Part 11

"At my side, Mary, not at my feet," said he. "You love me, for you knew that I loved you, and now you belong to me for life. And you will never leave me alive, do you hear! For our whole life long. And now I place you on my throne and give you the power over me and my belongings, my name and my property, my honor and my actions, but if you forget that it is I who gave you the power, and if you misuse or give it away, then as a tyrant I will overthrow you to such a depth that you shall never see the sunlight more! But you cannot do it, for you love me, is it not true that you love me?"

He had placed her on the stone stool, and kneeling he laid his head in her bosom.

"I lay my head in your lap," continued he, "but do not cut off my hair meanwhile I sleep on your bosom. Let me uplift you but do not drag me down. Become better than I am, for you can when I protect you from contact with the world's corruption and misery, in which I must delve. Ennoble yourself with great faculties which I do not possess, so that we together shall become a perfect whole."

His feelings began to take the cooler tone of reason and seemed to quench her exaltation, so that she interrupted him by placing her glowing face to his, and when he did not answer her caress, she pressed a burning kiss on his lips.

"You child," said she, "don't you dare to kiss when nobody can see it?"

Then he sprang up, clasped her round the neck and kissed her throat repeatedly until she freed herself from him with a laugh and stood erect before him.

"You are a perfect little savage," scolded she.

"The savage is there, be careful!" answered he, and grasping her round the waist they wandered onwards on the warm sands which whispered round their feet.

And now the lighthouse in the distance blinked, as the air had cooled off and the dew had fallen. Out from the rookeries they heard the cries of the seals as from the shipwrecked.

They wandered an hour or more, and spoke of their first meeting, about their secret thoughts from time to time; about the future, about the coming winter; about traveling in foreign countries; meantime they came out on the point where the pile of stones with a cross was selected in memory of a shipwreck with loss of life.

Suddenly they caught a glimpse of two shadows that sneaked away and disappeared.

"It is Vestman and his sister-in-law," said Borg. "Fie! If I were her husband I would sink her!"

"Not him?" came from the girl more hastily than she intended.

"He is not married!" answered Borg shortly; "that is the difference!"

There was a silence, a disagreeable silence, such as makes one seek for a topic for conversation; and meantime whispered the thoughts, now untied from the enchantment: and he already longed for the enchantment again, for the intoxication, which blinded him, which turned gray to rose color, which built pedestals; which placed gilded edges on cracked china.

At this they turned from the rocky wall to go home. The wind which had been quite asleep, now began to waft against them and in his anxiety the awakened lover felt how freshly it blew. It was the north wind which he had waited for, and which he now greeted as a rescuer. For in a second when the girl's contradiction in a serious matter had just as though broken something in him, so that he felt that her being could only be soldered to his, not melted together with it, unless he gave up resisting and delivered himself to her wholly and fully, he now grasped the opportunity to raise himself again without treading upon her.

"Why do the people hate me?" asked he suddenly.

"Because you are superior to them," slipped from the girl without her observing the confession she made.

"I do not believe it," answered he, "for their intellect is not sufficient to value my superiority."

"Their hate can pervert their vision!"

"Superbly answered! But if they should see the miracle, would their eyes open?"

"Perhaps! If the wonder aroused fear."

"Well, they shall have the miracle! To-morrow at ten o'clock it will appear!"

"What?"

"That which I have promised you!"

The girl looked into his face with amazement as though she did not believe what he said. After which she laughingly interposed:

"If it should be cloudy weather then?"

"But it won't be," answered the commissioner with decision. "However, now we have already come so far as to speak about weather, we can even think of what your mother will say about us."

"She won't trouble herself about it," answered the girl at once.

"It is astonishing that a mother does not pay any attention to what man her daughter is to bind herself in relationship, and whose name she is to carry! Can that be immaterial to her?"

"Good night, now!" interrupted Miss Mary and reached her mouth for a kiss. "To-morrow morning you will come and visit us! Is it not so?"

"Certainly," answered he, "certainly!"

She walked away.

But he still stood on the same place and saw her slender figure rise against the now sulphur yellow sky as she stepped upwards on the hillock, and when she came to the highest point she turned back and threw a kiss to him, and then she seemed to sink behind the slope until he only saw her head with its loose hair which fluttered in the northern wind.

