by Jonas Lie
Marie Forstberg’s attention had very soon been attracted to Elizabeth; and knowing her history, she tried very often to help her, and put her in the right way of doing things. At first she found her rather short and unapproachable, and could get nothing but “yes” or “no” from her; and there was something almost offensive in the brusque way in which she would turn with an impatient flush from her mentor when she sometimes didn’t understand what was meant, and would do the thing in her own way. She wouldn’t see at first the various little good turns which the other did her in her quiet, considerate way; but they were acknowledged at last with a look that made amends for all her former obtuseness; and in spite of their different natures and unequal social position, these two women soon came to feel, if not exactly drawn to one another, mutually interested in each other. At the same time, as Elizabeth was not blind to the diplomacy of the house, she had soon perceived that of all the young ladies who came there, Marie Forstberg was the one who had the best chance, and who indeed best deserved to be the young lieutenant’s bride; and although she tried to believe that she was merely a resigned looker-on herself, she seemed to feel every Sunday, when Marie Forstberg came, that a certain disagreeable impression had grown up in her mind about her during the week which it took some time to thaw. When it did thaw, however, which in time it always did, she would feel attracted to her with redoubled warmth; and though their conversation might be ostensibly occupied only with such subjects as laying the table or dishing the dinner, she would contrive to introduce into it anything and everything concerning the lieutenant which she thought might interest or recommend him to her friend. Marie Forstberg couldn’t help sometimes fixing her clear blue eyes searchingly upon her, to ascertain if there was not some object underlying this communicativeness; but Elizabeth would look so unconscious, as she stood there with her sleeves tucked up, busy with her work, that she dismissed the idea from her mind.
In this country life, although without a moment to call her own, Elizabeth felt freer at all events than she had done in the town; and she had made such rapid progress under Madam Beck’s tuition, that the latter’s supervision was in many things no longer required. One part in particular, the one which she might have been expected to find the most difficult of all—that of parlour-maid—she filled to perfection; and her upright figure and expressive face attracted many an admiring glance on Sundays, when in her becoming striped chintz dress and white apron, and with her luxuriant hair turned up in the simplest manner, she carried the tea or coffee things out to the guests in the summer-house. She could feel that Carl Beck’s eyes were never off her as long as she was in sight, and she seemed to know that it was she whom his eye wandered in search of first whenever he came home. In a hundred small ways he made her conscious of the interest which he felt in her; and whenever there was a commission to be particularly remembered, he never gave it to his sisters alone, but to her also.
His pretty pleasure-boat—a long, light, sharp-built yawl, with a red stripe along its black side, and two sloping masts—which he had lately had built, lay often the whole week through moored in the bay under the house. He was very particular about the boat, and during his absence it was to Elizabeth’s sole care that she was intrusted. There was always something or other to be looked after; and when he came home he would generally subject her, in a jokingly harsh tone, to an examination, which he called holding a summary court-martial.
Sometimes on Saturdays he would come up the path waving in his hand a letter covered with post-marks. It would be from his father to his stepmother; and Madam Beck would generally read it by herself first, and then it would be read aloud, Elizabeth listening with strained attention—she was always so afraid that there might be something bad about Salvé.
One Sunday she remarked that Carl wore in the buttonhole of his uniform a wild flower which she had thrown away. It might have been the purest accident; but she knew that he had seen her with it in her hand. The same day they had wild strawberries at dinner, and there were no strangers, and he broke out all in a moment, “Yes, I’d sooner ten thousand times have wild strawberries than garden ones. They have quite another taste and smell.”
It was a natural remark for any one to make. But she thought he had looked with peculiar earnestness at her as he made it, and afterwards he had fixed his eyes upon his plate for a long while without raising them. She felt that the remark had been meant for her, and altogether that day there was something about him that made her uneasy—he gazed at her so often.
Madame Beck happened to have just then a long list of household necessaries required from Arendal, and Carl said that if some one would go with him in the boat the next morning to help him with the parcels, he would execute her commissions himself. When Madame Beck suggested Elizabeth he eagerly assented; but the colour rushed into Elizabeth’s cheeks, and with an angry toss of her head, which she didn’t make any attempt to conceal, she left the room.
As he was standing alone outside some little time after, she came up to him, and said, looking him straight in the face—
“I don’t go into Arendal with you, Herr Beck.”
“No?—and why not, Elizabeth?” he asked, with affected indifference, and trying to meet her look.
“I don’t go,” she repeated, her voice trembling with pride and anger—“that is all I have to say;” and she turned from him, and left him gazing after her, partly in confusion, and partly in admiration of the magnificently proud way in which she crossed the turf to the house again.
The expedition was given up; and in spite of Carl’s finesse, it came out inadvertently that it was on account of Elizabeth having refused to go alone in the boat with him, which Madam Beck found very commendable on her part. Indeed she ought to have known herself, she said, that it was scarcely proper; but at the same time, she was decidedly of opinion that the more becoming course for Elizabeth would have been to speak to her mistress first.
