"But to whom?"
"Ah, that is it! Didn"t I tell you before, that at the time I met your father I was in absolute despair?"
"You, mother? No."
"I did not believe that life had anything to offer, or that I had anything to wait for. Most girls who arrive at the age of twenty-eight without anything having happened to them, anything that is worth rousing themselves for, believe that nothing is worth caring about. The age, or about that age, is the most perilous."
"How do you mean?"
"That is when most girls come to despair."
She took her daughter"s arm, which she pressed, and so they walked on together.
"I must confess it all to you"--but there she stopped.
"Who was it, mother?" She said it so softly that her mother didn"t hear, but she knew what it was.
"It was some one for whom you have but small respect, my child. And you are right."
"My uncle?"
"How did that occur to you?"
"I don"t know. But was it he?"
"Yes, it was. Yes, I see you don"t understand it. I never understood it myself, either. Think of your father, and of him! And just about the same time, too. What do you think of me? But, oh! take care of yourself, my child."
"Mother?"
"Well, well--_you_ have a mother, and I had none. And I was at Court, and, as I told you, at the perilous age when nothing seems worth caring about any longer. Of course I, too, had been playing the same game that I have been looking on at to-day, but not with your apt.i.tude. Yes, you may turn away your face. I had come to feel a certain disgust with life--for myself among the rest--and so I went on refusing people till it was too late in the day."
"But--with my uncle!" Magne broke out again.
"We looked upon him differently at that time. But I don"t want to go into all that again now. I will only admit that it was horrible. So you may think what you like about it--I mean as to how it came about."
The daughter took her arm away and looked at her mother.
"Yes, Magne, we don"t always do as we mean to do, and I have told you I was at the perilous age. And so you can understand how I felt when I saw your father--there was something more than pettiness and frivolity in me after all."
"But the others, mother! How could you put it in the proper light to the others, to the Court, to our relations, to my uncle, and all his people? Surely there must have been a fuss and a scandal that you had to hold up your head against?"
"Wait, Magne, we will let all that alone till later. There were no "others" at all! Some fishermen had seen us, and they had taken measures to find out who I was. Before it was known I had gone away, and within one month I was his wife. I had fallen into the hands of a man who did things thoroughly and at once. He was too simple to conceive any other way than to go straight forward. So it took place without any obstacles."
"And what did people say? Was it a good thing for my father--I mean in people"s opinion--that he had married you?"
"You mean that he should marry a maid of honour?" she smiled. "Do you know what people said of it? Why, Karl Mander had publicly maligned the Queen--one of her maids of honour had heard him, and a month after she had eloped with him. That was about it. She had chosen the roughest man in the country. That was what people said."
"Naturally."
"A year after a tourist wrote in a newspaper that he had seen the runaway maid of honour standing at the washing-tub. Ha, ha! It was true enough for that matter. You had come, then, and it was harvest-time, and I was obliged to lend a hand. We both did."
"Mother, mother, what was he like at home? When you were together, I mean? Wasn"t it perfect? It must have been the greatest and best thing the world had to give? Mother, mother, all my life I must be grateful to you for having treasured this up for me till now, for before I should not have understood it."
"Yes, isn"t it so? Such things cannot be told to a child, nor to a half-grown girl. But I am not telling you, now, only for the sake of telling you. You ask how things were when we were together. Picture him to yourself first. An unselfish, devoted nature that was very little understood, by some few perhaps, in a way, but even by them not adequately. The result was that when he believed he had found sympathy, he poured himself out so unrestrainedly that people laughed at him. If he were in company he drank, or rather was made to drink, until he was tipsy, and so let his untamable nature take the bit in its teeth. Do you know--yes, I must tell you this. At a party a lady (she is now married to the captain here) set to work to draw him out for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the others. She was very bright and witty; she appeared to be entirely carried away by him, so that she could not listen to him enough, could not question him enough, and all the while poured more and more wine into his gla.s.s. She drank with him; she made all the others drink with him."
"Good heavens, mother!"
"Do you know where it all ended? In the cowhouse. They locked him into the cowhouse by himself. His frenzy of rage brought on a nervous attack. She it was whom he saw from the window as he stood on the platform that day. It was then he became sober."