CHAPTER EIGHTH

When the commissioner sat the following morning at breakfast with his betrothed, after having been received without comment as the future son-in-law, he felt again the combined impression of a great calm at having been received in a little circle, where common interests formed a tie to unbounded confidence; and at the same time an anxiety over the necessity of giving himself up for these manifold considerations which sympathy and relationship bring. The past evening had rushed into his life mixing great and small, as life offers it, his whole history of love, which he had dreamed of with open eyes, had passed with his eyes purposely blindfolded. He had closed his eyes to the girl's pretended or imaginary illness; closed them completely, so that he had deceived himself into taking it seriously; for if he had not done so, and instead had said plainly from the first moment: rise up and be well, you are only sick in imagination, then she would have hated him for life; and his aim was to win her love. Now he had gained her love, perhaps because she believed that she had deluded him; therefore his love stood in direct relation to his credulity; and when now in the morning he repeated to himself again and again the question: Do you believe in your Mary? his rested reason translated it thus: Am I sure I can delude you? No, there does not exist a love with open eyes; and to gain a woman by frankness is impossible; to approach her with raised head, and with plain words is to drive her away. He had begun with lies and must go on with dissembling. However, now while the conversation drifted between trifling things and effusive expressions of feelings, it gave no time for worry, and the pleasure of being in a home between two women made everything so bright and soft, that he delivered himself up to the enjoyment of being the petted one, the child, the little one, the son of the mother-in-law; and he did not observe that the daughter, who had already outgrown her mother, treating her as though she the mother was her child, by simple syllogism gradually took authority over him, who called her equal "mother-in-law." It amused him, this reversing of nature's order, and he had always before him the image of the giant, who let the children pull out three hairs from his beard, but only three. As they were sitting at their coffee and chatting, there was heard a murmuring from the people down on the beach.

From the window they saw them gathered on the landings, sometimes standing immovable, with hands shading their eyes: sometimes rocking on both feet, as though the ground was burning beneath them, or as if they could not stand still from fear.

"It is the miracle!" cried the girl, and hastened out accompanied by her mother and her betrothed.

Coming out on the slope the ladies stopped as though struck by fright, when on this clear sunny morning, they saw a corpse-white colossal moon rising above a graveyard with black cypress, floating on the sea.

The commissioner, who had not calculated the effect at this point of view, did not see quickly enough the relation of things, and stood deathly pale from the shock which follows something monstrous and unexpected in the otherwise law-bound nature. He hastened past the ladies who stood petrified and unable to move, and came down to the strand where the people were gathered. In a moment he found the solution of the riddle. His intended marble palace had become involuntarily framed between a projecting, rounded cliff on one side and a pine top on the other, so that the limestone slab showed as a round circle and, with the two windows which were too faintly painted, it imitated the map of the moon's disk.

The people who had been posted as to the exact hour when the miracle would appear, as promised by the commissioner, regarded the approaching man with frightened but venerating glances and the men contrary to what had been their habit to him raised their hats and caps.

"Now what do you say about my mirage?" asked he jokingly.

Nobody answered, but the head pilot, who was the most courageous, pointed northwest towards the heavens, where the real moon was hanging pale in its first quarter.

The miracle thus was crushing, and the strong impressions which the two moons had already produced was too deep to be effaced with an explanation. And when the commissioner made an attempt to the beginning of which nobody listened and the people stood infatuated just as though enamored of the fear of the inexplicable, he ceased trying to remove their belief. He had wished to give them a proof that neither he nor nature could break laws, and, nevertheless, chance had made him a wizard.

When he turned back he found his betrothed in an ecstatic state restrained by her mother, but when he appeared, she freed herself and falling on her knees she cried with half insane gestures, and words which seemed to have been borrowed from some spiritualistic circle.

"Mighty spirit, we fear thee! Take away our fear, that we may love thee!"

The case had already assumed a hazardous turn and the commissioner tried with all his art to explain the involuntary miracle, but in vain. The enjoyment of being infatuated, the numbness of fear and, behind it, the lurking feeling of ambition not to admit the confusion of senses, had so taken possession of the young girl's mind that no remonstrances or assurances availed. The mother with her unchanging, even temperament did not seem to know where she was and had forgotten the whole phenomenon of nature through her daughter's disquieting behavior.

But now the mass of people on the beach had, through Miss Mary's cries and gesticulations, turned their attention from the performance out on the sea towards her, and when they saw the young woman on her knees before the white dressed man, with his deep dark glances and bare head, out here on the rock, there must have passed before them some reminiscences from the Bible history about a young man who did miracles; for they crowded together in haste and began to whisper, while at the exhortation of the head pilot one of the women hastened into the nearest cottage and returned with a three-years-old child which had a foul ulcer on its cheek.

