X

Early that summer Erik Refstrup came home after his two years in Italy. He had gone away a sculptor; he returned a painter, and he had already attracted attention, had sold his pictures, and received orders for others.

The good fortune coming almost at his first call was due to the sure instinct for self-limitation which bound his art closely to his own personality. His gift was not of the large and generous kind that is instinct with every promise and seems about to grasp every laurel, that sweeps triumphantly through every realm like a bacchanalian troop, scattering golden seed on every side, and mounting genii on all its panthers! He was one of those in whom a dream is buried, making a peaceful sanctuary in one corner of their souls where they are most, and yet least, themselves. Through everything these people create there sounds the same wistful refrain, and every work of art that comes from their hands bears the same timidly circumscribed stamp of kinship, as if they were all pictures from the same little homeland, the same little nook deep among mountains. It was so with Erik; no matter where he plunged into the ocean of beauty, he always fetched the same pearl up to the light.

His canvases were small: in the foreground a single figure, clay-blue with its own shadow, behind it a heathery stretch of moor or campagna, and in the horizon a reddish yellow afterglow of sunset. There was one picture of a young girl telling her own fortune in the Italian fashion. She is kneeling on a spot where the earth shows brown between tufts of short grass. The heart, cross, and anchor of hammered silver, which she has taken from her necklace, are scattered on the ground. Now she is lying on her knees, her eyes closed in good faith with one hand covering them, the other reaching down, seeking rapture of love beyond words, bitter sorrow solaced by the cross, or the trusting hope of a common fate. She has not yet dared to touch the ground. Her hand shrinks back in the cold, mysterious shadow; her cheeks are flushed, and her mouth trembles between prayer and tears. There is a solemnity in the air; the sunset glow threatens, hot and fierce out there in the distance, but softly melancholy where it steals in over the heather. “If you only knew⁠—rapture of love beyond words, bitter sorrow solaced by the cross, or the trusting hope of a common fate?”

There was another in which she stands erect on the brown heath, tense with longing, her cheek pressed down on her folded hands. She is so sweet in her naive longing and a wee bit sad and angered with life for passing her by. Why does not Eros come with kissing roses? Does he think she is too young? Ah, if he would only feel her heart, how it beats! If he would only lay his hand there! A world is in there, a world of worlds, if it would only awaken. But why does it not call? It is there like a bud, tightly folded around its own sweetness and beauty, existing only for itself, oppressed by itself. For it knows there is something in life that it does not know. It is that which has warmed the sheltering petals and given light to the innermost heart of reddest dusk, where the scent lies yet scentless, a foreboding only, pressed into one tremulous tear!

Will it never be freed and breathe out all its slumbering fragrance, never be rich in its own wealth? Will it never, never unfold and blush itself awake with gleaming rays of sunlight darting in under its petals? She has no patience any more with Eros! Her lips are quivering with approaching tears; her eyes look out into space with hopeless defiance, and the little head sinks more and more forlornly, turning the delicate profile in toward the picture, where a gentle breeze wafts the reddish dust over dark green broom against a sherry-golden sky.

That was the way Erik painted. What he had to say always found expression in pictures such as these. He would sometimes dream in other images and long to break through that narrow circle within which he created, but when he had strayed beyond his bounds and tried his powers in other fields, he always returned with a chill sense of discouragement, feeling that he had been borrowing from others and producing something not his own. After these unfortunate excursions⁠—which, however, always taught him more than he was aware of⁠—he became more intensely Erik Refstrup than ever before. Then he would abandon himself with more reckless courage and with almost poignant fervor to the cult of his own individuality, while his whole manner of associating with himself, to his slightest act, would be suffused with a religious enthusiasm. He seemed surrounded by shadowy throngs of beautiful forms, younger sisters of the slender-limbed women of Parmigianino with their long necks and large, narrow princess hands; they sat at his table, poured his wine with movements full of noble grace, and held him in the spell of their fair dreams with Luini’s mystic, contemplative smile, so inscrutably subtle in its enigmatic sweetness.