The mother and daughter walked on in silence.
"You knew nothing of all this at that time, did you, mother?--not until later?"
"No; if I had known it, I believe I should have gone straight up to him, taken him by the hand, and greeted him with all my heart."
"I should too, mother!"
"Since my life with him I have thought a great deal. Do you know, I believe geniuses have this characteristic of confiding impulsiveness, and therefore the people and conditions that surround them are of all the greater importance. But most important of all is it that they should have a woman"s help. And, according to the nature of that help, so things go with them. Karl Mander had got into the habit of speaking in monologues. He got on best among peasants. They disturbed him least.
Books, meditations, farming, bathing, and now and then an orgie, a speech, or, for preference, one on top of the other--that had been his life up to then."
"But he didn"t drink, mother? There was no need for him to drink, was there?"
"No more need than for you or for me. It was simply an outburst of mere high spirits, or repressed longing for happiness. So the last time----"
"Yes, that time! Oh, why were you not there?"
"You had come to us then, my child, and I could not; I was nursing you at my breast. The whole thing would have gone off happily, if some one at the banquet after the meeting had not been so imprudent as to propose my health! Then he let himself go! There was the theme of themes, and he had never unbosomed himself about it to any one! The toast applied the match to his inward fire; his exultant joy blazed up.
He made a speech in praise of at least twenty of my characteristics, of marriage, of fatherhood. He----"
She could not go on. She sat down, her daughter by her; they were both in tears. The roar of the river swept pitilessly past them, and yet it seemed to bring them a kind of comfort. All the tears we may shed avail nothing. It goes on its way, and nothing arrests its determined course to the sea.
Through the voice of nature the whispers of memory brought back his tragic end. It came over them both again how, after the banquet, he wanted to refresh himself with a bath. How every one tried to dissuade him, but it was no use. How he sprang in from a great height, took longer and longer strokes out, as though each one of them were taking him home, was seized by cramp and sank.
"Mother, there is so much I still want to hear about your life together." Then, after a moment: "Mother, you must give me that too!
Yes, you have told me so much, so very much about it. But not just the thing I want to know now! The love, mother, the devotion between you both! Mother, that must have been something too wonderful to realise."
"Beyond all comprehension, my child! Beyond all understanding! And, do you know, the calumnies that were spread about us, especially the miserable anonymous letters, all kinds of meanness, it all helped. For each time we found in each other a perfect refuge. He was not so thin-skinned in such matters as I. It was through me that he first came to understand them--how to manage the petty incidents of social life.
The leaders of society in this little country are not of pure Norwegian race, but of foreign descent. A man like him could never learn to keep pace with them. But I was one of them, and, through the effect on me, he understood! When he once was started on a line of thought you can"t imagine how fast he went. He was a discoverer, an investigator by nature. But when he first rightly found out what I had exposed myself to by choosing him, ah! how the thought of it spurred him on! If ever any one has been rewarded here on the earth, he rewarded me. Night and day, the whole summer, the whole autumn, the whole winter, the whole spring, we were never apart. Our life was one continued flight from the outer world, but it was a flight into Paradise. He refused all invitations; he had hardly time to speak to the people who came to see him; he would not have them in the house. He and I, and I and he, in the big rooms, and the smaller ones, he in mine or I in his. And on the country roads, in the fields, in the mountain pastures, on the lake, on the ice, working, superintending together, together always, or if we were away from each other it was but to meet again at the very earliest moment. But the more we were together the more I came to understand the wealth of his nature. What impressed me most about him was not the flow of ideas, it was the man himself. To fathom his perfect uprightness, clear to the very bottom, gave me the most glorious moments I have known. His devotion to me--or what shall I call it?--was all summed up in one image--his mighty head on my lap! There he often rested it, and always said, "How good it is to be here!""
And the daughter laid her head in her mother"s lap and sobbed.
It began to rain. They rose and went home again. The little a.s.sembly house up by the station loomed more indistinct but more inviting through the rain. And the landscape took on a greater harmony of tints and greater friendliness; the scent from the birch-trees seemed trebled.
"Yes, my child. I believe I have given you some of his aspirations.
Have I not?" She bent down towards her face.
Instead of answering, the daughter pressed closer to her.
They waited a moment before going on.