With the ability to call forth a mirage there should also follow a supernatural knowledge of healing.

The role which was thrown on the commissioner, began to trouble him beyond measure, and when he saw the fishing population, pilots and custom house men, leave their work, and carpenters and finishers leave the building of the chapel to listen to his words as to prophesies with miraculous power, he became afraid as though before a power of nature that he had conjured up, but could not check. The moment, however, had come when he must express himself exactly, plainly, and turn them away.

"Good people," commenced he. But silently the reflection came: how to go on, what words to use, when each expression required an explanation which again presupposed foreknowledge, which was lacking. And during the second he meditated over the distance that lay between him and them, he heard steps approaching, and turning around, he saw a man who resembled an old sailor on his leave.

The man lifted a round felt hat and looked somewhat timorous at first, but coming nearer he straightened himself up and was just going to say something, when the commissioner relieved him from his embarrassment by the question:

"Perhaps you are the Home Mission preacher whom we expect?"

"I am the same!" answered the newcomer.

"Will you not say a few words to the people here, who are in a state of tumult on account of a phenomenon of nature which they do not wish to have explained and which I at this moment cannot elucidate"--the commissioner grasped at this in his eagerness to get out of his false position.

The preacher at once declared himself prepared. Stroking his long chin whiskers he took a Bible from his pocket.

When the people saw the black book a tremor passed through them and some of the men uncovered their heads.

The preacher turned the pages a moment and finally stopped, cleared his throat and began to read.

"And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sack cloth of hair, and the moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bond man, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains. And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of His wrath has come; and who shall be able to stand?"

The commissioner, who at once observed the dangerous turn the affair had taken, had drawn his betrothed half forcibly from the dangerous neighborhood, and got her down to the beach so that he could give her the right views and show, that it was no moon which had fallen from the heaven, that it was only the Italian landscape he had promised to arrange for her birthday.

But now it was too late. The girl's inner eye had already seen the vision in its first form, and the preacher's exciting interpretation had etched in that first delusion. He had toyed with the spirits of nature, conjured a foe to help him, as he believed, and then all had gone over to the foe so that he now stood alone.

While Mary's glances were still riveted to the preacher on the rock, he turned, as a trial, to the mother and whispered:

"Help us out of this. Follow me out to the skerry and see that it is only a plaything, a birthday joke."

"I cannot judge in these things," answered the mother, "and will not judge. But I believe ... that you should be married soon."

It was an advice, sober, prosaic, but from this old lady, who was herself a mother, it sounded so prudent, especially as it agreed with his own sharp understanding, he found, however, the explanation somewhat simplified. And after the hint he had received he went straight to the girl, and placing his arm round her waist, looked into her eyes with a smile, which she could not fail to understand, and kissed her lips.

At the same moment the girl seemed released from the wizard up on the rock, and without resistance she clung to her friend's arm and followed him almost dancing to her mother's cottage.

"Thanks," whispered she as she glanced into his eyes, "I thank you that you--how shall I say it?"

"Delivered you from the hobgoblin," filled in Borg.

"Yes, from the goblins!"

And she turned to look at the passed danger.

"Do not look back!" warned her betrothed as he pulled Mary through the cottage door, while fragments from the preacher's flow of words were wafted down to him by the wind.

CHAPTER NINTH

When the commissioner awoke one morning eight days later after a night of perfect rest, his first clear thought was that he must leave the skerry, go anywhere to be alone, collect himself, find himself again. The preacher's arrival had the desired effect in one way, namely to "scare the mob," so that the tumult and rudeness ceased; but on the other hand the commissioner had not been able to enjoy the newly gained peace, for the exalted condition of his betrothed obliged him to keep her always in his sight. So he had accompanied her, and formally guarded her from morning to night; and by endless talk upon the questions of religion tried to keep her aloof from the preacher's seducing talk. All these matters which he had fought through in his youth, he now had to fight over again; and as new counter-proofs had been brought forth since then, he must reedit his whole apology. He improvised psychological explanations of God, faith, miracles, eternity and prayer; and he imagined that the girl understood him. But when after three days he found that she held the same position and that this matter of feeling lay outside the conversation, he dropped the whole subject and sought by awakening the erratical with its new sphere of feeling to drive away the first. But this he must soon give up, for to speak of that which should be lived only excited the girl's feelings still more, and he soon observed that there existed secret bridges between the religious ecstasy and the sensual one. From the love of Christ she ran so easily over to love of the man on that broad drawbridge the love of one's neighbor, and from abstinence one could trip over the footbridge renunciation to its neighbor penance; a little contention awakened the disagreeable feeling of debt which must be resolved in a lustful feeling--the reconciliation.

