“Well, have it your own way,” said Philip good-naturedly, wishing that Lorimer were awake to interview this strange specimen of human wit gone astray; “we’ll fight if you like. Anything to please you!”
“We are fighting,” said Sigurd with intense passion in his voice. “You may not know it; but I know it! I have felt the thrust of your sword; it has crossed mine. Stay!” and his eyes grew vague and dreamy. “Why was I sent to seek you out — let me think — let me think!”
And he seated himself forlornly on one of the deck chairs and seemed painfully endeavoring to put his scattered ideas in order. Errington studied him with a gentle forbearance; inwardly he was very curious to know whether this Sigurd had any connection with the Güldmars, but he refrained from asking too many questions. He simply said in a cheery tone —
“Yes, Sigurd, — why did you come to see me? I’m glad you did; it’s very kind of you, but I don’t think you even know my name.”
To his surprise, Sigurd looked up with a more settled and resolved expression of face, and answered almost as connectedly as any sane man could have done.
“I know your name very well,” he said in a low composed manner. “You are Sir Philip Errington, a rich English nobleman. Fate led you to her grave — a grave that no strange feet have ever passed, save yours — and so I know you are the man for whom her spirit has waited, — she has brought you hither. How foolish to think she sleeps under the stone, when she is always awake and busy, — always at work opposing me! Yes, though I pray her to lie still, she will not!”
His voice grew wild again, and Philip asked quietly —
“Of whom are you speaking, Sigurd?”
His steady tone seemed to have some compelling influence on the confused mind of the half-witted creature, who answered readily and at once —
“Of whom should I speak but Thelma? Thelma, the beautiful rose of the northern forest — Thelma—”
He broke off abruptly with a long shuddering sigh, and rocking himself drearily to and fro, gazed wistfully out to the sea. Errington hazarded a guess as to the purpose of that coffin hidden in the shell cavern.
“Do you mean Thelma living? . . . or Thelma dead?”
“Both,” answered Sigurd promptly. “They are one and the same, — you cannot part them. Mother and child, — rose and rosebud! One walks the earth with the step of a queen, the other floats in the air like a silvery cloud; but I see them join and embrace and melt into each other’s arms till they unite in one form, fairer than the beauty of angels! And you — you know this as well as I do — you have seen Thelma, you have kissed the cup of friendship with her; but remember! — not with me — not with me!”
He started from his seat, and, running close up to Errington, laid one meagre hand on his chest.
“How strong you are, how broad and brave,” he exclaimed with a sort of childish admiration. “And can you not be generous too?”
Errington looked down upon him compassionately. He had learned enough from his incoherent talk to clear up what had seemed a mystery. The scandalous reports concerning Olaf Güldmar were incorrect, — he had evidently laid the remains of his wife in the shell-cavern, for some reason connected with his religious belief, and Thelma’s visits to the sacred spot were now easy of comprehension. No doubt it was she who placed fresh flowers there every day, and kept the little lamp burning before the crucifix as a sign of the faith her departed mother had professed, and which she herself followed. But who was Sigurd, and what was he to the Güldmars? Thinking this, he replied to the dwarf’s question by a counter-inquiry.
“How shall I be generous, Sigurd? Tell me! What can I do to please you?”
Sigurd’s wild blue eyes sparkled with pleasure.
“Do!” he cried. “You can go away, swiftly, swiftly, over the seas, and the Altenfjord need know you no more! Spread your white sails!” and he pointed excitedly up to the tall tapering masts of the Eulalie. “You are king here. Command and you are obeyed! Go from us, go! What is there here to delay you? Our mountains are dark and gloomy, — the fields are wild and desolate, — there are rocks, glaciers and shrieking torrents that hiss like serpents gliding into the sea! Oh, there must be fairer lands than this one, — lands where oceans and sky are like twin jewels set in one ring, — where there are sweet flowers and fruits and bright eyes to smile on you all day — yes! for you are as a god in your strength and beauty — no woman will be cruel to you! Ah! say you will go away!” and Sigurd’s face was transfigured into a sort of pained beauty as he made his appeal. “That is what I came to seek you for, — to ask you to set sail quickly and go, for why should you wish to destroy me? I have done you no harm as yet. Go! — and Odin himself shall follow your path with blessings!”