But when he had served the god faithfully for eleven days, it sometimes happened that other powers gained the ascendancy over him, and he would be seized with a violent craving for the coarse enjoyment of gross pleasures. Then he would plunge into dissipations, feverish with that human thirst for self-destruction which yearns, when the blood burns as hotly as blood can burn, for degradation, perverseness, filth, and smut, with precisely the measure of strength possessed by another equally human longing, the longing to keep one’s self greater than one’s self and purer.

In these moments there was but little that was rough and coarse enough for him, and when they had passed, it was long before he could regain his balance; for in truth these excesses were not natural to him; he was too healthy for them, too little poisoned by brooding. In a sense, they came as a rebound from his devotion to the higher spirits of his art, almost like a revenge, as though his nature had been violated by the pursuit of those idealistic aims which choice, aided by circumstances, had made his own.

This twofold struggle, however, was not carried on along such definite lines that it appeared on the surface of Erik Refstrup’s life; nor did he feel the need of making his friends understand him in this phase. No, he was the same simple, happy-go-lucky fellow as of old, slightly awkward in his shrinking from emotions put into words, a little of a freebooter in his capacity for seizing and holding. Yet the other thing was in him and could be sensed sometimes in quiet moments, like the bells that ring in a sunken city on the bottom of the sea. He and Niels had never understood each other so well as now; both felt it, and silently each renewed the old friendship. And when vacation time came, and Niels felt that he really must make his long-deferred visit to his Aunt Rosalie, who was married to Consul Claudi in Fjordby, Erik went with him.

The main highway from the richest district above Fjordby enters the town between two great thorn-hedges, which bound Consul Claudi’s vegetable garden and his large pleasure garden by the shore. What then becomes of the road⁠—whether it ends in the Consul’s courtyard, which is as large as a marketplace, or whether it is continued in a bend running between his hayloft and his lumber yard to form, later, the main street of the town⁠—is a matter of opinion. Many travellers follow the bend and drive on, but there are also many who stop and think the goal reached when they have come within the Consul’s wide tarred gateway, where the doors are always thrown back and covered with skins spread for drying.

The buildings on the premises were all old with the exception of the tall warehouse with its dead-looking slate roof, the newest architectural feature in Fjordby. The long, low main building appeared to be forced to its knees by three large gables, and was joined, in a dim corner, to the wing containing the kitchen and stables; in another lighter corner, to the warehouse. In the dark corner was the back door of the store, which formed, with the peasants’ waiting-room, the office, and the servants’ hall, a rather dingy world of its own, where the mingled odor of cheap tobacco and moldy floors, of spices and dried codfish and wet wool, made the air so thick you could almost taste it. But when you had passed through the office with its pungent smoke of sealing-wax and had reached the hall which formed the dividing line between the business and the family, a prevailing perfume of new millinery prepared you for the delicate scent in the living-rooms. It was not the fragrance of any nosegay or of any real flower; it was the intangible, memory-laden atmosphere which pervades a home, though no one can say whence it comes. Every home has its own, and it may suggest a thousand things⁠—the smell of old gloves or new playing-cards or open pianos⁠—but it is always different. It may be stifled by incense, perfumes, or cigar smoke, but it cannot be killed; it always comes back unchanged and is there just as before. Here it was of flowers, not stock or roses or any other flower that can be named, but rather as one might fancy the scent of those fantastic, pale sapphire lilies that twine their blossoms around vases of old porcelain. And how well it went with those wide, low rooms with their heirloom furniture and their stiff, old-fashioned grace! The floors were white as only grandmothers’ floors can be; the walls were in plain colors with a light tracery of garlands in delicate tints running under the ceiling, which had a stucco rose in the centre. The doors were fluted and had knobs of shining brass in the shape of dolphins. The windows of small square panes were curtained with filmy net, white as snow, its fullness caught up and fastened with coquettish bows of colored ribbon, like the curtains of a bridal bed for Corydon and Phyllis. In the windowsill the flowers of bygone days bloomed in motley green crocks; there were blue agapanthus, blue Canterbury bells, fine-leaved myrtles, fiery red verbenas, and butterfly bright geraniums. But it was, after all, chiefly the furniture that gave character to the rooms: immovable tables with wide expanse of darkened mahogany; chairs with backs that curled round your figure; cabinets of every conceivable form, gigantic dressers inlaid with mythological scenes in light yellow wood⁠—Daphne, Arachne, and Narcissus⁠—or small secretaries with thin twisted legs and on every tiny drawer a mosaic of dendrite marble representing a lovely square house with a tree near by⁠—all from the time before Napoleon. There were mirrors, too, the glass painted in white or bronze with designs of rushes and lotus plants floating on a bright sea. As for the sofa, it was not one of your trifling things on four legs designed for two persons; no, solid and massive it rose from the floor to form a veritable spacious terrace; flanking it on either side and built in one with the sofa, was a console-cupboard, on top of which a smaller cabinet rose with architectonic effect to the height of a man and held a precious old jar above the reach of careless hands. It was no wonder there were so many old things in the Consul’s house, for his father and grandfather had rested and enjoyed the good things of life within these walls in the intervals of their work in lumber yard and office.

