"Remember, Salvé, that you have an old father expecting you at home!"
That evening and a great part of the night Salvé passed in the Juno's maintop, gazing over at Beck's house as long as there was a light in the attic window. And when that went out it seemed as if something had been extinguished in himself with it.
CHAPTER X.
The outer side of Tromö, which lies off the entrance to Arendal, has only the ordinary barren stone-grey appearance of the rest of the islands along the coast; a wooden church, with a little belfry like a sentry-box and serving as a landmark, which lies drearily down by the sea, and under which on Sundays a pilot-boat or two may be seen lying-to while service is going on, is the only feature for the eye to rest upon. The land side of the island, on the contrary, presents a scene all the richer and livelier for the contrast. The narrow Tromö Sound, with its swarm of small coasters, lighters, pilot-boats, and vessels of larger build, suns itself there between fertile or wooded slopes and ridges, over which are scattered in every direction the red cottages of the sailor population, skippers' houses, and villas; and in every available spot, in every creek or bay where there is barely room for a vessel, the white timbers of ships in course of construction come into view. It is an idyllic dockyard, a very beautiful and very appropriate approach to Norway's principal seaport town; and whoever steams up it on a still summer's day must enjoy a surprise that will not easily be effaced from his recollection.
At the period of our story, indeed, the picture was far from being so complete or rich: but even then were becoming manifest the germs of the bustle and life which now pervade the place.
On one of the most beautiful points of the Sound peeped into view a small one-storeyed house with two small-paned attic windows projecting from its steep tiled roof, and with a pine-wood climbing the hillside behind, which was the property of Captain Beck; and here, until, as he proposed to do in a couple of years' time, he retired from the sea and invested his fortune in the shipbuilding yard which he had in view, his family generally took up their residence during the summer months. Hither in the early part of this summer, too, they had repaired.
It was no life of idleness, though, which they lived out there: Madam Beck always made work for everybody, and had her own spinning-wheel in the sitting-room. Her step-son had his occupation on land, and as much as he could do, as member of the coast commission. But he used generally to come over on Saturdays in his pretty sail-boat and remain over Sunday; and on that day, too, some one or other family of their acquaintance in the town would make them an object for a pleasure party, and would usually spend the afternoon with them.
Carl Beck was always in great force on these occasions. His brown face and frank sailor bearing and good looks would have been sufficient in themselves to make him a favourite with the ladies. But, in addition to these claims upon their interest, he had been known to most of the younger ones among them from his schoolboy days, when he used to come home on leave as a cadet, and he seemed to enjoy particular confidential relations with nearly every one of them, or, at all events, to be in possession of some secret or other which only they two knew. They had all kinds of jokes and expressions from their younger days which were unintelligible to the rest; and what is vulgarly called "chaff" formed, perhaps, the staple of his conversation with them, varied now and then by a touch of sentiment, which was intended, by chance as it were, to open up to them for a moment the real deeper nature which they might not have suspected him of possessing. They used to twit him about his inclination to stoutness, and he used to joke about it too, and say he had too good a time of it.
Among the Becks' most frequent visitors out there was postmaster Forstberg's family, which included, besides the parents, a hobbledehoy son and their daughter Marie, a fair-haired girl some eighteen years of age, of quiet manners, and with an uncommonly clever face. Nobody said that she was pretty, but nearly every one who knew her had the impression that she was; and there was a certain indefinable harmony and grace, not only about her perhaps rather small figure, but about everything she did. But if she was not considered pretty, it was agreed on all sides that she had great sense; and among her friends she was always the one they elected to confide in, whenever they had anything on their minds. That she never confided anything to them in return had, curiously enough, never struck them; and for that matter, she was too correct and proper, they imagined, to have any heart affairs herself. She was a confidential friend of Carl Beck's sisters, and especially of Mina, who declared that she put her before all the rest of her acquaintance, and thought in her own heart that she was exactly the match for her brother.
The only one of the young girls in the circle with whom Carl Beck had had no youthful acquaintance was Marie Forstberg; and it had been some time before he discovered that the quiet girl was worth talking to. He used to be secretly annoyed then that the conversation when she was present should lapse so easily into empty trifling; her mind was so clear and true, and she had such a beautiful smile for whatever she approved. Before her, therefore, he always displayed now the broad, manly side of his character—which he could do with so much grace—and the coquetry which was at the bottom of this was not without its effect. She had always made rather a hero of him in her own mind, and he had created the flattering impression now that the light and flirting manner which he adopted towards young ladies, and which had rather qualified her admiration of him, had been due to his not having before found among them any one that was worthy of a man's serious attention. He had begun consequently to occupy a much larger share of her thoughts than she would herself have been willing to acknowledge; and many of the confidences of which she was the recipient at this time would, if her friends had had a little more penetration, have been brought last of all to her.