UNDER NORTHERN SKY.

I.

HOW MARIE LARSEN EXORCISED A DEMON.

There has been a mighty storm; it has been raging for two days,—a storm in which the demon of drink has reigned like a sinister god in the big white house, and the frightened women have cowered away, driven before the hot blast of the breath upon which curses danced, and the blaze of ire in the lurid eyes of the master. Only the pale little mistress has stood unmoved through the whirlwind of his passion. Who knows? Maybe that roused him to higher, madder paroxysms of impotent rage; for he abuses her most when he loves her most,—a way man has, he being a creature of higher understanding.

All yesterday the bells jangled, until one by one a violent jerk snapped the connecting wire, and hurled them with a last echoing crash on the hall floor. The serving-men kept out of it, as men do. The horses cowered to the sides of their boxes, and set their hind legs hard, and pointed their ears when they heard his halting step. The great hounds shrank shiveringly into their boxes, and refused to come forth at his threatening call; and when he lashed their houses in his rage they winced at each blow, and showed their fangs when he turned away.

Night brought little rest, for lamps and candles were lit in every room. Champagne replaced brandy; then brandy, champagne; and then both mingled in one glass. And in measure as the liquid fire was tossed down the poor parched throat, the brain grew clearer; the intellect, with its Rabelaisque fertility of diseased imagining, keener; the sting the tongue carried more adder-like, and the ingenuity of its blasphemies more devilish. The tired women crept to bed at midnight, to start in their sleep at the hoot of every night-owl, the flitter of every bat, and the whistle of every passing steamer,—all save the little mistress of the great house, with its stores of linen and silver, its flower-filled garden, its farmyard with lowing sleek kine, its meadows in prime heart heavy with the sweetness of red clover, its line of brown nets pegged down to catch the incoming eager salmon at the mouth of the fjord, and the wood with its peaceful nooks of cool green and its winding paths, with their brown carpet of last year's pine-needles and fir-cones. She sits wearily in her low chair, with her thin hands clasped on her sharp knees and her shawl drawn round her shoulders, for in spite of the fire the first hour of the morning sends its chill breath into the room. He is lying on the sofa talking to himself, emphasizing his words with his heavy stick. A table with decanters and glasses stands next him.

"Women! ay, women! man's curse. At the end of the race they beat us always. We get one soft spot with our mother's milk, and well they know it, well they know it. What a man I would have been [a rising growl] if it hadn't been for women! Do you hear, you white-faced spawn? Yes, I mean it. God! when I look back—But [chuckling] I paid them out, the brutes!"

And curse follows curse, and worse than that; as from the lips of the stepdaughter in the fairy tale, the words that drop from his lips are the toads and vipers of filth.

"If one could forget! There was one, one long ago,—I might have spared her; she pleaded hard against me. Why do I think of her to-night? It is years, years ago. Ah, but I was big and beautiful in those days! She, she was an innocent little thing. I fascinated her like a snake, and I can see her eyes. They were blue, with long lashes. I can see them now, curse them! She and the child, gibbering idiots both! Oh [groan], curses on you for a devil, to plague me thus! Keep away! I say, keep away! How the ghosts dance about the room! There is another one I had forgotten. Light more candles, more! [a shriek] more! I say, all round the room! make a damn wake of it!"

Mutter, mutter,—a sourdine epic of Hades. She closes her eyes. The stick whirls past her, striking a vase off a table near her; she gets up, hands it to him without a word. He hiccoughs and laughs; and then he heaves one sob, and cries bitterly, with the great tears gushing forth in jets. She picks up his handkerchief and puts it into his hand, and he looks at her with a piteous softening of his wild eyes; and he says quietly, hiccoughing all the while like a child tired after a fit of passion,—for man in all his passions has a little of the inconsequent child; it is only woman who sins with clear seeing,—

"I am a brute, I know it; but you don't know what it is to see the ghosts of sins stirring in a man's soul like maggots in a dead rat. And the children, that is the worst of all. Oh, God! my poor little girls! What will become of them? Oh, oh!"

"But you settled for them!" soothing with her weary voice. "But you settled for them all right!"

"Oh, yes, the money's all right; oh, Lord, yes! I settled, I settled," with the reiteration of drunken gravity, "I settled that. But the mother was a brute, a heartless brute; and she was a lady too, ay, in her own right. And she never asked a word about them, not one word; it was I, I, poor disreputable brute, that put them to nurse, and I loathed her for it. Ah, if you women knew what a hold simple goodness has on us! I met her once, I had one at each hand; I used to go to see them. Oh, they don't know, they don't know, God forbid! and she lay back in her victoria and looked at us, curse her! She has children now, legitimate ones, and my little girls don't know I'm alive. Oh, my poor little girls! They are so pretty! Mind you bury that locket with me; don't open it! Yes, yes, I know; don't think I don't trust you,—only woman I ever trusted in the world. But I'm afraid for them: curse this water in my eyes [sob]; don't you imagine I'm crying, I'm not! It's whiskey, pure, unadulterated [hiccough] whiskey; but I can't help thinking of them. The others, ay, Lord! how many others? I don't care about them, I settled for them; they weren't ladies, they'll get on well enough; but these my pretty little ones, I'm afraid for them, afraid for them! I, who spared no man's daughter, how can I tell if some brute won't hurt mine? Oh, God! oh, God! how can they be good with such a father and such a mother?"

He drinks as he speaks, and pours out in grief and rage a wild torrent of prayers and curses.

"Ay, verily, it's reaping the whirlwind! How the faces crowd round! they always come with the gray morning light,—women's faces, girls' faces, child-girls' faces—oh, damn you! hide me from them! hold me tight and keep them away! put your arms right round me! you are clean, a clean little thing,—they can't come through you."

And she holds the throbbing head in her arms, and hides the wild eyes in her breast, and she feels as if there is a rustle of trailing skirts about her, and waving hair and a feel of women; and then he tears himself out of her clasp, and she falls, bruising herself sorely; and he throws over the table, with a shatter of falling glass, and bounds up the stairs, snatching a riding-whip out of the hall; and he beats its gold head into jagged shreds of glitter on the maids' door, and shouts to them to rise and come down. He'll show them he is master in his own house! He has eaten nothing all day,—no, nor for many days! down at once, or he'll know why, and cook, cook his dinner and light fires,—yes, fires everywhere! What does he pay them for, lazy sluts! what does he keep house for?

And so, man, the master mind of creation, asserts his authority, and the maids troop down, heavy-eyed and stupid with sleep; and bake and roast, and giggle hysterically under their breaths, and tell stories of other masters they have served, and goings on, and grind fresh coffee-beans, and have white bread and lump sugar and cold fowl, for there is no one to say them nay, and the larders are full of good things; and only the pale little mistress knows how near the grand place is drawing to bankruptcy.

Morning came, and the table was decked and the dinner served, and taken out again untasted; and another storm simmered all through the sunny forenoon, to burst like a hurricane over the house at noon.