The grandfather, Berendt Berendtsen Claudi, whose name the firm still bore, had built the houses and had interested himself chiefly in the retail and produce trade. The father had worked up the lumber yard, bought farmland, built the hayloft, and laid out the two gardens. The present Claudi had developed the grain trade and built the warehouse. He united with his mercantile business the activities of the English and the Hanoverian vice-consulates as well as a Lloyd’s agency; and the grain and the Western Sea kept him so busy he could give only a very cursory supervision to the other branches of the work. He therefore divided the responsibility between an insolvent cousin and an old unmanageable steward, who would drive the Consul into a corner every little while by declaring that, whatever happened to the store, the farm must be attended to, and when he wanted to plough, they could take horses for hauling lumber wherever they pleased⁠—his they couldn’t have, so help him. But as the man was capable, there was nothing to be done but to put up with him.

Consul Claudi was in the early fifties, a man of substantial presence. His regular features, strong to the point of coarseness, would as readily harden to an expression of energy and cool astuteness as they would relax into a look almost lickerish as though relishing a savory tidbit; and he was, in fact, equally at home whether driving a bargain with shrewd peasants or arguing with a stubborn salvage gang, or whether sitting with gray-bearded sinners over the last bottle of port wine, listening to stories more than salacious or telling them with the picturesque frankness for which he was noted.

This, however, was not all of the man.

His training naturally made him feel that he was on alien ground when he ventured outside of purely practical questions, but he never therefore scoffed at what he did not understand or tried to conceal his ignorance. Much less did it ever occur to him to give his opinion and demand that it be respected for the reason that he was a citizen of mature years and practical experience and a large taxpayer. On the contrary, he would often listen with a reverence that was almost touching when ladies and young men discussed such matters; now and then he would venture a modest question prefaced by elaborate excuses, which almost always elicited a scrupulously painstaking answer, and then he would express his thanks with all the courtesy which is so gracious in an older man thanking his juniors.

At certain favorable moments there could be something surprisingly fine about Consul Claudi, a wistful look in his clear brown eyes, a melancholy smile around his strong lips, a seeking, reminiscent note in his voice, as though he yearned for another and in his own eyes better world than that to which his friends and acquaintances consigned him, hide and hair.

The messenger between himself and this better world was his wife. She was one of those pale, gentle, virginal natures who have not the courage, or perhaps not the impulse, to give out their love in such fullness that there is no shred of self left in their innermost soul. Even in the most fleeting moment they can never be so carried away by their feeling that they throw themselves in blind rapture under the chariot wheels of their idol. They cannot do it, but all else they can do for the beloved; they can fulfil the heaviest duties, are ready for the most grievous sacrifices, and do not flinch from any humiliation whatsoever. This is true of the best among them.

