He had left the table, forsaking the farce of breakfast, and was now walking noiselessly backwards and forwards. At the sound of her voice, timid and deprecating, when she spoke the last words he stopped short before her.
“Then I must see her,” he said—“I must see her before I go. I have seen a good deal of … of grief, Brenda—in other people, I mean—and know its symptoms. Some people are stunned for a time, like a man who has been thrown from a gun-carriage, but it ought not to last very long, not more than twenty-four hours. And then they usually become nervously active. If Mrs. Wylie is like that, you must employ her somehow. Tire her out if you can. But we must take it upon ourselves, now, to have the Admiral buried at Fjaerholm. She is not taking it as I thought she would, and the voyage home, or back to Bergen even, with him on board would send her mad. When he is buried it will be different; she will recover then, under your care.”
“Yes,” replied the girl. “Yes, we must take it upon ourselves, Theo. I thought of it before.”
“If at any time,” he murmured in his gently suggestive way, “the matter is discussed—when I am away, I mean—you can say that the whole responsibility rests with me.”
She raised her head and looked at him with a sudden light in her blue eyes.
“I am not afraid of responsibility,” she said tersely.
“No, I think you are afraid of nothing!”
She received this statement as it was made, simply, half playfully, and quite without afterthought.
After a pause he rose, collected his letters, and went on deck, leaving her seated near the small table. She also had letters, and there was a packet of magazines and journals lying unopened near at hand. But she showed no desire to learn news from the outer world. All her interests were centred within four wooden walls just then, and she sat thinking far into the forenoon. Over her head, on the lightly-built deck, the regular tread of Theo Trist acted as an accompaniment to her thoughts. It was so light, that footstep, and yet so steady, seeming to tell of a gentle force which never swerved, never turned back, and never halted.
“I wonder,” she meditated, “if he would have gone at all events. I wonder if I have the slightest influence upon his motives or his actions. Sometimes it seems as if anyone could lead him like a child, and then suddenly there comes a conviction that no human force can move him.”
X
Fjaerholm
At the upper end of the fjord of the same name lies the small village of Fjaerholm. A white wooden church of conventional architecture is the most prominent, and at the same time the most unsightly, feature in the landscape. Around this edifice are clustered a few wooden houses, mostly painted white or yellow with a sparing brush, because paint is heavy freight, and can be bought only in Bergen or Christiania. Houses and church alike are roofed with red tiles of a bright and cleanly hue, which will be preserved much longer than the memory of the tiler. There is no smoke in Fjaerholm, and a long cold winter kills any moss-like growth, so everything looks clean and new.
Across the fjord, which is white and milky from the glaciers, is one farm, or what is by courtesy called a farm—a mere matter of ten acres or so divided into patches of potato, hay and wheat. Fjaerholm, like most Norwegian villages, hamlets, and homesteads, suggests a question. One cannot help wondering why it ever came there. The tillable soil is of sufficient area to nourish a single family, but no more, and yet a whole village manages to wrest a frugal sustenance from it. There is a post-office, and a postmaster who wears the inevitable spectacles and brown linen jacket; and he again suggests a question. With one mail a week, in and out on the same day—namely, Friday—what employment can he find during the other six? Yet he is as grave and busy as a young bank clerk in the presence of his manager. He is constantly walking backwards and forwards across the single unpaved street from his home to his office, from his office to his home, with two pieces of official paper held between his finger and thumb, his pen in his mouth, his elbow officially squared, and his linen jacket fluttering, all with an air of intense preoccupation. Poor postmaster! It is mean to fire off cheap sarcastic fireworks from a safe distance. There are others among us who wear a preoccupied air over nothing, and flourish our flimsy official papers with intense self-satisfaction.
Theo Trist found him to be the only intelligent man in the village (with the exception, perhaps, of an absorbed artist whose personal apparel spoke lamentably clear language upon the monetary prospects of Scandinavian art), and official dignity was tempered by a kindly, simple heart full of sympathy for the wandering sailor whose last resting-place was to be beneath the shadow of the ugly white church. The old minister, whose bleached and wrinkled face bore a faint and indefinite resemblance to his own sacerdotal ruff, simply obeyed Trist and the postmaster in every detail.
The arrival of the Hermione was a matter of no small wonder in this mountain fastness, but in a few minutes the story was known throughout the village, for the very good reason that every inhabitant possessing means of locomotion was on the small wooden pier to meet Trist and Captain Barrow when they landed. Norway is a taciturn country, and the matter was soon talked over in a mumbling, half-plaintive way.
At midday there was a simple funeral. Four bareheaded sailors bore their late chief from the pier to the scantily-tenanted churchyard. The British ensign fluttered for the