The kitchen is empty and the fire has gone out; a wreck of crockery shows where the storm raged worst. The girls flew before the thunder of voice and flash of whip; the Swedish gardener left his birthright of song untouched, and followed them: he is skylarking with them now up in the great loft; they have pulled up the ladder, and are pelting one another with last year's hay. The cow-girl, a wench from Hittedal, lured the cattle and goats and long-legged heifer calves deeper into the woods with her quaint Lokke song, calling,—

Only the housemaid, who is consumptive, and who stays for the little mistress's sake, her own days in the land being numbered, has taken her Bible up to the lookout in the wood, and laid it open on the stone table. She is crushing the Linnae, as she kneels, into a fragrant incense, rocking to and fro to the somber rhythm of the last book of Ecclesiastes.

And the master of them all is sitting exhausted in his big chair, and Marie Larsen and he are doing battle. She came on the scene just as the grand retreat was sounded, and took the enemy by stratagem. She lifted the little mistress bodily up, and carried her upstairs, leaving him, as she puts it, "to ramp like a bull of Basan below." She lays her on her bed, takes off her shoes, pulls down the blind, and pours out some drops out of a little blue bottle she carries in her pocket, talking as she might to a child: "There, Tulla, take naptha drops, very good drops; you go sleep, good sleep; Marie mind him, Marie not afraid," and with a final pat she goes down. He is laughing between his oaths at the stampede of petticoats, and he holds out his arms when she comes in.

She is a little square woman, between fifty and sixty, with a ruby button of a nose, hair, that oil and age has robbed of its brilliant red, drawn smoothly back into a tight screw at the back of her broad head. Her eyes are a fishy green gray, the left eyelid droops; when she thinks you are not looking, a sly elusive gleam brightens them, her pursed lips loosen, and if you happen to see it, you think that there may be something after all in the stories the gossips whisper of Marie Larsen. Her dress is exquisitely neat, her apron snowy. No one in the district can make such a suprême of fish as Marie; no one can beat her at roasting a capercailzie and serving it with sour cream sauce, or brew such caudles and possets for a lying-in, or bake such meats for a funeral feast. And what if there be an old-time tale of a brat accidentally smothered? And what if the Amtmanden (superior magistrate), he who had the sickly wife, did send Marie to Germany to learn cooking? Well, he had money to spare, and was always freehanded. And if Nils Pettersen did write home and say that he saw her in Hamburg at a trade—well, other than cooking, sure Nils Pettersen was a bit of a liar anyhow, and good cooking covers a multitude of frailties. And if her nose was red and her breath smelt of cloves, who could say they ever saw her buy a bottle of akavit,—and that was more than could be said of all the other temperance leaguers. She had a nice cottage, with marigolds and curly-mint and none-so-prettys nodding down the garden paths; and if you went inside it was very respectable, and you could not fail to notice the large brass-bound Bible on a crochet-square on top of the mahogany chest of drawers, with a sprig of palm marking the gospel of the previous Sunday. And no one answered the responses more loudly, or confessed more openly at revival times, or quoted Scripture more aptly to the confusion of a neighbor than Jomfru Marie Larsen. And then she had seen life too, and told them round the oven in winter over a cup of good coffee "tales that were human," just to warn them what risks they might run if they should be tempted to stray to the ungodly cities of the wicked world outside.

She stands and smiles at him. "Arcades ambo! Blackguards both!" quotes he, pointing to a glass. She pours him out a measure and blinks, and fills a wine-glass with raw spirit for herself, and clinks glasses and sips like a connoisseur; and then she takes out her knitting and sets the needles flying. So they sit awhile; his last grand charge has taxed him, but the quiet maddens him.

"Where's the Frue?" he asks, "the Frue?"

She lays her head sideways on her hand and closes her eyes, saying in English: "No can have Fruen; she sick, no can have her; be good, Marie tell you a tale."

She gets up and shuts the doors; he roars at her and tries to rise, but his knees fail him; he sinks back into the chair and begins to swear. She knits away, and commences in Norwegian a sing-song recitative like the drowsy buzz of a fly on a pane.

"Yesterday we had a bazaar, a bazaar in the school-house,—a bazaar for the poor black heathens in Africa, for the poor black heathens lost in the darkness of unbelief, and ignorant of the saving of the Lamb. Oh, it was a blessed work!"

A savage roar from him; but she goes on unheeding with her narrative:—

"And there were tables, with lots of things to be sold; and there were tables with refreshments; and there were wreaths and flags upon the walls, and godly texts and paper roses, yellow and red."

She draws out each word to spin the yarn longer, and he curses her for a Jezebel and foams with rage, and she sips her cognac with a deeper droop of eyelid and slower click of needle, and proceeds with her tale:—

"And we had hymns, and the kapelan [curate] played the harmonium; and then he held a little edifying discourse, and the school children sang, and Marie had to hand round refreshments, and oh it was a rousing day! And there was Frue[1] Magistrate Holmsen, and Frue Assessor Schwartz, and Frue Custom-House Chief's lady and her sister Fröken Dase, she of the long nose and pinched waist, and her engaged the Candidat. And there was Frue Doctor Barthelsen, and Frue General-Dealer Steen and daughter, with a high frill to hide the evils in her neck, and Frue Insurance Agent—"

She dodges a glass adroitly, and raises her voice to drown his shriek of what the merry devil she means.

"Insurance Agent Hansen, and the Kaptein of the 'Sea Gull'—S-s-s, you be quiet, Marie tell you tale. There was M'am Sörensen and fat M'am Larsen,—she's going to have her twelfth, and Larsen only third mate,—and M'am Johnsen and all the young gentlemen and ladies, and oh it was a glorious sight!"

She starts a key higher, for he is purple with fury and exertion,—

"And, and we had coffee two-pence a cup, and chocolade [with a long-drawn stress on the 'lade'] and Brus-selzers and lemonade and fruit juice and temperance beer—No, no! you be quiet, Marie tell tale!"

He is struggling till the veins stand in cords to get out of his chair, but in vain; he points to his glass in desperation. She refills it and her own.

"Yes, temperance beer, a penny a glass; and we had white bread and brown bread and currant buns and Berlin kringels and ginger-nuts and little cakes with hundreds and thousands on top! And oh it was grand!"

She is yelling louder and louder, and he is swearing deeper, and the battle shows no signs of ceasing.

"And then we sold all sorts of things, and drew numbers, and had a lucky bag; and Hans Jacobsen played on the melodeon; and missionary Hansen told us about the poor blacks and all his blessed work, and how the Lord guided his footsteps through the sandy wastes, and how he baptized a chief and all his wives in the waters of faith. And Nils Pettersen says they took out more raw alcohol and spent gun-powder and spoilt cotton goods than the fear of God; and that the 'Bird o' Faith' cleared one hundred per cent on her freight. But Nils Pettersen was always a liar; and oh it was a blessed thing to do all that for the heathen blacks! And then the kapelan spoke again, a touching discourse!"

