“And now,” said the Captain, as they reached it and rallied their forces, which had been a good deal scattered during the sharp descent, “where to bestow ourselves for the night? I should like to sleep in a bed, if it were only for the novelty of the thing; and here, in good time, comes Torkel, who looks as if he had made himself pretty well at home already.”
Torkel, considerably smartened up—however he had contrived it—and sporting a clean white shirt-front, like a pouter pigeon, with his silver shirt buttons newly polished, came up the church path in close conversation with a respectable, fatherly, well-to-do-in-the-world sort of farmer, or huusbonde as he was called, in whom, as he introduced him by the name of Torgensen, the fishermen recognized the father of the pretty hostess of the sœter. Not one word of English could the good-man speak, though he looked as like an honest rough-handed English farmer as one man could look to another; but he wrung their hands, as if, like Holger, he meant to test their manhood by their powers of endurance, and smiled, and looked pleasant, which Torkel interpreted to mean that he heartily desired to see the whole party under his hospitable roof that night, and would be right glad to make them all drunk in honour of his roof-tree. And poor Torkel looked so excessively happy, that it was easy to see that, in spite of the Haabet and her skipper, he had not only sped in his wooing at the sœter, but had contrived to ingratiate himself with the elders of the household.
A grand place was that homestead, which, hidden by a projecting point, and occupying a secluded valley of its own, had hitherto escaped their observation,—a good, snug, wealthy farm it really was, even as compared to others in the country; but in Norway, so much cover is always wanted; and building—at least timber building—is so cheap, that moderate-sized farm-houses, with their appurtenances, are little villages; and the house itself looks always larger than it is, as an habitation, because the whole upper storey, frequently called the rigging loft, is invariably used as a store-room for their provisions, and hides, and wool, and flax, and apples, and sometimes corn, in the winter, and not unfrequently as a ball-room, when they have eaten out sufficient space in it.
The house, like all the rest, a wooden building with a planked roof and gabled ends, was unusually painted. Torgensen, in his youth, had himself commanded the Haabet, and had traded in her for provisions and corn along the coast of Scånia, and from it had imported Scånian fashions. Instead of the deep, dull red, which harmonizes so well with the tints of the country, he had painted his house in figures, blue, and yellow, and white, and black, which had a singular, but, upon the whole, a not unpleasant effect. Texts of Scripture in rough black letter, and dates, and monograms of himself, and wife, and children, were written under every window and every gable; and the barge-boards and ridge timber-ends, were carved as elaborately and grotesquely as those of the church.
There was but little delicacy in accepting Torgensen’s hospitality; his house was large enough for a barrack, and its doors were as wide open as those of an inn. A large room, that could not exactly be called kitchen, hall, workshop, or dining-room, but served equally for any one of these offices (and occasionally for a ball-room also, when the store-room was too full to be used in that capacity), was open to all comers; half-a-dozen boards, as thick almost as baulks of timber, and placed upon trestles that might have supported the house, formed the principal table; two great chairs, like thrones, elaborately carved, and looking as if they required a steam-engine to move them, stood on a sort of dais;—these are not uncommon pieces of furniture in old houses; they are called grandfather and grandmother chairs, and are the seats of honour, though very seldom occupied at all, unless the master and mistress of the house are old enough to have lost their active habits. The more ordinary seats were substantial benches, with or without backs, and three-legged stools. Here and there was a great chest, a sort of expense magazine for stowing away the wool, and the flax, and the skins, which were in process of being converted into linen, wadmaal, or shoes, by the farm servants. Over these a series of shelves, like an ancient buffet, containing pewter drinking-vessels, large brass embossed plates with the bunch of grapes from the promised land or the expulsion of Adam and Eve glittering upon them in all the brightness of constant polish. Over these, again, were slung a row of copper cauldrons and pots; and on the opposite side a chest of drawers, carved and painted with grotesque figures, was ornamented with heaps of blue and white dishes, and pewter dinner-plates, and rows of brass candlesticks.
