'I wonder,' she meditated, 'if he would have gone at all events. I wonder if I have the slightest influence upon his motives or his actions. Sometimes it seems as if anyone could lead him like a child, and then suddenly there comes a conviction that no human force can move him.'
CHAPTER X.
FJAERHOLM.
At the upper end of the fjord of the same name lies the small village of Fjaerholm. A white wooden church of conventional architecture is the most prominent, and at the same time the most unsightly, feature in the landscape. Around this edifice are clustered a few wooden houses, mostly painted white or yellow with a sparing brush, because paint is heavy freight, and can be bought only in Bergen or Christiania. Houses and church alike are roofed with red tiles of a bright and cleanly hue, which will be preserved much longer than the memory of the tiler. There is no smoke in Fjaerholm, and a long cold winter kills any moss-like growth, so everything looks clean and new.
Across the fjord, which is white and milky from the glaciers, is one farm, or what is by courtesy called a farm—a mere matter of ten acres or so divided into patches of potato, hay and wheat. Fjaerholm, like most Norwegian villages, hamlets, and homesteads, suggests a question. One cannot help wondering why it ever came there. The tillable soil is of sufficient area to nourish a single family, but no more, and yet a whole village manages to wrest a frugal sustenance from it. There is a post-office, and a postmaster who wears the inevitable spectacles and brown linen jacket; and he again suggests a question. With one mail a week, in and out on the same day—namely, Friday—what employment can he find during the other six? Yet he is as grave and busy as a young bank clerk in the presence of his manager. He is constantly walking backwards and forwards across the single unpaved street from his home to his office, from his office to his home, with two pieces of official paper held between his finger and thumb, his pen in his mouth, his elbow officially squared, and his linen jacket fluttering, all with an air of intense preoccupation. Poor postmaster! It is mean to fire off cheap sarcastic fireworks from a safe distance. There are others among us who wear a preoccupied air over nothing, and flourish our flimsy official papers with intense self-satisfaction.
Theo Trist found him to be the only intelligent man in the village (with the exception, perhaps, of an absorbed artist whose personal apparel spoke lamentably clear language upon the monetary prospects of Scandinavian art), and official dignity was tempered by a kindly, simple heart full of sympathy for the wandering sailor whose last resting-place was to be beneath the shadow of the ugly white church. The old minister, whose bleached and wrinkled face bore a faint and indefinite resemblance to his own sacerdotal ruff, simply obeyed Trist and the postmaster in every detail.
The arrival of the Hermione was a matter of no small wonder in this mountain fastness, but in a few minutes the story was known throughout the village, for the very good reason that every inhabitant possessing means of locomotion was on the small wooden pier to meet Trist and Captain Barrow when they landed. Norway is a taciturn country, and the matter was soon talked over in a mumbling, half-plaintive way.
At mid-day there was a simple funeral. Four bare-headed sailors bore their late chief from the pier to the scantily-tenanted churchyard. The British ensign fluttered for the first time in the cold breeze that steals down from the glacier into the Fjaerholm Valley, and the old white-haired minister, clad in his quaint Lutheran robes, read unintelligible phrases over the coffin. Then the stony earth fell heavily, for it was still damp, and Theo Trist turned in his philosophically calm way and smothered a sigh of relief.
There was something to be written in a book in the vestry of the church, a few homeopathic fees to be paid, an exchange of names and addresses to be effected with the preoccupied postmaster, and Admiral Wylie was left to his rest amidst the simple Northerners. To-day, as on that day years ago, the little village stands by the side of the silent milky fjord with its white church, yellow houses, and clean red tiles. The tide steals up as of yore to the very wall of the churchyard, but in God's garden there are more seeds sown to grow in peace and holiness till the great spring-tide calls them to flower. At the head of every short valley round the Fjaerholm fjord there is still the blue wonder of the glacier which extends in one vast field of unexplored snow and ice over the broken tableland. From its edge the same stream trickles down in white confusion, gaining strength and volume in its progress, until it runs past the church and beneath the narrow wooden bridge, a veritable river. So, even in his sleep, the old salmon-fisherman may hear perchance the sweet murmurous voice of running water, the gurgle of the rapid, and the plash of the fall.
The old minister is dead. Many years ago he joined the silent ones of Fjaerholm. The postmaster also has been removed to another sphere, where, we are told, there are no wrinkled brows, no official papers, no sealing-wax and weekly mail-bags. But many there are who remember and speak still in a wondering way of the beautiful English vessel which came and went within twelve short hours—the only yacht whose anchor has stirred up the mud of the fjord. And among the wooden crosses, amidst the unlabelled mounds, there stands to-day a simple marble cross with strange English writing on it.