+"I shall send you money. You shall not have that as an excuse. So far as
+I am concerned, you may enjoy the society of Fru Beck and your fine
+friends as long as ever you please."
+
+"And why should I not be allowed to speak to Fru Beck?" she cried, with
+her head thrown back, and with an expression of rising anger. "You don't
+mean, I suppose, that there is anything against me that should prevent
+my entering her house? But there must be an end to this, Salve--and it
+is for the sake of our love I say it; for if matters go on as they have
+been going on so long between us," she concluded slowly, and with a
+tremor in her voice, "you might live to see the day when it had ceased
+to exist. These things are not in our own power, Salve."
+
+He stood for a moment still, and gazed at her in speechless amazement,
+while the flash of his dark keen eyes showed that a devil had been
+roused within him, which he had the utmost difficulty in restraining.
+
+"I will suppose that you have said this in a moment of excitement," he
+said, with terrible calmness; "I shall not be angry with you--I shall
+forget it; I promise you that. And I think that you have not been quite
+yourself to-day--ill--"
+
+"Don't deceive yourself, Salve. I mean every word--as surely as I love
+you."
+
+"Farewell, Elizabeth; I shall be here again on Wednesday," he said, as
+if he only held to his purpose, and did not care to hear any more of
+this. He left her then, and shut the door quietly behind him.
+
+When he had gone, Elizabeth sank rather than sat down upon the bench.
+She was frightened at what she had said. A profound dread took
+possession of her. She knew his nature so well, and knew that she was
+risking everything, that the result might be that he would leave her
+altogether, and take to some misguided life far away from home. And yet
+it must--it must be dared. And with God's help she would conquer, and
+bind him to her closer than ever he had been before.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+
+As Salve stood and steered for home, he had as yet only a dull
+consciousness of what had occurred; but there was anger in his eye, and
+a hard determined look in his face. His pride had received a terrible
+shock. She had suddenly fallen upon him with all this on neutral ground;
+she had told him plainly that she had been unhappy, and that she felt
+she had been living under a tyranny the whole time of their married
+life. He smiled bitterly--well, he had been right, it seemed, all along
+in feeling that she was not open with him.
+
+Yes, it was true that they had lived unhappily; but whose fault had it
+been? Had she not deceived him when he was young and confiding, and did
+not know what doubt was? And since?--he knew but too well what it had
+cost her to adapt herself to his humble circumstances.
+
+He felt that the power which he had had over her for so many years was
+gone. It was as if she had all of a sudden set down a barrel of
+gunpowder on the floor of his house and threatened to blow it up. Such
+threats, however, would have no weight with him.
+
+When he came to Merdoe he moored the cutter in silence--scarcely looking
+at Gjert, who came down to help him--and went in, without speaking, to
+the house, where he stood by the window for a while writing on the
+window-pane. It was soon quite dark outside; Gjert had lit a candle, and
+had sat down by the table. He understood that there was something wrong
+again with his mother, but did not dare to ask after her, as he was
+longing to do. His father, during the rest of the evening, never stirred
+from the corner of the bench which was his son's sleeping-place; it was
+made to serve the double purpose of bench and bed.
+
+When supper-time arrived, Gjert put some food on the table. He felt that
+the situation somehow was dangerous, and went on his tiptoes to make as
+little noise as possible; but he was the more awkward in consequence,
+and made a clatter with the plates.
+
+This, and the dread of him which his son showed, irritated Salve. He
+flared up suddenly, and burst out in a thundering voice--
+
+"Don't you ask after your mother, boy?"
+
+Gjert would have been frightened under ordinary circumstances, but his
+anxiety for his mother, for whom his heart bled, gave him courage to
+answer boldly--
+
+"Yes, father; I have been wanting all the time to ask how mother was. Is
+she not coming? Poor mother!" and the boy burst into tears, laid his
+head upon his arm, and sobbed.
