In Great Waters: Four Stories

by Thomas A. Janvier

While the wedding-party walked unsteadily abroad the big room in the tavern was cleared; and when the company was come back again, much the better for fresh air and exercise, the dancing began. And just then a very queer thing happened: Krelis led off the dance with Geert Thysen instead of with Marretje his bride!

Some say that Geert made him promise to do this as the price of her coming to the wedding; others say that it was done on the spur of the moment—was one of Geert's sudden whims that Krelis, who also was given to sudden whims, fell in with. About the truth of this matter there can be only guess-work, but about what happened there is plain fact: Just as the set was forming, Krelis dropped Marretje's hand and said lightly: "You won't mind, Marretje, will you? It's for old friendship's sake, you know." And with that he took the hand of Geert Thysen, who was standing close beside him, and away he went with her in the dance. Those who think that it had been arranged between them beforehand point out that Geert had refused all offers to dance and had come close to Krelis just as the set was formed. There is something in that, I think. But whether they had planned it or had not planned it, the fact remains that Marretje's place at the head of the dance at her own wedding was taken by another woman; and as the set was complete without her, she did not dance at all until the first figure came to an end. They say that there were tears in her eyes as she stood alone there—and that she was very white when Krelis took her hand again, at the end of the first figure, and gave her for the rest of the dance the place at the head of it that was hers. They say, too, that Geert stood watching them—when Krelis had left her and had taken his bride again—with a hot blaze of color coming and going in her cheeks, and with a wonderful flashing and sparkling of her great black eyes. And before the dance ended Geert went home.

There was a great crackling of talk, of course, about this slight that Krelis had put upon Marretje on her wedding-day; and people shook their heads and said that worse must come after it. Some of the stories about Krelis's escapades in Amsterdam were raked up again and were pointed with a fresh moral. As for Geert, the Marken women had but one opinion of her—and the least unkindly expression of it was that she was walking in a very dangerous path. But when echoes of this talk came to Geert's ears—as they did, of course—she merely curled her red lips a little and said that as she was neither a weak woman nor a foolish woman she was safe to walk where she pleased.

VI

It was a little disconcerting to the prophets of evil that the weeks and the months slipped away without any signs of the fulfilment of their prophecies. However keen may have been Marretje's sorrow on her wedding-day, it was not lasting. Indeed, her gentle nature was so filled with a worshipping love for Krelis that he had only to give her a single light look of affection or a half-careless kiss to fill her whole being with happiness. He was a god to her—this gayly daring young fellow who had raised her up to be a shy little queen in a queendom, she was sure, such as never had been for any other woman in all the world. And Krelis was very well pleased with her frank adoration. It was tickling to his vanity that she should be so completely and so eagerly his loving slave.

Next to her love for Krelis—and partly because it was a part of her love for him—Marretje's greatest joy was in her housekeeping. She had taken a just pride in the tidiness of her housekeeping for her grandfather; but it was a very different and far more exciting matter to furbish and polish a house that really was her own. And Krelis's house, of which she was the proud mistress, was far bigger and far finer than her old home. It was a stately dwelling, for Marken, standing on an out-jutting ridge of earth at the back of the Kesbeurt, close upon a delightful little canal—and from the back doorway was a restful far-off outlook over the marsh-land to the level horizon of the Zuyder Zee. Marretje loved that outlook, and she had it before her often: for down beside the canal was her scouring-shelf—where she scoured away through long sunny mornings, while Krelis was away at his fishing, until her pots and kettles ranged in the sunlight shone like burnished gold.

Yet the fact should be added that when the old men of Marken talked together about this fine house of Krelis Kess's they would shake their heads a little—saying that a better spending of money would have been for a smaller house founded on solid piling, instead of for this showy dwelling standing on an out-thrust earth bank which well enough might crumble away beneath it in some time of tremendous tempest when all the island should be overswept and beaten by the sea.

For the most part, of course—save for little chats with her neighbours—Marretje was alone in that fine house of hers. Old Jaap had come to live with the young people—as was only fair, since he had no one but his granddaughter to care for him—but both he and Krelis spent all their week-days afloat at their fishing and only their Sundays at home. Yet now and then the old man, making some excuse for not going out with the fleet, would give himself a turn at shore duty; and would sit in his big chair, smoking his long pipe very contentedly, watching his granddaughter at her endless scouring and cleaning, and listening to her little bursts of song. In his unsettled old mind he sometimes fancied that the years had rolled backward and that he was watching his own young wife again; and in his old heart he would dream young love-dreams by the hour together—blessedly forgetting that the love and the happiness which had made his life beautiful had been snatched away from him and lost forever in the wrathful waters of the Zuyder Zee.

"IT WAS A STATELY DWELLING"