Part 20 (1/2)
Turning to Salve then she said a little curtly, ”For the like of that we take no payment,” adding in a milder tone, ”We have two sons ourselves who ply to Norway--there's a bad coast there too.”
Salve was pale and worn out with over-exertion, and after taking a mouthful of food he lay down to rest. But he could not sleep, and towards morning he was lying awake listening to the dull booming of the distant sea. Elizabeth was tossing about feverishly and talking in her sleep. Her brain was evidently busy with the terrors of the previous night, and from occasional words it seemed as if he had a share in her thoughts. He lay and listened, though there was not much to be made out of her disjointed utterances. She grew more restless, and began to talk more excitedly--
”Never! never!” she said, vehemently; ”he shall never hear a word about the brig,” and she went on then in a confidential whisper--
”Shall he, Gjert? He shall find us in our berth, or else he will think we are afraid.”
Salve kissed her forehead tenderly, but with a sigh. There had been a motive then, after all, at the bottom of that display of confidence which had occasioned him such pangs of self-reproach.
A couple of hours after he was on the way down to the sea to look at the brig. The general aspect of the world about him was in harmony with his mood. The wind whistled over the dreary sand-hills, whirling the sand in clouds in among the downs that stretched away like a storm-tossed sea into the distance, in every variety of desolate and jagged outline. Upon the melancholy sh.o.r.e a sea-gull or two were circling round some old black stumps of wreck that protruded from the sand; while beyond lay the dismal expanse of the western sea, without a sail upon its leaden waste of waters, so shunned by all. Dreariness, wreck, and desolation were on every side; and it seemed to Salve that it was only a reflection of his own life. He had got to be the owner of a brig, and there it lay, what remained of it, buried in the sand. He had succeeded in making Elizabeth his own, but had he thereby added anything to the happiness of his life?
He stood gazing at the remains of his brig, over which the yellow waves were breaking, in a state of gloomy abstraction, from which he was only aroused by the approach of Ib Mathisen and a party of his own crew, who had followed him to the sh.o.r.e to see if possibly they might retrieve some of their property. He joined them in the search, and with but small result; three s.h.i.+p chests and the compa.s.s being all the reward of an hour's labour among the timber-ends and bolts and pieces of rigging that strewed the beach, or made ripples in the sand for a long distance in either direction.
They remained that day in the fis.h.i.+ng hamlet; and when Salve had made his declaration before the authorities, and had paid the crew what he owed them with the greater part of the money he had saved, he and Elizabeth took pa.s.sage for Christiansand in a corn s.h.i.+p from Harboere.
He was very silent on the way, thinking about his future; and the prospect was not a bright one: he knew that there prevailed but one opinion among the crew about the loss of the brig, that he had his own folly only to thank for it; and as this, of course, would get about, his chance of being employed as a skipper by any s.h.i.+powner would be very small. Elizabeth's popularity in Tonsberg might probably be of service to him, but he would sooner starve than help himself to a situation by means of it; and in her present circ.u.mstances she should not even return to Tonsberg.
One only course remained open to him if he was not to begin again from the very beginning--he would become an uncertificated pilot for the Arendal district. No one knew the coast there better than he did; he had always had the idea in his mind, ever since the night when he brought the Juno into Merdo; and out there, or in some other spot along the coast, he reflected gloomily that he could have Elizabeth all to himself.
When he announced his decision to Elizabeth, she entered with animation into the project; and when he went on to add, that she would have to be content now with being only a common man's wife, she replied, intrepidly--
”If he is only called Salve Kristiansen, I require nothing more.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
It was so arranged then; and though Elizabeth was rather disappointed to hear that she was not to see her tidy house at Tonsberg again, she allowed no indication of the feeling to escape her, and Salve went by himself to arrange their affairs there.
When he had sold what property they had, and bought his pilot-boat, they had still a small sum left with which to begin housekeeping afresh, and Merdo was chosen for their future residence.
From the outside this island looks only like one of the desolate series which form the outworks of the coast for miles here in either direction, with many a spot of angry white marking the sunken rocks between. But the inner side forms the well-known Merdo harbour of refuge, with its little hamlet of fishermen's and pilots' houses on the strand; and it was in one of these, a little red painted house with a small porch in front and a flagged yard and garden behind, and which presently became their own, that they eventually settled.
The coast outside Merdo is exceptionally dangerous, but the Merdo pilots have also the reputation of being exceptionally brave and skilful. They are also perhaps the widest known. For having no defined district they take a wide range, and may to-day be lying off Lindesnaes, to-morrow under the Skaw or the Holmen, and the day after board a s.h.i.+p from Hamburg right away down at Horn's Reef. It is a common thing to meet one of them with his Arendal mark, his red stripe and number on the mainsail, trawling for mackerel far out over the North Sea, and even down as far as the Dogger Bank, where they get information from foreign fis.h.i.+ng smacks of vessels from the Channel or from English or Dutch ports. If a skipper wants news from the North Sea or Skager Rack, he generally keeps a look-out for one of these pilot-boats, and finds a living s.h.i.+pping list, and the newest too, on board, which costs him, at the most, supposing he has nothing of interest to impart in return, a roll of tobacco, a bottle of spirits, or a strand of rope. But it is to the captain who, on some pitch-dark winter night, when the sea is running mountains high, has come in beneath bare poles under the Torungens, and who knows that he is doomed if he cannot get a pilot, that these Merdo men are most familiar. When, perhaps, he has given up all hope, he suddenly hears himself hailed from the darkness; a line is thrown; and a dripping pilot stands upon the deck. When the sea is too rough to board a vessel in any other way, they do not think twice about taking a line round their waist and jumping overboard; and when it is a point of honour with them to bring in a s.h.i.+p, boat and home and life weigh but very little in the opposite scale.