In his need he must first tear up the bridges, place her face to face with carnal desire, awake her avidity for the temporal, which he delineated in glowing colors. But when he had so succeeded and retreated at the last moment, there arose the coldness of disappointment in her, and when he then tried to cultivate her feelings, and lead them out to the thoughts of offspring and family, she withdrew and explained to him with determination, that she would not have any children. She could even use a phraseology which is current among a certain group of women, saying that she would not be the womb which he lacked; or carry his heirs, whom she must with danger to her life bring to the world for him.

Then he felt that nature had placed something between them which he did not yet understand. He consoled himself by imagining that it was only the butterfly's fear to lay its eggs and die, the flower's suspicion that its beauty would fade away with the setting of its seed.

But he had worn himself out in these eight days; his fine wheels of thought had begun to halt in their pivot holes, and the spring in the movement had become relaxed.

After such a day of exertion, when he would have worked for a couple of hours, his head was filled with trifles. Small words repeated themselves almost audibly to his ear; gesticulations and mannerisms, that she had used in their conversation, miraged themselves, suggestions how he ought to have answered now and then, and the recollection of an appropriate repartee which he had made gave him a momentary pleasure. In a word, his head was full of bagatelles, and now he observed that he had tried to straighten out a chaos; that he had conversed as a schoolboy instead of exchanging thoughts with a mature woman; that he had given out from himself masses of power without getting anything in return; that he had placed a dry sponge in the center of his soul, and that the sponge had swelled, while he himself had become dry.

He loathed everything; was tired, and longed to get out for a moment; for be free forever he could not.

When he now looked out through the window, about five o'clock in the morning, he saw only a dense fog which stood immovable notwithstanding a light breeze from the south. But far from being discouraged thereby, he felt attracted by this light, white obscurity, which would hide him and seclude him from the little fragment of the earth, where he now felt himself tied down.

The barometer and weather vane told him that there would be sunshine later in the day, and therefore he stepped into his boat without long preparations; only provided with chart and compass, on which, however, he did not intend to rely, as he could hear the whistling buoy three miles out at sea, just in the direction in which he would seek a landing.

He therefore put full sail on and was soon in the fog. Here, where the eyes were free from all impressions of color and form, he felt first the pleasure of isolation from the medley of an outer world. He had as it were his own atmosphere around him, soaring onwards alone as on another celestial body, in a medium, which was not air but water vapors, more agreeable and more refreshing to inhale than the exsiccating air with its superfluous seventy-nine per cent of nitrogen, which had remained without evident purpose, when the elements of the earth emerged from the chaos of gases.

It was not an obscure, smoke colored mist, through which the sunlight shone. It was light, like newly melted silver. Warm as wadding it lay healingly round his tired ego, protecting it from jars and pressure. He enjoyed for a moment this fully-awake rest of the senses, without sound, without color, without smell, and he felt how his pained head was soothed by this safety from contact with others. He was sure of not being questioned; needed not to answer, nor talk. The apparatus was standing still a moment, now that all conducts had been cut off; and so he began again to think clearly, systematically over all that had passed. But what he had just gone through was so inferior, so trifling, that he must first let the bilge water run off before the fresh came in.

In the distance he heard the whistling buoy cry at intervals of several minutes, and guided by the sound he steered his course right into the mist.

It became silent again, and only the splashing of the boat at the bow and the purling aft in the wake made him conscious that he was moving forwards. Immediately after he heard a sea gull cry in the fog, and at the same time it seemed to him that he heard the dashing and rustle about the prow of a boat coming abaft, and when he shouted to avoid the danger, he received no answer, but heard only the hissing of the water as when a boat is falling off.

After a moment of sailing he observed to windward the top of a mast with mainsail and jib, but nothing was to be seen of the hull or helmsman for they were hidden by the high swells of the sea.

This occurrence under other circumstances would not have disturbed his thought, but now it made an impression which was momentarily inexplicable, and which caused a fear, which was only one step removed from thoughts of persecution. The newly awakened suspicions were further aroused, when he shortly after caught sight of the haunting boat which shot by him on the lee side, as though painted on the mist, without his being able to get sight of the helmsman who was hidden by the mainsail.

He now hailed again, but instead of an answer he saw only the boat fall off so much that he observed that the stern sheet was empty; and then the apparition vanished in the all devouring mist.