Mrs. Claudi was not called on to bear such trials. Nevertheless her marriage was not without its sorrows; for it was a matter of common knowledge in Fjordby that the Consul was not, or at least had not been until a few years ago, the most faithful husband, and that he had several illegitimate children in the neighborhood. This was, of course, a bitter grief to her, and it had not been easy to keep her heart steadfast through the tumult of jealousy, scorn and anger, shame and sickening fear, which had made her feel as though the ground were slipping away under her feet. But she stood firm. Not only did she never allow a reproachful word to pass her lips, but she warded off any confession on the part of her husband, any direct prayer for forgiveness, and anything that might seem like a repentant vow. She felt that if it were ever put into words, they might sweep her along and away from him. Silently she would bear it, and in the silence she tried to make herself believe that she was in part to blame for her husband’s crime, because of the barrier she had built around herself, which her love had not been strong enough to break down. She succeeded in magnifying this sin until she felt an indistinct need of forgiveness, and in course of time she brought herself to the point where she gave rise to a rumor that the girls whom Consul Claudi had seduced and their children were taken care of in other ways than with money; it seemed that a hidden woman’s hand must be sheltering them, keeping them from harm, supporting and guiding them.

So it came to pass that evil was turned into good, and a sinner and a saint each made the other better.

The Claudis had two children, a son who was in a merchant’s office in Hamburg and a nineteen-year-old daughter named Fennimore after the heroine in St. Roche, one of Frau von Paalzow’s novels which had been very popular in the time of Mrs. Claudi’s girlhood.

Fennimore and the Consul came down to meet the steamer on the day it brought Niels and Erik to Fjordby. Niels was pleasantly surprised to see that his cousin was pretty, for hitherto he had known her only from a terrible old family daguerreotype, where she appeared in a misty atmosphere, forming a group with her brother and her parents, all with hectic crimson on their cheeks and bright gilding on their jewelry. And now he found her simply lovely as she stood there in her light morning dress and her dainty little shoes with their black ribbons crossing a white-stockinged instep. She was resting one foot on the plank at the edge of the pier, and bent forward smiling to give him her parasol-handle for a handshake and a welcome, before the steamer was made fast. Her lips were so red and her teeth so white, and her forehead and temples so delicately outlined under the wide brim of her Eugenie hat, from which shadowing edges of deep black lace fell weighted with bright jet.

At last the gangplank was let down, and the Consul started off with Erik. He had already introduced himself with twelve feet of water between them and, still shouting, had drawn Erik into a humorous conversation about the agonies of seasickness, which he carried on with a wizened hatter’s widow on board. Now he was calling on him to admire the large linden trees outside of the revenue collector’s house and the new schooner standing ready to be launched from Thomas Rasmussen’s shipyard.

Niels walked with Fennimore. She pointed to the flag flying in the garden in honor of him and his friend, and then they began to discuss the Neergaards in Copenhagen. They quickly agreed that Mrs. Neergaard was a little⁠—a very little⁠—they would not say the word, but Fennimore smiled primly and made a catlike movement with her hand. The characterization was evidently plain enough to them both, for they smiled and quickly became serious again. Silently they walked on, each wondering how he or she appeared in the other’s eyes.

Fennimore had imagined Niels Lyhne taller, more distinguished, and of an individuality more marked⁠—like an underscored word. He, on the other hand, had found much more than he expected. He thought her charming, almost alluring, in spite of her dress which savored too much of small town elegance. When they had entered the hall, and she stood looking down with a preoccupied air, as she took off her hat and smoothed her hair with wonderfully soft, languid, graceful turns of hand and wrist, he felt as grateful as if her movements had been caresses. This almost puzzling sense of gratitude did not leave him either that day or the next, and sometimes it welled up so strong and warm that he felt it would have been the greatest happiness if he might have thanked her in words for being so pretty and so sweet.

