Jan Vedder's Wife - Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr (historical books to read txt) 📗

of Jan, one, or both of them, know. But because the body has not been found, there hath been no inquest, and his mates let him go out of life like a stone dropped into the sea, and no more about it."

"They told thee that?"

"Ay, they did; and John Scarpa said thou had long hated Jan, and he did believe thou would rather lose Jan's life than save it. Yes, indeed!"

"And thou?"

"I said some angry words for thee. Ill thou hast been to Jan, cruel and unjust, but thou did not murder him. I do not think thou would do that, even though thou wert sure no man would know it. If I had believed thou hurt a hair of Jan's head, I would not be thy servant to-day."

"Thou judgest right of me, Snorro. I harmed not Jan. I never saw him. I did not want him brought to my house, and therefore I made no haste to go and help him; but I hurt not a hair of his head."

"I will maintain that every where, and to all."

"What do they think came of Jan?"

"What else, but that he was pushed over the cliff-edge? A very little push would put him in the sea, and the under-currents between here and the Vor Ness might carry the body far from this shore. All think that he hath been drowned."

Then Peter turned away and sat down, silent and greatly distressed. A new and terrible suspicion had entered his mind with Snorro's words. He was quite sure of his own innocence, but had Margaret pushed Jan over? From her own words it was evident she had been angry and hard with him. Was this the cause of the frantic despair he had witnessed. It struck him then that Margaret's mother had ever been cold and silent, and almost resentful about the matter. She had refused to talk of it. Her whole behavior had been suspicious. He sat brooding over the thought, sick at heart with the sin and shame it involved, until Snorro said--"It is time to shut the door." Then he put on his cloak and went home.

Home! How changed his home had become! It was a place of silence and unconfessed sorrow. All its old calm restfulness had gone. Very soon after Jan's disappearance, Thora had taken to her bed, and she had never left it since. Peter recognized that she was dying, and this night he missed her sorely. Her quiet love and silent sympathy had been for many a year a tower of strength to him. But he could not carry this trouble to her, still less did he care to say any thing to Margaret. For the first time he was sensible of a feeling of irritation in her presence. Her white despairing face angered him. For all this trouble, in one way or another, she was responsible.

He felt, too, that full of anxiety as he was, she was hardly listening to a word he said. Her ears were strained to catch the first movement of her child, who was sleeping in the next room. To every one he had suddenly become of small importance. Both at home and abroad he felt this. To such bitter reflections he smoked his pipe, while Margaret softly sung to her babe, and Thora, with closed eyes, lay slowly breathing her life away: already so far from this world, that Peter felt as if it would be cruel selfishness to trouble her more with its wrongs and its anxieties.

Four days afterward, Thora said to her daughter: "Margaret, I had a token early this morning. I saw a glorious ship come sailing toward me. Her sails were whiter than snow under the moonshine; and at her bow stood my boy, Willie, my eldest boy, and he smiled and beckoned me. I shall go away with the next tide. Ere I go, thou tell me something?"

"Whatever thou ask me."

"What came of poor Jan Vedder?"

Then Margaret understood the shadow that had fallen between herself and her mother; the chill which had repressed all conversation; the silent terror which had perchance hastened death.

"Oh, mother!" she cried, "did thou really have this fear? I never harmed Jan. I left him on the cliff. God knows I speak the truth. I know no more."

"Thank God! Now I can go in peace." Margaret had fallen on her knees by the bedside, and Thora leaned forward and kissed her.

"Shall I send for father?"

"He will come in time."

A few hours afterward she said in a voice already far away, as if she had called back from a long distance, "When Jan returns be thou kinder to him, Margaret."

"Will he come back? Mother, tell me!"

But there was no answer to the yearning cry. Never another word from the soul that had now cast earth behind it. Peter came home early, and stood gloomily and sorrowfully beside his companion. Just when the tide turned, he saw a momentary light flash over the still face, a thrill of joyful recognition, a sigh of peace, instantly followed by the pallor, and chill, and loneliness of death.

At the last the end had come suddenly. Peter had certainly known that his wife was dying, but he had not dreamed of her slipping off her mortal vesture so rapidly. He was shocked to find how much of his own life would go with her. Nothing could ever be again just as it had been. It troubled him also that there had been no stranger present. The minister ought to have been sent for, and some two or three of Thora's old acquaintances. There was fresh food for suspicion in Thora Fae being allowed to pass out of life just at this time, with none but her husband and daughter near, and without the consolation of religious rites.

