I
“Good King Wenceslas looked out,
On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even!”
sang the violin with pathetic accent, and then stopped abruptly, as the player dropped the bow and pressed his face against the window. The stars shone from the cold blue of a cloudless sky; below lay the city ablaze with light. It was a Danish city, and the player was a Dane, but when a violin sings, it speaks to each one in his own language. Bells pealing from a neighbouring church took up the same carol of Christmastide, and young voices echoed it faintly from within the doors of many homes.
On that Christmas night, two young women were drilling childish voices in the singing of the same tune. These women had never met, or either even dreamed of the other’s existence, yet a current, as actual as the sound-waves of the music, at that moment began to draw them together, the player of the violin, Gurth Waldsen, being the unconscious medium.
Waldsen looked from the window at the outlines of the palace across the water, its ramparts twinkling with lights that looked like reflections of the brilliant winter stars, but his thoughts did not follow his sight. In a few days he would be an exile from both home and country, and though the leaving was wholly voluntary, yet the past and present struggled together. A visionary in many respects, refusing to understand social classification as read by his family, he had, in his mother’s eyes, capped the climax of his folly on his graduation from the University by refusing a diplomatic career, insisting upon earning his bread literally by the sweat of his brow, and betrothing himself to a pretty, modest, blue-eyed girl of a near-by village,—“A girl of the people,” his mother called her, for though she had been carefully reared, her father, a poor pastor, had been taken from his peasant brothers and educated for the ministry because he was both docile and fragile.
Waldsen’s mother was the controlling power of the family. His father, long since dead, had been a dreamer, a musician, and something of a poet, whose wife had married him in a fit of girlish romance, and then lived to scorn him for his lack of ambition and reproach herself for marrying beneath her. Her only son should make no such mistake; she would oversee at least his social education, but she completely overlooked the matter of heredity.
So little Gurth grew up with only one parent. At ten the boy was tall and undeveloped, with a shock of strange golden-brown hair that he shook back as he played the violin, his greatest pleasure; but at twenty-two he was a slender man with a gold-tipped beard, straight nose, and blue-gray eyes, that looked at and through what he saw, all his features being softened by his father’s dreamy temperament.
Mrs. Waldsen, therefore, set her face against the marriage with the bitterness of her disappointment stung to fury by the memory of her own past. If she loved her son, it was for her own gratification, not for his, and now, as her world was beginning to talk of him, his bearing and gentle accomplishments, should she allow him to be taken from her?
Gurth had waited several months after the first rebuff, hoping that time would mend matters. Andrea could not marry yet; she was the foster-mother to four small brothers, and managed the little household for her overworked and underpaid father, but in another year Theresa, the younger sister, would be able to take her place. Time, however, did nothing but rivet Mrs. Waldsen’s decision, and in the interval the knowledge of her treatment of his father came to Gurth, and he knew then that argument was hopeless. He had some money of his own, though merely a trifling legacy from an uncle, and his last interview with his mother brought to an end all idea of remaining in Denmark. This was what he was fighting alone in his study that Christmas night, when, turning to his violin for sympathy, it sang the half-sad carol that Andrea had been teaching her little brothers the last time that he supped with her.
Gurth now regretted the time that had passed in temporizing, in drifting. To-night would end it all, and freed, as far as possible for a man to free himself, he would carry out in detail a plan of life that had often before vaguely offered him escape—not merely liberty to marry as he pleased, but also release from the particular social conditions into which he was born, that had at all times cramped him. He loved Nature and his fellow-men, in a genuine and wholesome fashion, but with the institution called Society, as it existed about him, he seemed pre-natally at war.
Putting aside what he had been, he chose to go as an emigrant, elbow to elbow with labourers; going to gain a living from the soil by his own toil, to try if the strength of body in him matched the strength of intention. He meant to follow an outdoor life, and thus make a home for Andrea, wearing the path a little before he let her willing feet tread it with him.
As he looked about his rooms he almost smiled at his few possessions. Some long shelves of books, a rack of music, a few pelt rugs, a high-post bed behind an alcove curtain, chairs, a long oak table upon the end of which stood a great bird-cage, while half a dozen smaller ones hung by the window. A porcelain stove stood under the mantel-shelf, and above it was a litter of pipes and broken foils, while on one corner, in a little place apart, shrine-like and surrounded by growing ivy, the portrait of a young girl looked at him. It was merely a photograph taken with the crude art of a provincial town, but the stiff posing could not mar the charm of the face, and Gurth looked longingly. Leaving the window he moved slowly toward it until, resting his elbows on the shelf, he touched her lips with his, and then started at the unconscious act. To see her once more, to-morrow, Stephen’s Day, and then go away! His heart and its primitive instinct whispered, “Marry her—take her with you!” What he considered his reason said,—“Where to? It is winter; the sea is deep and wide, the journey long. Make the home; wait for spring!” Ah, this was one of the many matters in which what is called impulse would have been wiser because the more direct of the two. It was morning before Gurth had thought the matter to a conclusion, and the streets had slept and were waking again before he threw himself upon the bed, still dressed.