+
+"Mother will come back when her aunt over in Arendal is well again,"
+said the pilot, soothingly. But he soon broke out again.
+
+"You have nothing to blubber for," he said; "you can go in and see her
+if you like t-omorrow morning the first thing. You may go now and sleep
+in our bed."
+
+Gjert obeyed; and his father paced to and fro on the floor afterwards
+for a long while in great agitation.
+
+"That is her game, then, is it?" he exclaimed. "She knew what she was
+about, and she knew who it was she was threatening."
+
+He sat down again on the bench-bed with clasped hands, and eyes fixed on
+the ground. Passion was working strongly within him.
+
+"But she does not put compulsion upon me."
+
+The candle was expiring in the socket, and he lit another and put it in
+its place. It was past midnight. He remained for a little with the
+candlestick in his hand, and then took the light in to Gjert. The boy
+was lying in his mother's place, and had evidently cried himself to
+sleep.
+
+His father stood for a long while over him. His lips quivered, and his
+face became ashy pale. He controlled himself with an effort and went
+back to the other room, where he sat down in the same attitude as
+before.
+
+When Gjert came in in the morning, he found his father lying down on the
+bench with all his clothes on. He was asleep. It was evident that he had
+sat up the whole night. It went to the boy's heart; and he felt sorry
+for his father now.
+
+The latter woke shortly after and looked at him rather confusedly at
+first. Then he said, gently--
+
+"I promised you yesterday, my boy, that you should go to your mother in
+Arendal. I daresay she is wanting to see you."
+
+"If mother is not ill I had rather stay here with you, father, until you
+go in to see her yourself. She has Henrik with her."
+
+"You would?" said his father, in a rather toneless voice, and looking at
+him as if some new idea had been suggested to him by the boy's reply.
+
+"But I wish you to go, Gjert," he said then, suddenly, in a changed
+tone, that admitted of no further question. "Mother took no things with
+her. You must take her Sunday gown, and what else you know she will
+want, in with you in the trunk there. It may be a long while
+before--before aunt is well," he said, and left the house.
+
+While Gjert packed up the things, his father went down to the strand and
+got the row-boat ready himself for him.
+
+When the boy started he stroked the child's cheek, but said a little
+bitterly, "Remember me to your mother now, and say that father is
+coming, as he promised, on Wednesday. Be careful, now, how you go. I
+have only given you the oars; I don't like to trust you with a sail in
+the boat."
+
+He stood for some time looking after his son as he rowed sturdily away,
+and then went up to the look-out, where he began to walk up and down
+with his hands behind his back in his usual manner. His restlessness of
+mind, however, soon drove him back again to the house, where he remained
+alone nearly the whole day.
+
+The first intensity of his anger had so far worked itself off now, that
+he could think clearly; and the chief feeling which possessed him was
+one of wonder as to what could have come over her all of a sudden like
+this. It could hardly be that scene which they had had when he last went
+to sea--it had not been the first of its kind. No--it must be something
+else; it must have been something which had occurred in Arendal. She had
+spoken of Fru Beck's unhappy married life with a certain significance,
+as if it bore upon their own. That was evidently it--she had been
+talking to Fru Beck; she must have been put up to it by her old friend.
+
+"What gratitude I do owe these Becks!" he exclaimed; "it seems as if
+every trouble must come from that owl's nest."
+
+"She has gone and thought all this at home here, concealing it from me
+the whole time, submitting, and saying nothing. Now she has found her
+opportunity. And over there, in Arendal, she could, of course, count
+upon being able to make her own terms against her husband, the unpopular
+pilot--could be sure of having every one on her side, from her aunt to
+these same Becks."
+
+Yes; and what was the real history of her connection with the Becks? He
+had never had that matter satisfactorily cleared up.
+
+"She stipulated that I should trust her--wouldn't hear mention of a
+doubt. But I have never felt satisfied about that business."
+
+"I'll not be fooled by you any longer," he cried then, flying into a
+sudden passion, and striding up and down the room. "It is she who must
+give me an explanation; it is she who has trampled me under foot!"
