Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories - Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (reading well TXT) 📗

her if it had not been for this constant fear that she might any moment be Snatched away from him.

It was a novel experience in a life like his, so lonely amid its cold, abstract aspirations, to have this warm, maidenly spring-breath invading those chambers of his soul, hitherto occupied by shivering calculations regarding the duration and remoteness of the ice age. The warmer strata of feeling which had long lain slumbering beneath this vast superstructure of glacial learning began to break their way to the light, and startled him very much as the earth must have been startled when the first patch of green sod broke into view, steaming under the hot rays of the noonday sun. Abstractly considered, the thing seemed preposterous enough for the plot of a dime novel, while in the light of her sweet presence the development of his love seemed as logical as an algebraic problem. At all events, the result was in both cases equally inexorable. It was useless to argue that she was his inferior in culture and social accomplishments; she was still young and flexible, and displayed an aptness for seizing upon his ideas and assimilating them which was fairly bewildering. And if purity of soul and loving singleness of purpose be a proof of noble blood, she was surely one of nature's noblewomen.

In the course of the summer, Fern had made several attempts to convince old Tharald that the glacier was actually advancing. He willingly admitted that there was a possibility that it might change its mind and begin to recede before any mischief was done, but he held it to be very hazardous to stake one's life on so slim a chance. The old man, however, remained impervious to argument, although he no longer lost his temper when the subject was broached. His ancestors had lived there on the farm century after century, he said, and the glacier had done them no harm. He didn't see why he should be treated any worse by the Almighty than they had been; he had always acted with tolerable fairness toward everybody, and had nothing to blame himself for.

It was perhaps the third time when Tharald had thus protested his blamelessness, that his guest, feeling that reasoning was unavailing, let drop some rather commonplace remark about the culpability of all men before God.

Tharald suddenly flared up, and brought down his fist with a blow on the table.

"Somebody has been bearing tales to you, young man," he cried. "Have you been listening to parish talk?"

"That matters little," answered Fern, coolly. "No one is so blameless that he can claim exemption from misfortune as his just desert."

"Aha, so they have told you that the farm is not mine," continued his host, while his gray eyes glimmered uneasily under his bushy brows. "They have told you that silly nursery tale of the planting of the fern and the sweet-brier, and of Ulf, who sought his death in the glacier. They have told you that I stole the bride of my brother Arne, and that he fled from me over the sea,--and you have believed it all."

At the sound of the name Arne, a flash darted through Maurice's mind; he sprang up, stood for a moment tottering, and then fell back into the chair. Dim memories of his childhood rose up within him; he remembered how his father, who was otherwise so brave and frank and strong, had recoiled from speaking of that part of his life which preceded his coming to the New World. And now, he grasped with intuitive eagerness at this straw, but felt still a vague fear of penetrating into the secret which his father had wished to hide from him. He raised his head slowly, and saw Tharald's face contracted into an angry scowl and his eyes staring grimly at him.

"Well, does the devil ride you?" he burst forth, with his explosive grunt.

Maurice brushed his hand over his face as if to clear his vision, and returned Tharald's stare with frank fearlessness. There was no denying that in this wrinkled, roughly hewn mask there were lines and suggestions which recalled the free and noble mold of his father's features. It was a coincidence of physiognomic intentions rather than actual resemblance--or a resemblance, such as might exist between a Vandyck portrait and the same face portrayed by some bungling village artist.

The old man, too, was evidently seeing visions; for he presently began to wince under Maurice's steady gaze, and some troubled memory dwelt in his eye as he rose, and took to sauntering distractedly about on the floor.

"How long is it since your brother Arne fled over the sea?" asked Maurice, firmly.

"How does that concern you?"

"It does concern me, and I wish to know."

Tharald paused in his walk, and stood long, measuring his antagonist with a look of slow, pondering defiance. Then he tossed his head back with a grim laugh, walked toward a carved oaken press in a corner, took out a ponderous Bible, and flung it down on the table.

"I am beginning to see through your game," he said gruffly. "Here is the family record. Look into it at your leisure. And if you are right, let me know. But don't you tell me that that scare about the glacier wasn't all humbug. If it is your right of entail you want to look up, I sha'n't stand in your way."

Thereupon he stalked out, slamming the door behind him; the walls shook, and the windows shivered in their frames.

A vast sheet of gauzy cloud was slowly spreading over the western expanse of the sky. Through its silvery meshes the full moon looked down upon the glacier with a grave unconcern. Drifts of cold white mist hovered here and there over the surface of the ice, rising out of the deep blue hollows, catching for an instant the moonbeams, and again gliding away into the shadow of some far-looming peak.

