III.
AN EBB TIDE.
On right and left with flight of light,
How whirled the hills, the trees, the bowers!
With light-like flight, on left and right,
How spun the hamlets, towns, and towers!
Dost quail? The moon is fair to see;
Hurrah! the Dead ride recklessly!
Beloved! Dost dread the shrouded dead?
"Ah, let the dead repose!" she said.
James Clarence Mangan: Anthology.
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:—
"Sleep! no more the dupe of hopes and schemes,
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow!
Curious anticlimax to thy dreams
Twenty golden years ago!"
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,—
"But kaipoi te waipero, Kaipoi te waiena;
For Rangatira Sal, Bob Walker sold his pal,
But he's now at the bottom o' the harbor!"
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,—
"For thee it is that I dree such pain
As when wounded even a plank will;
My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain,
That thine may ever bide tranquil,
May ever remain
Henceforward untroubled and tranquil."
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.
[1] The title "Frue" is properly borne by the wives of officials, but all the professional men's wives bear it. "Madam" is used by the small shopkeepers or lower burgher class, but the distinction is dying out. A Frue's daughter is Fröken; Madam's Jeomfrue.