He paused, almost breathless with his own earnest pleading. Errington was silent. He considered the request a mere proof of the poor creature’s disorder. The very idea that Sigurd seemed to entertain of his doing him any harm, showed a reasonless terror and foreboding that was simply to be set down as caused by his unfortunate mental condition. To such an appeal there could be no satisfactory reply. To sail away from the Altenfjord and its now most fascinating attractions, because a madman asked him to do so, was a proposition impossible of acceptance, so Sir Philip said nothing. Sigurd, however, watching his face intently, saw, or thought he saw, a look of resolution in the Englishman’s clear, deep grey eyes, — and with the startling quickness common to many whose brains, like musical instruments, are jarred, yet not quite unstrung, he grasped the meaning of that expression instantly.
“Ah! cruel and traitorous!” he exclaimed fiercely. “You will not go; you are resolved to tear my heart out for your sport! I have pleaded with you as one pleads with a king and all in vain — all in vain! You will not go? Listen, see what you will do,” and he held up the bunch of purple pansies, while his voice sank to an almost feeble faintness. “Look!” and he fingered the flowers, “look! . . . they are dark and soft as a purple sky, — cool and dewy and fresh; — they are the thoughts of Thelma; such thoughts! So wise and earnest, so pure and full of tender shadows! — no hand has grasped them rudely, no rough touch has spoiled their smoothness! They open full-faced to the sky, they never droop or languish; they have no secrets, save the marvel of their beauty. Now you have come, you will have no pity, — one by one you will gather and play with her thoughts as though they were these blossoms, — your burning hand will mar their color, — they will wither and furl up and die, all of them, — and you, — what will you care? Nothing! no man ever cares for a flower that is withered, — not even though his own hand slew it.”
The intense melancholy that vibrated through Sigurd’s voice touched his listener profoundly. Dimly he guessed that the stricken soul before him had formed the erroneous idea that he, Errington, had come to do some great wrong to Thelma or her belongings, and he pitied the poor creature for his foolish self-torture.
“Listen to me, Sigurd,” he said, with a certain imperativeness; “I cannot promise you to go away, but I can promise that I will do no harm to you or to — to — Thelma. Will that content you?”
Sigurd smiled vacantly and shook his head. He looked at the pansies wistfully and laid them down very gently on one of the deck benches.
“I must go,” he said in a faint voice:— “She is calling me.”
“Who is calling you?” demanded Errington astonished.
“She is,” persisted Sigurd, walking steadily to the gangway. “I can hear her! There are the roses to water, and the doves to feed, and many other things.” He looked steadily at Sir Philip, who, seeing he was bent on departure, assisted him to descend the companion ladder into his little boat. “You are sure you will not sail away?”
Errington balanced himself lightly on the ladder and smiled.
“I am sure, Sigurd! I have no wish to sail away. Are you all right there?”
He spoke cheerily, feeling in his own mind that it was scarcely safe for a madman to be quite alone in a cockle-s
hell of a boat on a deep Fjord, the shores of which were indented with dangerous rocks as sharp as the bristling teeth of fabled sea-monsters, but Sigurd answered him almost contemptuously.
“All right!” he echoed. “That is what the English say always. All right! As if it were ever wrong with me, and the sea! We know each other, — we do each other no harm. You may die on the sea, but I shall not! No, there is another way to Valhalla!”
“Oh, I dare say there are no end of ways,” said Errington good-temperedly, still poising himself on the ladder, and holding on to the side of his yacht, as he watched his late visitor take the oars and move off. “Good-bye, Sigurd! Take care of yourself! Hope I shall see you again soon.”
