“It is what a man gets who wooes a rich wife,” 11 he muttered; “but I will go and tell Michael Snorro about it.” And he smiled at the prospect, and hurried onward to Peter’s store.
For Michael Snorro lived there. The opening to the street was closed; but the one facing the sea was wide open; and just within it, among the bags of feathers and swans’ down, the piles of seal skins, the barrels of whale oil, and of sea-birds’ eggs, and the casks of smoked geese, Michael was sitting. The sea washed the warehouse walls, and gurgled under the little pier, that extended from the door, but it was the only sound there was. Michael, with his head in his hands, sat gazing into the offing where many ships lay at anchor. At the sound of Jan’s voice his soul sprang into his face for a moment, and he rose, trembling with pleasure, to meet him.
In all his desolate life, no one had loved Michael Snorro. A suspicion that “he was not all there,” and therefore “one of God’s bairns,” had insured him, during his long orphanage, the food, and clothes, and shelter, necessary for life; but no one had given him love. And Michael humbly acknowledged that he could not expect it, for nature had been cruelly 12 unkind to him. He was, indeed, of almost gigantic size, but awkward and ill-proportioned. His face, large and flat, had the whiteness of clay, except at those rare intervals when his soul shone through it; and no mortal, but Jan Vedder, had ever seen that illumination.
It would be as hard to tell why Michael loved Jan as to say why Jonathan’s soul clave to David as soon as he saw him. Perhaps it was an unreasonable affection, but it was one passing the love of woman, and, after all, can we guess how the two men may have been spiritually related? There was some tie of which flesh and blood knew not between them.
“Michael, I am going to be married.”
“Well, Jan—and what then?”
“It will be with me as others; I shall have children, and grow rich, and old, and die.”
“Who is it, Jan?”
“Margaret Fae.”
“I thought that. Well, thou art sunshine, Jan, and she is like a pool of clear water. If the sun shines not, then the water will freeze, and grow cold and hard.”