CHAPTER XI
The house in the town was undergoing repairs this year, which kept the family out in the country until rather late in the autumn. But the glorious September days prolonged the summer, and they could still sit out on the steps in the evening and enjoy the beauty and the sentiment of the season, and the rich variety of the autumn tints reflected on the still waters of the Sound.
The members of Carl’s commission, with their president, were invited out there one day, and it was made a great occasion, all the resources of the house being brought into requisition to do them honour.
Carl, although the youngest member of the Commission, and really only included in it to make up the required number, had been fortunate enough to distinguish himself upon it; and his sisters even thought that there might be a question of an order for him—that distinction so coveted in Norway—if they made love sufficiently to the president. Carl professed to be quite superior to a mere external decoration of the kind, though longing for it in his heart; and Marie Forstberg, whom he had not taken into his confidence in the matter, was highly indignant with his sisters for supposing that it should depend upon the president, and not upon Carl’s own merit, whether he received it or not. Mina, however, had declared, with a great air of knowledge of the world, that people couldn’t trust to merit alone, and that, besides (and here she had laid her hand flatteringly on her friend’s shoulder), they were not all so strict and high-principled as Marie Forstberg; and so she paid her court to the president accordingly.
In the evening, when the gentlemen were sitting together out in the wood, and Elizabeth came out to them with a fresh supply of hot water for their toddy, the said president thought proper to make a joke that brought the colour to her cheeks. She made no reply, but the water-jug trembled in her hands as she put it down, and as she did so she gave the speaker such a look that for a moment he felt cowed.
“’Sdeath, Beck!” he broke out, “did you see the look she gave me?”
; “She is a proud girl,” said Carl, who was highly incensed, but who had his reasons for restraining himself before his superior.
“A proud girl indeed!” returned the other, in a tone which implied very clearly that in his opinion impudent hussy would have been the more correct description.
“A good-looking girl, I mean,” said Carl, evasively, by way of correction, and laughed constrainedly.
Elizabeth had heard what he said. She was hurt, and for the first time instituted a comparison between him and Salvé. If Salvé had been in his place, he would not have got out of it in that way.
Later on in the evening Carl met her alone, as she was putting things to rights out on the steps after the departed guests, and he said half-anxiously—
“I hope you didn’t mind what that blustering old brute said, Elizabeth. He is a very good fellow really, and doesn’t mean anything by his nonsense.”
Elizabeth was silent, and tried to avoid answering by going in with what she had in her hands.
“Come, I won’t stand your being offended, Elizabeth,” he broke out suddenly, firing up in a moment, and trying to catch her by the arm. “That hand you work with is dearer to me than the hands of all the fine ladies put together.”
“Herr Beck!” she exclaimed wildly, and with tears in her eyes, “I leave this house—this very night—if you say a word more.”
She disappeared into the hall, but he followed her.
“Elizabeth,” he whispered, “I mean it in earnest.” She tore herself hastily from him, and went into the kitchen, where his sisters were talking together over the fire.
Carl went out for a solitary walk over the island in the glorious starlight night, and didn’t come in till past midnight.
He had not meant what he said quite so decidedly in earnest; but now after seeing her standing before him so wondrously beautiful, with tears in her eyes—now he meant it in real earnest. He was prepared to engage himself, if necessary, in spite of every consideration.
The next morning he left in his boat for Arendal, having whispered to her, however, in passing, before he left, “I mean it in earnest.”
The repetition of these words threw Elizabeth into dire perplexity. She had lain and thought over them the night before, and had thrust them from her with indignation, for they could mean nothing else than that he had brought himself to dare to tell her that he had conceived a passion for her, and she had quite determined to execute her threat and leave the house.
But now, repeated in this tone!
Did he really mean to ask for her hand and heart—to ask her to be his—an officer’s wife? There lay before her fancy a glittering expanse of earlier dreams that almost made her giddy; and the whole week she was absent and pale, thinking anxiously of Sunday, when he was to return. What would he say then?
And—what should she answer?
He didn’t come, however, his duties having required him to make another journey that he had not reckoned upon.
On the other hand Marie Forstberg did appear, and felt at once that some change or other must have come over Elizabeth, as she pointedly declined all assistance from her; and in the look which Marie Forstberg intercepted by chance, there was something even hard and unfriendly. She laid her hand once gently upon Elizabeth’s shoulder, but it produced, apparently, absolutely no impression—she might as well have caressed a piece of wood; and when she returned to the sitting-room again, she couldn’t help asking, “What has happened to Elizabeth?” But the others had not observed anything unusual.
Carl Beck, contrary to his custom, came not on the following Saturday, but before it, in the middle of the week; and he strode with hasty steps through the rooms when he didn’t see Elizabeth.
