Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories Part 9

"Even though I did say it."

Fern was now no longer a resident of the Ormgra.s.s Farm. After the discovery of their true relation, Tharald had shown a sort of sullen, superst.i.tious fear of him, evidently regarding him as a providential Nemesis who had come to avenge the wrong he had done to his absent brother. No amount of friendliness on Maurice's part could dispel this lurking suspicion, and at last he became convinced that, for the old man's sake as well as for his own, it was advisable that they should separate. This arrangement, however, involved a sacrifice which our scientist had at first been disposed to regard lightly; but a week or two of purely scientific companionship soon revealed to him how large a factor Elsie had become in his life, and we have seen how he managed to reconcile the two conflicting necessities. The present rendezvous he had appointed with a special intention, which, with his usual directness, he proceeded to unfold to her.

"Elsie dear," he began, drawing her down on a stone at his side, "I have something very serious which I wish to talk to you about."

"And why do you always want to talk so solemnly to me, Maurice?"

"Now be a brave little girl, Elsie, and don't be frightened."

"And is it, then, so very dreadful?" she queried, trembling a little at the gravity of his manner rather than his words.

"No, it isn't dreadful at all. But it is of great importance, and therefore we must both be serious. Now, Elsie dear, tell me honestly if you love me enough to become my wife now, at once."

The girl cast timid glances around her, as if to make sure that they were un.o.bserved. Then she laid her arms round his neck, gazed for a moment with that trustful look of hers into his eyes, and put up her lips to be kissed.

"That is no answer, my dear," he said, smiling, but responding readily to the invitation. "I wish to know if you care enough for me to go away with me to a foreign land, and live with me always as my wife."

"I cannot live anywhere without you," she murmured, sadly.

"And then you will do as I wish?"

"But it will take three weeks to have the banns published, and you know father would never allow that."

"That is the very reason why I wish you to do without his consent. If you will board the steamer with me to-morrow night, we will go to England and there we can be married without the publishing of banns, and before any one can overtake us."

"But that would be very wrong, wouldn't it? I think the Bible says so, somewhere."

"In Bible times marriages were on a different basis from what they are now. Moreover, love was not such an inexorable thing then, nor engagements so pressing."

She looked up with eyes full of pathetic remonstrance, and was sadly puzzled.

"Then you will come, darling?" he urged, with lover-like persuasiveness. "Say that you will."

"I will--try," she whispered, tearfully, and hid her troubled face on his bosom.

"One thing more," he went on. "Your house is built on the brink of eternity. The glacier is moving down upon you silently but surely. I have warned your father, but he will not believe me. I have chosen this way of rescuing you, because it is the only way."

The next evening Maurice and his servant stood on the pier, waiting impatiently for Elsie, until the whistle sounded, and the black-hulled boat moved onward, ploughing its foamy path through the billows. But Elsie did not come.

Another week pa.s.sed, and Maurice, fired with a new and desperate resolution, started for the capital, and during the coming winter the glacier was left free to continue its baneful plottings undisturbed by the importunate eyes of science. Immediately on his arrival in the city he set on foot a suit in his father's name against Tharald Gudmundson Ormgra.s.s, to recover his rightful inheritance.

VII.

On a cold, bleak day, in the latter part of March, we find Maurice once more in the valley. He had played a hazardous game, but so far fortune had favored him. In that supreme self-trust which a great and generous pa.s.sion inspires, he had determined to force Tharald Ormgra.s.s to save himself and his children from the imminent destruction. The court had recognized his right to the farm upon the payment of five hundred dollars to its present nominal owner. The money had already been paid, and the farm lay now desolate and forlorn, shivering in the cold gusts from the glacier. The family had just boarded a large English brig which lay at anchor out in the fjord, and was about to set sail for the new world beyond the sea. In the prow of the vessel stood Tharald, gazing with sullen defiance toward the unknown west, while Elsie, her eyes red with weeping, and her piquant little face somewhat pinched with cold, was clinging close to him, and now and then glancing back toward the dear, deserted homestead.

It had been a sad winter for poor little Elsie. As the lawsuit had progressed, she had had to hear many a harsh word against her lover, which seemed all the harder because she did not know how to defend him. His doings, she admitted, did seem incomprehensible, and her father certainly had some show of justice on his side when he upbraided him as cruel, cold, and ungrateful; but, with the sweet, obstinate loyalty of a Norse maiden, she still persisted in believing him good and upright and generous. Some day it would all be cleared up, she thought, and then her triumph and her happiness would be the greater. A man who knew so many strange things, she argued in her simplicity (for her pride in his accomplishments was in direct proportion to her own inability to comprehend them), could not possibly be mean and selfish as other men.

The day had, somehow, a discontented, dubious look. Now its sombre veil was partially lifted, and something like the shadow of a smile cheered you by its promise, if not by its presence; then a great rush of light from some unexpected quarter of the heavens, and then again a sudden closing of all the sunny paths--a dismal, gray monotony everywhere. Now and then tremendous groans and long-drawn thunderous rumblings were heard issuing from the glaciers, and the ice-choked river, whose voice seldom rose above an even baritone, now boomed and brawled with the most capricious interludes of crashing, grinding, and rushing sounds.

