Footsteps of Fate Part 4

"How stupid!" she exclaimed. "Why does it stand here at all if it is shut up? Does no one live in it?"

"Why, of course not," said Sir Archibald, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Frank helped Eva to climb the cairn round the pole, and they looked down on the panorama at their feet.

"It is beautiful, but melancholy," said Eva.

The long fjord lay below them, a narrow riband of pale, motionless water, hemmed in by the mountains, now wreathed with grey vapour, through which they gleamed fitfully like ghosts of mountains; Lauparen and Vengelinder, Trolltinder and Romsdalhorn, towering up through the envious, rolling mist, which, swelled by the coming storm, hung in black clouds from every peak and cast a gloomy reflection on the still waters.

The hills were weeping--unsubstantial, motionless phantoms, sorrowing and tragical under some august and superhuman woe--a grief as of giants and demiG.o.ds; the fjord, with its township, a plot of gardens, and roofs, and walls, and the white chalet of the Grand Hotel--all weeping, all motionless under the gloomy sky. A ghostly chill rose up from the gulf to where the trio stood, mingling with the tangible clamminess of the mist, which seemed to weigh on their eyelids. It was not raining, but the moisture seemed to distil on them from the black unbroken rack of clouds; and to the westwards, between two cliffs which parted to show a gleaming strip of ocean, a streak was visible of pale gold and faint rose-colour--hardly more than a touch of pink, a sparkle of gold--a stinted alms of the setting sun. They scarcely said another word, oppressed by the superhuman sadness which enwrapped them like a shroud.

When Eva at last spoke her clear voice sounded far away--through a curtain.

"Look, there is a glint of sunshine over the sea. Here we are pining for the sun. Oh, I wish the sun would break through the clouds! It is so dismal here--so dreary! How well I understand Oswald's cry in Ibsen's 'Ghosts' when he is going mad: 'The sun, the sun!' Men might pray for sunshine here and get no more than that distant gleam. Oh, I am perished!"

She shivered violently under the stiff, shining folds of her waterproof cloak; her face was drawn and white, and her eyes looked large and anxious. She suddenly felt herself so forlorn and lonely that she instinctively took her father's arm and clung to him closely.

"Are you cold, my child; shall we go home?" he asked.

She nodded, and they both helped her down the heap of stones. Why, she knew not, but suddenly she had thought of her mother, who was dead, and wondered whether she had ever felt thus forlorn in spite of her father's fondness. But when they came in sight of the hut again, she said, as if it had just occurred to her:

"Papa, there are some names cut in the door; let us cut ours too."

"But child, you are so cold and pale--"

"Never mind; let us cut our names; I want to," she urged, like a spoilt child.

"No, Eva--what nonsense!"

"Oh, but I do want to," she repeated coaxingly, but the old man would not give in, grumbling still; Frank, however, pulled out his pocket-knife.

"Oh, Mr. Westhove, do cut my name; nothing but Eva--only three letters.

Will you?" she asked softly.

Frank had it on his lips to say that he would like to cut his own name with hers, although it was so long, but he was silent; it would have sounded flat and commonplace in the midst of this mournful scenery. So he carved the letters on the door, which was like a traveller's alb.u.m.

Eva stood gazing out to the west, and she saw the three streaks of gold turn pale, and the rose-tint fade away.

"The sun, the sun!" she murmured, with a shudder, and a faint smile on her white lips and in her tearful eyes.

A few heavy drops of rain had begun to fall. Sir Archibald asked if they were ever coming, and led the way. Eva nodded with a smile, and went up to Frank:

"Have you done it, Mr. Westhove?"

"Yes," said Frank, hastily finishing the last letter.

She looked up, and saw that he had cut, "Eva Rhodes," and in very neat, even letters, smoothly finished. Below he had roughly cut, "Frank," in a great hurry.

"Why did you add 'Rhodes'?" she asked, and her voice was faint, as if far away.

"Because it took longer," Frank replied simply.

IV.

They got back to the Grand Hotel in a torrent of rain, a deluge poured out of all the urns of heaven; muddy to their waists, wet to the skin, and chilled to the bone. Eva, after a hot supper, was sent off to bed by her father, and the three men--Sir Archibald, Frank, and Bertie--sat in the drawing-room, where a few other visitors, all very cross at the bad weather, tried to solace themselves with ill.u.s.trated papers or alb.u.ms.

The old gentleman took a doze in an easy-chair. Frank gazed pensively at the straight streaks of rain, which fell like an endless curtain of close steel needles, thrashing the surface of the fjord. Bertie sipped a hot grog, and looked at his shiny slippers.

"And did you not miss my company on your excursion?" he asked, addressing Frank with a smile, just to break the silence that reigned in the room.

Westhove turned to him in some surprise, as if roused from a dream; then, with a frank laugh, he briefly answered:

"No."

Bertie stared at him, but his friend had already turned away, lost in thought over the patter of the rain; so Bertie at last took up his book again, and tried to read. But the letters danced before his eyes; his ears and nerves still thrilled uncomfortably under the remembrance of that one short, astounding word which Frank had fired into the silence like a leaden bullet. It annoyed him that Frank should take no further notice of him.

Frank stood unmoved, looking out at the mountains, scarcely visible through the watery shroud; what he saw was their walk back from Moldeho; the meandering downward path through the tall, dripping braken; the pelting rain streaming in their faces as from a watering-pot; Eva, closely wrapped in her wet mackintosh, and clinging to his arm as if seeking his protection; behind them her father, carefully feeling the slippery, moss-grown stones with his walking-stick. Frank had wanted to wrap her in his own thick waterproof coat, but this she had positively rejected; she would not have him made ill for her sake, she said, in that far-away voice. And then, when they were at home again, after they had changed their clothes and dined, and laughed over their adventure, Sir Archibald was afraid lest Eva should have taken cold.

Frank remembered at this moment a fragment of their conversation; his asking her, a little surprised in spite of himself, "Have you read Ibsen's 'Ghosts'? You spoke of Oswald when we were up on Moldeho."

As it happened, he had himself read "Ghosts", and he did not think it a book for a young girl; she noticed his surprise, and had blushed deeply as she replied:

"Yes, I have read it. I read a great deal, and papa has brought me up on rather liberal lines. Do you think that I ought not to have read 'Ghosts'?"

She herself had seen no harm it, had not perhaps fully understood it, as she candidly confessed. He had not ventured to tell her that the study of such a drama of physiological heredity was, to say the least, unnecessary for a young girl; he had answered vaguely, and she had coloured yet more deeply, and said no more.

"She must have regarded me as a prig of a schoolmaster!" thought he, ill at ease. "Why should she not read what she likes? She does not need my permission for her reading; she is grown up enough. She must have thought me a pedantic owl."

"Frank!" said Bertie again.

"What?" said Frank, startled.

"We leave this place to-morrow morning, I suppose?"

"Yes, that was our plan. At least if the weather improves."

"What is the name of the next outlandish spot we are going to?"

"Veblungsnaes; and from thence to Romsdal and Gudbrandsdal."

"And the Rhodes?"

"They are going to Bergen."

"To-morrow?"

"I don't know."