Very soon Erik as well as Niels felt quite at home in the Consul’s hospitable house. Before many days they had slipped into that pleasantly arranged idling which is the real vacation life and which it is so difficult to guard against the friendly encroachments of well-meaning people. They had to use all their diplomacy to avoid the stuffy evening parties, large boating excursions, summer balls, and amateur theatricals which were constantly threatening their peace. They were ready to wish that the Consul’s house and garden had been on a desert island; and Robinson Crusoe was not more agitated by fear on finding the footsteps in the sand than they were at the sight of strange paletots in the hall or unfamiliar reticules on the sitting-room table. They much preferred to be by themselves; for they had scarcely passed the middle of the first week before they were both in love with Fennimore. It was not the mature passion which must and will know its fate and longs to have and to hold and to be assured. As yet it was only the first dawn of love like a hint of spring in the air, instinct with a longing akin to sadness and with an unrest that is gently pulsing joy. The heart is so tender and yielding and easily moved. A light on the water, a rustling in the leaves, a flower unfolding its petals⁠—all seem to have a strange new power. Vague hopes without a name burst out, suddenly flooding the earth with sunlight and as suddenly vanishing again: weak despondency sails like a broad cloud over the glory, churning the flashes of hope down into its own gray wake.⁠—Then hopelessness, melting hopelessness; bittersweet resignation to fate, a heart full of self-pity, renunciation gazing at its own reflection in quiet elegies and fainting in a sigh that is half dissembled.⁠ ⁠… But again there is the whispering of roses: a dreamland rises from the mist with golden haze over soft beech crowns and with fragrant summer darkness under leafy boughs arched over paths that lead no one knows whither.

One evening after tea they were all gathered in the sitting-room. The garden and all outdoor amusements were barred, for the rain was pouring down; but no one seemed to mind. The sense of being shut in gave the room something of the snug comfort of a winter evening, and moreover the rain was a blessing. Everything had been so parched and dry, but now the water streamed down, and when the heavy drops rattled against the frame of the reflector in the window the sound called up vague, fleeting glimpses of luscious green meadows and freshened foliage. Now and then someone would say under his breath: “How it pours!” and glance at the windowpanes with a little gleam of pleasure and a half-conscious luxuriating in fellow-feeling with everything out of doors. Erik had fetched the mandolin he had brought with him from Italy and sang about Napoli and the bright stars. Then a young lady who had been to tea sat down at the piano and accompanied her own rendering of “My little nook among the mountains,” in Swedish, making the ah’s very broad to get the right Swedish effect.

Niels, who was not particularly musical, let himself be soothed into a gentle melancholy and sat lost in his own thoughts, until Fennimore began to sing.

Then he awoke, but not pleasantly.

Her song agitated him uncomfortably. She was no longer the little country girl when she gave herself up to the spell of her own voice. Strange how she let herself be carried away by the tones, how freely and unreservedly she poured herself into them! He felt it almost as something immodest, as though she were singing herself naked before him. There was a burning around his heart; his temples throbbed, and he cast his eyes down. Did none of the others see it? No, they saw nothing. Why, she had flown out of herself, away from Fjordby, from Fjordby poetry and Fjordby sentiments! She was in another and a bolder world, where the passions grew on high mountains and flung their red blossoms to the storm.

Could it be his lack of musical sense that made him read so much meaning into her song? He could hardly persuade himself that it was so, and yet he wished it, for he would much rather have her as she usually appeared. When she sat at her sewing, talking in her quiet, tranquil voice, or looking up with her clear, kind eyes, his whole being was drawn to her with the irresistible strength of a deep, calm longing for home. He wanted to humble himself before her, to bend the knee and call her holy. He always felt a strange yearning to come close to her, not only to her present self, but to her childhood and all the days he had not known her. When they were alone, he would lead her to talk of the past, of her little troubles and mistakes and the vagaries that every childhood is full of. He lived in these memories and clung to them with a restless jealousy and a languishing desire to possess and be one with these pale foreshadowings of a life which was even now glowing in richer, riper colors. And then came this song so strangely powerful! It startled him very much like a wide sweep of horizon suddenly revealed by a turn of the path, reducing the forest dell which had been his home to a mere corner in the landscape, and making its little rippling lines seem insignificant beside the grandeur of the hills and distant moors.⁠—Oh, but the landscape was a fata morgana, and what he thought he heard in her song only a fantasy; for now she spoke just as she always did and was her blessed self again. Moreover, he knew from a thousand little things that she was like still water, without storm or waves, reflecting the starry blue heavens.