On the pier down at the fjord stood Maurice, dressed from head to foot in flannel, and with a jaunty sailor's hat, secured with an elastic cord under his chin. He was gazing with an air of preoccupation up toward the farm, above which the white edge of the glacier hung gleaming against the dim horizon. Above it the fog rose like a dense gray wall, hiding the destructive purpose which was even at this moment laboring within. Some minutes elapsed. Maurice grew impatient, then anxious. He pulled his note-book from his pocket, examined some pages covered with calculations, dotted a neglected _i_, crossed a _t_, and at last closed the book with a desperate air. Presently some dark figure was seen striding down the hill-side, and the black satellite, Jake, appeared, streaming with mud and perspiration.

"Well, you wretched laggard," cried Maurice, as he caught sight of him, "what answer?"

"n.o.body answered nothing at all," responded Jake, all out of breath.

"They be all gone. Aboard the ship, out there. All rigged, ready to sail."

A few minutes later there was a slight commotion on board the brig _Queen Anne_. A frolicsome tar had thrown out a rope, and hauled in two men one white and one black. The crew thronged about them,

"English, eh?"

"No; American."

"Yankees? Je-ru-salem! Saw your rig wasn't right, somehow."

General hilarity. Witty tar looks around with an air of magnanimous deprecation.

A strange feeling of exultation had taken possession of Maurice. The light and the air suddenly seemed glorious to him. He knew the world misjudged his action; but he felt no need of its vindication. He was rather inclined to chuckle over its mistake, as if it and not he were the sufferer. He walked with rapid steps toward the prow of the ship, where. Tharald and Elsie were standing. There was a look of invincibility in his eye which made the old man quail before him.

Elsie's face suddenly brightened, as if flooded with light from within; she made an impulsive movement toward him, and then stood irresolute.

"Elsie," called out her father, with a husky tremor in his voice. "Let him alone, I tell thee. He might leave us in peace now. He has driven from hearth and home." Then, with indignant energy, "He shall not touch thee, child. By the heavens, he shall not."

Maurice smiled, and with the same sense of serene benignity, wholly unlover-like, clasped her in his arms.

A wild look flashed in the father's eyes; a hoa.r.s.e groan broke from his chest. Then, with a swift rekindling of energy, he darted forward, and his broad hands fell with a tiger-like grip on Maurice's shoulders. But hark! The voices of the skies and the mountains echo the groan. The air, surcharged with terror, whirls in wild eddies, then holds its breath and trembles. All eyes are turned toward the glacier. The huge white ridge, gleaming here and there through a cloud of smoke, is pushing down over the mountain-side, a black bulwark of earth rising totteringly before it, and a chaos of bowlders and blocks of ice following, with dull crunching and grinding noises, in its train. The barns and the store-house of the Ormgra.s.s farm are seen slowly climbing the moving earth-wall, then follows the mansion--rising--rising--and with a tremendous, deafening crash the whole huge avalanche sweeps downward into the fjord. The water is lashed into foam; an enormous wave bearing on its crest the shattered wrecks of human homes, rolls onward; the good ship _Queen Anne_ is tossed skyward, her cable snaps and springs upward against the mast-head, shrieks of terror fill the air, and the sea flings its strong, foam-wreathed arms against the farther sh.o.r.e.

A dead silence follows. The smoke scatters, breaks into drifting fragments, showing the black naked mountain-side.

The next morning, as the first glimmerings of the dawn pierced the cloud-veil in the east, the brig _Queen Anne_ shot before a steady breeze out toward the western ocean. In the prow stood Maurice Fern, in a happy reverie; on a coil of rope at his feet sat Tharald Ormgra.s.s, staring vacantly before him. His face was cold and hard; it had scarcely stirred from its dead apathy since the hour of the calamity. Then there was a patter of light footsteps on the deck, and Elsie, still with something of the child-like wonder of sleep in her eyes, emerged from behind the broad white sail.

Tharald saw her and the hardness died out of his face. He strove to speak once--twice, but could not.

"G.o.d pity me," he broke out, with an emotion deeper than his words suggested. "I was wrong. I had no faith in you. She has. Take her, that the old wrong may at last be righted."

And there, under G.o.d's free sky, their hands were joined together, and the father whispered a blessing.

A KNIGHT OF DANNEBROG.

I.

Victor Julien St. Denis Dannevig is a very aristocratic conglomeration of sound, as every one will admit, although the St. had a touch of irony in it unless placed before the Julien, where in the present case its suggestion was not wholly unappropriate. As he was when I first met him, his nature seemed to be made up of exquisite half-tints, in which the most antagonistic tastes might find something to admire. It presented no sharp angles to wound your self-esteem or your prejudices. Morally, intellectually, and physically, he was as smooth as velvet, and as agreeable to the touch. He never disagreed with you, whatever heterodox sentiments you might give vent to, and still no one could ever catch him in any positive inconsistency or self-contradiction. The extreme liberal who was on terms of intimacy with the nineteenth century, and pa.s.sionately hostile to all temporal and spiritual rulers, put him down as a rising man, who might be confidently counted on when he should have shed his down and a.s.sume I his permanent colors; and the prosperous conservative who had access to the private ear of the government lauded his good sense and his moderate opinions, and resolved to press his name at the first vacancy that might occur in the diplomatic service. In fact, every one parted from him with the conviction that at heart he shared his sentiments; even though for prudential reasons he did not choose to express himself with emphasis.