Thelma
through the parted pine boughs,--a face in which two wild eyes shone
with a blue-green glitter, like that of newly sharpened steel.
"Hello, Sigurd!" said Lorimer good-naturedly, as he recognized his
visitor. "What are you up to? Going to climb a tree?"
Sigurd pushed aside the branches cautiously and approached. He sat down
by Lorimer, and, taking his hand, kissed it deferentially.
"I followed you. I saw you go away to grieve alone. I came to grieve
also!" he said with a patient gentleness.
Lorimer laughed languidly. "By Jove, Sigurd, you're too clever for your
age! Think I came away to grieve, eh? Not so, my boy--came away to
smoke! There's a come-down for you! I never grieve--don't know how to do
it. What _is_ grief?"
"To love!" answered Sigurd promptly. "To see a beautiful elf with golden
wings come fluttering, fluttering gently down from the sky,--you open
your arms to catch her--so! . . . and just as you think you have her, she
leans only a little bit on one side, and falls, not into your
heart--no!--into the heart of some one else! That is grief, because,
when she has gone, no more elves come down from the sky,--for you, at
any rate,--good things may come for others,--but for _you_ the heavens
are empty!"
Lorimer was silent, looking at the speaker curiously.
"How do you get all this nonsense into your head, eh?" he inquired
kindly.
"I do not know," replied Sigurd with a sigh. "It comes! But, tell
me,"--and he smiled wistfully--"it is true, dear friend--good friend--it
is all true, is it not? For you the heavens are empty? You know it!"
Lorimer flushed hotly, and then grew strangely pale. After a pause, he
said in his usual indolent way--
"Look here, Sigurd; you're romantic! I'm not. I know nothing about elves
or empty heavens. I'm all right! Don't you bother yourself about me."
The dwarf studied his face attentively, and a smile of almost fiendish
cunning suddenly illumined his thin features. He laid his weak-looking
white hand on the young man's arm and said in a lower tone--
"I will tell you what to do. Kill him!"
The last two words were uttered with such intensity of meaning that
Lorimer positively recoiled from the accents, and the terrible look
which accompanied them.
"I say, Sigurd, this won't do," he remonstrated gravely. "You mustn't
talk about killing, you know! It's not good for you. People don't kill
each other nowadays so easily as you seem to think. It can't be done,
Sigurd! Nobody wants to do it."
"It _can_ be done!" reiterated the dwarf imperatively. "It _must_ be
done, and either you or I will do it! He shall not rob us,--he shall not
steal the treasure of the golden midnight. He shall not gather the rose
of all roses--"
"Stop!" said Lorimer suddenly. "Who are you talking about?"
"Who!" cried Sigurd excitedly. "Surely you know. Of him--that tall,
proud, grey-eyed Englishman,--your foe, your rival; the rich, cruel
Errington. . . ."
Lorimer's hand fell heavily on his shoulder, and his voice was very
stern.
"What nonsense, Sigurd! You don't know what you are talking about
to-day. Errington my foe! Good heavens! Why, he's my best friend! Do you
hear?"
Sigurd stared up at him in vacant surprise, but nodded feebly.
"Well, mind you remember it! The spirits tell lies, my boy, if they say
that he is my enemy. I would give my life to save his!"
He spoke quietly, and rose from his seat on the moss as he finished his
words, and his face had an expression that was both noble and resolute.
Sigurd still gazed upon him. "And you,--you do not love Thelma?" he
murmured.
Lorimer started, but controlled himself instantly. His frank English
eyes met the feverishly brilliant ones fixed so appealingly upon him.
"Certainly not!" he said calmly, with a serene smile. "What makes you
think of such a thing? Quite wrong, Sigurd,--the spirits have made a
mistake again! Come along,--let us join the others."
But Sigurd would not accompany him. He sprang away like a frightened
animal, in haste, and abruptly plunging into the depths of a wood that
bordered on Olaf Gueldmar's grounds, was soon lost to sight. Lorimer
looked after him in a little perplexity.
