Like children, too, Katharine led them from the room and took them into
the old Peise-stue below. Tante had for the time being forgotten her
Viking origin. Her nerve completely forsook her; and she cried
abundantly, from the strain and the merciful loosening of the tension.
Once she smiled through her tears as she pressed Katharine's hand and
gave Alan a reassuring nod.
"Ak," she said, "this is not the correct behaviour of an abandoned
sea-robber, is it?" And to Alan she added quaintly:
"Don't I make a beautiful comforter, kjaere? Ought not I to be proud of
myself?"
He made no answer, but came close to her, to show that she was a
comforting presence. He was painfully quiet--indeed, he seemed
half-bewildered; and Katharine, glancing at his ashen face, knew that he
was still under the spell of death's mysterious majesty. She wished that
they had not suffered him to go into that room of death; and yet he
would never have been satisfied to remain outside and take their word;
it was perhaps his own father lying there, and he had to see for
himself. But that part of it was over, and she felt she must break the
spell for him at once. She thought of scores of things to say; but
nothing seemed suitable. Suddenly, without thinking, she said:
"I know it sounds dreadfully prosaic; but I believe we should all be
better for some food. I am famished. Do go and ask that nice woman if we
can have breakfast, Alan."
The old Peise-stue in which they were sitting was a typical old
Norwegian room, with its quaint painted furniture, its sideboard adorned
with inscriptions, its Peise in the corner, fitted up in true old
fashion with a shelf on the top, which was furnished with carved and
painted jugs and bowls. There was, of course, a recess in the wall for
the Langeleik, and a queer little cupboard for the housewife's keys. Old
carved and painted mangles (manglebret), marriage gifts to several
generations, hung on the walls. The Kubbe-stul,[P] made from a solid
block of wood, stood in the corner. At any other time Katharine and
Knutty would have been deeply interested in seeing this characteristic
old place. But now they scarcely noticed it. They sat together looking
at nothing, and awaiting in silence the boy's return.
He came back with a different expression on his face.
"It's all right," he said. "We can have breakfast. I'm awfully hungry
too."
"So am I," said Tante; and in a few minutes the servant, in her pretty
costume of red bodice, white sleeves, and black skirt edged with green,
served them a good meal of trout, fladbröd, and admirable flödemelk
(milk with cream).
"Ripping, isn't it?" Katharine said, nodding approvingly to Alan.
"Ripping," he answered, always so glad and proud of her _camaraderie_.
"And now you'll go back to the Gaard," she went on, "and I believe you
will find your father waiting for you there, Alan. This was a false
alarm of danger, and I cannot think there is any more trouble in store."
"Do you really think that?" they both said to her.
"Yes," she answered, touched beyond words by their pathetic dependence
on her. "I believe he will come down from the mountains, and that you
will find him safe and sound."
"But you will be there too?" Alan said anxiously. And Knutty also said:
"But you will be there too?"
"I shall be with you in spirit," Katharine said; "but, you see, my place
is here, upstairs, Knutty, with that dead Englishman, lying lonely and
uncared for in a strange land. I could not go away until I, as an
Englishwoman, had done something on his behalf: watched by him a little,
written to his people, done something to show him that our gratitude to
him for not being--ours--had passed into gentle concern for him and
his."
Her voice faltered for the first time that morning when she paused at
the word "ours."
"So you will go back without me," she said; "but you will tell Professor
Thornton why I stayed behind. He will understand."
"Ah," said Knutty, looking at her lovingly, "you English people have the
true secret of nationality."
So they left her there, sadly enough; yet knowing that for the moment
her place was not with them, to whom she had already been so much, but
with her dead countryman upstairs. Knutty, with many tender
instructions, gave her into the charge of the people of the house.
Solli's last words as he drove off were:
"Take care of the English lady. Send her safely back in your best
cariole."
Katharine stood watching the carriage until it was out of sight; and
then a great longing and loneliness seized her. The music and words of
Gerda's Swedish song suddenly came into her remembrance:
"The lover whom thou lov'st so well,
Thou shalt reach him never--ah ... ah ...!"
And the wail of despair at the end of the verse smote as a piercing
blast on her spirit.
"Yes," she said, "he will come down from the mountains, and the joy of
reunion will be theirs; and I shall be outside of it--outside of it as
always. Always outside the heart of things."
She went slowly up the stairs; but when she reached the threshold where
the dead man was lying alone and as yet unmourned, she had forgotten
herself and her own personal life.
She uncovered his face once more. There was the burnt mark where the
lightning had passed through his brain. She tried to hide it with his
hair. His eyes were closed; but she laid her gentle hands on each of
them, so that his own countrywoman, and not a foreigner, should be the
one to put the last seal of sightlessness on them. She drew a soft
little handkerchief from her satchel and spread it over his face. Then
she glanced through the letters and papers which had been found on him,
and she discovered his name and his home address in Cornwall. He was a
soldier, captain in one of the line regiments. Probably he had been out
in South Africa. Yes, there was a letter addressed to him at
Bloemfontein. Katharine's sympathy deepened.
"Even more willingly do I watch by him," she said.
