Aasa Kvaerk loved her father well, but especially in the winter. Then,
while she sat turning her spinning-wheel in the light of the crackling
logs, his silent presence always had a wonderfully soothing and calming
effect upon her. She never laughed then, and seldom wept; when she felt
his eyes resting on her, her thoughts, her senses, and her whole being
seemed by degrees to be lured from their hiding-place and concentrate on
him; and from him they ventured again, first timidly, then more boldly,
to grasp the objects around him. At such times Aasa could talk and
jest almost like other girls, and her mother, to whom “other girls”
represented the ideal of womanly perfection, would send significant
glances, full of hope and encouragement, over to Lage, and he would
quietly nod in return, as if to say that he entirely agreed with her.
Then Elsie had bright visions of wooers and thrifty housewives, and even
Lage dreamed of seeing the ancient honor of the family re-established.
All depended on Aasa. She was the last of the mighty race. But when
summer came, the bright visions fled; and the spring winds, which to
others bring life and joy, to Kvaerk brought nothing but sorrow. No
sooner had the mountain brooks begun to swell, than Aasa began to laugh
and to weep; and when the first birches budded up in the glens, she
could no longer be kept at home. Prayers and threats were equally
useless. From early dawn until evening she would roam about in forests
and fields, and when late at night she stole into the room and slipped
away into some corner, Lage drew a deep sigh and thought of the old
tradition.
Aasa was nineteen years old before she had a single wooer. But when she
was least expecting it, the wooer came to her.
It was late one summer night; the young maiden was sitting on the brink
of the ravine, pondering on the old legend and peering down into the
deep below. It was not the first time she had found her way hither,
where but seldom a human foot had dared to tread. To her every alder and
bramble-bush, that clothed the naked wall of the rock, were as familiar
as were the knots and veins in the ceiling of the chamber where from
her childhood she had slept; and as she sat there on the brink of the
precipice, the late summer sun threw its red lustre upon her and upon
the fogs that came drifting up from the deep. With her eyes she followed
the drifting masses of fog, and wondered, as they rose higher and
higher, when they would reach her; in her fancy she saw herself dancing
over the wide expanse of heaven, clad in the sun-gilded evening fogs;
and Saint Olaf, the great and holy king, came riding to meet her,
mounted on a flaming steed made of the glory of a thousand sunsets; then
Saint Olaf took her hand and lifted her up, and she sat with him on the
flaming steed: but the fog lingered in the deep below, and as it rose
it spread like a thin, half-invisible gauze over the forests and the
fields, and at last vanished into the infinite space. But hark! a huge
stone rolls down over the mountain-side, then another, and another; the
noise grows, the birches down there in the gorge tremble and shake.
Aasa leaned out over the brink of the ravine, and, as far as she could
distinguish anything from her dizzying height, thought she saw something
gray creeping slowly up the neck-breaking mountain path; she watched
it for a while, but as it seemed to advance no farther she again took
refuge in her reveries. An hour might have passed, or perhaps more, when
suddenly she heard a noise only a few feet distant, and, again stooping
out over the brink, saw the figure of a man struggling desperately to
climb the last great ledge of the rock. With both his hands he clung to
a little birch-tree which stretched its slender arms down over the black
wall, but with every moment that passed seemed less likely to accomplish
the feat. The girl for a while stood watching him with unfeigned
curiosity, then, suddenly reminding herself that the situation to him
must be a dangerous one, seized hold of a tree that grew near the brink,
and leaned out over the rock to give him her assistance. He eagerly
grasped her extended hand, and with a vigorous pull she flung him up
on the grassy level, where he remained lying for a minute or two,
apparently utterly unable to account for his sudden ascent, and gazing
around him with a half-frightened, half-bewildered look. Aasa, to whom
his appearance was no less strange than his demeanor, unluckily hit
upon the idea that perhaps her rather violent treatment had momentarily
stunned him, and when, as answer to her sympathizing question if he was
hurt, the stranger abruptly rose to his feet and towered up before her
to the formidable height of six feet four or five, she could no longer
master her mirth, but burst out into a most vehement fit of laughter.
He stood calm and silent, and looked at her with a timid but strangely
bitter smile. He was so very different from any man she had ever seen
before; therefore she laughed, not necessarily because he amused her,
but because his whole person was a surprise to her; and there he stood,
tall and gaunt and timid, and said not a word, only gazed and gazed. His
dress was not the national costume of the valley, neither was it like
anything that Aasa had ever known. On his head he wore a cap that hung
all on one side, and was decorated with a long, heavy silk tassel. A
threadbare coat, which seemed to be made expressly not to fit him, hung
loosely on his sloping shoulders, and a pair of gray pantaloons, which
were narrow where they ought to have been wide, and wide where it was
their duty to be narrow, extended their service to a little more than
the upper half of the limb, and, by a kind of compromise with the tops
of the boots, managed to protect also the lower half. His features were
delicate, and would have been called handsome had they belonged to a
proportionately delicate body; in his eyes hovered a dreamy vagueness
which seemed to come and vanish, and to flit from one feature to
another, suggesting the idea of remoteness, and a feeling of hopeless
strangeness to the world and all its concerns.
“Do I inconvenience you, madam?” were the first words he uttered, as
Aasa in her usual abrupt manner stayed her laughter, turned her back on
him, and hastily started for the house.
“Inconvenience?” said she, surprised, and again slowly turned on her
heel; “no, not that I know.”
“Then tell me if there are people living here in the neighborhood, or if
the light deceived me, which I saw from the other side of the river.”
“Follow me,” answered Aasa, and she naïvely reached him her hand; “my
father’s name is Lage Ulfson Kvaerk; he lives in the large house you see
straight before you, there on the hill; and my mother lives there too.”
And hand in hand they walked together, where a path had been made
between two adjoining rye-fields; his serious smile seemed to grow
milder and happier, the longer he lingered at her side, and her eye
caught a ray of more human intelligence, as it rested on him.
“What do you do up here in the long winter?” asked he, after a pause.
“We sing,” answered she, as it were at random, because the word came
into her mind; “and what do you do, where you come from?”
“I gather song.”
“Have you ever heard the forest sing?” asked she, curiously.
“That is why I came here.”
And again they walked on in silence.
It was near midnight when they entered the large hall at Kvaerk. Aasa
went before, still leading the young man by the hand. In the twilight
which filled the house, the space between the black, smoky rafters
opened a vague vista into the region of the fabulous, and every object
in the room loomed forth from the dusk with exaggerated form and
dimensions. The room appeared at first to be but the haunt of the
spirits of the past; no human voice, no human footstep, was heard; and
the stranger instinctively pressed the hand he held more tightly; for he
was not sure but that he was standing on the boundary of dream-land,
and some elfin maiden had reached him her hand to lure him into her
mountain, where he should live with her forever. But the illusion was of
brief duration; for Aasa’s thoughts had taken a widely different course;
it was but seldom she had found herself under the necessity of making a
decision; and now it evidently devolved upon her to find the stranger
a place of rest for the night; so instead of an elf-maid’s kiss and a
silver palace, he soon found himself huddled into a dark little alcove
in the wall, where he was told to go to sleep, while Aasa wandered over
to the empty cow-stables, and threw herself down in the hay by the side
of two sleeping milkmaids.