And she refills her glass, dodging his stick and watching him out of the tail of her eye as she turns the heel of her stocking, and repeats the whole of the sermon. His vocabulary is exhausted, and he is inventing the weirdest oaths, hurling them forth, a deep accompaniment to her shriller sermon, with its sanctimonious sing-song tune and unctuous phrasing; for she is, perhaps unwittingly, mimicking the kapelan to the life. He is getting tired and drowsy, the cognac is rising to her head, and even a kapelan's sermon must draw to a close; and as a mother will change her lullaby into a quick hushoo, and pat mechanically with a drowsy nod as the child drops to sleep, so Marie puts her knitting tidily into her apron pocket, and folding her withered old hands breaks into a hymn. He opens his eyes languidly, and protests feebly with a last damn; but Marie has exorcised the devil this time. His jaw drops, and muttering softly, he falls into heavy sleep; and she sings on, till her head too droops on her breast, and her quavering old woman's voice dies away in an abortive allelujah!

And the motes dance in the golden bar of a waning sun-ray that pierces the room and crosses the motionless figures; and above stairs the little mistress is wrapped in rare, delicious, dreamless slumber. And I like to think that the recording angel registered that sleep to the credit of Jomfru Marie Larsen!

II.

A SHADOW'S SLANT.

It is a sunny afternoon in mid-summer. A phaeton drawn by a pair of sturdy gray Stavanger horses, whose dainty heads and the mark of Saint Olav's thumb on their throats tell their race, is dashing along at a break-neck pace. The whip curls over them, and the vehicle sways a little to one side. Two great hounds bound along on the right of it.

A strip of blue fjord and a background of dark mountains, with the cool ice-kisses of the snow queen still resting on their dusky heads, can be seen at intervals through the fir and pine trees. A squirrel scrambles up a rowan-tree, and a cattle-bell tingles far in the woods. Nature has ever a discordant note in its symphony. A little brown bird is fluttering in helpless, terrified jerks; it emits, as it rises and falls, a sharp sound between a chirp and a squeak. A hawk is swooping over it: a poise—a dip—a few feathers float with the breeze, and hawk soars up with its prey in its claws.

The red-brown eyes that gleam out of the small, sallow face of the woman who sits on the left side of the phaeton close for a second; the delicate nostrils quiver, the lips tighten over a sigh; then the lids rise again, the eyes are darker, the pupils have a trick of dilating; a smile subtle in meaning, for much of mocking pain and bitterness is expressed in its brief passage, flits across her face.

A savage jerk! the horses stop.

"Kiss me!" says the man who is driving. His voice is harsh, and the eyes that scan her face have a lurid light in them; and as he speaks a smell of spirit mingles with the smell of the pine chips. Her lips tighten still more; she turns to obey. She has to rise up a little; he is very tall. His nose is powerful like a hawk's beak, and his beard is stirred by the breeze, and his eyes peer out from under their fringe of black lashes with a cruel, passionate gleam. She almost touches his face, but falls back from a rough shove:—

"No! keep your kiss and be damned to you!"

A savage whoop, the whip curls out and the reins jerk, and the quivering horses that know the voice too well dash on; and the hounds that have felt the whip-cord sting, as the strike of a snake on their flanks, bay savagely as they join in the race.

On the right of the narrow, winding road a great lake lies hundreds of feet below; the wheel is not half a foot from the edge, and the vehicle jolts and leans that way, and the lash coils round and flicks her cheek, and leaves a sorry sting,—and she never winces at it, but her small hands clinch, and her lips part, and the red light flashes in her eyes, and something akin to exultant expectation steals over the thin small face as they court death each wheel-turn in their mad career.

The stable-door opens, and the horses turn their heads. She—it is she—goes and passes her fingers gently over the swollen stripes that make little ridges in the close-clipped hair. Once she lays her cheek caressingly upon a cruel furrow, and whispers, "Poor little Ola! if I had only governed my face better, you would not have been so punished!" and Ola turns his satiny muzzle, softer than the daintiest lady's breast, and rubs it against her, to coax for the apples that always follow. She goes from one to the other, and cooes to them, and rubs her chin against their soft noses; and when the stripes are very bad her jaws set, and one can see the mark of the teeth through her thin cheeks.

"Come here! I want some brandy!... Now put the glass down and come back. What's that mark on your cheek?"

"Only the whip touched me."

"And you were too damned proud to say so, eh? By the way, I saw some gypsies in the park. Johann can do the translating, they are coming here to play. One of them is a thundering fine girl; I'd like to—What! what's that you said?"

"I did not make any remark!" a fine scorn trembles about her pale lips, and her face is a shade grayer.

A pause.

"Where are your rings?"

"Upstairs."

"Go and fetch them! Blast it! I don't buy you rings to leave them upstairs."

She comes back with them on, and he takes up the slim fingers laden with jewelled bands, spreads them out on his palm, then closes his thumb and finger round her wrist, and laughs a rasping laugh.

"Did any mortal man ever see such a hand? You witch! with eyes that probe into a fellow's soul, and shame him and fear nothing!" and he tightens his grip, and she winces at his roughness. "There [with a softening of voice], did I hurt you, you poor little thing, you queer little womany? Come closer [with fierce, impatient tenderness]; put down your little old head, a head like a snipe, on my breast! There, great God, I'm very fond of you!" A tremor runs through his voice. "You queer little thing! You are no beauty, but you creep in, and I, I love every inch of you. I'd kiss the ground under your feet, I know every turn of your little body, the slope of your shoulders,—I that always liked women to have square shoulders!—the swing of your hips when you walk. Hips! ha, ha! you haven't got any, you scrap! And yet, by the Lord, I'd lick you like a dog [slower, with emphasis]! And you don't care for me! You obey me, no matter what I ask." He is holding her face against his breast, and stroking her head with clumsy touch. "You wait on me,—ay, no slave better,—and yet I can't get at you, near you; that little soul of yours is as free as if I hadn't bought you, as if I didn't own you, as if you were not my chattel, my thing to do what I please with—do you hear [with fury]—to degrade, to—to treat as I please? No, you are not afraid, you little white-faced thing; you obey because you are strong enough to endure, not because you fear me. And I know it; don't you think I don't see it! You pity me, great God! pity me,—me that could whistle any woman to heel! Yes, you pity me with all that great heart of yours because I am just a great, weak, helpless, drunken beast, a poor wreck!" And the tears jump out of his eyes, eyes that are limpid and blue and unspoiled; and he sobs out: "Kiss me! take my head in your arms! I am a brute, an infernal brute, but I'm awfully fond of you, you queer little gypsy, with your big heart and your damnable will! I! I! I who hated women like poison, who always treated them as such,—I could cry when I look at you, like a great puling boy, because your spirit is out of my grasp. Smooth my head! no other little hand in the world has such a touch as yours. I'd know it among a thousand, my poor little thing! Don't ever leave me! promise even if I go mad, promise you'll stay! Get a man to mind me, but stay, won't you? Stay!"

"I'll stay."

