Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories Part 6

Six weeks later two young Americans were sitting on the deck of the Cunarder _Siberia_, which had that morning left the Queenstown harbor.

"Jack," said the one, laying his hand on the other's shoulder in a way that expressed an untold amount of friendliness, "I don't think it is good policy to keep silence any longer. I know I have committed my monumental piece of folly, as you prophesied, but I need hardly tell you, Jack, that I didn't know at the time what--what I know now," he finished, hurriedly.

"I never doubted that, Harry," answered the other with a certain solemn impressiveness. "But don't let us talk. I have not reached the stage yet when I can mention her name without a pang; and I fear--I fear I never shall."

They sat for a long while smoking in silence and gazing pensively toward the dim coast-line of Europe, which was gradually fading away upon the eastern horizon.

"Jack," began Vincent abruptly, "I feel as if I had pa.s.sed through a severe illness."

"So you have, Harry," retorted Cranbrook.

"Oh, pshaw! I don't mean that. That little physical suffering was nothing more than I deserved. But a fever, they say, sometimes purifies the blood, and mine, I think, has left me a cleaner and a wiser fellow than it found me."

The steamer kept ploughing its broad pathway of foam through the billows; a huge cloud of fantastic shape loomed up in the east, and the vanishing land blended with and melted away among its fleecy embankments.

"Are you perfectly sure, Jack," said Vincent, throwing the burning stump of his cigar over the gunwale, "that the experiences of the past year have not been all an excursion into the 'Arabian Nights'? If it were not for that fine marble relief in my trunk which I bought of that miserable buffoon in the Via Sistina, I should easily persuade myself that the actual world were bounded on the east by the Atlantic and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. I was just considering whether I should try to smuggle it through the custom-house, or whether, perhaps, it would be wiser to give Uncle Sam his due."

"And what does the relief represent?" asked Cranbrook, half indifferently.

"It is a copy from an antique one. Agamemnon robbing Achilles of his--"

Cranbrook gave a start, and walked rapidly toward the other end of the boat. In half an hour he returned, stopped in front of Vincent, grasped his hand warmly and said:

"Harry, let us agree never to refer to that which is pa.s.sed. In your life it was an episode, in mine it was a catastrophe."

Since that day, Annunciata's name has never pa.s.sed their lips.

There is, however, an epilogue to this tale which cannot well be left untold. In the winter of 187-, ten years after their first Italian sojourn, the two friends again visited Rome together. One beautiful day in February, they found themselves, perhaps not quite by accident, in the neighborhood of the well-remembered villa. They rang the bell at the garden gate and were admitted by a robust young man who seemed to be lounging among the overgrown hedges in some official capacity.

The mossy Triton was still prosecuting his thankless task in the midst of his marble basin; the long stairs to the terrace were yet as damp and slippery as of old, and the noseless Roman senator was still persevering in his majestic att.i.tude, although a sprig of maiden-hair was supporting its slender existence in the recess of his countenance which had once been occupied by his stately nose. Vincent and Cranbrook both regarded these familiar objects with peculiar emotions, but faithful to their agreement, they made no comment. At last they stopped before the sarcophagus--and verily Babetta was still there. A clean and chubby-faced Italian baby with large black eyes rose out of its marble depth and hailed them with simple, inarticulate delight.

Cranbrook gazed long at the child, then lifted it up in his arms and kissed it. The young man who had opened the gate for them stood by observing the scene with a doubtful expression of suspicion and wonder. As the stranger again deposited the child on the blanket in the bottom of the sarcophagus, he stepped up before the door and called:

"Annunciata!"

A tall, comely matron appeared in the door--and the strangers hastened away.

UNDER THE GLACIER.

I.

In one of the deepest fjord-valleys on the western coast of Norway there lives, even to this day, a legend which may be worth relating.

Several hundred years ago, a peasant dwelt there in the parish who had two sons, both born on the same day. During their infancy they looked so much alike that even the father himself could not always tell one from the other; and as the mother had died soon after their birth, there was no one to settle the question of primogeniture. At last the father, too, died, and each son, feeling sure that he was the elder, laid claim to the farm. For well nigh a year they kept wrangling and fighting, each threatening to burn the house over the other's head if he dared to take possession of it. The matter was finally adjusted by the opportune intervention of a neighbor who stood in high repute for wisdom. At his suggestion, they should each plant side by side a twig or sprout of some tree or herb, and he to whose plant G.o.d gave growth should be the owner of the farm. This advice was accepted; for G.o.d, both thought, was a safer arbiter than man. One of the brothers, Arne, chose a fern (_Ormgra.s.s_), and the other, Ulf, a sweet-brier. A week later, they went with the wise man and two other neighbors to the remote pasture at the edge of the glacier where, by common consent, they had made their appeal to the judgment of heaven. Arne's fern stood waving in dewy freshness in the morning breeze; but Ulf's sweet-brier lay prostrate upon the ground, as if uprooted by some hostile hand. The eyes of the brothers met in a long, ill-boding glance.

