Tales of Two Countries
they lay kicking with green legs. The meadows were spangled with flowers
and weeds, and the heather slopes towards the sea began to light up.
Only the yellow sand along the shore remained as it was; it has no
flowers to deck itself with, and lyme-grass is all its finery. Therefore
it piles itself up into great mounds, seen far and wide along the shore,
on which the long soft stems sway like a green banner.
There the sand-pipers ran about so fast that their legs looked like
a piece of a tooth comb. The sea-gulls walked on the beach, where the
waves could sweep over their legs. They held themselves sedately, their
heads depressed and their crops protruded, like old ladies in muddy
weather.
The sea-pie stood with his heels together, in his tight trousers, his
black swallow-tail, and his white waistcoat.
“Til By’n! Til By’n!” he cried [Note: “To Town! To Town!”], and at each
cry he made a quick little bow, so that his coat tails whisked up behind
him.
Up in the heather the lapwing flew about flapping her wings. The spring
had overtaken her so suddenly that she had not had time to find a proper
place for her nest. She had laid her eggs right in the middle of a
flat-topped mound. It was all wrong, she knew that quite well; but it
could not be helped now.
The lark laughed at it all; but the sparrows were all in a hurry-scurry.
They were not nearly ready. Some had not even a nest; others had laid
an egg or two; but the majority had sat on the cow-house roof, week out,
week in, chattering about the almanac.
Now they were in such a fidget they did not know where to begin. They
held a meeting in a great rose-bush, beside the Pastor’s garden-fence,
all cackling and screaming together. The cock-sparrows ruffled
themselves up, so that all their feathers stood straight on end; and
then they perked their tails up slanting in the air, so that they looked
like little gray balls with a pin stuck in them. So they trundled down
the branches and ricochetted away over the meadow.
All of a sudden, two dashed against each other. The rest rushed up,
and all the little balls wound themselves into one big one. It rolled
forward from under the bush, rose with a great hubbub a little way into
the air, then fell in one mass to the earth and went to pieces. And
then, without uttering a sound, each of the little balls suddenly went
his way, and a moment afterwards there was not a sparrow to be seen
about the whole Parsonage.
Little Ansgarius had watched the battle of the sparrows with lively
interest. For, in his eyes, it was a great engagement, with charges and
cavalry skirmishes. He was reading _Universal History_ and the _History
of Norway_ with his father, and therefore everything that happened about
the house assumed a martial aspect in one way or another. When the cows
came home in the evening, they ware great columns of infantry advancing;
the hens were the volunteer forces, and the cock was Burgomaster Nansen.
Ansgarius was a clever boy, who had all his dates at his fingers’ ends;
but he had no idea of the meaning of time. Accordingly, he jumbled
together Napoleon and Eric Blood-Axe and Tiberius; and on the ships
which he saw sailing by in the offing he imagined Tordenskiold doing
battle, now with Vikings, and now with the Spanish Armada.
In a secret den behind the summer-house he kept a red broom-stick, which
was called Bucephalus. It was his delight to prance about the garden
with his steed between his legs, and a flowerstick in his hand.
A little way from the garden there was a hillock with a few small trees
upon it. Here he could lie in ambush and keep watch far and wide over
the heathery levels and the open sea.
He never failed to descry one danger or another drawing near; either
suspicious-looking boats on the beach, or great squadrons of cavalry
advancing so cunningly that they looked like nothing but a single horse.
But Ansgarius saw through their stealthy tactics; he wheeled Bucephalus
about, tore down from the mound and through the garden, and dashed at a
gallop into the farm-yard. The hens shrieked as if their last hour
had come, and Burgomaster Nansen flew right against the Pastor’s study
window.
The Pastor hurried to the window, and just caught sight of Bucephalus’s
tail as the hero dashed round the corner of the cow-house, where he
proposed to place himself in a posture of defence.
“That boy is deplorably wild,” thought the Pastor. He did not at all
like all these martial proclivities. Ansgarius was to be a man of peace,
like the Pastor himself; and it was a positive pain to him to see how
easily the boy learned and assimilated everything that had to do with
war and fighting.
The Pastor would try now and then to depict the peaceful life of the
ancients or of foreign nations. But he made little impression. Ansgarius
pinned his faith to what he found in his book; and there it was nothing
but war after war. The people were all soldiers, the heroes waded in
blood; and it was fruitless labor for the Pastor to try to awaken the
boy to any sympathy with those whose blood they waded in.
It would occur to the Pastor now and again that it might, perhaps,
have been better to have filled the young head from the first with more
peaceful ideas and images than the wars of rapacious monarchs or the
murders and massacres of our forefathers. But then he remembered that he
himself had gone through the same course in his boyhood, so that it must
be all right. Ansgarius would be a man of peace none the less--and if
not! “Well, everything is in the hand of Providence,” said the Pastor
confidingly, and set to work again at his sermon.
“You’re quite forgetting your lunch to-day, father,” said a blond head
in the door-way.