The black-bearded Salve Kristiansen soon came to be the best known in Arendal of them all. The dauntless look in his keen brown eyes, his sharp features, and his short, sudden manner and way of speaking, gave the impression of a character of uncommon energy; and it was said that not the very wildest weather would deter him from going to sea. He was known to have more than once stayed alone on board a water-logged vessel while he sent his comrade on sh.o.r.e for help; and in his little room at home, with its white-painted windows, and geraniums, and Dutch cuckoo-clock, there stood above the roll of charts and telescope on the wall a bracket with more than one silver goblet upon it, which, like the telescope, were presents in acknowledgment of his services in piloting vessels into port under circ.u.mstances of unusual difficulty and danger.
But, notwithstanding the repute in which he was held, he had never yet received the medal for saving life, nor had he yet been made a certificated pilot of the district.
He was not a man who gathered comrades round him; and as the years pa.s.sed, his unapproachability of demeanour, which seemed intended to convey to people with a certain bitterness that he could do very well without them, increased. It was said up in the town that he had taken to drink. For after selling off his mackerel down on the quay, he would often now sit the whole day in Mother Andersen's parlour with his brandy-gla.s.s before him; and when evening approached, and his head had had as much as it could carry, it was just as well to keep out of his way. He did not talk much; and what attraction he found in Mother Andersen's parlour it was not easy to say. But they knew, at all events, how to treat him there; and he felt, from the casual questions that would be addressed to him after he had returned from sea, or from the way in which a newcomer would salute him, that he was in a sympathetic atmosphere, and that his name was in repute. It was even something more than respect, perhaps, which he inspired, for a sailor would think twice before sitting down beside him, unless it came natural to him to do so from the way in which they had greeted or spoken to one other.
It was not, however, any attraction which he found in Mother Andersen's parlour which made him spend so much of his time there; it was that he was afraid of his own temper at home.
When he had first set up on his own account, and had had his appointment as a duly certificated pilot for the object of his ambition, he had never made it his habit to stay in Arendal when he returned from sea instead of going home. But some two or three years after he had settled out at Merdo, a couple of incidents had occurred which made a new starting-point, as it were, in his domestic life. They were the nomination of Captain Beck, who was now a wealthy man, to the post of master of the pilots of the district, and who, as such, became his superior; and the arrival of Carl Beck to live in Arendal and superintend his father's s.h.i.+pbuilding yard, for which purpose he had retired from the navy. Since the arrival of the Becks he had become more and more difficult to get on with; and Elizabeth's secret, self-denying struggle grew proportionately harder. Whenever she returned from a shopping expedition to Arendal, or from seeing her aunt, she would be sure to find him in an irritable humour, which would generally vent itself in contemptuous remarks upon old Beck's incapacity for the post he held; and at last, much as she longed to get a glimpse now and then of something different from the monotony of her daily life out on Merdo, she gave up going altogether.
Her patience and self-suppression had had the effect, as years went on, of making a tyrant of her husband. When in one of his dark moods now, he would not tolerate the slightest contradiction from her or from any one in the house, and all she could do was to be quietly cheerful and affectionate, and to try her best to avoid falling into any of the traps which he would lay to catch her, and to make her, by some chance word or other, or even by a slightly displeased or resigned expression, give his bad humour an excuse for breaking out. She had to weigh every word she uttered, and to take the most roundabout methods of avoiding his sensitiveness, and after all, she would perhaps commit herself when she least expected it; upon which a scene would immediately ensue, that would be all the more unpleasant from his never expressing himself directly. Sometimes Salve was really desperate, and would terrify her with all kinds of threats, not against her, but against himself--and she knew he was just the man to carry them out. It had often happened that for some unlucky word of hers he had gone to sea again an hour after coming home; and once in such weather that she had not the faintest hope of ever seeing him return.
She would sit at home and weep for hours together, striving to repress the angry feelings of resentment which would rise from time to time when she thought how little return she received for all she gave; how less than little her happiness was considered; and how meagre a reward for all she had to endure were the two or three days perhaps of occasional happy calm and suns.h.i.+ne in her home, when she seemed to have him with her as he had been in the first early days of their married life, and when he would find it as hard to tear himself away from his home again as she knew he had often found it to return. What a heart he had in reality! She alone knew that--the others judged him only by his hard and harsh exterior. And how proud she was of him when she heard the others talking of the daring things he had done, and saw how they all looked up to him! But it was not enough. And in the dulness and loneliness of her life out there on Merdo, she enjoyed to the full, during these many weary years, her woman's privilege of suffering for the man she loved.