He found her at last up-stairs. She was standing gazing out of the window on the landing, out of which all that was to be seen was the wooded slope of the hill and the sky above it. She heard his step—she knew that he was coming up-stairs—and felt a sudden indefinable sense of apprehension—a sort of panic almost—as if she could have jumped out of the window. What should she answer?
When he came and put his arm round her waist, and asked in a low voice, “Elizabeth, will you be mine?” she felt, for the first time in her life, on the point of fainting. She hardly knew what she did, but pushed him involuntarily away from her.
He seized her hand afresh, and asked, “Elizabeth, will you be my wife?”
She was very pale, as she answered—“Yes!”
But when he wanted again to take her by the waist, she sprang suddenly back, and looked at him with an expression of terror.
“Elizabeth!” he said, tenderly, and tried again to approach her, “what is the matter with you? If you only knew how I have longed for this moment.”
“Not now—no more now!” she pleaded, holding out her hand to him. “Another time.”
“But you say ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth—that you are my—?” But he felt that she wanted him to go now.
After he had gone, she sat there on a box for a long time in silence, gazing straight before her.
So it had actually come to pass! Her heart beat so that she could hear it herself, and she seemed to feel a dull pain there. Her face, little by little, acquired a fixed, cold expression: she was thinking that he was then telling his stepmother of their engagement, and fortifying himself for her reception of the announcement.
She expected to be called down. But no summons came; and at last she decided to go without being called.
In the sitting-room they were all quietly intent upon their several occupations. Carl was pretending to read a book; but he threw her a stolen, tenderly anxious look over the top of it when she entered.
Supper was brought in, and everything went on as quietly as usual, even to his customary banter. To Elizabeth it seemed as if there was a mist over them all; and when Mina once asked if there was anything the matter with her, she could only answer mechanically, ‘No.’ The question was repeated later on, and received the same answer. She brought the supper things in and took them out, as usual, and it seemed as if she could not feel the floor under her feet, or what she carried in her hand.
The evening passed, and they went to bed without anything happening. But in the partial darkness of the stair-landing, he seized her hand passionately, and said—“Good-night, my Elizabeth, my—my Elizabeth!”
She was not in a condition to return the pressure of his hand, and when he approached his lips to her forehead, she hastily drew herself away.
“I came out here alone to tell you this, dear, dearest Elizabeth,” he whispered, with passion trembling in his voice, and making an effort to draw her to him. “I must be on land again tomorrow. Must I go without one sign that you care for me?”
She bent her forehead slowly towards him, and he kissed it, and she then immediately left him.
“Good-night, my beloved one!” he whispered after her.
Elizabeth lay for a long while awake. She would have given anything to have been able to cry, but the tears would not come; and she felt as if she was freezing internally. When at last she did fall asleep, it was not of him she dreamt, but of Salvé—the whole time of Salvé. She saw him gazing at her with that earnest face—it was so heavy with grief, and she stood like a criminal before him. He said something that she could not hear, but she understood that he condemned her, and that he had thrown the dress overboard.
She rose early, and tried to occupy her thoughts with other dreams—with her future as an officer’s lady. But it was as if all that had before seemed to be pure gold was now changed to brass. She felt unhappy and restless; and it was a long time before she could make up her mind to go into the sitting-room.
Carl Beck did not leave that morning. He had perceived that there was something on Elizabeth’s mind.
During the forenoon, when his siste
rs were out, and his stepmother was occupied, he found an opportunity to speak with her alone: she was in a fever, always waiting for him to have spoken to Madam Beck.
“Elizabeth,” he said, gently smoothing her hair, for she looked dispirited, and stood with her eyes fixed upon the ground, “I couldn’t leave without having spoken to you again.”
She still kept her eyes upon the ground, but didn’t withdraw herself from his hand.
“Do you really care for me?—will you be my wife?”
She was silent. At last she said, a shade paler, and as if with an effort—
“Yes—Herr Beck.”
“Say ‘du’ to me—say Carl,” he pleaded, with much feeling, “and—look at me.”
She looked at him, but not as he had expected. It was with a fixed, cold look she said—
“Yes, if we are engaged.”
“Are we not then?”
“When is your stepmother to know it?” she asked, rather dragging the words out one after the other.
“Dear Elizabeth! These people at home here must notice nothing for—for three months, when I shall be—” But he caught an expression now in her face, and something in the abrupt way in which she drew her hand from him, that made him keep back what he had originally intended to say, and he corrected it hastily.
“Next week, then, I’ll write from Arendal and tell my father, and then let my stepmother know what I have written. Are you offended, Elizabeth—dear Elizabeth? or shall I do it at once?” he broke out resolutely, and seized her hand again.
“No, no—not now! next week—let it not be till next week,” she cried, in sudden apprehension, returning the pressure of his hand at the same time almost entreatingly—it was the first he had had from her.
“And then you are mine, Elizabeth?”
“Yes, then”—she tried to avoid meeting his eye.