“Why, so I am, Rebecca; I’m a whole hour too late,” answered the father,
and went at once into the dining-room.
The father and daughter sat down at the luncheon-table. Ansgarius was
always his own master on Saturdays, when the Pastor was taken up with
his sermon.
You would not easily have found two people who suited each other better,
or who lived on terms of more intimate friendship, than the Pastor and
his eighteen-year-old daughter. She had been motherless from childhood;
but there was so much that was womanly in her gentle, even-tempered
father, that the young girl, who remembered her mother only as a pale
face that smiled on her, felt the loss rather as a peaceful sorrow than
as a bitter pain.
And for him she came to fill up more and more, as she ripened, the void
that had been left in his soul; and all the tenderness, which at his
wife’s death had been so clouded in sorrow and longing, now gathered
around the young woman who grew up under his eyes; so that his sorrow
was assuaged and peace descended upon his mind.
Therefore he was able to be almost like a mother to her. He taught her
to look upon the world with his own pure, untroubled eyes. It became
the better part of his aim in life to hedge her around and protect her
fragile and delicate nature from all the soilures and perturbations
which make the world so perplexing, so difficult, and so dangerous an
abiding-place.
When they stood together on the hill beside the Parsonage, gazing forth
over the surging sea, he would say: “Look, Rebecca! yonder is an image
of life--of that life in which the children of this world are tossed to
and fro; in which impure passions rock the frail skiff about, to litter
the shore at last with its shattered fragments. He only can defy the
storm who builds strong bulwarks around a pure heart--at his feet the
waves break powerlessly.”
Rebecca clung to her father; she felt so safe by his side. There was
such a radiance over all he said, that when she thought of the future
she seemed to see the path before her bathed in light. For all her
questions he had an answer; nothing was too lofty for him, nothing too
lowly. They exchanged ideas without the least constraint, almost like
brother and sister.
And yet one point remained dark between them. On all other matters she
would question her father directly; here she had to go indirectly to
work, to get round something which she could never get over.
She knew her father’s great sorrow; she knew what happiness he had
enjoyed and lost. She followed with the warmest sympathy the varying
fortunes of the lovers in the books she read aloud during the winter
evenings; her heart understood that love, which brings the highest
joy, may also cause the deepest sorrow. But apart from the sorrows of
ill-starred love, she caught glimpses of something else--a terrible
something which she did not understand. Dark forms would now and then
appear to her, gliding through the paradise of love, disgraced and
abject. The sacred name of love was linked with the direst shame and the
deepest misery. Among people whom she knew, things happened from time
to time which she dared not think about; and when, in stern but guarded
words, her father chanced to speak of moral corruption, she would
shrink, for hours afterwards, from meeting his eye.
He remarked this and was glad. In such sensitive purity had she grown
up, so completely had he succeeded in holding aloof from her whatever
could disturb her childlike innocence, that her soul was like a shining
pearl to which no mire could cling.
He prayed that he might ever keep her thus!
So long as he himself was there to keep watch, no harm should approach
her. And if he was called away, he had at least provided her with armor
of proof for life, which would stand her in good stead on the day of
battle. And a day of battle no doubt would come. He gazed at her with
a look which she did not understand, and said with his strong faith,
“Well, well, everything is in the hand of Providence!”
“Haven’t you time to go for a walk with me to-day, father?” asked
Rebecca, when they had finished dinner.
“Why, yes; do you know, I believe it would do me good. The weather is
delightful, and I’ve been so industrious that my sermon is as good as
finished.”
They stepped out upon the threshold before the main entrance, which
faced the other buildings of the farm. There was this peculiarity about
the Parsonage, that the high-road, leading to the town, passed right
through the farm-yard. The Pastor did not at all like this, for before
everything he loved peace and quietness; and although the district was
sufficiently out-of-the-way, there was always a certain amount of life
on the road which led to the town.
But for Ansgarius the little traffic that came their way was an
inexhaustible source of excitement. While the father and daughter stood
on the threshold discussing whether they should follow the road or go
through the heather down to the beach, the young warrior suddenly came
rushing up the hill and into the yard. He was flushed and out of breath,
and Bucephalus was going at a hand gallop. Right before the door he
reined in his horse with a sudden jerk, so that he made a deep gash in
the sand; and swinging his sword, he shouted, “They’re coming, they’re
coming!”
“Who are coming?” asked Rebecca.
“Snorting black chargers and three war chariots full of men-at-arms.”
“Rubbish, my boy!” said his father, sternly.
“Three phaetons are coming with townspeople in them,” said Ansgarius,
and dismounted with an abashed air.
“Let us go in, Rebecca,” said the Pastor, turning.
But at the same moment the foremost horses came at a quick pace over the
brow of the hill. They were not exactly snorting chargers; yet it was a
pretty sight as carriage after carriage came into view in the sunshine,
full of merry faces and lively colors. Rebecca could not help stopping.
On the back seat of the foremost carriage sat an elderly gentleman and
a buxom lady. On the front seat she saw a young lady; and just as they