It was almost in spite of himself that Erik loved her. His ideal had always been high, proud, and noble, with quiet melancholy suffusing her pale features and coolness of temple air lingering in the severe folds of her garment. But Fennimore’s sweetness conquered him. He could not resist her beauty. There was such a fresh, innocent sensuousness about her whole form. When she walked her gait whispered of her body; there was a nakedness in her movements and a dreamy eloquence in her repose, neither of which she could help, for she could not conceal the one or silence the other, even had she been in the slightest degree conscious of their existence. No one saw this better than Erik, and he was fully aware of what a large part her purely physical beauty played in her attraction for him. He struggled against it, for there were exalted ideals of love in his soul, ideals which had their source, perhaps, not only in tradition and poetry, but in deeper strata of his nature than those that appeared on the surface. But whatever their source, they had to yield.
He had not yet confessed his love to Fennimore, when it happened that the good ship Berendt Claudi came in. Inasmuch as it was going to unload farther up the fjord, it did not enter the harbor, but lay out in the stream, and as the Consul was very proud of his schooner and wanted to show it to his guests, they rowed out there one afternoon to drink tea on board.
It was a glorious day without a breath of wind, and all were intent on a merry time. The hours passed quickly. They drank English porter, set their teeth in English hardtack as large as moons, and ate salted mackerel caught on the voyage across the North Sea. They pumped with the ship’s pump till the water frothed, tipped the compass, drew water from the casks with the large tin siphon, and listened to the mate playing his octagonal hand harmonica.
It was quite dark before they were ready to return.
They separated into two parties. Erik and Fennimore and two of the older people went in the ship’s yawl, which was to make a detour around the harbor and then row slowly to land, while the rest of the party went in the Consul’s own boat, which was to steer directly for the pier. This arrangement was made in order to hear how the song would sound over the water on such a quiet night. Erik and Fennimore therefore sat together in the stern of the yawl and had the mandolin between them, but the singing was forgotten when the oars were dipped in the water and revealed an unusually bright phosphorescence which absorbed their attention.
Silently the boat glided onward, and behind it the dull, glassy surface was fluted with shifting lines and rings of a tender white light too faint to penetrate the darkness beyond its own groove, except now and then when it seemed to give out a luminous mist. It frothed white where the oars cut into it and slid backward in tremulous rings growing fainter and fainter; it was scattered from the blades in bright drops falling like a phosphorescent rain, which was extinguished in the air but lighted the water drop by drop. There was such quiet over the fjord that the sound of the oars seemed only to measure the stillness in pauses of equal length. Hushed and soft, the gray twilight brooded over the soundless deep; the boat and its occupants melted together in one dark mass, from which the phosphorescence freed the plying oars and sometimes a trailing rope’s end, or perhaps the brown impassive face of the oarsman. No one spoke. Fennimore was cooling her hand in the water; she and Erik sat turning back to look at the network of light that trailed silently after the boat and held their thoughts in its fair meshes.
A call for a song shouted from land roused them, and together they sang two or three Italian romances to the accompaniment of the mandolin.
Then all was still again.
At last they landed at the little jetty running out from the garden. The Consul’s empty boat was moored alongside, and the party had already gone up to the house. Fennimore’s aunt and her companion followed them, but Erik and Fennimore remained standing and looked after the boat as it returned to the ship. The latch of the garden gate fell with a click; the sound of the oars grew fainter and fainter, and the swelling of the water around the pier died away. Then a breath stirred in the dark trees around them like a sigh that had hidden itself and now softly lifted the leaves, flew away, and left them alone.
In the same moment they turned to each other and away from the water. He caught her hand and slowly, questioningly, drew her close and kissed her. “Fennimore!” he whispered, and they walked through the dark garden.
“You have known it long!” he said, and she replied, “Yes.” Then they walked on, and the latch fell once more.
Erik could not sleep when he reached his room at last, after drinking coffee with the company and saying good night at the street door.
There was no air in there; he flung the windows wide open, then threw himself on the couch and listened.
He wanted to get out again.
How everything resounded through the house! He could hear the Consul’s slippers, and now Mrs. Claudi opened the kitchen door to see if the fire was out. What in the world could Niels want in his trunk at this time of night! Ah—there was a mouse behind the wainscoting. Now someone crossed the attic in stocking-feet—now another—there were two.—At last! He opened the door to the guestroom within and listened, then