+
+He sat down at the table and pursued this train of thought.
+
+"Elizabeth! Elizabeth! what have you done?" he whispered, presently,
+with emotion, and hid his forehead in his hands.
+
+"Yes, what has she done? Nothing, I firmly believe; and that it is just
+you, Salve, who are mad! Ah! if I could only really believe that there
+was nothing to quarrel about, after all! And I can believe it, if I have
+only been with her for a while," he sighed; and then added with a touch
+of self-contempt, "the fact is, I ought never to go away from home. I am
+like an anchovy; I don't bear taking out of the jar!
+
+"She was so like the old Elizabeth as she stood there and told me all
+this; it is years since I have seen her like that. There's not her match
+to be found the whole world through.
+
+"She has told me so often that she cares for me, has always cared for
+me, ever since the time she was living with her grandfather out on the
+rock; and an untruth never came from her lips. I'd stake my life upon
+that.
+
+"For truth--I believe you, Elizabeth, when you stand like that and tell
+me so," and he struck the table as if he was making the declaration to
+her face.
+
+"But why should she care for me?" he went on. "Have her thoughts not
+been running always on things much beyond what I, a poor pilot, and my
+humble cottage can give her? Has she not always been hankering after
+something grand?"
+
+During these days, while this conflict of thought was surging to and fro
+within him, he had the appearance of a man distraught; and if he ever
+left the house, he could not rest until he had returned to it again. The
+prolonged agitation of mind had told upon him, and he was sitting
+now--the day before the one when he was to go in to Arendal again--alone
+in his house, feeling very low and depressed; it looked so dreary and
+empty.
+
+Over in the window, by the leaf-table, where she generally sat to sew,
+stood the polished buffalo-hoof which he had brought long ago as a
+curiosity from Monte Video, and had since had made into a weight for
+her; and by the wall, under the old print of the Naiad, was the
+elephant, carved out of bone, which he had also had from the time when
+he was roaming through the world as a sailor before the mast.
+
+He gazed at these things for a while absently, and then went in to their
+bedroom.
+
+There was the chest of drawers by the wall, on which she always placed
+the lacquered glass which hung in the other room, when she arranged her
+beautiful hair. How many a conversation they had had together as she
+stood there with her back to him; and what a figure she had! often
+answering him with merely a change of expression as she looked back at
+him over her shoulder. Everything in the room had some such vivid memory
+to suggest; and as he sat dismally on the side of their bed, adjoining
+which was little Henrik's, his thoughts were occupied with many a
+trivial recollection of the kind, which might seem almost childish in a
+man of his age and character, and of such a stern, black-bearded
+exterior; but he was anything but stern now.
+
+Presently his eyes ceased to wander. He sat perfectly still. The
+conviction had seized him that he could not possibly do without her; and
+as he looked slowly about him a great terror seemed to be taking
+possession of him. He imagined that she was really gone--that in some
+way or another he had really lost her, and that everything in the room
+was standing just as she had left it, and as it would stand unmoved,
+undusted for ever.
+
+"I have deserved it," he muttered; and a cold perspiration came out upon
+his forehead. "Have I treated her in such a way that I have any right to
+expect her to care for me? Is it not just my own folly that is to blame?
+She was right--more than right. I have behaved shamefully to her,
+suspiciously, and tyrannically--invariably, unceasingly; and now I may
+sit here long enough and repent it, to no purpose. She would not be what
+she is if she tamely submitted to such treatment."
+
+He dwelt upon this last thought until the scales seemed to drop from his
+eyes, and, acknowledging the truth at last, he broke out with bitter
+scorn against himself--
+
+"The fact is, in my cursed pride I have never been able to bear the
+thought that she might have been better off--that I was not good enough
+for her, not fit for her; that is what has been at the bottom of it all:
+and as I would not acknowledge that, I have insisted always to myself
+that I could not trust her.