"Did any Christian man ever have such an atom for a wife? I believe you are a gypsy; your hair curls at the ends like a live thing, and there are red lights in its black, and your eyes have a flash in them at times and a look as if you were off in other lands! Oh, oh! get me a little brandy, quick, quick!"

Merrily twang the guitars, and the tambourines rattle as they are swung aloft by slender curving wrists. The wild cries of a Zingari dance ring out. Black eyes gleam, and brown skins shine under orange and scarlet kerchiefs. The grace of panthers and the charm of wild, untamed, natural things is revealed in every movement. Color, vivacity, dirt, and rhythm.

Wild the music, wilder the dance; and he sits in his chair on the veranda, the clean, clear air and the fresh breeze blowing in from the sea, stirring the white hairs in the curls at his temples, and listens and looks with no eye or ear for aught of its beauty,—only a ribald jest as their petticoats rise, or their bosoms quiver in the fling of the dance. And she, with a crimson shawl drawn round her spare shoulders and a splash of color in her thin cheeks, holds one hand tightly pressed over her breast—to still what? What does the music rouse inside that frail frame? What parts her lips and causes her eyes to glisten and the thin nostrils to quiver? Is there aught in common between that slight figure, with its jewelled hands and its too heavy silken gown, and those tattered healthy Zingari vagabonds? Who knows?

The whole tribe are gathered round him, begging and screaming with one voice, and he throws silver lavishly to them, and thrusts his hand with a coarse jest into the open bodice of the girl nearest him. A brown hand goes to the knife of a swarthy youth with gold rings in his ears; but at a few strange words from the oldest woman in the group the girl steps back, and with the quickness of lightning the hag takes her place and answers his jest in his own tongue. The girl looks curiously, pityingly, respectfully at the other girl: she is a little more than a girl as she stands dumbly by during all this scene. Eye seeks eye, sympathy meets sympathy. What affinity is between these two creatures?

"Kan de rokra Romany?" she asks, with a smile that visits her face as the ghost of a vanished beauty; and her voice is sweetly soft as she asks it. A flash of eye, a hurried backward word thrown to the old woman who joins them on hearing it. She stands between, with a smile at their wonder, and she holds out her hand, and one slim ivory-tinted hand rests palm upward in a no less slim but browner one. The old woman peers into the lines and crosses, and as she scans them a look of wonder creeps up to her usually inscrutable face. She exchanges words in an undertone with the gypsy girl at her side.

"I speak Romany too, Deya! An evil fate, isn't it, mother?"

"A mole on your cheek, and a free Romany heart in your breast, your spirit fights to be free as the Romany chai. Seven suns rise and seven moons, and the flag is half-mast, and the cage opens and the bird—"

An impatient curse cuts short her words, and they turn to him.

"Here, you old Jezebel! Send these vagabonds of yours down there; there's plenty to eat."

The servants are bearing beer and food to the lawn.

"Shall I go blind? I dare say you know as much as those infernal doctors, eh?"

"No; your eyes, and pretty eyes they are, and many a soul they've lost, they'll last your time, my lord! I see a journey to England; it lies before you, and no return. Seven times the moon will rise, and the Romanies go to the South, but the bird—"

"Get to blazes out of this! Help me in, ducky; oh, damn it, be quick! Get me some brandy, quick, quick! not all brandy, a little milk in it!"

The moon is high in the heavens, and the sea is running into the creek with a silver sheen on its back; the blinds are drawn up in the four windows of the bedroom, and the northern night is like unto day disguised in a domino of silver-gray crape.

He is sleeping. She is standing motionless at the window. The red of her dressing-gown and the moonlight make her face look more ghostlike, as she leans her head wearily against the window-frame. She is gazing sea-ward; a steamer has just passed, and the beacon in the lighthouse on Jomfru-land gleams like a great bright eye. In how many dreary vigils has it not greeted her and seemed to say: "Courage! I too am watching; you are not alone!"

At the end of the wood two tents are pitched, and she can see two figures outlined against the white palings,—the Romany girl and the youth with the gold ear-rings. He is holding her in his arms. The dog-chains rattle now and then; something brown and stealthy creeps about the duck-house; the white mists in the marshy bit of meadow lying next the creek dance like spirits, and beckon to her with shadowy arms, and a faint yellow streak appears in the east. How many more nights must she stand alone, and watch the morning herald a new day of bondage?

She moves noiselessly away, and goes into the dressing-room, and walks over to the mirror. She shakes her dusky elf-locks round her face, and catching up a yellow scarf lying on a chair winds it round her head, and then peers at herself in the glass. A deft twist turns down the white frills of her nightgown; she has a gold chain round her neck, and she laughs a childish, noiseless laugh at her own image. "How strangely my eyes gleam, and what a gypsy I look! No one would know, no one would dream of it. I would soon get brown!" and she looks wistfully out toward the camp again. "In an hour they will go. A heap of fern to lie on, scant fare, and weary feet; but the freedom, ah, the freedom! The woods with their wealth of shy, wild things, and the mountains that make one yearn to soar up over their heights to the worlds above! Free to follow the beck of one's spirit, a-ah to dream of it!" and the red light glows in her eyes again. They have an inward look; what visions do they see? The small thin face is transformed, the lips are softer, one quick emotion chases the other across it, the eyes glisten and darken deeply, and the copper threads shine in her swart hair. What is she going to do, what resolve is she making?

A muttered groan, a stir in the bed rouses her, and throwing aside the scarf she glides swiftly to his side. She stands and looks down. What a magnificent head it is, and how repellent! The tossed black locks with their silver streaks lie scattered on the pillow. The ear suggests vigorous animalism, the nose is powerful, the broad forehead shines whitely, and the long lashes curl upward as those of a child. The sensual-lipped mouth with its cruel lines shows more cruel as the head is thrown back. She looks at it steadily; no line escapes her,—looks from it to the hands, nerveless, white; the long, thin thumbs have a hateful expression, and the backs are short with an ugly joining to the wrists. He stirs, and a lewd word escapes his lips. She shudders! Again her eyes wander out with an appealing look (to whom do they appeal,—to part of herself, to some God of convention?) toward the camp. They are stirring; she can see the Finn dog run to and fro. She steps away; irresolution is expressed in her face; her head is thrust forward, her fingers spread out unconsciously. She glances across the floor; some shelves are to be nailed up, one of them is leant against the wardrobe door. As she hesitates, she notices that the shadow of it and the half-closed door throws a long cross almost to her feet. She folds her hands involuntarily: a whimper from the bed, a frightened call,—

"Come to me! Where are you? Don't leave me a second! oh, God! don't leave me! What's that there? Give me a drop of brandy! quick, oh quick! Kneel down, dearie, close, close to me; lay your little old cheek against mine, and say a little prayer,—no psalm business, just one out of your own little head [sob] to suit a poor devil like me!"

The sun is saying good-morning to the moon; she is wan from watching. The birds are awake, but the man still sleeps; and the little red-gowned figure crouched at the bed-side, her left hand, with its heavy gold band, clasped lightly in his, is sleeping too. A half-dried tear is held in the dark hollow under the closed eyes; the nose looks pinched in the morning light, and a gray-green shadow stains mouth and chin, but a smile plays round the dry lips.