"This is not heaven's judgment," muttered Ulf, under his breath.

"Methinks I know the hand that has wrought this dastardly deed."

The umpires, unmindful of the charge, examined the uprooted twig, and decided that some wild animal must have trodden upon it. Accordingly they awarded the farm to Arne. Then swifter than thought Ulf's knife flew from its sheath; Arne turned pale as death and quivered like an aspen leaf. The umpires rushed forward to shield him. There was a moment of breathless suspense. Then Ulf with a wild shout hurled his knife away, and leaped over the brink of the precipice down into the icy gulf below. A remote hollow rumbling rose from the abyss, followed by a deeper stillness. The men peered out over the edge of the rock; the glacier lay vast and serene, with its cold, glittering surface glaring against the sky, and a thousand minute rivulets filled the air with their melodious tinkling.

"G.o.d be his judge and yours," said the men to Arne, and hastened away.

From that day Arne received the surname Ormgra.s.s (literally Wormgra.s.s, Fern), and his farm was called the Ormgra.s.s farm. And the name has clung to his descendants until this day. Somehow, since the death of Ulf, the family had never been well liked, and in their proud seclusion, up under the eternal ice-fields, they sought their neighbors even less than they were themselves sought. They were indeed a remarkably handsome race, of a light build, with well-knit frames, and with a touch of that wild grace which makes a beast of prey seem beautiful and dangerous.

In the beginning of the present century Arne's grandson, Gudmund Ormgra.s.s, was the bearer of the family name and the possessor of the estate. As ill luck would have it, his two sons, Arne and Tharald, both wooed the same maiden,--the fairest and proudest maiden in all the parish. After long wavering she at last was betrothed to Arne, as some thought, because he, being the elder, was the heir to the farm.

But in less than a year, some two weeks before the wedding was to be, she bore a child; and Arne was not its father.

That same night the brothers met in an evil hour; from words they came to blows, knives were drawn, and after midnight Tharald was carried up to the farm with a deep wound in his shoulder and quite unconscious. He hovered for a week on the brink of death; then the wound began to heal and he recovered rapidly. Arne was nowhere to be found; rumor reported that he had been seen the day after the affray, on board a brig bound for Hull with lumber. At the end of a year Tharald married his brother's bride and took possession of the farm.

II.

One morning in the early summer of 1868, some thirty-five years after the events just related, the fjord valley under the glacier was startled by three shrill shrieks from the pa.s.sing steamer, the usual signal that a boat was wanted to land some stray pa.s.senger. A couple of boats were pushed out from the beach, and half a dozen men, with red-peaked caps and a certain picturesque nonchalance in their attire, scrambled into them and soon surrounded the gangway of the steamer.

First some large trunks and boxes were lowered, showing that the pa.s.senger, whoever he might be, was a person of distinction,--an impression which was still further confirmed by the appearance of a tall, dark-skinned man, followed by a woolly-headed creature of a truly Satanic complexion, who created a profound sensation among the boatmen. Then the steamer shrieked once more, the echoes began a prolonged game of hide-and-seek among the snow-hooded peaks, and the boats slowly ploughed their way over the luminous mirror of fjord.

"Is there any farm here, where my servant and myself can find lodgings for the summer?" said the traveller, turning to a young peasant lad.

"I should prefer to be as near to the glacier as possible."

He spoke Norwegian, with a strong foreign accent, but nevertheless with a correct and distinct enunciation.

"My father, Tharald Ormgra.s.s, lives close up to the ice-field,"

answered the lad. "I shouldn't wonder if he would take you, if you will put up with our way of living."

"Will you accompany me to your father's house?"

"Yes, I guess I can do that." (_Ja, jeg kan nok det_.)

The lad, without waiting for further summons, trotted ahead, and the traveller with his black servant followed.