+
+"Do I really believe this?" he asked himself then slowly, and fell into
+thought again, his face growing darker and darker every minute.
+
+"What a good-natured booby, fool, idiot, I am!" he cried, with a
+scornful laugh. "No, it is she who has been false and untruthful, she
+who must acknowledge it, she who is bound to give me, once for all, full
+explanation. Yes, it is she who must bend, and then she may have some
+claim to hear from me what I too may have to reproach myself for in my
+acts or bearing towards her. That is how it is, and that is how it shall
+be!"
+
+A hard, inexorable look overspread his face as he said this; but for a
+moment he appeared almost moved again--
+
+"I shall speak kindly to her--be so gentle--forget everything.
+
+"But bend she shall," he added; and that decision was evidently final.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+
+That evening was passed by Elizabeth in a terrible struggle with
+herself. When Gjert had brought her clothes she had turned very pale,
+and had felt as if she had undertaken what she would not have strength
+to carry through. And now that the decisive moment had nearly come, this
+feeling increased almost to despair.
+
+They had all gone to bed in the house. It was so quiet about her; and a
+feeling came over her such as she had experienced that time on the
+Apollo, as she sat and waited whilst they approached the sandbanks.
+Early next morning the crisis would inevitably come; and it was a
+question now of losing more than the brig--of losing all they jointly
+possessed on earth! She saw a long, dreary life-strand stretching away
+beyond.
+
+This time it was she who was at the helm, and steering a desperate
+course--to save her love. A solemn look came over her face. The prayer
+for seamen in danger, which she had so often used when the gusts were
+shaking the house out there on Merdoe, and she sat waiting for him in her
+solitary home, came into her head now--the prayer that God might save
+him from a sudden death.
+
+A sudden death!
+
+If he really had been lost on one of those many occasions when he had
+parted from her with bitterness and anger in his heart! Would her love
+then have been a blessing to him?
+
+"No, Salve!" she cried; "you shall not have me to thank for such a life
+in your last hour!"
+
+In the night she awoke with a scream. She had dreamt that Salve was
+going to leave her for ever, and she cried frantically after him,
+"Salve! Salve!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+
+His two sons were waiting for him when the pilot came up to the jetty
+next morning. Little Henrik had begun to shout to him gleefully while he
+was still some way off; but Gjert was quiet. He had seen enough to feel
+that there must be something serious the matter between his parents, and
+he was depressed.
+
+"Good morning, boys!" said their father, kindly; "how is your--aunt?"
+
+"Better," replied Gjert.
+
+"She sleeps in the daytime, too," added the "bagman," triumphantly--he
+had discovered that this was what was required to make her well again.
+He then threw his cap down on the stones with a great sailor air, and
+with an eager "hale-hoi--o--ohoi!" began to haul in the shore-rope which
+his father had thrown, while Gjert, paying no attention whatever to his
+brother's efforts, made it fast to the mooring-ring.
+
+"That's good lads! Stay here now, both of you, by the boat, and look
+after her till I come back," said their father. "See, Gjert, that Henrik
+doesn't leave the quay."
+
+He left them then, and went rapidly up the street.
+
+Elizabeth was standing by the hearth expecting him; and something of a
+Sunday calm seemed to have come over her as she stood there. She heard
+him out in the passage; and when he entered, a rapid flush passed over
+her fine features, but it disappeared again immediately, and she stared
+at him with half-open lips, forgetting to greet him. At the same time,
+there was a conscious self-possession in her bearing which did not
+escape him. That was the Elizabeth he loved.
+
+He came to the point at once; and looking her full in the face, began
+with great earnestness--"Elizabeth, I have a serious accusation to make
+against you. You have not been frank towards me--you have disguised your
+real feelings from me for many years, I am afraid during the whole time
+we have lived together."
+
+He spoke gently, and as though he had no desire to press the charge, but
+merely waited to hear her make a full acknowledgment before he forgave
+her. She stood, however, without raising her eyes from the ground, her
+face pale, and her bosom heaving.
