But, after all, the week of preparation was a very happy week to Jan and Snorro; and on the sixteenth of May they were the foremost of the sixty boats that sailed out of Lerwick for the ling ground. There was a great crowd on the pier to see them off—mothers, and wives, and sweethearts; boys, sick and sad with longing and envy; and old men, with the glamor of their own past in their faces. Among them was Suneva, in a bright blue dress, with blue ribbons fluttering in her yellow hair. She stood at the pier-head and as they passed poured a cup of ale into the sea, to forespeak good luck for the fleet. Jan would have dearly liked to see his wife’s handsome face watching him, as he stood by the main-mast and lifted his cap to Peter. Margaret was not there.
She really felt very much humiliated in Jan’s position. She had always held herself a little apart from the Lerwick women. She had been to Edinburgh, she had been educated far above them, and she was quite aware that she would have a very large fortune. Her hope had been to see Jan take his place among the merchants and bailies of Lerwick. She had dreams of the fine mansion that they would build, and of the 44 fine furniture which would come from Edinburgh for it. Margaret was one of those women to whom a house can become a kingdom, and its careful ordering an affair of more importance than the administration of a great nation. When she chose Jan, and raised him from his humble position, she had no idea that he would drift back again to the fishing nets.
For the first time she carried her complaint home. But Thora in this matter had not much sympathy with her. “The sea is his mother,” she said; “he loved her before he loved thee; when she calls him, he will always go back to her.”
“No man in Shetland hath a better business to his hand; and how can he like to live in a boat, he, that hath a home so quiet, and clean, and comfortable?”
Thora sighed. “Thou wilt not understand then, that what the cradle rocks the spade buries. The sea spoke to Jan before he lay on his mother’s breast. His father hath a grave in it. Neither gold nor the love of woman will ever keep them far apart; make up thy mind to that.”
All this might be true, but yet it humiliated 45 Margaret. Besides, she imagined that every wife in Lerwick was saying, “Not much hold has Margaret Vedder on her husband. He is off to sea again, and that with the first boat that sails.” Yet if success could have reconciled her, Jan’s was wonderful. Not unfrequently “The Fair Margaret” took twenty score ling at a haul, and every one was talking of her good luck.
During these days Jan and Snorro drew very close to each other. When the baits were set most of the men went to sleep for three hours; but Snorro always watched, and very often Jan sat with him. And oh, the grand solemnity and serenity of these summer nights, when through belts of calm the boats drifted and the islands in a charmed circle filled the pale purple horizon before them. Most fair then was the treeless land, and very far off seemed the sin and sorrow of life. The men lay upon the deck, with a pile of nets or their folded arms for a pillow, and surely under such a sky, like Jacob of old, they dreamed of angels.
Snorro and Jan, sitting in the soft, mystical light, talked together, dropping their voices involuntarily, and speaking slowly, with thoughtful 46 pauses between the sentences. When they were not talking, Snorro read, and the book was ever the same, the book of the Four Gospels. Jan often watched him when he thought Jan asleep. In that enchanted midnight glow, which was often a blending of four lights—moonlight and twilight, the aurora and the dawning—the gigantic figure and white face, bending over the little book, had a weird and almost supernatural interest. Then this man, poor, ugly, and despised, had an incomparable nobility, and he fascinated Jan.
One night he said to him, “Art thou never weary of reading that same book, Snorro?”