As there was no evidence of where he had come from in Norway, and as the
people of the Skyds-station had not even begun to make active inquiries,
she telegraphed to his Cornish address, and also to two or three of the
sanatoria in the more mountainous part of the country. No answer came;
and meantime she watched by his side, weaving from some forget-me-nots
and berries a garland, which she placed at his feet. It was no strain to
her to be giving her companionship to the dead. Katharine was fearless
of life and fearless of death, fearless of the living, fearless of the
dead. Her mind wandered back to her own dead: her mother whom she had
loved passionately and lost as a young girl; her girlhood's lover, whom
she had lost when she was scarcely twenty; her school-friend, whom she
had laid to rest ten years past. When each of them had died, she had
said, "This is the end of everything for me." But she knew that those
words had been no truer for her at thirty than at thirteen, and that the
only end of life itself, and therefore of life's thrill, was death
itself; _and then was that the end_? Was there immortality?--and what
was immortality? Was it, as some one had once told her, merely the
natural persistence under different conditions of the temperamentally
strong? Not necessarily the persistence of the good, but of the
masterful? She thought of all the forceful people she had known, and she
could not believe in their obliteration; somehow, somewhere they would
surely continue their individual processes for good or for bad. She
thought of all the half-toned, colourless people she had known, who
scarcely seemed to have any life in them in this life. Was it reasonable
to suppose that there could be any continuance of their feeble outlines?
She recalled a conversation she had had with an embittered man in
Arizona. He had scoffed at everything: at life, at love, at patriotism,
at death, at immortality.
"Belief in immortality!" he had cried. "Why, it is just a typical bit of
selfishness, that's all. We want immortality for ourselves and for those
we love. But we do not want it for those we hate. We do not want it for
those who interfere with us. We may pretend to have the principle of it
implanted in our hearts; but all we really care about is the
offshoot--the personal application of it to our own individual needs."
She remembered she had said to him:
"Yes, but the people hated by us are loved by other people; so that all
the thousands and thousands of personal applications create the great
principle, surely?"
She remembered his answer:
"That is not logical," he had said.
"Logical!" she had replied. "What a word to use about the great
mysteries of life and death! Learn to love some one. Then you will not
crave to be logical about immortality; you will only crave to believe in
it."
He had laughed at her; but two years later he wrote:
"Since seeing you, I have loved and have lost my love. I buried her in
the little cañon not far from my ranch. I find myself turning, spite of
myself, to a belief in immortality, whatever that may be."
Whatever that may be. That was the whole mystery which the reasoning of
all the finest brains in the world's history had failed to unravel.
Love, itself a great mystery, had done more. Was it possible that love,
itself a mystery, and yet a key to many of life's perplexing problems,
might prove to be the only key to the problems of death?
These thoughts passed through Katharine's mind as she watched over the
dead.
Once she turned in her impulsive way to that silent companion.
"If you could only tell us what you have found!" she cried.
And then she recalled to her mind something which a great thinker had
said in her presence.
"Some day," he had said, "we may stumble across the natural means of
communication with the dead, and, like all other great discoveries, it
will seem simple. The difficulties are insuperable in the present state
of knowledge among the living; and the dead have to recover from the
shock of death, and to find readjustment to altered conditions of
existence. But there is all Time in which to work out the discovery; and
there is always the chance that we may find out the great truth by an
accident of detail in our researches and reflections."
"_But the dead have to recover from the shock of death._" What was it he
meant? Death was a shock to the nervous system of the living; but to the
dead themselves surely it was----Ah, that was just the whole mystery;
and the chemist, the philosopher, the poet, the musician, the explorer,
the priest, and herself, an ordinary unilluminated person of average
intelligence,--all were mere surmisers--mere surmisers....
Then the door was gently opened, and Katharine, leaving with a sigh of
relief the regions of surmise, came back to actual life; for, first and
foremost, she was human, and the earth was her territory. The woman of
the Gaard said something to her, and beckoned to her. Katharine followed
her out of the room, and tried to understand what she was saying, but
could only gather the words, "To Engelske" (Two Englishmen). The woman,
who seemed greatly harassed, took her straight to the "Peise-stue,"
pointed in a despairing way to two men, said, "Engelsk," and hurried
off, holding her hands to her head, as though things were too much for
her. Katharine saw two Englishmen sitting warming themselves before the
fire. They turned round as she came in, and she noticed at a glance that
the elder of the two was the exact image of the dead man upstairs.
"Then you got my telegram," she said, thinking at once of the telegram
which she had sent off to three of the mountain sanatoria.
"Telegram?" said the elder man, looking at her in a puzzled way. "What
telegram? I've had no telegram; could have had no telegram. I, my
friend, and my brother have been out in the mountains fishing; but my
brother left us. The storm came on; he did not return, and we made our
way down here, hoping to find him or get some news of him. Perhaps you
can tell us something; for the woman of the house does not understand a
word we say, and we don't understand her. We are quite bewildered, and
so is she."
Katharine looked at the two Englishmen, and saw that they were worn out,
wet through, and hopelessly at a loss. Her protective instincts for
those who were in trouble leapt up within her. She was not going to
suffer these tired fellows to have any unnecessary shock, and so she
took the precaution of asking the elder man his name.
It was the name of the dead man upstairs.
Then in the gentlest manner possible, as though she had known this
stranger years instead of minutes, Katharine broke the sad news to him.
[Footnote P: _Kubbe-stul_, a chair cut out of one solid piece of wood.]