+
+"And yet how I have loved you, Elizabeth!--more dearly than my life," he
+added.
+
+She still remained for a moment silent, and had to summon all her
+courage now to speak. At last she said, in a rather strained voice, and
+without lifting her eyes--
+
+"I hear you say it, Salve. But I have been thinking a good deal lately."
+
+"You have been thinking, Elizabeth?" he repeated, "what have you been
+thinking?" and his expression changed in a moment to the dark, stern one
+she knew so well. He had made his advance; further he would not go.
+
+"Am I right, or am I not?" he asked, sharply.
+
+"No, Salve, you are not right," she replied, turning to him now with a
+look that seemed fired by all she had endured; "you are not right. It is
+yourself, and yourself only, you have loved all along; and when you took
+me as your wife, you merely took another to help you. There were two
+about it then, and even so it was not enough. No! no!" she cried,
+striking out her hand with an emphatic gesture in the bitterness of her
+feeling--"if you had loved me as I have loved you, we would not be
+standing before one another as we are this day!"
+
+He was taken aback for a moment by this unexpected outburst, but replied
+in a cold hard voice, while his eyes never moved from her face, "I thank
+you, Elizabeth, for having at last told me your thoughts, though it
+comes a little late. You see I was right when I said that you had not
+been frank towards me."
+
+"I have not been frank with you, you say? Yes, that is true," she
+rejoined, while her eye met his unflinchingly. "And it is to my honour.
+I have submitted to be an object of suspicion in my own house. I have
+shut my eyes and persisted in believing that you cared for me, in spite
+of the heavier burden which you were every day imposing upon me--in
+spite of all that I have had to endure--and it has been much, very much,
+Salve,--and I have done all this because I believed it was my duty, and
+because I thought you could not bear to hear the truth, and because I
+hoped that I might conquer in the end, and make you really love me as I
+have all along, and but too well, loved you, Salve. It is true that I
+have not been frank with you. And, I repeat, it is to my honour."
+
+This interpretation of their relations together was not one which he
+chose to accept, and he rejoined in the same hard tone as before--
+
+"However cleverly you may have tried to conceal it, Elizabeth, it has
+always been but too evident to me what you have endured in trying to
+accommodate yourself to the humble circumstances of a man like me. I
+know as well as you that a common seaman was little suited to be your
+husband--I have always known it from the time we were first engaged,
+when we stood before Van Spyck's portrait in Amsterdam. That was the
+sort of man, I knew very well, whom you ought to have had for a husband.
+I saw it again, as I have seen it always, when you made comparisons
+between the North Star and my poor brig--"
+
+"Salve!" she exclaimed, passionately, unable to control herself any
+longer--"what rubbish are you talking? Do you not know perfectly well
+that if you had been an admiral itself you never would have been greater
+in my eyes than you are now, and always have been as a simple pilot? And
+pray, whom was I thinking of when I was looking at Van Spyck? why, of
+whom but of you?--thinking that the man called Salve Kristiansen, who
+stood behind me, was just the one to have done what Van Spyck did. Or
+when I was admiring the North Star was I not thinking then too: If you,
+Salve, were in command of her, they would see what she could really do
+with a proper man on board? What possible interest do you suppose I
+could have in the North Star, except in connection with you? Were not
+you, poor skipper of the Apollo, worth more, a thousand times more to
+me, than a hundred North Stars with all their bravery?"
+
+When she spoke like this it was impossible not to believe every single
+word of what she said, and Salve's expression while she had been
+speaking had gradually changed to one of inexpressible happiness. So it
+was really he, and he alone, who had been the hero of her life! and he
+stretched out his arms to her, as though, like Alcibiades of old, he
+would end the discussion by clasping her to his heart and carrying her
+straight off with him to his home. But he was arrested by the deep
+repelling seriousness with which she continued--
+
+"No, Salve!--it is not which that stands between us, however ingeniously
+you may have discovered it--it is not that,--it is something else. It is
+that you don't trust me in your heart; that is the truth--and that has
+been the real source of all these morbid ideas you have formed.