The caravan is winding slowly round the curve of the road, and three plump geese are stowed inside. The Romany lass is humming a song,—a song about love and dance and song,—and the soul of the sleeping girl floats along at her side in a dream of freedom. She of the song looks up: "Six moons will rise, then you will be free!" she mutters to herself as she passes on; and the sun mounts higher, and the shadow of the cross is lightening with the coming dawn—who knows?

III.

AN EBB TIDE.

It is a sunshine Sabbath morning. The sea quivers under an armor of silver scales, and laps, laps with a laugh as it runs into the creek. The sails of the ships glisten whiter than any snow. The sun distils the scent from the clove carnations and the sweetbrier leaves, and coaxes the pungent resin through the cracks in the bark, until the air is heavy with a smell that would cease to be perfume, were it not filtered through the salt ooze of the incoming sea-breeze that flutters the flags on the tall white poles, and tempers the ardor of the young year's sun.

The kariol bearing the specialist whose skill is of no avail in the face of a pressing call from the great god Death, has just wound round the pine-wood in a whirl of dust. The dogs, unbound, lie on the back veranda, with their black snouts resting on their forepaws, and they watch him depart without a growl; they have not barked for days past, nor chased the plucky badger, nor yapped impatiently as the cheeky squirrels flirted through the branches. Even beggars have come and gone without a snarling protest; but all last night they howled and bayed and cowered together as if they could see the passage of invisible guests. A peculiar stillness seems to brood over the great place. The maids are sitting in their gowns of Sunday black, with open psalm-books on their laps; they are listening and whispering with the disturbance of expectancy.

The housekeeper is talking to the leech woman, quaint survival of older days, whose business in life is to keep the slimy suckers lively and apply them. She looks as if she fed them between times on herself, so bony and colorless a creature is she. They are negotiating the last ghastly offices that may soon be needed, speculating as to the changes and their effect on the village. The vicar, she tells, is about to make the departing life the text of his sermon; every one in the district is coming to hear it. Why not? A sermon of warning, with a smack of the Pharisee in it; a "Lord, I thank Thee I am not like unto this man" note, especially if you know the publican in question, cannot fail to be attractive; it has an up-to-date interest that the parable of the far-away-time sinner necessarily lacks.

Upstairs the cow-girl is crouching like a faithful dog outside his bedroom door; she is listening to the murmured Latin service of the mass that comes from inside. The windows of the room are wide open, and the sea stretches away and melts into the horizon in an infinity of blue and silver. He is lying still on the ebb of his last tide, and when his eyes open they wander from the little priest before the extemporized altar, to the bowed head of the woman kneeling beside him.

"Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum!" intones the priest.

"Et cum spiritu tuo!" she utters in response, in dead, dull tones; and when she chimes the little silver bell she does it in a mechanical way, and all the time he holds her one hand to his breast. When the mass is read and the extreme unction administered, the little priest reads the prayers for the dying. He listens attentively, and she listens too, with eyes dry as horn, and tightened lips. She scarcely hears what he reads:—

"My feet have gone astray in the paths of vanity and sin, now let me walk in the way of Thy commandments.... Forgive me, O Lord, all the sins which I have committed by my disordered steps—"

"'Steps!' that means feet; 'eyes seen vanities,' that means sight; 'tongue hath in many ways offended,' speech. Why, he is going through all the seven senses, or is it seven, or five?" She must give him the envelope with the check in it before he leaves. She hasn't a black frock, not one; he liked her in colors, light girlish colors, with a silken waist-band to match. Must she wire for a coffin? What a beast she is to think like this! But how can she help it? Her tear-bags—what is their right name, lachrymal glands?—are exhausted, even her lashes have thinned; yet she never shed a tear, at least only inwardly, with a choke.

He sobs, and she looks up; the tears are trickling down his cheeks; she puts up her free hand and wipes them off gently.

"To Thee I resign my heart! Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit!" reads the priest in broken English; and when the, from its point of view, beautiful prayer has drawn to a solemn close, the man sobs out in genuine, heartfelt conviction with a force of epithet that is habit not irreverence,—

"That is a damn nice prayer! I was always afraid of death, always [with a sob] a coward; but when it comes to the point, that vanishes too!"

And the boyish priest purses his check and takes it with him, and leaves his blessing instead, and follows in the wake of the town doctor.

"Send Johann to me, dearums; let me get dressed; I'll have a try to die in the sunshine. Get your own little bed carried down to the veranda, and your own little white pillow,—mind, the one you put your head on last,—and lend them to me for this turn."

And so the maids take it down, and she stands at the head of the stairs as they carry it, two at the head, and two at the foot; and as she hears their cautious backward steps and the rest at the turn, she fancies it sounds like the bearing out of a coffin. And then he follows slowly out, leaning on his big stick, and his beard divides into patches and shows the purplish skin, and his breathing is labored, but he steps more firmly than he has done for a long time past. And he leans on her frail shoulders, and when they reach the dining-room he calls in the maids and the men who serve him, and bids them charge their glasses; and he thanks them, and says he is sorry for all the trouble he has given them, and shakes hands with each one, and they courtesy and say "Skaal!" a salutation when drinking, and troop out crying. They are mostly women, and women forgive easily and forget everything—to a man! Only the cow-girl stops behind, crouched near the door, crying, "O-ah, o-ah!" And he fills his own glass with champagne and sips it; but nature sets a limit to the alcohol a man may absorb, and he has passed it. He cannot get it down; so he lays his hand on her head and smooths it gently, and says:—

"Your luck, little one, your very good luck! Oh, my poor little one, I am afraid for you! I ought to have—well, it's no good regretting;" and with a last flame of the old fierce fire he cries, "I have had my last drink, and no man shall drink after me;" and he shivers the glass against the wall, and purple shadows, the "skreigh" of another dawn, chase one another over his swollen face, and he leans heavily on her and says faintly, "Lay me down, I am tired!"

When they reach the veranda, the leaves of the virgin-vine are strewn in dancing shadow-leaves and fluttering tendrils at their feet. He looks at them and mutters, "Shadows—only shadows!"

Suddenly he searches her face intently and asks, "Is there no hope, little one,—none?" He reads the answer in her wistful eyes. "When? Don't you be afraid to tell me,—when did he say?"

"Inside twenty-four hours."

There is a long silence, and the shadow-leaves dance, and the bees whirl buzzing past, and the strong young life of midsummer mocks dissolution in a subtle, arrogant way.

"One good clean year, one clean year, one year's home for a finish! Just as I learnt to know what it meant, to leave it all! It's hard to look on a day like this [sob], and know that to-morrow I rot. A long life as lives go, and nothing to show for it! Well, I always wanted to die in the sunshine, with the birds singing, and, since I knew you, with you near me,—oh, my dear, my poor, dear little one!"

