Frances Mary Peard

“ Every one is attracted by the furs, the carvings, the silver buttons, the soft eider rugs with their beautiful green duck-breast borderings. In the sweet summer dusk it is pleasant to stroll about the little town, buy cherries from the men who bring their baskets of ripe fruit, and turn into this store of Norwegian handiwork. It is more enchanting to go to the front of the hotel, where the fjord runs up between snow-flecked hills, and ends. Grave evening purples steal over the land; in the sky, and reflected in the faithful waters, daffodil and primrose tints melt into each other. ”

“ His had passed when, sooner than carry out an engagement, she had broken away abruptly, and faced the talk and jibes of her world by venturing on a course for which blame was the more unsparingly heaped on her because it was inexplicable. Hugh was young, handsome, ardent. Until this moment Wareham had fancied him the very man to catch the fancy of a woman, and it was only since Anne had lifted the curtain which friendship held tight, that he could admit that possible something—was it the power of boring?—which had driven her from him. ”

“ Lord Milborough might love, but women such as Anne do not invariably carry out what the worlds judgment insists must be their action; the Anne he believed himself to have discovered was too complex to be counted upon. His heart wandered in meadows where hope sprang and budded, for if she held a thought of him, she would not be unfaithful to it, and in a few weeks’ time his lips would be unsealed. Free to love her—free to woo. Wareham’s blood leapt at the thought! ”

“ Barring Hugh, what others thought mattered nothing; it was himself he arraigned with the reluctance of a strong character. He answered briefly yes and no, happily sufficient for his companion, who was content to talk.
The storm had vanished, leaving an added beauty, on either side a land flashing light from raindrops on which the sun shone brilliantly, a land of bold heights, leaping torrents, and sweet recesses of bedded moss, out of which peeped wild strawberries and a hundred delicate flowers, while far up against the soft blue of the sky gleamed the unbroken whiteness of the snows. ”

“ It was Anne who made the ventures, Anne who held aside hindering branches, Anne whose voice came laughing back to vow that the labyrinth grew more tangled, Anne who at last dropped by the side of a baby stream babbling over its stones, and bade Millie rest. She could not say enough of the fascinations of the spot.
“They will come back boasting of their fall with the hopeless name, only because it is big. What has size to do with beauty? This thing is perfect. Look at its curves, and its swirls, and its pools, and its grasses, and its small airs!” ”

“ Mr Wareham, you are a conjuror!”
“May the conjuring land you finally and safely at Balholm!”
“After which!” She laughed again.
Silence fell on them once more. One man was scooping up the water in the tin mug; it gurgled under his hand, and the splash of throwing it over followed. The fjord, in the clear semi-darkness, stretched into infinite distances, a wisp of cloud sailed slowly overhead, a pettish breeze blew chilly against Anne’s cheek. She called across to Wareham—“There is a little wind. Can’t we sail?”
“These fjords are treacherous. I dare not. You are not cold?” ”

“ Lady Fanny drew her own conclusions, and they were favourable. For a man to stay in London for the sake of dining with three women, she felt, spoke volumes. Her own experience in signs was so much more extensive than that of either Mrs Ravenhill or Millie, that she looked on them from heights as a professor would look at a tyro, and smiled at the mothers unconsciousness, and at Millie’s—to her—evident perturbation. ”

“ Wareham suggested their walking round the island until the pipes had been smoked. She hesitated, finally agreed.
They scrambled round to the western side, a filmy glory spread over the heavens, interrupted only by the swoop of a grey vapourish cloud. As it had been all along, what the waters saw they gave back again, so that the golden suffusion reached to their very feet. The near reflections were now dark.
“To live here alone! Can you conceive it?” Anne exclaimed.
“Not for one of us; but with so thin a population, solitude probably is second nature.” ”

“ There is something, I am certain there is something! At another time I should write and ask him,” cried Lady Fanny. “Now, where is Mr Wareham?”
His movements were not recorded.
“Not there, at any rate. Millie, I told you you were a goose. But I have no patience with Miss Dalrymple! That poor man just dead, and here she is, amusing herself. Oh, yes, that explains! I know Milborough. But how can she turn from one to the other? Tell me quickly, Millie, is she the girl to marry him just for the position? Because—a marriage without love—I never before knew how horrible it must be! ”

“ Such forlorn habitations only deepen the brooding solitude, by forcing on the imagination dreams of these alone, self-dependent lives, but for the call of the steamer as alone as though they were a knot of sailors shipwrecked on a desert shore.
Wareham, for whom they had a strange attraction, watched them from the forepart of the vessel. While he was there, Colonel Martyn joined him. He was a tall sad-looking man, with a mountainous nose, devoted to sport, and hating society. He grumbled a disconsolate question. ”

“ Great wet rocks, shining metallic, stood erect in the midst of racing waters, waving grasses caught in the eddies were washed relentlessly, never a pause allowed in which to straighten themselves, and over the magnificent turmoil a rainbow arched serenely. Young Grey sprang into perilous places; Millie gathered trails of the delicate Linnaea Borealis, slender northerner which the great botanist chose for his own; Mrs Ravenhill and Wareham strolled down to the carriages, and leaving the Lotefos behind by a road which soon began to edge itself along a lake, they drove on to Odde. ”