All this was beautifully clean and tidy, for the Norse men and women keep all their cleanliness for their ships and houses, and waste none of it on their persons.
A strong aromatic smell pervaded the whole room, from the fresh sprigs of fir and juniper with which it was strewn every morning, as old English halls were with rushes; it might indeed have well passed muster for an English hall in the olden times, but for the absence of the great gaping fire-place with its cozy chimney-corner and fire-side benches; the place of all this was ill supplied by the pride of Torgensen’s heart, which he pointed out before they had been in the room for five minutes, and called his “pot-kakoluvne”—a great pyramidal heap of glazed tiles, portraying Scripture subjects in Dutch costumes, and doing duty as a stove. This being an importation from foreign parts was of course of additional value; its pyramidal shape indicated Denmark as the country of its manufacture, for in Sweden the corresponding piece of furniture is cubical; and both are great improvements on the cast-iron stoves of Norway, which get nearly red hot, dry and parch the skin, crack the furniture, and fill the rooms with a description of gas, which, whatever it may do to a native, ensures to the stranger a perpetual headache.
It is rare to find in Norway a farm, and consequently an establishment of the size of Torgensen’s, though in Sweden it is common enough. The Odal law, which enforces equal division of property among the children, prevents any accumulation of territorial property, and will ultimately reduce Norway to a population of agricultural peasants with a commercial aristocracy. The homesteads of the old Norwegian nobility are deserted and decaying, like their families, but Torgensen had been educated as a merchant and shipowner, as elder sons frequently are, and having been fortunate in his speculations, had been able to buy out his brothers, and to keep up unimpaired the old hospitalities of his father’s mansion; and thus fourteen or sixteen farm-servants, and as many girls, with, it must be confessed, an indefinite number of children that had found themselves by chance in the establishment without any fathers at all, sat daily round that mass of timber which was called the meal-board (mad borden), and supped their daily gröd and drank their daily brandy.
Although the head of so great an establishment, Frue[30] Kerstin—as Madame Torgensen was usually called, though in truth she had no great right to the title—did not consider herself exempt from household duties; in fact she was but the principal housekeeper of the establishment, and wore a bunch of keys big enough for an ordinary jail as a badge of this distinction. It was not a very easy matter to catch her unprepared, for frugality was by no means the order of the house; but this day was really an exception to the general rule, and she saw with some dismay the party which her husband was bringing home with him. Lota was at the sœter, and with her were most of the young girls and, of course, their admirers. There had been hay-making at the Præstgaard during the past week, and, it being Saturday night, two-thirds of the remainder were dancing and drinking there, and thus the party at the homestead being a small one, the supper was none of the best. Good humour and real welcome, however, supplied all deficiencies, which after all, were more in Frue Kerstin’s imagination than in reality. The evening passed off admirably in songs and conversation; Torkel was an evident favourite,—and indeed his manly character, his ready stories and songs, his fine voice and constant and cheerful good humour well entitled him to the distinction, to say nothing of a broad strath in the higher Tellemark, and a lake, and a stream, and a saw-mill, and a “hammer” as it was called, that is to say, a smelting furnace for iron, to which, being the only son, he was undoubted heir, a qualification which prudent parents are not apt to overlook; but he had evidently risen in their esteem from the fact of his having brought such popular characters as English gentlemen to the homestead, and from the consideration with which those gentlemen treated him.
Torgensen might have been better pleased had more justice been done to his brandy, which was real Cognac and admirable, and might have been a little scandalized at the admixture of water, but his broad, jolly face never lost that glow of good humour which made his guests feel they were doing him a pleasure by drinking his brandy and eating his good cheer. A lively conversation was kept up through Birger and Torkel till late at night, and when the fishermen, having duly thanked their hostess, after the customs of the country, retired to rest in the great square boxes of fragrant poplar leaves, they sank into such a mass of eider down, that told well for the ci-devant attractions of the Lady Christina.