CHAPTER VI.
When the rest of the household were in deep sleep, Randal stood long at his open window, looking over the dreary, comfortless scene—the moon gleaming from skies half-autumnal, half-wintry, upon squalid decay, through the ragged fissures of the firs; and when he lay down to rest, his sleep was feverish, and troubled by turbulent dreams.
However, he was up early, and with an unwonted colour in his cheeks, which his sister ascribed to the country air. After breakfast, he took his way towards Hazeldean, mounted upon a tolerable horse, which he hired of a neighbouring farmer who occasionally hunted. Before noon, the garden and terrace of the Casino came in sight. He reined in his horse, and by the little fountain at which Leonard had been wont to eat his radishes and con his book, he saw Riccabocca seated under the shade of the red umbrella. And by the Italian's side stood a form that a Greek of old might have deemed the Naiad of the Fount; for in its youthful beauty there was something so full of poetry—something at once so sweet and so stately—that it spoke to the imagination while it charmed the sense.
Randal dismounted, tied his horse to the gate, and, walking down a trellised alley, came suddenly to the spot. His dark shadow fell over the clear mirror of the fountain just as Riccabocca had said, "All here is so secure from evil!—the waves of the fountain are never troubled like those of the river!" and Violante had answered in her soft native tongue, and lifting her dark, spiritual eyes—"But the fountain would be but a lifeless pool, oh my father, if the spray did not mount towards the skies!"
THE MASTER THIEF.
A NORSE POPULAR TALE.
On a gloomy autumn evening I sat alone with the "proprietor," to whose children I was then tutor, in his country house, about twenty miles from Christiania. Out of doors something was falling which was neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, but a mixture of all three; and inside, in the "proprietor's" parlour, the lights burned so sluggishly, that no other objects were discernible through the haze than a corner cupboard, filled with Chinese nick-nacks, a great mirror in an old-fashioned gilt frame, and a hereditary tankard, the reward of one of the proprietor's ancestors for service rendered to the state. That worthy individual had nestled himself into one corner of the sofa, where he pored over the proof-sheets of his pamphlet, entitled, "A few Patriotic Expressions for the Country's Good; by an Anonymous Writer."
While brooding over this gold mine of his own ideas he gave birth to many sagacious thoughts, which, from time to time, with a twinkle of his grey eyes, he threw out for my edification, as I sat and tried to read in the other corner of the sofa. After a while, warming with his theme, he poured out a host of "patriotic expressions" and opinions, worthy of all respect, but of which nothing save the pamphlet quoted above, or his great Treatise on Tithe, can give an adequate idea. I am ashamed to own that all this wisdom was lost upon me. I knew it all by heart, for I had heard the same story forty times at least before. I am not gifted with a patience of Indian-rubber; but what could I do? Retreat to my own room was impossible, for it had been scoured for Sunday, and was full of reek and damp. So, after some fruitless attempts to bury myself in my book, I was forced to give in, and to suffer myself to be carried along in the troubled stream of the proprietor's eloquence. Of course he dilated on questions of profound national importance, which he furbished up with all sorts of cut-and-dried figures of speech. He was now fairly on his hobby, and rose rapidly to the seventh heaven. He stood up and gesticulated; then he strode up and down, and his grey dressing-gown described streaming circles behind him, as he turned short round, and limped backwards and forwards on his spindle-shanks,—for, like Tyrtæus, the proprietor had a strong halt. The candles flared, flickered, and guttered, as he passed triumphantly by the table on which they stood; and his winged words sung in my ears like humble-bees when the linden-trees are in bloom. Off he went on "Class Legislation" and "Judicial Reform," on "Corn Laws and Free Trade," on "Native Industry and Centralisation," on the "Victorious progress of Ideas," and the "Insufficiency of our Circulating Medium," on "Bureaucracy," and the "Aristocracy of Office," till he bid fair to exhaust all the cracies, archies, and isms that ever existed, from King Solomon to the present time.
Mortal man could hold out no longer, and I was just on the point of bursting out into a roar of laughter in the worthy proprietor's face, when peal after peal of laughter resounded from the kitchen, and came to my rescue. It was Christian the blacksmith who had the word in that quarter of the house, and when he ceased speaking, repeated roars of mirth followed.
"I'll just go out and hear some of the smith's stories," I cried as I ran out, leaving the proprietor behind in the parlour with the dull candles and his drowsy current of thought.
"Children's prate and lying stories," growled the proprietor as I shut the door. "People of intelligence should be ashamed to listen to them; but well-meant patriotic expressions—" The rest was lost upon me.
Light and life and mirth streamed forth in the high and airy hall; on the hearth blazed a pile of logs, which threw a strong light into the furthest nook. In the chimney-corner sat enthroned the proprietor's housekeeper with her spinning-wheel; and though for many years she had had hard struggles with the rheumatism, and barricaded the enemy out with a multitude of undercoats and kirtles, throwing over all, as an outwork, a huge grey woollen wrapper, yet her face shone under her plaited cap like the full moon. At her feet lay the proprietor's children laughing and cracking nuts; while round about sat a circle of maids and workmen's wives, who trode their spinning-wheels with busy feet, or plied the noisy carding-comb. In the entrance the threshers shook off the snow from their feet, and stepping in with icicles in their hair, sat down at the long table, where the cook served up to them their supper—a bowl of milk and a dish of close-pressed porridge. Against the high chimney-piece leant the smith, who smoked tobacco from a short pipe, and whose face, while it showed traces of the smithy, bore an expression of dry humour, which testified that he had been telling a good story, and telling it well.
"Good afternoon, smith," said I; "what story have you been telling which aroused so much laughter?"
"Ha, ha!" shouted the boys, "Christian has been telling us all about the 'Devil and the Smith,' and how the smith got the fiend into a hazel-nut; and now he's going to tell us about the Master Thief, and how he won the Squire's daughter."
"Well, don't let me stop the story, smith," I replied, only too glad to escape for a while from the proprietor with his "Patriotic Expressions," his "Corn Laws and Free Trade," his "Circulating Mediums and Bureaucracies," and to refresh myself with hearing one of these old national tales, told in a simple childish way by one of the people.
So after one or two long-drawn puffs, the Smith began