+
+"And look you," she went on, with wild anguish in her voice, "we shall
+never get on together as long as you encourage the faintest suspicion of
+such thoughts; we shall never have peace beside our hearth--that peace
+that I have been striving for all these years, when I have been
+submitting, as I did, to everything--in a way that you know well, Salve,
+was very far from natural to me," and as she said this she looked with a
+magnificent air at him; "and if you cannot yet understand that--may God
+help you--and us!" she ended in despair, and turning half away again to
+the fire, stared dejectedly into it.
+
+He stood before her half-averted form as if he had been paralysed, and
+scarcely dared to look up at her, with such truth had all that she had
+said come home to him. She had held a mirror up to their life together,
+and he saw himself in it so utterly selfish and so small by the side of
+all this love. He was profoundly pained and humbled, and was too
+naturally truthful to wish not to acknowledge it.
+
+He went absently to the window and stood there for a moment.
+
+"Elizabeth," he said then, despondently, turning round, "you still must
+know in your heart that you have been everything in this world to me.
+But I know where my great fault to you has been, and I'll tell it you
+now, fully and freely, even if you must despise me for it. Yes,
+Elizabeth, it is true I have never been able to feel absolutely certain
+that I had full possession of your heart--though, God be praised, you
+have taught me differently to-day--since that time,"--it evidently cost
+him a struggle to go on with the humiliating confession--"since that
+business between you and the lieutenant. That has been the thorn in my
+flesh," he said, gently, as if opening his inmost heart to her, "which I
+have not been able to get rid of, in spite of my better reason. And I
+don't know but what it may still be there. There lies my weakness--I
+tell it you plainly and honestly; but at the same time I can't give you
+up, Elizabeth.
+
+"I have always seen," he continued, "that the proper husband for you
+would have been a man who was something in the world--such a one as he,
+and not a man of no position like me. In my pride I never could bear the
+thought--and it is that that has made me so full of rancour against all
+the world, and so suspicious and bad towards you. I have not been strong
+enough--not like you--but I can truly say I have struggled with my
+weakness, Elizabeth," he said, pale with intensity of feeling, and
+laying both his hands on her shoulders, and looking into her face.
+
+She felt that his arms were trembling, and her eyes filled with
+tears--it went to her heart to see him like this. All at once on a
+sudden thought she withdrew herself from his hands and went into the
+little room adjoining the one they were in, and opened a drawer there.
+She came out with the old note in her hand and held it out to him--
+
+"That is the letter I wrote to the lieutenant the night I left the
+Becks'."
+
+He looked at her a little wonderingly.
+
+"Fru Beck gave it to me," she said. "Read it, Salve."
+
+He looked at the large clumsy writing and spelt out--
+
+"Forgive me that I cannot be your wife, for my heart is given to
+another.--Elizabeth Raklev."
+
+He sat down on the bench and read it over again, while she bent over
+him, looking now at the writing, and now at his face.
+
+"What do you find there, Salve?" she asked. "Why could I not be Beck's
+wife?"
+
+"'Because my heart is given to another,'" he answered, slowly, and
+looking up at her with moistened eyes.
+
+"Not yours; it is I who loved another. And who was that other?"
+
+"God bless you--it was me!" he said, and drew her down upon his knee
+into a long, long embrace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The boys had become tired of waiting down at the boat, the "bagman"
+especially, since it was clearly past dinner-time; the bell had rung
+over at the dry-dock, and the town boys had already passed from school.
+His white head and heated face appeared now at the kitchen-door, and
+with scarcely a glance over to where his father and mother were sitting
+on the bench together looking very happy, he turned at once to the
+hearth and became aware of the sad fact that there was positively no
+porridge to be seen; there was not even a fire. Coming bodily into the
+room, he asked, with tears in his voice--
+
+"Have you had dinner? Are Gjert and I not to have any, then?"