He reels, and she clutches him; but he steadies himself by a supreme effort, and says through his ground teeth: "Now I am going to say good-by to the world, and, by God! I'll say it standing. I have had good days in it,—wild, glad days, drunk with the lust of love and wine; but I never saw good or beauty in it till you showed me how. Oh, oh, oh! Let no man write my epitaph!"

He stands leaning on her shoulders, looking sea-ward, drinking his fill of sun and sea,—sea that was a rapture to him, that he loved as the greatest and strongest and cruelest thing he knew; the only thing that responded to the wild moods in his soul, and struck a rushing strain of song in his stormy heart that made him rejoice with a fierce delight. The tears fall and splash on her hands, and then she helps him to lie down; and she feels his feet, and they bring hot bottles, for they are getting cold, and he lies with his eyes closed. The village doctor comes and goes; but nothing can be done, the sands are running out fast. "If the Lord be merciful [the sermon is working in him] He will take him before morning, otherwise he will suffer much," he whispers to her. She does not answer, only kneels silently at his side, and he holds her hand. There is a strange smell that has a chill uncleanness in its breath about them.

The people pass by on the road above and peer down through the palings. The maids give audience to inquisitive or interested callers at the back. The housekeeper is busy at the linen press, sorting out sheets and things that may be needed; and as she moves about with noiseless tread, and folds and lays aside, she mentally remodels her wardrobe. If she take out the flower in her black summer hat, and put in some curled tips, it will serve nicely. Mistress will surely bring her a dress from England, and the merino they hang the rooms with (she will get it cut the proper lengths) will do for the maids. Uf! that nasty wine gave her a headache; she will get some fresh beans roasted, and have a good cup with fresh cream,—that will do her good. How Gudrun [the cow-girl] takes on! He was a devil to serve, but there were advantages,—ay, many pickings that would not fall to one's share in a better regulated Christian household, not to speak of the distinct comfort of having a mistress whose time is taken up elsewhere. Poor thing! Well, it's best for her; she has money, she'll marry again. But that Gudrun! it is odd. Why should she carry on so? Or could there be a reason? He always took great notice of Gudrun; she used to laugh and grin and go on when he went out in the yard, and never was afraid; and then there was that anonymous letter the mistress got. Uf! Men folk, God save us! Even with a leg in the grave it's hard to trust them! There's no smoke without fire, that's sure. There, that's all ready. "Well! what is it?"

This to the second housemaid. She is a fat girl, with a restless twitch about her mouth and half-closed eye-lids, that curl upward at the outer corners. One gets the impression somehow that her solid physique is but a mask to cover an emotional soul with a dangerous sense of humor.

"The Bible reader, Morten Ring, wants to know if he may read for a while, now that the Popish priest has gone and left the dying sinner without any one to direct his thoughts heavenward."

There is an imitative note in her voice, and a mocking gleam shoots from her eyes.

"Uf! is he here again? That's the third time. Mistress told him no before, and strong enough too; I should think that ought to have been more than enough for him."

"Yes, but he says the whole village thinks it shocking, and he is like sent up, and that you might put it to her!"

"Indeed, then I won't! When I did last time, she told me to tell him to go down to the weighing place on the wharf and ring a bell, and call the population together, and read out to them all the places in the Bible that refer to hypocrisy, lying, and scandal, the sins of adultery, fornication, and the begetting of bastards; that she'd be willing to pay him treble his fee for the charity of it, they need it so much. It might teach them to begin at home and let other folks alone."

"Shall I tell him that?" eagerly.

"Are you mad? No, tell him Mistress is reading herself, and ask him to stay and have a good cup of coffee and sweet rusks. I want to get the truth out of him about the magistrate's girl's illness; he was up there, and I don't believe a sniff in her sprained foot—"

And down below the rose-buds opened into roses, and nodded with the effrontery of assured beauty to the sun-god; and the birds hushed them for their noon siesta; and he lay with shut eyes and held her hand tightly; and sometimes he spoke to her, and sometimes he muttered to himself (she caught the words) a line of his favorite Mangan:—

The odd unpleasant smell seems to hang about them as if too heavy to diffuse itself in the thin, clear air; the smell of cow-sheds that clings to the cow-girl's clothes is perfume to it. It attracted the flies, and they gathered like swarming bees on the window-panes and door-posts, and buzzed and hummed and stung like Bushmen carousing over a find of dead meat; and they crept over the bed and stuck in his hair, and she tried to keep them off his face; and when one of them crawled up her own with tickling, clinging feet, she paled and shuddered. The cow-girl stepped out of her clogs, and went into the drawing-room and brought out a gayly painted palm-leaf fan, and stationing herself at the head of the bed set it in motion. His breathing is getting labored, and at times an ugly flush crosses his face. Once when it is deeper than usual, the girl cries,—

"O Lord God! Lord God!"

He hears her and looks up. "Ah, Gudrun, is that you? Good girl, good girl!"

She sinks on to her knees, and moans and rocks herself; and then she looks at his closed eyes and says to her: "Mistress, may I? It can't harm you!"

She nods her head wearily; she is fanning awkwardly with her left hand, and she says with her tired, tender voice: "Gudrun wants to say good-by, dear!"

He opens his eyes, and for a moment the charm of his rare smile returns. The girl stoops and leaves a kiss upon his forehead, and then rushes away and flings herself down on the long lush grass, that is never cut, under a big chestnut-tree.

He looks at her and lifts her hand to his lips: "Always a big heart, always a great little woman [with a groan]! and now I am to lose you, and it is the best thing could happen to you. Ay, there's the sting,—leave you to some brute, that is my punishment. O little one! don't you think too hardly of me," he talks with effort; "I meant to be better than I was to you. You'll never find another man love you as I did; remember that, and forget all the rest if you can. You have forgotten all, I might have known you would! Where am I drifting to? No man ever came back to say. Do you believe in hell [eagerly], do you believe in it?"

She looks at him pityingly, with a flash of past energy in the lift of her head, and a curl of scorn on her pale lips: "The hell of the priests or parson? No, I do not. Is that worrying you? Don't you let it, old man, don't you let it! Wherever you are going, whatever after existence your poor troubled soul is fighting its way to, it is not to their hell!"

The girl has come back and taken up her former position, and fans steadily, for the flies are gathering in greater numbers every hour. The veranda seems airless and close, and uncanny with unseen things; the doctor comes and goes; the servants peep out, and the hours seem to hold many hours in their embrace. She seems to live all her life over again. Things she has forgotten completely come vividly back to her. An old Maori man, who used to sell sweet potatoes and quaint ring-shells for napkin rings to the Pakeha lady in Tauranga Bay, floats before her inward vision as tangible as if he were next her; and a soldier servant, she can hear his voice, he used to sing as he pipe-clayed,—

Why did the stupid chorus come back to her now; what chink of brain did it lie in all these years? Oh what a brute she is and how callous! She ought to read prayers, or say things; in a few hours it will be too late ever to say a word more. She finds herself beating time with her foot to a jig tune, a bizarre accompaniment to the words "too late." She would give all she possesses to cry, yet she cannot; and so the day wears on.

