The Pilot and his Wife Part 26

He spoke gently, and as though he had no desire to press the charge, but merely waited to hear her make a full acknowledgment before he forgave her. She stood, however, without raising her eyes from the ground, her face pale, and her bosom heaving.

"And yet how I have loved you, Elizabeth!--more dearly than my life," he added.

She still remained for a moment silent, and had to summon all her courage now to speak. At last she said, in a rather strained voice, and without lifting her eyes--

"I hear you say it, Salve. But I have been thinking a good deal lately."

"You have been thinking, Elizabeth?" he repeated, "what have you been thinking?" and his expression changed in a moment to the dark, stern one she knew so well. He had made his advance; further he would not go.

"Am I right, or am I not?" he asked, sharply.

"No, Salve, you are not right," she replied, turning to him now with a look that seemed fired by all she had endured; "you are not right. It is yourself, and yourself only, you have loved all along; and when you took me as your wife, you merely took another to help you. There were two about it then, and even so it was not enough. No! no!" she cried, striking out her hand with an emphatic gesture in the bitterness of her feeling--"if you had loved me as I have loved you, we would not be standing before one another as we are this day!"

He was taken aback for a moment by this unexpected outburst, but replied in a cold hard voice, while his eyes never moved from her face, "I thank you, Elizabeth, for having at last told me your thoughts, though it comes a little late. You see I was right when I said that you had not been frank towards me."

"I have not been frank with you, you say? Yes, that is true," she rejoined, while her eye met his unflinchingly. "And it is to my honour.

I have submitted to be an object of suspicion in my own house. I have shut my eyes and persisted in believing that you cared for me, in spite of the heavier burden which you were every day imposing upon me--in spite of all that I have had to endure--and it has been much, very much, Salve,--and I have done all this because I believed it was my duty, and because I thought you could not bear to hear the truth, and because I hoped that I might conquer in the end, and make you really love me as I have all along, and but too well, loved you, Salve. It is true that I have not been frank with you. And, I repeat, it is to my honour."

This interpretation of their relations together was not one which he chose to accept, and he rejoined in the same hard tone as before--

"However cleverly you may have tried to conceal it, Elizabeth, it has always been but too evident to me what you have endured in trying to accommodate yourself to the humble circ.u.mstances of a man like me. I know as well as you that a common seaman was little suited to be your husband--I have always known it from the time we were first engaged, when we stood before Van Spyck's portrait in Amsterdam. That was the sort of man, I knew very well, whom you ought to have had for a husband.

I saw it again, as I have seen it always, when you made comparisons between the North Star and my poor brig--"

"Salve!" she exclaimed, pa.s.sionately, unable to control herself any longer--"what rubbish are you talking? Do you not know perfectly well that if you had been an admiral itself you never would have been greater in my eyes than you are now, and always have been as a simple pilot? And pray, whom was I thinking of when I was looking at Van Spyck? why, of whom but of you?--thinking that the man called Salve Kristiansen, who stood behind me, was just the one to have done what Van Spyck did. Or when I was admiring the North Star was I not thinking then too: If you, Salve, were in command of her, they would see what she could really do with a proper man on board? What possible interest do you suppose I could have in the North Star, except in connection with you? Were not you, poor skipper of the Apollo, worth more, a thousand times more to me, than a hundred North Stars with all their bravery?"

When she spoke like this it was impossible not to believe every single word of what she said, and Salve's expression while she had been speaking had gradually changed to one of inexpressible happiness. So it was really he, and he alone, who had been the hero of her life! and he stretched out his arms to her, as though, like Alcibiades of old, he would end the discussion by clasping her to his heart and carrying her straight off with him to his home. But he was arrested by the deep repelling seriousness with which she continued--

"No, Salve!--it is not which that stands between us, however ingeniously you may have discovered it--it is not that,--it is something else. It is that you don't trust me in your heart; that is the truth--and that has been the real source of all these morbid ideas you have formed.

"And look you," she went on, with wild anguish in her voice, "we shall never get on together as long as you encourage the faintest suspicion of such thoughts; we shall never have peace beside our hearth--that peace that I have been striving for all these years, when I have been submitting, as I did, to everything--in a way that you know well, Salve, was very far from natural to me," and as she said this she looked with a magnificent air at him; "and if you cannot yet understand that--may G.o.d help you--and us!" she ended in despair, and turning half away again to the fire, stared dejectedly into it.

He stood before her half-averted form as if he had been paralysed, and scarcely dared to look up at her, with such truth had all that she had said come home to him. She had held a mirror up to their life together, and he saw himself in it so utterly selfish and so small by the side of all this love. He was profoundly pained and humbled, and was too naturally truthful to wish not to acknowledge it.