But Sigurd replied not. Bending to the oars, he rowed swiftly and strongly, and Sir Philip, pulling up the ladder and closing the gangway, saw the little skiff flying over the water like a bird in the direction of the Güldmar’s landing-place. He wondered again and again what relationship, if any, this half-crazed being bore to the bonde and his daughter. That he knew all about them was pretty evident; but how? Catching sight of the pansies left on the deck bench, Errington took them, and, descending to the saloon, set them on the table in a tumbler of water.
“Thelma’s thoughts, the poor little fellow called them,” he mused, with a smile. “A pretty fancy of his, and linked with the crazy imaginings of Ophelia too. ‘There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts,’ she said, but Sigurd’s idea is different; he believes they are Thelma’s own thoughts in flower. ‘No rough touch has spoiled their smoothness,’ he declared; he’s right there, I’m sure. And shall I ruffle the sweet leaves; shall I crush the tender petals? or shall I simply transform them, from pansies into roses, — from the dream of love, — into love itself?”
His eyes softened as he glanced at the drooping rose he wore, which Thelma herself had given him, and as he went to his sleeping cabin, he carefully detached it from his button-hole, and taking down a book, — one which he greatly prized, because it had belonged to his mother, — he prepared to press the flower within its leaves. It was the “Imitation of Christ,” bound quaintly and fastened with silver clasps, and as he was about to lay his fragrant trophy on the first page that opened naturally of itself, he glanced at the words that there presented themselves to his eyes.
“Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller or better in heaven or in earth!” And with a smile and a warmer flush of color than usual on his handsome face, he touched the rose lightly yet tenderly with his lips and shut it reverently within its sacred resting-place.
CHAPTER IX.
“Our manners are infinitely corrupted, and wonderfully incline to the worse; of our customs there are many barbarous and monstrous.”
MONTAIGNE.
The next day was very warm and bright, and that pious Lutheran divine, the Reverend Charles Dyceworthy, was seriously encumbered by his own surplus flesh material as he wearily rowed himself across the Fjord towards Olaf Güldmar’s private pier. As the perspiration bedewed his brow, he felt that Heaven had dealt with him somewhat too liberally in the way of fat — he was provided too amply with it ever to excel as an oarsman. The sun was burning hot, the water was smooth as oil, and very weighty — it seemed to resist every stroke of his clumsily wielded blades. Altogether it was hard, uncongenial work, — and, being rendered somewhat flabby and nerveless by his previous evening’s carouse with Macfarlane’s whisky, Mr. Dyceworthy was in a plaintive and injured frame of mind, he was bound on a mission — a holy and edifying errand, which would have elevated any minister of his particular sect. He had found a crucifix with the name of Thelma engraved thereon, — he was now about to return it to the evident rightful owner, and in returning it, he purposed denouncing it as an emblem of the “Scarlet Woman, that sitteth on the Seven Hills,” and threatening all those who dared to hold it sacred, as doomed to eternal torture, “where the worm dieth not.” He had thought over all he meant to say; he had planned several eloquent and rounded sentences, some of which he murmured placidly to himself as he propelled his slow boat along.
“Yea!” he observed in a mild sotto-voce— “ye shall be cut off root and branch! Ye shall be scorched even as stubble, — and utterly destroyed.” Here he paused and mopped his streaming forehead with his clean perfumed handkerchief. “Yea!” he resumed peacefully, “the worshippers of idolatrous images are accursèd; they shall have ashes for food and gall for drink! Let them turn and repent themselves, lest the wrath of God consume them as straw whirled on the wind. Repent! . . . or ye shall be cast into everlasting fire. Beauty shall avail not, learning shall avail not, meekness shall avail not; for the fire of hell is a searching, endless, destroying—” here Mr. Dyceworthy, by plunging one oar with too much determination into the watery depths, caught a crab, as the saying is, and fell violently backward in a somewhat undignified posture. Recovering himself slowly, he looked about him in a bewildered way, and for the first time noticed the vacant, solitary appearance of the Fjord. Some object was missing; he realized what it was immediately — the English yacht Eulalie was gone from her point of anchorage.