Later on she bends her head to him and asks: "Are you dozing or are you thinking? What are you thinking of?"

He smiles. "Of zoo, dearums, of zoo!"

"Have you said your prayers? Shall I read you any?"

"Finished them long ago! I am just waiting; lying thinking of you, dearie, thinking of you. Happier than ever I was since I left off 'taw in the lay' and pegging tops."

Her question was a concession to a past religious conscience; she feels as she puts it that as for herself, if she would die as she sits there, she would not trouble to pray; it would be well to drift out.

There is another weary hour's silence; then he looks up at her and shivers slightly, and tightens his clasp of her hand. "Kiss me, duckums, kiss me! Now lay your little old phiz on the pillow close to mine, you dearest and best in the world! Close, close to mine."

The wind is changing, and the sun hides his face decently behind a great white cloud. There is a hoarse rattle in his throat, and his breathing is difficult. The doctor comes and stands quietly behind her; the crowd at the gate above gets denser; the servants huddle together in the dining-room and cry. The Swedish gardener pats them all in turn, but most gently the fat housemaid. A sudden blast of wind blows a strand of her hair loose and it touches his lips, and he mutters, "My little one!" She lifts her face and looks at him; a strange purple color vibration is waving over his face, and she calls affrightedly,—

"Dear, oh dear man, look at me! Can you see me, do you know me?"

He lifts his heavy lids and looks at her steadily with half-dead eyes, and says with stiff, barely articulate speech: "Of course I do, my dearie! I'm all rig—"

She feels his fingers close more tightly over hers,—once, twice,—then relax; his chin falls, and the doctor passes his hand over his eye-lids and puts a handkerchief to his lips; and the cow-girl drops with a cry to the ground and throws her apron over her head; and at the gate above a child calls "Mammy!" in frightened tones; and the lad who has been sitting up on the slope at the foot of the flag-staff slides the Union Jack half-mast; and the big white house is without a master.

She is sitting in an old garden, a retired place in the village, right on the fjord. They have driven her down there away from the house that seems haunted by his spirit, infected with the loathsome odor of rapid dissolution that nothing can overcome, that seems to ooze out and taint the very flowers. And then the myriad flies that crawl and creep, as if sick or drunk, over everything, and make one loathe and turn from the very sight of food and drink, for dread of where they have been; make one long to scream hysterically to drown their hateful buzzing, and rush away and plunge into the sea,—were it not that it too seems to whisper in undertones of dead men and lost sweethearts, drowned mariners with swollen gray-green faces and tangled locks floating like sea-sedge behind them, as they toss on the swift undercurrents beneath its treacherous smiling surface.

It is with her, sitting there, as it is with most men, that when numbed in mind and heart by some great trouble her senses are more alive to outward sounds and scenes. It is as if when one's inner self is working with some emotion, wrestling with some potential moral enemy, crying out under the crucifixion of some soul-passion, eyes and ears, and above all sense of smell, are busy receiving impressions and storing them up, as a phonograph records a sound, to reproduce them with absolute fidelity if any of the senses be touched in the same way by the subtile connection between perfume and memory. She will, in all time to come, never forget that old garden. She is rocking unconsciously to and fro. Her thoughts, and the emotions belonging to them, cross one another rapidly, flash past as the landscape seen from a mail train, so that she cannot fasten any of them. The weary vigils of many months, the details of days and hours, are ticked off as the events on a tape. The look in his eyes, press of his fingers; the quiet face with the awful look of peace; the rapid changes to a thing to be hidden away as swiftly as hands can coffin it; the clasped fingers, never to be lifted in tender caress or angry gesture; the future to face without even the rough protection of his passionate, wayward affection;—all these conflicting images and reasonings dash through her brain, and yet not a detail of her surroundings escapes her,—the strips of blue fjord, with the pilot boats with their numbered sails in the immediate foreground, and the prams turned bottom up on the miniature wharf for a fresh coat of paint; the dip of the white sail of a pleasure-boat in the distance, and the gleam of the scarlet cap of a girl steering; bright flecks on the black-green shadows of the trees in the near background, that stand out distinctly from the misty blue of the distant mountains, misty with the purple light that only clothes the northern heights.

Not a detail of the quaint garden escapes her. It is a garden of surprises. Fruit-trees from strange lands, dwarf shrubs of foreign birth, curious shells gathered on the beach of far-away islands, flourish promiscuously with indigenous plants. A painted lady (the figure-head of some effete sailing-craft), who has cloven the storms through many seas with her mighty breasts, and commanded the rising waves with her upraised hand, and faced the storm with a smile ghastly in its wooden fixity, has come here to rest. She leans next to an old sun-dial in the shade of an ancient lilac-bush. The sense of beauty, and the bump of utility of successive owners, is manifested at every turn. The even drills of potatoes are disturbed by the tombstone of a favorite dog; a plaster Mercury, and a shrub, cut in the form of a bulgy tea-pot, spoil the symmetry of a bed of carrots; strawberries carrying their ripe, red fruit right bravely fill the background of one bed, and a tangled profusion of pinks, pansies, and gilly-flowers, forget-me-nots, and fragrant lavender spikes have a long straight line of leeks running amid their sweet irregularity as a pungent line in a dainty sheaf of verse. She is conscious of a vague pleasure as she notes these things, and a sort of wondering pity at the pathos of her own quiet figure. She fingers her black cashmere gown and the heavy silk fringe of her shawl. She never wore a shawl before; they had nothing else black. Her mother used to wear a shawl, a white Indian silk with raised flowers. Her shoulders sloped too, like Eugenie's. Funny to wear a shawl like an old lady! She has a bag with money, papers, certificate of death for the customs. What a nuisance all these formalities are! "Lum tum, te tum, te tum,"—the dead march in Saul! no, she mustn't hum that. She remembers once in the long ago, before the flood, her flood, she had a sweetheart, a boy officer,—she wonders did he get fat; they always chaffed and said he would. Once she was humming it, when he stopped her saying, "Oh, don't! when any one hums that, a poor soldier dies somewhere." Superstition, of course; but she won't hum it, all the same, just for the old sake's sake. Why should she kill a soldier? She used to like all soldiers. "Tum tum!" Is she going mad? How does one go mad?

She turns her head in relief at an approaching step. The little doctor stands bowing, hat in hand. She notices that he is wearing his dress-suit, and adds mentally, "They wear dress clothes on solemn occasions, christenings, weddings, funerals. Why, of course it's the funeral!" She even smiles at the conjunction of a swallow-tail with elastic side-leather boots with high heels. His trousers too must have been made before he grew stout; they ruck up at the knees, and show the end line of his under-drawers quite plainly. She feels inclined to laugh. She hasn't really laughed for a long time; well, why shouldn't she laugh?

"Will Fruen come now?" he queries.

There is a subtile blending of the soothing professional tone he uses to lady patients and the gravity befitting a solemn occasion.

