The splendor of the night was almost dazzling as Gunnar came out from the crowded hall and again stood under the open sky. A host of struggling thoughts and sensations thronged upon him. He was happy, oh, so happy!--at least he tried to persuade himself that he was; but strange to say, he did not fully succeed. Was it not toward this day his yearnings had pointed, and about which his hopes had been clustering from year to year, ever since he had been old enough to know what yearning was? Was it not this day which had been beckoning him from afar, and had shed light upon his way like a star, and had he not followed its guidance as faithfully and as trustingly as those wise men of old? "Folly and nonsense," muttered he; "the night breeds nightly thoughts!" With an effort he again brought Ragnhild's image before his mind, jumped upon his skees, and darted down over the glittering snow. It bore him toward the fjord. A sharp, chill wind swept up the hillside, and rushed against him. "Houseman's son!" cried the wind. Onward he hastened. "Houseman's son!" howled the wind after him. Soon he reached the fjord, hurried on up toward the river-mouth, and coming to the Henjum boat-house, stopped, and walked out to the end of the pier, which stretched from the headland some twenty to thirty feet out into the water. The fjord lay sombre and restless before him. There was evidently a storm raging in the ocean, for the tide was unusually high, and the sky was darkening from the west eastward. The mountain-peaks stood there, stern and lofty as ever, with their heads wrapped in hoods of cloud. Gunnar sat down at the outer edge of the pier, with his feet hanging listlessly over the water, which, in slow and monotonous plashing, beat against the timbers. Far out in the distance he could hear the breakers roar among the rocky reefs; first the long, booming roll, then the slowly waning moan, and the great hush, in which the billows pause to listen to themselves. It is the heavy deep-drawn breath of the ocean. It was cold, but Gunnar hardly felt it.
He again stepped into his skees and followed the narrow road, as it wound its way from the fjord up along the river. Down near the mouth, between Henjum and Rimul, the river was frozen, and could be crossed on the ice. Up at Henjumhei it was too swift to freeze. It was near daylight when he reached the cottage. How small and poor it looked! Never had he seen it so before;--very different from Rimul. And how dark and narrow it was all around it! At Rimul they had always sunshine. Truly, the track is steep from Henjumhei to Rimul; the river runs deep between.
MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON
(1837-)
hatever objections may be made to the sensational character of many of Miss Braddon's earlier novels, her place is certainly in the ranks of the "born" story-tellers. Although still in the prime of life, she has been before the public for thirty-seven years. Her books have been produced in amazingly rapid and continuous succession. She was born in London in 1837, wrote little stories in her early teens, and was fond of entertaining her companions with startling original tales.
When a young girl she conceived a passion for the stage, and a dramatic--or melodramatic--element is conspicuous in most of her novels. She was barely twenty-one when she had completed a comedietta, 'The Lover of Arcadia,' which, after many alterations and revisions, was put on the stage of the Strand Theatre in 1860, with--naturally--but moderate success. Her disappointment was extreme. She gave up the hope of becoming a successful dramatist. Her next venture, like that of most young authors, was a small volume of poems, of which Garibaldi was the chief theme. About this time she also wrote a number of highly colored, much strained tales in the Temple Bar and St. James' magazines. These tales drew attention, and awoke an echo which neither the comedietta nor the poems had done, making it clear to her that in narrative fiction lay her strength. She was ambitious, she wanted money even more than reputation, and she has followed narrative fiction most diligently ever since, with widening and indisputable success.
In 1862 appeared her first full-fledged novel, 'Lady Audley's Secret.' It achieved instantaneous distinction and an enormous sale, six editions being disposed of in as many weeks. She had finally hit the mark, though not by accident. She had carefully thought out a new scheme, and had corrected literary mistakes by her late experience. She knew that the first desire of novel readers is for novelty, a characteristic usually preferred to originality, which is often much more slowly recognized. Mrs. Gore's fashionable novels, correct in portraiture and upholstery, clever but monotonous, had had their day; Mrs. Trollope's coarse and caustic delineations; G.P.R. James's combats, adventures, skirmishes, disguises, trials, and escapes, and Bulwer's sentimental and grandiloquent romances, had begun to pall upon the public taste. Miss Braddon perceived that the time had come for something new, so 'Lady Audley's Secret' was a striking innovation.