The form of the island was a sort of cup, of which the cliffs round the edge were the highest parts, and the centre, from having no drain, had formed a fresh-water lake with a spongy, mossy border,—and this it was which supplied the streamlet. The outer rim was bare rock, but between these two extremes there was a boggy, black ring of vegetable mould, which produced in great abundance a coarse, rank, wiry grass, which the people were storing up for the winter, in order to deceive the poor beasts into the idea that they were eating hay. Poor as it was, they had come out a dozen miles to sea to get it: their boats, four in number, including the floating hay-stack, lay snugly in a little bay or inlet, on the shoreward side, where the water was comparatively quiet. They had evidently taken up their quarters on the island, and established a regular bivouac till the work should be finished, for there was a cooking place built up with stones, and two or three of the girls were spreading out to dry, in the hot sun, the clothes they had been washing in the lake.
“Who would have expected such a marine pastoral,” said Birger.
“Här Necken sin harssa in glasborgen slaar,
Och Haafsfruar kamma sitt grönskende haar,
Och bleka den skinande drägten.”[34]
“Heaven forefend,” said the Parson, hastily, “we are mad enough, some of us already; and Torkel is in love, which is worse; we do not want to see Haafsfruer. Remember Duke Magnus.”
“It was not the Haafsfru that took away the senses of Duke Magnus,” said Torkel, “it was the curse of good Bishop Brask, that rested on the family of Gustavus from the day when he killed the two bishops and deceived our Bishop of Trondhjem, who had given them sanctuary; the whole royal family of Sweden have been crazy, more or less ever since, till they turned them all out and put our good father Karl Johann in their place.”
Birger shook his head sadly; he was too highly born himself, and too aristocratic, not to feel a little shame at the idea of a French common soldier superseding the old family of Vasa, sprung, like himself, from Jarl Birger; but, for all that, he could not help admiring the worthy old king who, by his downright honesty and sincerity and his strict sense of duty, had painfully worked his way against all prejudices of rank and nationality, and had wound himself into the affections of the people who had chosen him. Still he had a kindly feeling for the old and glorious race, and though he could neither deny the fact of the sacrilege and breach of faith of Gustavus Vasa,—to which all the Norwegians, and many of the Swedes also, attribute the hereditary madness of his family,—nor indeed, the fact of the insanity itself, which was notorious in Eric his successor, in Charles XII., and Gustavus IV., as well as the present exiled representative of the family, yet he did not above half like Torkel’s allusion to it. The Duke Magnus, whom they were speaking of, was the youngest son of Gustavus Vasa, and was the first in whom the symptoms of that disease about to be hereditary, had manifested themselves.
The Parson, rather sympathising in his discomfiture, gave a turn to the subject by quoting the Swedish version of the Duke’s madness, to which he had himself alluded; for the Swedes ascribe it to the love of a mermaid, the sight of whom is invariably unlucky and is generally supposed to produce insanity.
“Duke Magnus! Duke Magnus! bethink thee well,—