Maurice Fern (for that was the stranger's name) was, as already hinted, a tall, dark-complexioned man, as yet slightly on the sunny side of thirty, with a straight nose, firm, shapely mouth, which was neither sensual nor over-sensitive, and a pair of clear dark-brown eyes, in which there was a gleam of fervor, showing that he was not altogether incapable of enthusiasm. But for all that, the total impression of his personality was one of clear-headed decision and calm energy. He was a man of an absorbing presence, one whom you would have instinctively noticed even in a crowd. He bore himself with that unconscious grace which people are apt to call aristocratic, being apparently never enc.u.mbered by any superfluity of arms and legs. His features, whatever their ethnological value might be, were, at all events, decidedly handsome; but if they were typical of anything, they told unmistakably that their possessor was a man of culture. They showed none of that barbaric frankness which, like a manufacturer's label, flaunts in the face of all humanity the history of one's origin, race, and nationality. Culture is hostile to type; it humanizes the ferocious jaw-bones of the Celt, blanches the ruddy l.u.s.tre of the Anglo-Saxon complexion, contracts the abdominal volume of the Teuton, and subdues the extravagant angularities of Brother Jonathan's stature and character. Although respecting this physiognomic reticence on the part of Mr. Fern, we dare not leave the reader in ignorance regarding the circ.u.mstances of which he was the unconscious result.

After his flight from Norway, Arne Ormgra.s.s had roamed about for several months as "a wanderer and a vagabond upon the earth," until, finally, he settled down in New Orleans, where he entered into partnership with a thrifty young Swede, and established a hotel, known as the "Sailors' Valhalla." Fortune favored him: his reckless daring, his ready tongue, and, above all, his extraordinary beauty soon gained him an enviable reputation. Money became abundant, the hotel was torn down and rebuilt with the usual barbaric display of mirrors and upholstery, and the landlords began to aspire for guests of a higher degree. Then, one fine day, a young lady, with a long French name and aristocratic antecedents, fell in love with Arne, not coolly and prudently, as northern damsels do, but with wildly tragic gesticulations and a declamatory ardor that were superb to behold. To the Norseman, however, a pa.s.sion of this degree of intensity was too novel to be altogether pleasing; he felt awed and bewildered,--standing, as he did, for the first time in his life in the presence of a veritable mystery. By some chance their clandestine meetings were discovered. The lady's brother shot at Arne, who returned the shot with better effect; then followed elopement--marriage--return to the bosom of the family, and a final grand tableau with parental blessing and reconciliation.

From that time forth, Arne Fern, as he was called (his Norse name having simply been translated into English), was a man of distinction.

After the death of his father-in-law, in 1859, he sold his Louisiana property and emigrated with his wife and three children to San Francisco, where by successful real-estate investments he greatly increased his wealth. His eldest son, Maurice, was, at his own request, sent to the Eastern States, where educational advantages were greater; he entered, in due time, one of the best and oldest universities, and, to the great disappointment of his father, contracted a violent enthusiasm for natural science. Being convinced, however, that remonstrance was vain, the old gentleman gradually learned to look with a certain vague respect upon his son's enigmatical pursuits, and at last surprised the latter by "coming down quite handsomely" when funds were required for a geological excursion to Norway.

III.

A scientific enthusiasm is one of the most uncomfortable things a human bosom can harbor. It may be the source of a good deal of private satisfaction to the devotee, but it makes him, in his own estimation, superior to all the minor claims of society. This was, at least in an eminent degree, the case with Maurice Fern. He was not wilfully regardless of other people's comfort; he seemed rather to be unconscious of their existence, except in a dim, general way, as a man who gazes intently at a strong light will gradually lose sight of all surrounding objects. And for all that, he was, by nature, a generous man; in his unscientific moments, when his mind was, as it were, off duty, he was capable of very unselfish deeds, and even of sublime self-sacrifice. It was only a few weeks since he had given his plaid to a shivering old woman in the Scottish stage-coach, and caught a severe cold in consequence; but he had bestowed his charity in a reserved, matter-of-fact way which made the act appear utterly commonplace and unheroic. He found it less troublesome to shiver than to be compelled to see some one else shivering, and his generosity thus a.s.sumed the appearance of a deliberate choice between two evils.

Phenomena of this degree of complexity are extremely rare in Norway, where human nature, as everything else, is of the large-lettered, easily legible type; and even Tharald Ormgra.s.s, who, in spite of his good opinion of himself, was not an acute observer, had a lively sense of the foreignness of the guest whom, for pecuniary reasons, he had consented to lodge during the remainder of the summer.

A large, quaint, low-ceiled chamber on the second floor, with a superfluity of tiny greenish window-panes, was a.s.signed to the stranger, and his African servant, Jake, was installed in a smaller adjoining apartment. The day after his arrival Maurice spent in unpacking and polishing his precious instruments, which, in the incongruous setting of rough-hewn timbers and gaily painted Norse furniture, looked almost fantastic. The maid who brought him his meals (for he could waste no time in dining with the family) walked about on tip-toe, as if she were in a sick-chamber, and occasionally stopped to gaze at him with mingled curiosity and awe.