+
+His mother sprang up. "And aunt!" she exclaimed. "I declare it is
+half-past one, and no dinner put down!" Henrik was glad to find that the
+worst danger was over.
+
+Mother Kirstine had conjectured that there must be something particular
+going on between the pair in the kitchen, and that was the reason she
+had not called Elizabeth. When the latter now came in, she looked at her
+inquiringly, and asked if anything had happened.
+
+"The happiest thing of my whole life, aunt," said Elizabeth, coming over
+to the bed and embracing her impetuously. She hurried back then to her
+business in the kitchen.
+
+The old woman looked after her, and nodded her head a couple of times
+slowly, thoughtfully. "No--so?"
+
+"He is joking with little Henrik," she said then to herself. "That is
+wonderful: I have never heard him laugh before."
+
+When they went to dinner in the kitchen Salve left them--he was not
+hungry--and came in to her. He had a great deal to say, and was a long
+while away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+
+It was an afternoon in the following winter in the pilot's home. His
+wife was expecting him, and kept looking uneasily out of the window. He
+was to have been home by noon, and it was now beginning to get dark; and
+the weather had been stormy the whole of the previous day.
+
+She gave up sewing, and sat thinking in the twilight, with the light
+playing over the floor from the door of the stove, where a little kettle
+was boiling, that she might have something warm ready for him at once
+when he came. It was too early to light a candle.
+
+Gjert was at school in Arendal, living at his aunt's; and Henrik was
+sitting by the light from the stove, cutting up a piece of wood into
+shavings.
+
+"It is beginning to blow again, Henrik," she said, and put a
+handkerchief round her head to look out.
+
+"It is no use, mother," he pronounced, without stirring, and splitting a
+long peg into two against his chest; "it's pitch-dark, isn't it?" So she
+gave it up again before she got to the door, but stood and listened; she
+thought she had heard a shout outside.
+
+"He is coming!" she cried, suddenly, and darted out; and when Salve
+entered the porch from the sleet squall that had just come up, with his
+sou'wester and oilskin coat all dripping, he found himself, all wet as
+he was, suddenly encircled in the dark by a pair of loving arms.
+
+"How long you have been!" she cried, taking from him what he had in his
+hands, and preceding him into the house, where she lit a candle. "What
+has kept you? I heard that you had taken a galliot up to Arendal
+yesterday, and thought you would have been here this morning. It was
+dreadful weather yesterday, Salve; so I was a little anxious," she
+continued, as she helped him off with his wet oilskin coverings.
+
+"I have done well, Elizabeth," he said, looking pleased.
+
+"On the galliot?"
+
+"Yes, and I had a little matter to arrange in Arendal, which kept me
+there till after midday."
+
+"You saw Gjert, then?"
+
+"I did." He looked a little impatiently towards the door.
+
+"And he is well?"
+
+"He can tell you now, himself," was the reply, as the door at the moment
+opened and Gjert entered with a loud "Good evening, mother!"
+
+She sprang towards him in astonishment, and threw her arms round him.
+"And not a dry stitch on the whole boy!" she cried, with motherly
+concern.
+
+"But, Salve dear, what is the meaning of this? How can the boy come away
+from school?"
+
+"When we have changed our clothes and warmed ourselves a little, I'll
+tell you, mother," answered the pilot, slily. "He will be at home with
+you the whole week."
+
+Gjert was evidently ready to burst with some news or other, but he had
+to restrain himself until his father had taken his seat by the fire that
+was crackling brightly on the hearth in the kitchen, and had leisurely
+filled his pipe, and taken two or three pulls at it.
+
+"Now then, Gjert," he said, "you may tell it. I see you can't keep it in
+any longer."
