She had always retained her warm interest in Elizabeth, and the messages which she had received from her from time to time had always given her pleasure. She had never felt so attracted towards any one since as she had been to that girl; and now after her great disappointment, Elizabeth's features, so full of character and expression, were constantly before her. She had seen her sometimes in Arendal, and thought she knew the reason why Elizabeth always seemed to avoid meeting her; for she had found once, by chance, among some old letters in one of her husband's drawers, the note which Elizabeth had written to him.
It had been no shock to her. By that time she had come to know his volatile nature, and had given up all hope of ever being more to him than another would be.
On the occasions when she had caught a glimpse of the pilot's wife in the street, she had looked searchingly into her face to try and satisfy herself whether she looked happy. But she had not been able to do so; there seemed to be something on Elizabeth's mind. And taking this impression in connection with what she heard of the pilot, of his hardness and uncompanionable temper, she thought that it was clear enough that Elizabeth too, was unhappy in her married life, and longed to have a talk with her, to know whether she herself was not the more unhappy of the two.
Nor had Fru Beck's uncommon pallor escaped Elizabeth's notice, and she also longed to have a talk again with her friend of former days; but Beck's house was for many reasons impossible ground for her. As she was standing one day with Gjert on the quay, about to start for home, Fru Beck passed a little way off, leaning on her husband's arm, and looked back with an expression so sad, and with eyes that seemed to linger so longingly, as if she had something she wanted to say, or to confide, that they nodded involuntarily to one another.
Since then they had never met, for from that time Elizabeth had scarcely ever been in Arendal.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Gjert was now ten years old; and whilst his father was sitting over his glass in Mother Andersen's parlour, he used generally to amuse himself out in the harbour with a number of the Arendal boys with whom he had struck up an acquaintanceship, and who understood very little about differences of social position.
The brown-haired, brown-eyed little lad, with his sharp, intelligent face, was the wildest of them all, and enjoyed a certain consideration among them at the same time as his father's son—an honour which he evidently thought it incumbent upon him to maintain by every kind of break-neck exploit. His proper business, of course, was to look after his father's boat in his absence; but as it was safely moored, and could be seen just as well from any of the yards in the harbour, he used generally to wait in some such conspicuous position till his friends came streaming down to the quay from school, and throwing their books down, sailed out in some punt or other to join him. Most of the boys had been expressly warned by their mothers against the reckless Kristiansen's son, but cross-trees and mast-heads became thereby only the more attractive.
Old Beck's grandson, Frederick, who was going to be a naval cadet, had fancied one day that he would escape observation from the windows at home by climbing up to join his friend at the mast-head, on the other side of the mast; but the slender spar was not sufficient to protect him from the master-pilot's keen eye, and the latter came himself on board in full grandfatherly indignation against the skipper for allowing such pranks to be played on board his craft, thrashed Gjert for being the cause of his grandson's disobedience, and told him that it was very clear what he would come to some day—that he came of a bad stock, and took after it. His own little scion, although a couple of years older than Gjert, escaped punishment altogether—the other lads, however, determining among themselves that he should have it the next time they met. And he would have had it, if Gjert, who should have been the one more particularly to desire revenge, had not unexpectedly taken his part.
It was only as they were sailing the cutter home that the pilot heard how Beck had thrashed his son, and cast his horoscope. His smurched face grew white as a sheet. But when Gjert went in to tell him how, all the same, he had taken Frederick Beck's part, his father looked at him in surprise, and then muttered something about "telling this to his mother."