"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 Salvé'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 Salvé 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 Salvé'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, Salvé?" 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, Salvé," 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.
Salvé 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. Salvé 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 Salvé 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.
Salvé 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 Salvé. 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 Salvé 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 Salvé 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 Salvé, 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.
Salvé 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, Salvé," 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, Salvé."
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.
Salvé 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. Salvé 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 Salvé 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, Salvé 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 Salvé, 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, Salvé 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," Salvé 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.
Salvé, 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 Salvé 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.
Salvé 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 Salvé 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 Salvé 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. Salvé 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 Salvé 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 Salvé, 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," Salvé 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 Salvé 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."
Salvé 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."
Salvé 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 Salvé 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 Salvé 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 Merdö; 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 Salvé 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 Salvé 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 Merdö 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 Merdö 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 Merdö is exceptionally dangerous, but the Merdö 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 Merdö 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 Salvé 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 Merdö, 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 Merdö, 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 Salvé 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 Merdö, 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 Frederiksværn 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, éclaircissement. 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 Merdö 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 Salvé 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 Merdö, 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 Salvé'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.
Salvé 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.