On the little winding path at the end of the glacier stood Maurice, looking anxiously down toward the valley. Presently a pale speck of color was seen moving in the fog, and on closer inspection proved to be that scarlet bodice which in Norway constitutes the middle portion of a girl's figure. A minute more, and the bodice was surmounted by a fair, girlish face, which looked ravishingly fresh and tangible in its misty setting. The lower portions, partly owing to their neutral coloring and in part to the density of the fog, were but vaguely suggested.

"I have been waiting for you nearly half an hour, down at the river-brink," called out a voice from below, and its clear, mellow ring seemed suddenly to lighten the heavy atmosphere. "I really thought you had forgotten me."

"Forgotten you?" cried Maurice, making a very unscientific leap down in the direction of the voice "When did I ever forget you, you ungrateful thing?"

"Aha!" responded Elsie, laughing, for of course the voice as well as the bodice was hers. "Now didn't you say the edge of the glacier?"

"Yes, but I didn't say the lower edge. If you had at all been gifted with the intuition proverbially attributed to young ladies in your situation, you would have known that I meant the western edge--in fact here, and nowhere else."

"Even though you didn't say it?"

"Even though I did say it."

Fern was now no longer a resident of the Ormgrass Farm. After the discovery of their true relation, Tharald had shown a sort of sullen, superstitious fear of him, evidently regarding him as a providential Nemesis who had come to avenge the wrong he had done to his absent brother. No amount of friendliness on Maurice's part could dispel this lurking suspicion, and at last he became convinced that, for the old man's sake as well as for his own, it was advisable that they should separate. This arrangement, however, involved a sacrifice which our scientist had at first been disposed to regard lightly; but a week or two of purely scientific companionship soon revealed to him how large a factor Elsie had become in his life, and we have seen how he managed to reconcile the two conflicting necessities. The present rendezvous he had appointed with a special intention, which, with his usual directness, he proceeded to unfold to her.

"Elsie dear," he began, drawing her down on a stone at his side, "I have something very serious which I wish to talk to you about."

"And why do you always want to talk so solemnly to me, Maurice?"

"Now be a brave little girl, Elsie, and don't be frightened."

"And is it, then, so very dreadful?" she queried, trembling a little at the gravity of his manner rather than his words.

"No, it isn't dreadful at all. But it is of great importance, and therefore we must both be serious. Now, Elsie dear, tell me honestly if you love me enough to become my wife now, at once."

The girl cast timid glances around her, as if to make sure that they were unobserved. Then she laid her arms round his neck, gazed for a moment with that trustful look of hers into his eyes, and put up her lips to be kissed.

"That is no answer, my dear," he said, smiling, but responding readily to the invitation. "I wish to know if you care enough for me to go away with me to a foreign land, and live with me always as my wife."

"I cannot live anywhere without you," she murmured, sadly.

"And then you will do as I wish?"

"But it will take three weeks to have the banns published, and you know father would never allow that."

"That is the very reason why I wish you to do without his consent. If you will board the steamer with me to-morrow night, we will go to England and there we can be married without the publishing of banns, and before any one can overtake us."

"But that would be very wrong, wouldn't it? I think the Bible says so, somewhere."

"In Bible times marriages were on a different basis from what they are now. Moreover, love was not such an inexorable thing then, nor engagements so pressing."

She looked up with eyes full of pathetic remonstrance, and was sadly puzzled.

"Then you will come, darling?" he urged, with lover-like persuasiveness. "Say that you will."

"I will--try," she whispered, tearfully, and hid her troubled face on his bosom.

"One thing more," he went on. "Your house is built on the brink of eternity. The glacier is moving down upon you silently but surely. I have warned your father, but he will not believe me. I have chosen this way of rescuing you, because it is the only way."

The next evening Maurice and his servant stood on the pier, waiting impatiently for Elsie, until the whistle sounded, and the black-hulled boat moved onward, ploughing its foamy path through the billows. But Elsie did not come.

Another week passed, and Maurice, fired with a new and desperate resolution, started for the capital, and during the coming winter the glacier was left free to continue its baneful plottings undisturbed by the importunate eyes of science. Immediately on his arrival in the city he set on foot a suit in his father's name against Tharald Gudmundson Ormgrass, to recover his rightful inheritance.


VI.


On a cold, bleak day, in the latter part of March, we find Maurice once more in the valley. He had played a hazardous game, but so far fortune had favored