His two sons were waiting for him when the pilot came up to the jetty
next morning. Little Henrik had begun to shout to him gleefully while he
was still some way off; but Gjert was quiet. He had seen enough to feel
that there must be something serious the matter between his parents, and
he was depressed.
"Good morning, boys!" said their father, kindly; "how is your--aunt?"
"Better," replied Gjert.
"She sleeps in the daytime, too," added the "bagman," triumphantly--he
had discovered that this was what was required to make her well again.
He then threw his cap down on the stones with a great sailor air, and
with an eager "hale-hoi--o--ohoi!" began to haul in the shore-rope which
his father had thrown, while Gjert, paying no attention whatever to his
brother's efforts, made it fast to the mooring-ring.
"That's good lads! Stay here now, both of you, by the boat, and look
after her till I come back," said their father. "See, Gjert, that Henrik
doesn't leave the quay."
He left them then, and went rapidly up the street.
Elizabeth was standing by the hearth expecting him; and something of a
Sunday calm seemed to have come over her as she stood there. She heard
him out in the passage; and when he entered, a rapid flush passed over
her fine features, but it disappeared again immediately, and she stared
at him with half-open lips, forgetting to greet him. At the same time,
there was a conscious self-possession in her bearing which did not
escape him. That was the Elizabeth he loved.
He came to the point at once; and looking her full in the face, began
with great earnestness--"Elizabeth, I have a serious accusation to make
against you. You have not been frank towards me--you have disguised your
real feelings from me for many years, I am afraid during the whole time
we have lived together."
He spoke gently, and as though he had no desire to press the charge, but
merely waited to hear her make a full acknowledgment before he forgave
her. She stood, however, without raising her eyes from the ground, her
face pale, and her bosom heaving.
"And yet how I have loved you, Elizabeth!--more dearly than my life," he
added.
She still remained for a moment silent, and had to summon all her
courage now to speak. At last she said, in a rather strained voice, and
without lifting her eyes--
"I hear you say it, Salvé. But I have been thinking a good deal lately."
"You have been thinking, Elizabeth?" he repeated, "what have you been
thinking?" and his expression changed in a moment to the dark, stern one
she knew so well. He had made his advance; further he would not go.
"Am I right, or am I not?" he asked, sharply.
"No, Salvé, you are not right," she replied, turning to him now with a
look that seemed fired by all she had endured; "you are not right. It is
yourself, and yourself only, you have loved all along; and when you took
me as your wife, you merely took another to help you. There were two
about it then, and even so it was not enough. No! no!" she cried,
striking out her hand with an emphatic gesture in the bitterness of her
feeling--"if you had loved me as I have loved you, we would not be
standing before one another as we are this day!"
He was taken aback for a moment by this unexpected outburst, but replied
in a cold hard voice, while his eyes never moved from her face, "I thank
you, Elizabeth, for having at last told me your thoughts, though it
comes a little late. You see I was right when I said that you had not
been frank towards me."
"I have not been frank with you, you say? Yes, that is true," she
rejoined, while her eye met his unflinchingly. "And it is to my honour.
I have submitted to be an object of suspicion in my own house. I have
shut my eyes and persisted in believing that you cared for me, in spite
of the heavier burden which you were every day imposing upon me--in
spite of all that I have had to endure--and it has been much, very much,
Salvé,--and I have done all this because I believed it was my duty, and
because I thought you could not bear to hear the truth, and because I
hoped that I might conquer in the end, and make you really love me as I
have all along, and but too well, loved you, Salvé. It is true that I
have not been frank with you. And, I repeat, it is to my honour."
This interpretation of their relations together was not one which he
chose to accept, and he rejoined in the same hard tone as before--
"However cleverly you may have tried to conceal it, Elizabeth, it has
always been but too evident to me what you have endured in trying to
accommodate yourself to the humble circumstances of a man like me. I
know as well as you that a common seaman was little suited to be your
husband--I have always known it from the time we were first engaged,
when we stood before Van Spyck's portrait in Amsterdam. That was the
sort of man, I knew very well, whom you ought to have had for a husband.
I saw it again, as I have seen it always, when you made comparisons
between the North Star and my poor brig--"
"Salvé!" she exclaimed, passionately, unable to control herself any
longer--"what rubbish are you talking? Do you not know perfectly well
that if you had been an admiral itself you never would have been greater
in my eyes than you are now, and always have been as a simple pilot? And
pray, whom was I thinking of when I was looking at Van Spyck? why, of
whom but of you?--thinking that the man called Salvé Kristiansen, who
stood behind me, was just the one to have done what Van Spyck did. Or
when I was admiring the North Star was I not thinking then too: If you,
Salvé, were in command of her, they would see what she could really do
with a proper man on board? What possible interest do you suppose I
could have in the North Star, except in connection with you? Were not
you, poor skipper of the Apollo, worth more, a thousand times more to
me, than a hundred North Stars with all their bravery?"