He went absently to the window and stood there for a moment.

"Elizabeth," he said then, despondently, turning round, "you still must know in your heart that you have been everything in this world to me.

But I know where my great fault to you has been, and I'll tell it you now, fully and freely, even if you must despise me for it. Yes, Elizabeth, it is true I have never been able to feel absolutely certain that I had full possession of your heart--though, G.o.d be praised, you have taught me differently to-day--since that time,"--it evidently cost him a struggle to go on with the humiliating confession--"since that business between you and the lieutenant. That has been the thorn in my flesh," he said, gently, as if opening his inmost heart to her, "which I have not been able to get rid of, in spite of my better reason. And I don't know but what it may still be there. There lies my weakness--I tell it you plainly and honestly; but at the same time I can't give you up, Elizabeth.

"I have always seen," he continued, "that the proper husband for you would have been a man who was something in the world--such a one as he, and not a man of no position like me. In my pride I never could bear the thought--and it is that that has made me so full of rancour against all the world, and so suspicious and bad towards you. I have not been strong enough--not like you--but I can truly say I have struggled with my weakness, Elizabeth," he said, pale with intensity of feeling, and laying both his hands on her shoulders, and looking into her face.

She felt that his arms were trembling, and her eyes filled with tears--it went to her heart to see him like this. All at once on a sudden thought she withdrew herself from his hands and went into the little room adjoining the one they were in, and opened a drawer there.

She came out with the old note in her hand and held it out to him--

"That is the letter I wrote to the lieutenant the night I left the Becks'."

He looked at her a little wonderingly.

"Fru Beck gave it to me," she said. "Read it, Salve."

He looked at the large clumsy writing and spelt out--

"Forgive me that I cannot be your wife, for my heart is given to another.--Elizabeth Raklev."

He sat down on the bench and read it over again, while she bent over him, looking now at the writing, and now at his face.

"What do you find there, Salve?" she asked. "Why could I not be Beck's wife?"

"'Because my heart is given to another,'" he answered, slowly, and looking up at her with moistened eyes.

"Not yours; it is I who loved another. And who was that other?"

"G.o.d bless you--it was me!" he said, and drew her down upon his knee into a long, long embrace.

The boys had become tired of waiting down at the boat, the "bagman"

especially, since it was clearly past dinner-time; the bell had rung over at the dry-dock, and the town boys had already pa.s.sed from school.

His white head and heated face appeared now at the kitchen-door, and with scarcely a glance over to where his father and mother were sitting on the bench together looking very happy, he turned at once to the hearth and became aware of the sad fact that there was positively no porridge to be seen; there was not even a fire. Coming bodily into the room, he asked, with tears in his voice--

"Have you had dinner? Are Gjert and I not to have any, then?"

His mother sprang up. "And aunt!" she exclaimed. "I declare it is half-past one, and no dinner put down!" Henrik was glad to find that the worst danger was over.

Mother Kirstine had conjectured that there must be something particular going on between the pair in the kitchen, and that was the reason she had not called Elizabeth. When the latter now came in, she looked at her inquiringly, and asked if anything had happened.

"The happiest thing of my whole life, aunt," said Elizabeth, coming over to the bed and embracing her impetuously. She hurried back then to her business in the kitchen.

The old woman looked after her, and nodded her head a couple of times slowly, thoughtfully. "No--so?"

"He is joking with little Henrik," she said then to herself. "That is wonderful: I have never heard him laugh before."

When they went to dinner in the kitchen Salve left them--he was not hungry--and came in to her. He had a great deal to say, and was a long while away.

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

It was an afternoon in the following winter in the pilot's home. His wife was expecting him, and kept looking uneasily out of the window. He was to have been home by noon, and it was now beginning to get dark; and the weather had been stormy the whole of the previous day.

She gave up sewing, and sat thinking in the twilight, with the light playing over the floor from the door of the stove, where a little kettle was boiling, that she might have something warm ready for him at once when he came. It was too early to light a candle.

Gjert was at school in Arendal, living at his aunt's; and Henrik was sitting by the light from the stove, cutting up a piece of wood into shavings.

"It is beginning to blow again, Henrik," she said, and put a handkerchief round her head to look out.

"It is no use, mother," he p.r.o.nounced, without stirring, and splitting a long peg into two against his chest; "it's pitch-dark, isn't it?" So she gave it up again before she got to the door, but stood and listened; she thought she had heard a shout outside.