After old Jacob had fallen into ill health, lighterman Kristiansen used
to come out oftener to Torungen with provisions and other necessaries;
and his visits now became periodical.
He was accompanied one autumn by his son Salvé, a black-haired,
dark-eyed, handsome lad, with a sharp, clever face, who had worked in
the fishing-boats along the coast from his childhood almost, and had, in
fact, been brought up amongst its sunken rocks and reefs and breakers.
He was something small in stature, perhaps; but what he wanted in
robustness he made up in readiness and activity--qualities which stood
him in good stead in the many quarrels into which his too ready tongue
was wont to bring him. He was eighteen years old at this time; had been
already engaged as an able seaman; and was in great request at the
Sandvigen and Vraangen dances,--a fact of which he was perfectly well
aware. Old Jacob's granddaughter, being a little girl of only fourteen
years of age, was of course altogether beneath his notice, and he didn't
condescend to speak to her. He merely delivered himself of the witticism
that she was like a heron; and with her thick, checked woollen
handkerchief tied with the ends behind her waist, the resemblance was
not so very far-fetched. At any rate, he declared on the way home that
such a specimen of womankind he, for his part, had never come across
before, and that he would give anything to see her dancing in the public
room with her thin arms and legs--it would be like a grasshopper.
The next time he came, she took out her grandfather's watch in its
silver case and showed it to him, and some conversation passed between
them. His first impression of her was that she was stupid. She asked
questions about every sort of thing, and seemed to think that he must
know everything. And finally, she wanted to know what it was like on
shore among the great folk of Arendal, and particularly how the ladies
behaved. It afforded him much amusement at the time to see with what
simple credulity she took in everything he chose to invent on the
subject; but after he had left he was not sure that he wasn't sorry for
what he had done, and at the same time he made the discovery that the
girl, in her way, was anything but silly.
His remorse was to be brought home to him presently, for old Jacob had
had duly recounted to him over again all his cock-and-bull stories, and
was in high dudgeon. When he came again the old man was very snappish to
him, and he found it so unpleasant in the house that he made all the
haste he could to get his business done. While he was thus occupied, the
little girl told him all about the Naiad, and the part her grandfather
had taken in the action. Salvé, who was ruffled, and thought the old man
had been an ill-mannered old dog, followed the relation from time to
time with a sneering remark, which in her eagerness she didn't notice,
or didn't understand. But when he had finished what he had to do, he
gave vent to his feelings in a way she did understand,--he laughed
incredulously.
"Old Jacob there on board the Naiad! This is the first time anybody ever
heard of it."
The individual in question unfortunately came out at the moment to see
the boat off, and turning, to him, red with anger, she cried--
"Grandfather! he doesn't believe you were on board the Naiad that time!"
The old man answered at first as if he didn't deign to enter upon any
controversy on the subject--
"Oh, I suppose it's only little girls' prattle again."
But whether it was wounded vanity, or a sudden access of irritation
against the lad, or that his eye fell upon his granddaughter standing
there, so evidently incensed and resentful, he flared up the next
moment, and thrusting his huge fist under the youngster's nose, burst
out--
"If you want to know all about it, you young swabber, I may tell you I
stood on the Naiad's gun-deck with better folk than _you_ are ever
likely to come across"--he stamped his foot here as if he had the deck
under him--"when, with one broadside from the Dictator, the three masts
and bowsprit were shot away, and the main deck came crashing down upon
the lower;"--the last sentence was taken from 'Exploits of Danish and
Norwegian Naval Heroes,' and the old man was as proud of these lines as
he would have been of a medal.
"When the crash came," he pursued, always in the same posture, and in
the manner of the sacred text, "he who stands here and tells the tale
had but just time to save himself by leaping into the sea through a
gun-port."
But he threw off then the trammels of the text, and continued _in
propriâ personâ_, violently gesticulating with his fists, and steadily
advancing all the time, while Salvé prudently retreated before his
advance down to the boat.
"We don't deal in lies and fabricate stories out here like you, you
young whipper-snapper of a ship's cub; and if it wasn't for your father,
who has sense enough to rope's-end you himself, I'd lay a stick across
your back till you hadn't a howl left in you."
With this finale of the longest speech to which he had given vent for
thirty years perhaps, he turned with a short nod to the father, and went
into the house again.
Elizabeth was miserable that Salvé should go away like this, without so
much as deigning to say good-bye to her. And her grandfather was cross
enough himself; for he was afraid that he had done something foolish,
and broken with the lighterman.