When she spoke like this it was impossible not to believe every single
word of what she said, and Salvé's expression while she had been
speaking had gradually changed to one of inexpressible happiness. So it
was really he, and he alone, who had been the hero of her life! and he
stretched out his arms to her, as though, like Alcibiades of old, he
would end the discussion by clasping her to his heart and carrying her
straight off with him to his home. But he was arrested by the deep
repelling seriousness with which she continued--
"No, Salvé!--it is not which that stands between us, however ingeniously
you may have discovered it--it is not that,--it is something else. It is
that you don't trust me in your heart; that is the truth--and that has
been the real source of all these morbid ideas you have formed.
"And look you," she went on, with wild anguish in her voice, "we shall
never get on together as long as you encourage the faintest suspicion of
such thoughts; we shall never have peace beside our hearth--that peace
that I have been striving for all these years, when I have been
submitting, as I did, to everything--in a way that you know well, Salvé,
was very far from natural to me," and as she said this she looked with a
magnificent air at him; "and if you cannot yet understand that--may God
help you--and us!" she ended in despair, and turning half away again to
the fire, stared dejectedly into it.
He stood before her half-averted form as if he had been paralysed, and
scarcely dared to look up at her, with such truth had all that she had
said come home to him. She had held a mirror up to their life together,
and he saw himself in it so utterly selfish and so small by the side of
all this love. He was profoundly pained and humbled, and was too
naturally truthful to wish not to acknowledge it.
He went absently to the window and stood there for a moment.
"Elizabeth," he said then, despondently, turning round, "you still must
know in your heart that you have been everything in this world to me.
But I know where my great fault to you has been, and I'll tell it you
now, fully and freely, even if you must despise me for it. Yes,
Elizabeth, it is true I have never been able to feel absolutely certain
that I had full possession of your heart--though, God be praised, you
have taught me differently to-day--since that time,"--it evidently cost
him a struggle to go on with the humiliating confession--"since that
business between you and the lieutenant. That has been the thorn in my
flesh," he said, gently, as if opening his inmost heart to her, "which I
have not been able to get rid of, in spite of my better reason. And I
don't know but what it may still be there. There lies my weakness--I
tell it you plainly and honestly; but at the same time I can't give you
up, Elizabeth.
"I have always seen," he continued, "that the proper husband for you
would have been a man who was something in the world--such a one as he,
and not a man of no position like me. In my pride I never could bear the
thought--and it is that that has made me so full of rancour against all
the world, and so suspicious and bad towards you. I have not been strong
enough--not like you--but I can truly say I have struggled with my
weakness, Elizabeth," he said, pale with intensity of feeling, and
laying both his hands on her shoulders, and looking into her face.
She felt that his arms were trembling, and her eyes filled with
tears--it went to her heart to see him like this. All at once on a
sudden thought she withdrew herself from his hands and went into the
little room adjoining the one they were in, and opened a drawer there.
She came out with the old note in her hand and held it out to him--
"That is the letter I wrote to the lieutenant the night I left the
Becks'."
He looked at her a little wonderingly.
"Fru Beck gave it to me," she said. "Read it, Salvé."
He looked at the large clumsy writing and spelt out--
"Forgive me that I cannot be your wife, for my heart is given to
another.--Elizabeth Raklev."
He sat down on the bench and read it over again, while she bent over
him, looking now at the writing, and now at his face.
"What do you find there, Salvé?" she asked. "Why could I not be Beck's
wife?"
"'Because my heart is given to another,'" he answered, slowly, and
looking up at her with moistened eyes.
"Not yours; it is I who loved another. And who was that other?"
"God bless you--it was me!" he said, and drew her down upon his knee
into a long, long embrace.
* * * * *
The boys had become tired of waiting down at the boat, the "bagman"
especially, since it was clearly past dinner-time; the bell had rung
over at the dry-dock, and the town boys had already passed from school.
His white head and heated face appeared now at the kitchen-door, and
with scarcely a glance over to where his father and mother were sitting
on the bench together looking very happy, he turned at once to the
hearth and became aware of the sad fact that there was positively no
porridge to be seen; there was not even a fire. Coming bodily into the
room, he asked, with tears in his voice--
"Have you had dinner? Are Gjert and I not to have any, then?"
His mother sprang up. "And aunt!" she exclaimed. "I declare it is
half-past one, and no dinner put down!" Henrik was glad to find that the
worst danger was over.
Mother Kirstine had conjectured that there must be something particular
going on between the pair in the kitchen, and that was the reason she
had not called Elizabeth. When the latter now came in, she looked at her
inquiringly, and asked if anything had happened.
"The happiest thing of my whole life, aunt," said Elizabeth, coming over
to the bed and embracing her impetuously. She hurried back then to her
business in the kitchen.
The old woman looked after her, and nodded her head a couple of times
slowly, thoughtfully. "No--so?"
"He is joking with little Henrik," she said then to herself. "That is
wonderful: I have never heard him laugh before."
When they went to dinner in the kitchen Salvé left them--he was not
hungry--and came in to her. He had a great deal to say, and was a long
while away.