Peter asked Margaret angrily, why she had neglected to send for friends and for the minister?

"Mother was no worse when thou went to the store this morning. About noon she fell asleep, and knew nothing afterward. It would have been cruel to disturb her."

But in her own heart Margaret was conscious that under any circumstances she would have shrunk from bringing strangers into the house. Since Jan's disappearance, she had been but once to kirk, for that once had been an ordeal most painful and humiliating. None of her old friends had spoken to her; many had even pointedly ignored her. Women excel in that negative punishment which they deal out to any sister whom they conceive to have deserved it. In a score of ways Margaret Vedder had been made to feel that she was under a ban of disgrace and suspicion.

Some of this humiliation had not escaped Peter's keen observation; but at the time he had regarded it as a part of the ill-will which he also was consciously suffering from, and which he was shrewd enough to associate with the mystery surrounding the fate of his son-in-law. Connecting it with what Snorro had said, he took it for further proof against his daughter. Thora's silence and evident desire to be left to herself, were also corroborative. Did Thora also suspect her? Was Margaret afraid to bring the minister, lest at the last Thora might say something? For the same reason, had Thora's old intimates been kept away? Sometimes the dying reveal things unconsciously; was Margaret afraid of this? When once suspicion is aroused, every thing feeds it. Twenty-four hours after the first doubt had entered Peter's heart, he had almost convinced himself that Margaret was responsible for Jan's death.

He remembered then the stories in the Sagas of the fair, fierce women of Margaret's race. A few centuries previously they had ruled things with a high hand, and had seldom scrupled to murder the husbands who did not realize their expectations. He knew something of Margaret's feelings by his own; her wounded self-esteem, her mortification at Jan's failures, her anger at her poverty and loss of money, her contempt for her own position. If she had been a man, he could almost have excused her for killing Jan; that is, if she had done it in fair fight. But crimes which are unwomanly in their nature shock the hardest heart, and it was unwomanly to kill the man she had loved and chosen, and the father of her child; it was, above all, a cowardly, base deed to thrust a wounded man out of life. He tried to believe his daughter incapable of such a deed, but there were many hours in which he thought the very worst of her.

Margaret had no idea that her father nursed such suspicions; she felt only the change and separation between them. Her mother's doubt had been a cruel blow to her; she had never been able to speak of it to her father. That he shared it, never occurred to her. She was wrapped up in her own sorrow and shame, and at the bottom of her heart inclined to blame her father for much of the trouble between her and Jan. If he had dealt fairly with Jan after the first summer's fishing, Jan would never have been with Skager. And how eager he had been to break up her home! After all, Jan had been the injured man; he ought to have had some of her tocher down. A little ready money would have made him satisfied and happy; her life and happiness had been sacrificed to her father's avarice. She was sure now that if the years could be called back, she would be on Jan's side with all her heart.

Two souls living under the same roof and nursing such thoughts against each other were not likely to be happy. If they had ever come to open recrimination, things uncertain might have been explained; but, for the most part, there was only silence in Peter's house. Hour after hour, he sat at the fireside, and never spoke to Margaret. She grew almost hysterical under the spell of this irresponsive trouble. Perhaps she understood then why Jan had fled to Torr's kitchen to escape her own similar exhibitions of dissatisfaction.

As the months wore on, things in the store gradually resumed their normal condition. Jan was dead, Peter was living, the tide of popular feeling turned again. Undoubtedly, however, it was directed by the minister's positive, almost angry, refusal to ask Peter before the kirk session to explain his connection with Jan's disappearance. He had never gone much to Peter's store, but for a time he showed his conviction of Peter's innocence by going every day to sit with him. It was supposed, of course, that he had talked the affair thoroughly over with Peter, and Peter did try at various times to introduce the subject. But every such attempt was met by a refusal in some sort on the minister's part. Once only he listened to his complaint of the public injustice.

"Thou can not control the wind, Peter," he said in reply; "stoop and let it pass over thee. I believe and am sure thy hands are clear of Jan's blood. As to how far thou art otherwise guilty concerning him, that is between God and thy conscience. But let me say, if I were asked to call thee before the kirk session on the count of unkindness and injustice, I would not feel it to be my duty to refuse to do so." Having said this much, he put the matter out of their conversation; but still such a visible human support in his dark hour was a great comfort to Peter.

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