+
+"Well, mother!" he exclaimed, "father says that I shall be an officer in
+the navy; and so he has taken me from school and is going with me to
+Frederiksvoern next week."
+
+Henrik's mouth opened slowly, while Elizabeth, who was stirring the
+porridge, suspended that operation, and looked in something like alarm
+at her husband.
+
+"What do you mean, Salve?"
+
+"Wouldn't it be a fine thing, don't you think, to see the boy come home
+to you some day in a smart uniform, Elizabeth? You have always had a
+turn for that sort of thing," he added, jokingly. "And since you
+couldn't go in for it yourself,--as they don't take womenfolk in the
+navy--and it was not much in my line either,--why, I thought we could
+make the experiment with Gjert."
+
+"Are you really in earnest, Salve?" she asked, looking at him still in
+suspense.
+
+He nodded in confirmation.
+
+"Well, if it is your father's wish, may--may God prosper you in it, my
+boy!" she said, going over to Gjert and stroking his forehead.
+
+"So--now you may take your joiner's bench into the room again, Henrik;
+you can talk with Gjert in there--that is to say, if he will condescend
+now to answer a common man like you--tell him you will be a merchant
+captain, and earn as much as two such fellows in uniform. Mother and I
+can then enjoy a little peace from you here in the kitchen."
+
+When they were alone, Elizabeth asked--
+
+"But how has it all happened, Salve?"
+
+"Well, you see, I had taken the idea into my head about Gjert that he
+should become something a little better than his father had been, and so
+I went up to the Master, to Beck, and asked what I must do to push the
+thing. Yes; and I spoke to young Fru Beck too."
+
+"Salve! did you go to Beck?"
+
+"Yes, I did--the boy must be pushed; and into the bargain, I half begged
+his pardon for the way I used to turn the rough edge of my tongue on
+him--and so we were reconciled. He is a fine old fellow in reality, and
+I have wronged him. He said he had never forgotten that I had saved the
+Juno for him, and that he had intended to put me one day in command of
+her. While we were talking, young Fru Beck came in, and when she heard
+what we were speaking about, she showed the greatest interest at once.
+You were an old friend of hers, she said; and she thought we might get
+Gjert into the Institute there free, when he had been up for an
+examination in the summer. She knew some of the officials who would be
+able to get it done; and if the Master wrote," he continued, a little
+consciously, "that I was neither more nor less than a remarkable pilot
+who ought to be salaried by the State, the thing would be as good as
+done. So the Master wrote the application for me there and then."
+
+"See that!" cried Elizabeth.
+
+"Ay, and he wrote a testimonial from himself underneath. I hadn't an
+idea that I was such a fine fellow," he laughed.
+
+"You see," she cried, looking at him proudly, "it comes at last. He
+acknowledges it now."
+
+"Well, if we don't manage the thing that way, Salve Kristiansen will be
+able nevertheless to work it out of his own pocket--for worked it shall
+be, mind you. It won't be done for nothing; but we have something in the
+savings bank, and the rest will come right enough.
+
+"It will be just as well that I should have something to drive me out of
+the house occasionally, for otherwise I should get too fond both of it
+and of you, Elizabeth," he said, and drew her towards him. "I must have
+a little rain and storm now and again--it's my nature, you know. And the
+Master must not be made to have written lies about me."
+
+His wife looked at him. A glow of deep feeling overspread her handsome
+features.
+
+"How happy we have become, Salve!" she exclaimed. "If it could only have
+been like this from the very beginning!"
+
+"I have thought over that, Elizabeth," he said, seriously. "There has
+been One at the helm who is cleverer than I, for there was a deal of bad
+stuff to be knocked out of me after I returned from that foreign life.
+You, poor woman, were the chief sufferer by it, I am afraid."
+
+"And it was I, Salve, who was the chief cause of it all," she replied.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pilot and his Wife, by Jonas Lie
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PILOT AND HIS WIFE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 15588.txt or 15588.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/5/5/8/15588/
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, Jim Wiborg and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.