It is a long way, she keeps thinking. Where are they going, anyway? Oh, yes, to the tug,—the tug that is to bear them away on a glorious lonely death-ride, out of the sunny fjord to the glistening sea, away to where the rainbow ends. At the end of the rainbow you'll find a pot of gold! But, first, they must pass through the wide wooden gate; it is open. What is that they say about a wide wooden gate? No, it's about a road,—it's the wide road that leads to destruction. They have decked the gate with green too,—the gate through which the children used to peer with inquisitive, frightened child-eyes, up to the house where the wicked man dwelt. How they used to scamper away with half-real, half-acted terror at a cry of, "The man is coming!"—the man who was a bogie-man to them, a name with which to threaten them when naughty, about whom their elders told dreadful tales in subdued voices. She remembers this, and smiles half sadly to see as they reach the narrow street how the children swarm to meet his coming. There is no school to-day, and they get under the horses' hoofs, and crowd round the car, and point with dirty, chubby fore-fingers, and clasp hands, and cluster together in groups of twos and threes, and gaze with awe-struck eyes, and whisper, and follow. And one whispers to his comrades how he once got a drive and a silver piece from "the man," and another how he gave little Tulla a piece of cake. And she thinks of the train that danced in the wake of the pied piper, and of his own little ones who know him not. Perhaps they are dancing and laughing to-day,—to-day, when the father who gave them no name is being borne along to the tuneful patter of little feet that are not of his kith nor his kin. She seems to feel that that thing in the coffin is not he. He is walking next her, laughing with the rare humor of his best moments; chuckling at the grand funeral they are giving him,—him the bad man, of whom they had nought but evil to say. How hard it is to go down hill slowly! She tells herself that later on in the ages to come, when the little ones here have gone to their last homes as withered elders, the tales of the bogie-man of their child-days may have grown into a saga of a wild Angleman with great wealth, who landed and made himself a home on their coast, and drank and caroused and bought the strangest things; who took mad sails in a boat right into the teeth of coming gales that the pilots feared to brave, when the white-crested horses leaped high over the rocks, and the sea-dragons roared below, and the gray mews shrieked shrill warnings to the fishers to hasten them home; who turned the night into day, and took wild hag-rides with his baying and galloping horses at midnight, and used to crack his whip and urge them on with exultant oaths, and never let his little wife out of his sight, but call for her if he missed her till the woods rang with her name.
They reach the wharf. The tug "Bully-boy," with black funnel and hissing steam, is lying taut to the pier. Her head is really spinning. How stupid those eight men are! they haven't backed the horses enough. Hats off! They lay him on the deck; they have put the old flag under him and piled the posies on top. She pats the dogs and bids them stay, and lets the women kiss her, and walks up the plank: one plank! surely there should be four,—
"For thee it is that I dree such pain
As when wounded even a plank will;
My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain,
That thine may ever bide tranquil,
May ever remain
Henceforward untroubled and tranquil."
No, that's not the verse: she can't get it. "I heard four planks fall down with a saddening echo?—with a hollow echo?" She stands by the side of the coffin and gazes quietly at the crowd,—looks at the men with their uplifted hats, at the black-draped horses (Puck is biting Olla in the neck), at the children, and the group of dogs; and all the staring eyes seem to melt into one monster multi-colored eye, that pierces her through and through. Can't they see she is hollow,—the fools?
They loosen the hawser and cry "All right!" and "Bully-boy" swings round, and they steam sea-ward, and she sits and dreams, and the tug dances and splutters and fusses through the sunlit sea, past fjord mouths and hamlets, and boats with singing children and yapping dogs; and she never thinks of the future, nor of the steamer she is to meet at the city, nor makes any plan,—simply sits and lets her fancies run riot through her tired brain; sits under a canopy of clear air, and listens to the strange conceits that arise in her thinking self. She is a Viking's bond-maid of olden days; she hid on his bark while they built up his funeral pyre and laid the old warrior down. She watched them touch the flaming pine-knot to his fiery mausoleum, and set him adrift to the strain of a fierce, exultant chant of victory, to sail out on his last voyage for a handigrips with the grim foe Death. Ay, he too was a primitive man, with the primeval passions of untamed nature surging up and eating their way to his soul's core, as restless breakers hollow a place on the coast; and now he is going to rest.