"Ah!" said Susanna, "those who love and are loved, the happy, should never die! But why this strange foreboding?"
"I do not know myself!" replied Alette, "but it has accompanied me from my earliest youth. My mother was born under the beautiful heaven of Provence, and passed the greater part of her youth in that warm country. The love of my father made her love in our Norway a second country, and here she spent the remainder of her life; she never, however, could rightly bear this cold climate, longed secretly for that warmer land, and died with the longing. To me has she bequeathed this feeling; and although I have never seen those orange groves, that warm blue heaven, of which she so gladly spoke, I drew in from childhood a love to them; I have, besides, inherited my mother's suffering from cold;—my chest is not strong, ah!—the long, dark winters of Nordland; the residence on the sea-shore in a climate which is twice as cold as that to which I have been accustomed, the sea-mists and storms—ah! I cannot long withstand them. But Susanna, you must promise me not to say one word of what I have confided to you, either to Harald or to Lexow!"
"But if they know it," said Susanna, "then you certainly need not go there. Certainly your bridegroom would for your sake seek out a milder country——"
"And not feel at home there, and die of longing for his dear Nordland! No, no, Susanna! I know his love for his native land, and know that this winterly nature which I dread so much, is precisely his life and his health. Alf is a Nordlander in heart and soul, and has, as it were, grown up with the district which his fathers inhabited, and whose advance and prosperity is his favourite scheme, the principal object of his activity. No, no! for my sake he shall not tear himself from his home, his noble efforts. Rather would I, if it must be so, find an early grave in his Nordland!"
Susanna now desired to know, and Alette communicated to her, various particulars of the country which was she thought so terrible, and we will now, with the young friends, cast—
A GLANCE INTO NORDLAND.
All is cold and hard.
Blom.
The spirit of God yet rests upon Nordland.
Z.
A great part of Norway has, as it were, its face turned away from life. "The Old Night," which the ancient world considered to be the original mother of all things, here held the giant child in her dark bosom, and bound it tight in swaddling bands, out of which it could not shape itself to joy and freedom. Neither Nordland nor Finmark see the sun for many months in the year, and the difficulties and dangers of the road shut them out from intercourse with the southern world. The spirit of the North Pole rests oppressively over this region, and when in still August nights it breathes from hence over southern Norway, then withers the half-ripened harvests of the valleys and the plains, and the icy-grey face of hunger stares stiffly from the northern cliffs upon laborious but unhappy human multitudes. The sea breaks upon this coast against a palisadoed fence of rocks and cliffs, around which swarm flocks of polar birds with cries and screams. Storms alternate with thick mists. The cliffs along this coast have extraordinary shapes; now ascend they upwards like towers, now resemble beasts, now present gigantic and terrific human profiles; and one can easily imagine how the popular belief sees in them monsters and giants turned to stone, and why their ancestors laid their Jotunhem in this desolate wilderness.
And a dark fragment of Paganism still lingers about this region even to this day. It is frozen fast into the people's imagination; it is turned to stone in the horrible shapes of nature, which once gave it life. The light of the Gospel endeavours in vain to dissipate the shadows of a thousand years; the Old Night holds them back. In vain the Holy Cross is raised upon all the cliffs; the belief in magic and magic arts lives still universally among the people. Witches sit, full of malice, in their caves, and blow up storms for the sea-wanderers, so that they must be unfortunate; and the ghost Stallo, a huge man, dressed in black, with a staff in his hand, wanders about in the wildernesses, and challenges the solitary traveller to meet him in the contest for life and death.