She takes up her bag, gathers her shawl mechanically into graceful folds over her arms, and follows him. They go up through the wood, past the poor-house, to a side entrance. She notices as she looks down over the town that the flags are all half-way down the staffs, and that the village is crowded with folk; and that outside the house there are groups of black-coated men, like ants crawling about a white stone, she thinks. The little housekeeper meets her at the door; the other girls are crying. She bows to people without recognizing them. Then there is a tramping of feet, and some one leads her out; the bell is tolling up from the church, and she sees that they have covered the gray cobs with black palls, and attached a black canopy to the cart, and outlined the spokes of the wheels with fir needles, and smothered the rest of it with branches and flowers, wreaths and crosses, and harps and lyres: he hated music too! The coffin—what an ugly black thing, with an exaggerated stomach and garished silver ornaments!—is resting upon the Union Jack. A crowd of faces that she does not know meets her. She places herself behind the cart, and the maids follow her, and all the dogs gather round her, but never growl once as they move on; and the crowd follows. She can see the green road; they have covered it according to custom with branches of fir and pine,—a green river, a grass-green river, winding to the left. And the sea, the sea he loved,—it seems to her that there is a cadence of pity in the eternal note of its quiet sadness. How tired her feet are! It's quite half a mile yet. She has no ankles, how funny! Just stilts made of her will. She trips. The cow-girl pushes past the housekeeper, and watches her steps.

"Lord God, how stony-faced she is!" whispers the doctor's wife, "and she never cried once."

It is a long way, she keeps thinking. Where are they going, anyway? Oh, yes, to the tug,—the tug that is to bear them away on a glorious lonely death-ride, out of the sunny fjord to the glistening sea, away to where the rainbow ends. At the end of the rainbow you'll find a pot of gold! But, first, they must pass through the wide wooden gate; it is open. What is that they say about a wide wooden gate? No, it's about a road,—it's the wide road that leads to destruction. They have decked the gate with green too,—the gate through which the children used to peer with inquisitive, frightened child-eyes, up to the house where the wicked man dwelt. How they used to scamper away with half-real, half-acted terror at a cry of, "The man is coming!"—the man who was a bogie-man to them, a name with which to threaten them when naughty, about whom their elders told dreadful tales in subdued voices. She remembers this, and smiles half sadly to see as they reach the narrow street how the children swarm to meet his coming. There is no school to-day, and they get under the horses' hoofs, and crowd round the car, and point with dirty, chubby fore-fingers, and clasp hands, and cluster together in groups of twos and threes, and gaze with awe-struck eyes, and whisper, and follow. And one whispers to his comrades how he once got a drive and a silver piece from "the man," and another how he gave little Tulla a piece of cake. And she thinks of the train that danced in the wake of the pied piper, and of his own little ones who know him not. Perhaps they are dancing and laughing to-day,—to-day, when the father who gave them no name is being borne along to the tuneful patter of little feet that are not of his kith nor his kin. She seems to feel that that thing in the coffin is not he. He is walking next her, laughing with the rare humor of his best moments; chuckling at the grand funeral they are giving him,—him the bad man, of whom they had nought but evil to say. How hard it is to go down hill slowly! She tells herself that later on in the ages to come, when the little ones here have gone to their last homes as withered elders, the tales of the bogie-man of their child-days may have grown into a saga of a wild Angleman with great wealth, who landed and made himself a home on their coast, and drank and caroused and bought the strangest things; who took mad sails in a boat right into the teeth of coming gales that the pilots feared to brave, when the white-crested horses leaped high over the rocks, and the sea-dragons roared below, and the gray mews shrieked shrill warnings to the fishers to hasten them home; who turned the night into day, and took wild hag-rides with his baying and galloping horses at midnight, and used to crack his whip and urge them on with exultant oaths, and never let his little wife out of his sight, but call for her if he missed her till the woods rang with her name.

They reach the wharf. The tug "Bully-boy," with black funnel and hissing steam, is lying taut to the pier. Her head is really spinning. How stupid those eight men are! they haven't backed the horses enough. Hats off! They lay him on the deck; they have put the old flag under him and piled the posies on top. She pats the dogs and bids them stay, and lets the women kiss her, and walks up the plank: one plank! surely there should be four,—

No, that's not the verse: she can't get it. "I heard four planks fall down with a saddening echo?—with a hollow echo?" She stands by the side of the coffin and gazes quietly at the crowd,—looks at the men with their uplifted hats, at the black-draped horses (Puck is biting Olla in the neck), at the children, and the group of dogs; and all the staring eyes seem to melt into one monster multi-colored eye, that pierces her through and through. Can't they see she is hollow,—the fools?

They loosen the hawser and cry "All right!" and "Bully-boy" swings round, and they steam sea-ward, and she sits and dreams, and the tug dances and splutters and fusses through the sunlit sea, past fjord mouths and hamlets, and boats with singing children and yapping dogs; and she never thinks of the future, nor of the steamer she is to meet at the city, nor makes any plan,—simply sits and lets her fancies run riot through her tired brain; sits under a canopy of clear air, and listens to the strange conceits that arise in her thinking self. She is a Viking's bond-maid of olden days; she hid on his bark while they built up his funeral pyre and laid the old warrior down. She watched them touch the flaming pine-knot to his fiery mausoleum, and set him adrift to the strain of a fierce, exultant chant of victory, to sail out on his last voyage for a handigrips with the grim foe Death. Ay, he too was a primitive man, with the primeval passions of untamed nature surging up and eating their way to his soul's core, as restless breakers hollow a place on the coast; and now he is going to rest.

The sun sinks in a superb, audacious blending of hues; orange and scarlet, pink and blue, and lemon-yellow streaks with splotches of intensest purple are hurled from a palette of fire in a frenzy of color. The fishers pause and look curiously at the silent little figure keeping vigil next the flower-decked coffin, as she passes them in the pearl-mists of the summer night,—pearl-mists that wrap her in a chilly shroud; and she fancies that spirit hands spread the canopy of starred blue over them as they glide on; and the moon peers down and nods to her, and another moon runs sea-ward on a shining silver river; and the foam in their wake ripples together like frothing diamond chips; and the dew falls on the withering flowers, and bathes her pale face and moistens her dry lips; and the night breeze sings sadly to the thrumming of unseen harps, and soothes her troubled spirit with tender whisperings that only the stricken in soul can catch in snatches from the spirit of nature. The boy takes the wheel, and the captain brews her some coffee. They have forgotten at the house, in their care for the funeral, to provide her with food or rugs. She is too deliciously weary (there is no new effort either to make, unless she chooses) to care. When he brings it to her she swallows it gratefully, and follows him to the stuffy little cabin, and lies down as he suggests, with her head on a pilot coat, and he covers her tenderly with another: she is so small and frail it takes but little. Somehow it smells "homey," with its mingled odor of tobacco and brine and man, and touches her chilled, lone soul like the honest clasp of a warm human hand, with a promise of rest and shelter to come; and under its homely spell she falls asleep.

And so these two poor human souls, tossed together for good or ill for a brief space, sleep their last together through the summer night. He, to no mortal awakening; she, perchance, to a brighter dawn.

THE END.