He spent the following day in destroying papers and in writing letters to a friend or two. He had the equivalent of about five thousand dollars, to begin life with, and he resolved to hoard the money as carefully as if he were indeed a peasant starting for the New World. This money represented the land, the home; his own brain and hands must do the rest. A trunk of books, his violin, some of his plainest clothes, were all that he would take; a rough coat and a fur cap must be bought to supplement his wardrobe.
The bullfinch by the window piped gaily, and the chaffinches in the cages with fantastic dormers chirped in reply, reminding him of their necessities, and, after feeding them, he unhooked their cages and, fastening them, covered them and prepared to go out. He had promised Andrea that he would be with her for supper. It was already five o’clock, and the Clausens lived far outside the city, an hour’s sharp driving on the Klampenborg road, and the sleigh that he had ordered was waiting. Packing the cages under the fur robes, he started the horse at a brisk pace. It seemed already, so powerful is imagination, as if this decision had given him a greater sense of liberty.
In a long, low-studded room, whose polished board floor was relieved by a few squares of bright carpet, two young girls were preparing the supper table. The youngest was at an age when her closely braided hair lacked the dignity of being put up, and her skirts were still a few inches from the ground. She was squarely built, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and rosy with good nature. She held a large loaf, beautifully light and baked evenly brown, which she was regarding with great glee. “Lift it, Andrea!” she cried. “See how light it is, and how sweet it smells! Now that my baking is as good as yours, you can be married, for you know that father said a year ago you could not marry until I baked good bread!” and Theresa laughed teasingly. Andrea, so addressed, looked at the loaf carefully, then silently kissed the face that was smiling above it. She was half a head taller than her sister, with an oval face surrounded by thick, smooth, bright golden hair that was parted and braided in two wide bands and coiled around her head. Her cheek-bones, a trifle high for good proportion, were relieved by great, dark-blue eyes, with jet-black lashes; the chin was firm, the mouth not small but opening over long white teeth. The indescribable charm of the face came from the eyes. The kiss was the only answer that she gave her sister, who rattled on from one theme to another as she brought in the different dishes, occasionally joining in with the four little boys who were singing carols in a group around a battered piano at the other end of the room, mingling their shrill voices with the pastor’s tenor.
“Mark my footsteps, good my page,
Tread thou in them boldly:
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly!”
Gurth paused on the threshold an instant listening to the singing, then entered without knocking. The little boys rushed to hang about him and explore his pockets, and the pastor and Theresa welcomed him warmly. It was Andrea alone who saw a change in his whole demeanour, and wondered at the bird-cages. The evening meal was soon eaten, and the boys went to the kitchen with the toys that Gurth had brought them; the pastor, scenting something, sat erect in his arm-chair, all forgetful of his pipe and expectant of some news, while Theresa hung over him. Gurth stood by the stove, nervous and uncertain how to begin.
Andrea went to him, and, putting her hand through his arm, said quietly, but with an infinite tenderness in her voice, “You are going away, dearest, and you have brought your birds for me to keep for you.”
It was as if her voice smoothed away his fears and perplexities, so all four together they discussed the situation without reserve.
Gurth, forgetting his prudent plans, begged the pastor to marry them then, or at the latest in a few days, when the necessary legalities could be complied with, so that he might leave Andrea as his wife. Upon this point the pastor was obdurate. His practical instinct, born partly of the peasant suspicion of another class, and partly of hard experience, forbade this. Among his parishioners many a wedding had taken place on the eve of parting, and the husband had been swallowed up in that vast new world, while the poor girl at home waited in vain, not knowing whether she was wife or widow.
He liked Gurth in a way, but he was sadly disappointed in his failure to reconcile his mother to the marriage, and, while he believed him sincere at present, he did not know how the separation might affect either of the young people; so he insisted upon delay. If Gurth had established himself by the next Christmas, he might return and marry. If not—well, there were other men who, under the circumstances, would be more suitable for Andrea, though he did not voice his opinion. In reality he had no romance in his nature, and he disbelieved in unequal marriages, especially if money was not coupled with the rank.
If, after a year’s trial, Gurth was in a position to come for Andrea,—well and good,—but further than that the pastor could be neither coaxed nor driven.
Moreover, he allowed them little privacy for saying good-by.
“I know how to work, and I like it, but you must learn how,” Andrea whispered, as she clung to him. “But I will be ready, Gurth, and, more, if you can’t return, I will go to you!” This understanding was their farewell.
His mother, when she found that he had gone, laughingly told her friends that Gurth had a foolish love affair, and, taking her advice, he had gone away to travel it off.