Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

When we came back to the inn, we were invited into the landlady's own parlor, and there were served to us wine and milk and sweet tarts, in a gracious and simple hospitality. The landlady and her sister were beautiful old ladies, well past sixty, with skins like peaches, and bright eyes and quick smiles. High caps of white lace, trimmed with sky-blue ribbons, and blue ostrich feathers laid on them like wreaths above the forehead, gave to their expression a sort of infantile elegance which was bewitching in its unworldliness; small white shawls thrown over their shoulders, and reaching only just below the belt, like those worn by old Quaker women, corroborated the simplicity of the blue ribbons, and added to the charm. They had all the freshness and spotlessness of Quakers, with color and plumes added; a combination surely unique of its kind. One of these old ladies was as gay a chatterer as if she were only seventeen. She had not one tooth in her mouth; but her mouth was no more made ugly by the absence of teeth, as are most old women's mouths, than a baby's mouth is made ugly by the same lack. The lips were full and soft and red; her face was not wrinkled; and when she talked and laughed and nodded, the blue ostrich feathers bobbing above, she looked like some sort of miraculous baby, that had learned to talk before "teething."

Her niece, who was our only interpreter, and too shy to use quickly and fluently even the English she knew, was in despair at trying to translate her. "It is too much, too much," she said. "I cannot follow; I am too far behind," and she laughed as heartily as her aunt. The old lady was brimful of stories: she had known Bergen, in and out, for half a century, and forgotten nothing. It was a great pleasure to set her going, and get at her narrative by peeps, as one sees a landscape through chinks in a fence, when one is whirling by in a railway train. One of her best stories was of "the man who was brought back from the dead by coffee."

It seemed that when she was young there lived in Bergen three old women, past whose house an eccentric old bachelor used to walk every day at a certain hour. When he came back from his walk, he always stopped at their house and drank a cup of coffee. This he had done for a great many years. "He was their watch to tell the time by," and when he first passed the house they began to make the coffee, that it should be ready on his return. At last he fell ill and died, and two of these old women were hired to sit up one night and watch the corpse. It is the custom in Norway to keep all dead bodies one week before burial, if not in the house where they have died, then in the chapel at the graveyard. "When we do die on a Wednesday, we shall not be buried till another Wednesday have come," said the niece, explaining this custom.

These old women were sitting in the room with the corpse, talking and sipping hot coffee together, and saying how they should miss him; that never more would he go by their house and stop to get his coffee.

"At any rate, he shall taste the coffee once more," said one of them, and she put a spoonful of the hot coffee into the corpse's lips, at which the old gentleman stirred, drew a long breath, and began to lift himself up, upon which the women uttered such shrieks that the city watchman, passing by, broke quickly into the house, to see what was the matter. Entering the room, he found the watchers senseless on the floor, and the corpse sitting bolt upright in his coffin, looking around him, much bewildered. "And he did live many years after that time,—many, many years. My aunt did know him well," said the niece.

Other of her stories were of the sort common to the whole world,—stories of the love, sorrow, tragedy, mystery, which are inwoven in the very warp and woof of human life; the same on the bleak North Sea coast as on bright Southern shores. It seemed, however, a little more desolate to have lived in the sunless North seventy years of such life as had been dealt to one Bergen woman, who had but just passed away. Seventy years she had lived in Bergen, the last thirty alone, with one servant. In her youth she had been beautiful; and when she was still little more than a child had come to love very dearly the eldest son in a neighbor's house. Their parents were friends; the young people saw each other without restraint, familiarly, fondly, and a great love grew up between them. They were suffered to become betrothed, but for some unassigned reason their marriage was forbidden. For years they bore with strange patience their parents' apparently capricious decision. At last the blow fell. One of the fathers, lying at the point of death, revealed a terrible secret. This faithful betrothed man and woman were own brother and sister. The shame of two homes, the guilt of two unsuspected wrong-doers, was told; the mystery was cleared up, and more than one heart broken. Bitter as was the grief of the two betrothed, who could now never wed, there must have been grief still more terrible in the hearts of those long ago wedded, and so long deceived. The father died as soon as he had confessed the guilty secret. The young man left Norway, and died in some far country. The girl lived on,—lived to be seventy,—alone with her sorrow and disgrace.

Two other Bergen lovers had had better fate. Spite of fathers and mothers who had forbidden them to meet, it fell out for them to be safely married, one night, in the very teeth of the closest watching. The girl was permitted to go, under the escort of a faithful man-servant, to a wedding dance at a friend's house. The man-servant was ordered to stand guard at the door, till the dance was over; if the lover appeared, the girl was to be instantly taken home. Strange oversight, for parents so much in earnest as that, to forget that houses have more than one door! When the mirth was at its height, the girl stole away by the back door, and fled to her lover. At length the dance was over, and the guests were leaving; anxiously the faithful servitor, who had never once left the doorstep, looked for his young mistress. The last guest departed; his mistress did not appear. In great terror he entered; the house was searched in vain; no one knew when she had taken her leave. Trembling, he ran back to the father with the unwelcome news; and both going in hot haste to the lover's house, there they found the two young people sitting gay and happy over cake and wine, with the excellent clergyman who had that very hour made them man and wife.

The old lady had a firm and unalterable belief in ghosts, as indeed she had some little right to have, one was forced to admit, after hearing her stories. "And could you believe that after a man is dead he should be seen again as if he were alive?" said the niece. "My aunt is so sure, so sure she have seen such; also my aunt's sister, they did both did see him."

At one time the two sisters hired a house in Bergen, and lived together. In one of the upper halls stood a small trunk, which had been left there by a sailor, in payment of a debt he had owed to the owner of the house. One day, in broad daylight, there suddenly appeared, before the younger sister, the shape of a man in sailor's dress. He walked toward her, holding out a paper. She spoke to him wonderingly, asking what he wanted. At the sound of her voice he vanished into thin air. She fainted, and was for some weeks seriously ill. A few months later, the same figure appeared in the bedroom of the eldest sister (the old lady who told these stories). He came in the night, and approached her bed holding out a white paper in his hands. "My aunt say she could cut the shape in paper like the hat he wore on his head; she did see it so plain to-day as she have seen it then, and it shall be fifty years since he did come by her bed. She was so scared she would not have the trunk of the sailor to stand in the house longer; and after the trunk had gone away he did come no more to their house."

Another instance of this ghost-seeing was truly remarkable, and not so easily explained by any freak of imagination. Walking, one day, in a public garden, with a friend, she saw coming down the path toward them a singular old woman in a white nightcap and short white bedgown,—both very dirty. The old woman was tossing her arms in the air, and behaving so strangely that she thought she must be drunk, and turned laughingly to her friend, about to say, "What can be the matter with this old woman?" when, to her surprise, she saw her friend pale, fainting, ready to fall to the ground. She seized her in her arms, called for help, and carried her to a seat. On returning to consciousness, her friend exclaimed, "It was my mother! It was my mother!" The mother had been dead some months, had always worn in her illness this white cotton nightcap and short bedgown, and had been, it seemed, notoriously untidy.