“Dear me!” said Mr. Dyceworthy, half aloud, “what a very sudden departure! I wonder, now, if those young men have gone for good, or whether they are coming back again? Pleasant fellows, very pleasant! flippant, perhaps, but pleasant.”
And he smiled benevolently. He had no remembrance of what had occurred, after he had emptied young Macfarlane’s flask of Glenlivet; he had no idea that he had been almost carried from his garden into his parlor, and there flung on the sofa and left to sleep off the effects of his strong tipple; least of all did he dream that he had betrayed any of his intentions towards Thelma Güldmar, or given his religious opinions with such free and undisguised candor. Blissfully ignorant on these points, he resumed his refractory oars, and after nearly an hour of laborious effort, succeeded at last in reaching his destination. Arrived at the little pier, he fastened up his boat, and with the lofty air of a thoroughly moral man, he walked deliberately up to the door of the bonde’s house. Contrary to custom, it was closed, and the place seemed strangely silent and deserted. The afternoon heat was so great that the song-birds were hushed, and in hiding under the cool green leaves, — the clambering roses round the porch hung down their bright heads for sheer faintness, — and the only sounds to be heard were the subdued coo-cooing of the doves on the roof and the soft trickling rush of a little mountain stream that flowed through the grounds. Some what surprised, though not abashed, at the evident “not-at-home” look of the farm-house, Mr. Dyceworthy rapped loudly at the rough oaken door with his knuckles, there being no such modern convenience as a bell or a knocker. He waited sometime before he was answered, repeating his summons violently at frequent intervals, and swearing irreligiously under his breath as he did so. But at last the door was flung sharply open, and the tangle-haired, rosy-cheeked Britta confronted him with an aspect which was by no means encouraging or polite. Her round blue eyes sparkled saucily, and she placed her bare, plump, red arms, wet with recent soapsuds, akimbo on her sturdy little hips, with an air that was decidedly impertinent.
“Well, what do you want?” she demanded with rude abruptness.
Mr. Dyceworthy regarded her in speechless dignity. Vouchsafing no reply, he attempted to pass her and enter the house. But Britta settled her arms more defiantly than ever, and her voice had a sharper ring as she said —
“It’s no use your coming in! There’s no one here but me. The master has gone out for the day.”
“Young woman,” returned Mr. Dyceworthy with polite severity, “I regret to see that your manners stand in sore need of improvement. Your master’s absence is of no importance to me. It is with the Fröken Thelma I desire to speak.”
Britta laughed and tossed her rough brown curls back from her forehead. Mischievous dimples came and went at the corners of her mouth — indications of suppressed fun.
“Th
e Fröken is out too,” she said demurely. “It’s time she had a little amusement; and the gentlemen treat her as if she were a queen!”
Mr. Dyceworthy started, and his red visage became a trifle paler.
“Gentlemen? What gentlemen?” he demanded with some impatience.
Britta’s inward delight evidently increased.
“The gentlemen from the yacht, of course,” she said. “What other gentlemen are there?” This with a contemptuous up-and-down sort of look at the Lutheran minister’s portly form. “Sir Philip Errington was here with his friend yesterday evening and stayed a long time — and today a fine boat with four oars came to fetch the master and Fröken Thelma, and they are all gone for a sail to the Kaa Fjord or some other place near here — I cannot remember the name. And I am SO glad!” went on Britta, clasping her plump hands in ecstasy. “They are the grandest, handsomest Herren I have ever seen, and one can tell they think wonders of the Fröken — nothing is too good for her!”
Mr. Dyceworthy’s face was the picture of dismay. This was a new turn to the course of events, and one, more over, that he had never once contemplated. Britta watched him amusedly.
“Will you leave any message for them when they return?” she asked.
“No,” said the minister dubiously. “Yet, stay; yes! I will! Tell the Fröken that I have found something which belongs to her, and that when she wishes to have it, I will myself bring it.”
Britta looked cross. “If it is hers you have no business to keep it,” she said brusquely. “Why not leave it, — whatever it is, — with me?”
Mr. Dyceworthy regarded her with a bland and lofty air.
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 84