It was thus he loved her, and thus he saw her; and when she was with him she gradually formed herself upon his image of her, not with any conscious dissembling, for after all his conception was partly true, and it was only natural⁠—when his every word and look, his every thought and dream, appealed to that side of her nature and did homage to it⁠—that she should assume the guise he almost forced upon her. Besides, how could she bother about giving each and every one a correct impression of herself when all her thoughts centred around the one, Erik, the only one, her chosen lord, whom she loved with a passion that was not of herself and with an idolatrous worship that terrified her. She had imagined love to be a sweet dignity, not this consuming unrest, full of fear and humiliation and doubt. Many a time when the declaration seemed trembling on Erik’s lips, she had felt as if it were her duty to put her hand on his mouth and warn him against speaking, accusing herself and telling him how she had deceived him and how unworthy of his love she was, how earthly and small and impure, so far from noble, so wretchedly low and common and wicked! She felt herself dishonest under his admiring gaze; calculating, when she failed to avoid him; criminal, when she could not bring herself to beg God in her evening prayer that He would turn Erik’s heart from her in order that his life might be all sunlight and honor and glory. For she knew that her lowborn passion would drag him down.

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 he carefully opened the window, straddled over the sill, and slid into the courtyard. He knew that he could get down to the shore through the mangling-room. If anyone saw him, he meant to say that he had forgotten his mandolin down by the jetty and wanted to rescue it from the dew. Therefore he slung the mandolin on his back.

The garden was a little lighter now; there was a slight breeze and a bit of moon which laid a tremulous strip of silver from the jetty out to the Berendt Claudi.

He went through the garden out on the stone sloping which protected it from the water, running in abrupt angles round a large embankment and all the way out to the end of the harbor mole. Balancing uncomfortably on the flat, slanting stones, he finally reached the molehead and, rather out of breath, sat down on the bench.

Above his head the red lantern of the harbor light swung slowly back and forth with a sound like the sighing of iron, while the flag line flapped gently against its staff.

The moon had come out a little more and cast a cautious grayish-white light over the quiet ships in the harbor and over the maze of rectangular roofs and white dark-eyed gables in the town. Above and beyond it all the church steeple rose, calm and light.

He leaned back dreaming, while a wave of unutterable joy and exultation surged through his heart; he felt rich and full of strength and the warmth of life. It seemed as though Fennimore must hear every love-thought that grew from his rapture, vine in vine, and blossom on blossom; and he rose, and quickly striking the strings of the mandolin sang triumphantly to the town asleep in there:

“Wakeful aloft lies my lassie
She listens to my song!”

Again and again, when his heart grew too full, he repeated the words of the old ballad.

Gradually he became calmer. Memories of the hours in the past when he had felt weakest, poorest, and most forlorn pressed in on him with a slight, tense pain like that of the first tears welling up in the eyes. He sat down on the bench again, and with his hand lying mute on the mandolin strings, he gazed out over the blue-gray expanse of the fjord, where the moon bridge formed a glittering way past the dark ship to the lines of the Morsø hills, drawn in faint, melancholy cloud-blue land through a haze of white.

And the memories thronged, but they grew gentler, were lifted to fairer lands, and seemed lighted by a roseate dawn.

… My lassie!

He sang it to himself:

“Wakeful aloft lies my lassie
She listens to my song.”