“ Do they speak? Do they fight? Human nature could not allow them to be friendly!”
“Oh, I’m not so sure,” said Mrs Ravenhill; “you forget the strength of nature here, and that the human part of them would have to combine against snow and darkness and solitude. Once we are gone, I dare say they are good friends together.”
As they were carried along over the green waters of the Suldal lake, it seemed to some of those who were looking, as though they were entering a solemn and enchanted region.
The sun, which blazed upon the great granite hills, could not rob them of their supreme gravity. ”

“ Wareham went up the Naerodal alone in the afternoon, but in the dusk all three again strolled together. Clear golden lights swept along sky and fjord; long shadows trembled in the water; two or three ponies scrambled like goats among heaped-up boulders, and the goats themselves, perched on inaccessible heights, sent down faint argumentative bleatings in response to the wild cry with which a girl was coaxing them.
What land is this, in which we have all once wandered? A land of shadows and sweet lights, touching everything with mysterious charm. ”

“ He dropped the bitter-sweet topic, and talked of Bakke and the curve of the fjord behind it, promontory overlapping promontory, every light, shadow, and colour reflected in the water. An ugly little church stood near the brink, round it nestled the living and the waiting dead, a few flower-roofed cottages, more black crosses. They stood and looked over the paling; grass waved upon the graves, the same flowery sorrel-tinted grass as scented the air; two or three children were in a boat, the oars splashed, otherwise not a sound broke the silence. Millie’s spirits rose. ”

“ I am not sure that a will is ever a just thing. The dead, should they control the living?” She was unconscious how closely Wareham’s thoughts flew with hers. He said—
“They must, while men have hearts. Made as we are, it is impossible to refuse what the dying ask.”
“What they ask?” repeated Anne, lifting her eyebrows. “I was talking of what they command. The most undecided of men becomes an irrevocable force by the mere act of dying.”
“There are other forces besides that of law,” Wareham persisted. “A wish may bind as tightly as a will.” ”

“ Mrs Ravenhill was more quickly reconciled than Millie.
“If she respects him, I have no fear; and what else can have attracted her? I hope he does not think of her fortune, but I should not suspect him.”
“No, no! But a man that she laughs at!”
“It is her revenge on her own heart. I can hardly fancy Milborough approving, still—in a year she will be her own mistress. And, after all, Millie, we may have gone too far. It may be no more than girlish enthusiasm. You know, as well as I, how quickly Fanny is stirred by what she admires, and, poor child, Thorpe has not too much of that! ”

“ She had suddenly caught her mother’s simple power of enjoyment, and Wareham owned that her quick intuition gave originality to the commonplace.
By the time the harbour was reached, lights were golden, colour ran riot in the sky. There was too much ripple on the water for reflections, but the green boats bobbed gaily up and down; while far away the mountains lay faintly blue against the eastern sky, out of which light paled. Beyond the streets are public gardens, the houses are left behind, and the wide water-mouth stretches broadly. ”

“ They were near the landing-place at Balholm, and fronted by the mountain with the strange cleft in its snowy summit. Mountain, field, the few red-roofed houses, the outstanding pier, were bathed in the glory of the sun, now hastening upwards. One or two figures stood looking at the oncoming boat.
Wareham flung a glance over his shoulder.
“They are expecting us,” he said, “you see.”
A shout came to them across the water—another. A thought startled him, he looked eagerly at Anne. She had her eyes fixed on the shore, some agitation had crept into them, and for a minute she did not speak. ”

“ So, on the next day, Wareham turned his back on Firleigh. For ever, he told himself, though Mrs Forbes had expressed a gracious hope that they might often see him, and was contentedly unconscious that he went away raging at her, and comparing her to a tremolo stop, to the scrapings of slate-pencils, and to many other sources of irritation; calling her, to himself, the trumpet of deterioration, that belittling woman! ”

“ When the day arrived it was blustering and wet: Ella and he walked to church under drenched trees, and she wondered whether Miss Dalrymple would be there. Wareham could not doubt it. Nature would draw her to look at a grave. He felt it. He had a curious desire, too, for her to see the lines of old Forbes’ linking past centuries to present, from whom Hugh drew his brave blood. The Oakwood estates doubled, trebled the Firleigh ones, but Oakwood was a mushroom compared to Firleigh, and Lord Oakleigh’s a new title, while the other belonged to the soil. ”

“ He depreciated her beauty; who cares for half-shut eyes? He was not sure that Millie Ravenhill was not prettier; at any rate, he was certain that she was more attractive.
When conclusions stand up before us in such mighty good order, the chances are that we have always kept them ready made. This did not strike Wareham, sifter of causes though he might be; he set them down to acuteness of observation, and credited them with impartiality. It vexed him the more to be thrust by circumstances into a sort of companionship with Miss Dalrymple, whom of all women he would have avoided. ”

“ Admiration rushes easily after vast outlines, and these are lacking, for in Norway the mountains are of no great height, and when you are among them the lower masses block out the summits. Subtler charm lies in the variety, the infinite multitude of tints and shadings with which the sun is always painting hill and sky, the colours which the granite yields to its radiant touch, so that on these summer evenings the barest piece of rock is a wonder of soft and rich colouring. ”

“ The best friend in the world cannot adopt the misfortunes of his friend as though they were his own, least of all, as Wareham reflected, with a half-laugh, when they are the misfortunes of love. As Dick Wareham with Hugh Forbes opposite to him—seen through a cloud of smoke, and the mist of years—sympathy bound him to denunciation of the woman who had ruined Hugh’s happiness ”