The Pilot and his Wife Part 21

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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s 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 inc.u.mbent 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 pa.s.s Merdo 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 const.i.tuted himself her friend and support, although, at the same time, he was devoted to his father. When Gjert was in the boat, Elizabeth had a sort of security that Salve would at all events not be absolutely reckless; and Gjert always took care that she should have news of them by other pilots or fishermen from Merdo, 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 circ.u.mstances, have been remarkable. Little Henrik had even had his father as a companion on one of his shrimping expeditions; and much of Salve's time had since been taken up in rigging a little brig for his delighted son.

The only point upon which a harmless little difference occurred was the question of Gjert's schooling. They were very fairly well-to-do people for their position, and his mother had one day, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to her, asked why they should not send him to school in Arendal; he would be able to lodge with her aunt there, she said. His father, however, would not hear of it, and dismissed the subject very shortly by saying that when Gjert was old enough, he intended him to go to Tergesen's rigging-loft in Vraangen and learn to rig.

His mother could not, however, so easily dismiss the ambitious scheme from her mind, and it became, a few days after, the occasion of the most violent scene which had ever yet put her strength of purpose to the test, but from which there ensued eventually the very happiest results.

A man-of-war had lately come up to Arendal from a cadet cruise to the Mediterranean, and Gjert had been allowed to go over with one of the other pilots to see her.

Apart from the sensation which her lofty rig, the shining bra.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sertion by a comparison of the height out of the water of the schooner's hull and of the corvette's, by a.s.suring 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 "n.o.body," 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 sh.o.r.e; 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 ash.o.r.e."

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--