"I wonder if he ever gets dangerous?" he thought. "A fellow with such
queer notions might do some serious harm without meaning it. I'll keep
an eye on him!"
And once or twice during that same evening, he felt inclined to speak to
Errington on the subject, but no suitable opportunity presented
itself--and after a while, with his habitual indolence, he partly forgot
the circumstance.
On the following Sunday afternoon Thelma sat alone under the wide
blossom-covered porch, reading. Her father and Sigurd,--accompanied by
Errington and his friends,--had all gone for a mountain ramble,
promising to return for supper, a substantial meal which Britta was
already busy preparing. The afternoon was very warm,--one of those long,
lazy stretches of heat and brilliancy in which Nature seems to have lain
down to rest like a child tired of play, sleeping in the sunshine with
drooping flowers in her hands. The very ripple of the stream seemed
hushed, and Thelma, though her eyes were bent seriously on the book she
held, sighed once or twice heavily as though she were tired. There was a
change in the girl,--an undefinable something seemed to have passed over
her and toned down the redundant brightness of her beauty. She was
paler,--and there were darker shadows than usual under the splendor of
her eyes. Her very attitude, as she leaned her head against the dark,
fantastic carving of the porch, had a touch of listlessness and
indifference in it; her sweetly arched lips drooped with a plaintive
little line at the corners, and her whole air was indicative of fatigue,
mingled with sadness. She looked up now and then from the printed page,
and her gaze wandered over the stretch of the scented, flower-filled
garden, to the little silvery glimmer of the Fjord from whence arose,
like delicate black streaks against the sky, the slender masts of the
_Eulalie_,--and then she would resume her reading with a slight movement
of impatience.
The volume she held was Victor Hugo's "Orientales," and though her
sensitive imagination delighted in poetry as much as in sunshine, she
found it for once hard to rivet her attention as closely as she wished
to do, on the exquisite wealth of language, and glow of color, that
distinguishes the writings of the Shakespeare of France. Within the
house Britta was singing cheerily at her work, and the sound of her song
alone disturbed the silence. Two or three pale-blue butterflies danced
drowsily in and out a cluster of honeysuckle that trailed downwards,
nearly touching Thelma's shoulder, and a diminutive black kitten, with a
pink ribbon round its neck, sat gravely on the garden path, washing its
face with its tiny velvety paws, in that deliberate and precise fashion,
common to the spoiled and petted members of its class. Everything was
still and peaceful as became a Sunday afternoon,--so that when the sound
of a heavy advancing footstep disturbed the intense calm, the girl was
almost nervously startled, and rose from her seat with so much
precipitation, that the butterflies, who had possibly been considering
whether her hair might not be some new sort of sunflower, took fright
and flew far upwards, and the demure kitten scared out of its absurd
self-consciousness, scrambled hastily up the nearest little tree. The
intruder on the quietude of Gueldmar's domain was the Rev. Mr.
Dyceworthy,--and as Thelma, standing erect in the porch, beheld him
coming, her face grew stern and resolute, and her eyes flashed
disdainfully.
Ignoring the repellant, almost defiant dignity of the girl's attitude,
Mr. Dyceworthy advanced, rather out of breath and somewhat heated,--and
smiling benevolently, nodded his head by way of greeting, without
removing his hat.
"Ah, Froeken Thelma!" he observed condescendingly. "And how are you
to-day? You look remarkably well--remarkably so, indeed!" And he eyed
her with mild approval.
"I am well, I thank you," she returned quietly. "My father is not in,
Mr. Dyceworthy."
The Reverend Charles wiped his hot face, and his smile grew wider.
"What matter?" he inquired blandly. "We shall, no doubt, entertain
ourselves excellently without him! It is with you alone, Froeken, that I
am desirous to hold converse."
And, without waiting for her permission, he entered the porch, and
settled himself comfortably on the bench opposite to her, heaving a sigh
of relief as he did so. Thelma remained standing--and the Lutheran
minister's covetous eye glanced greedily over the sweeping curves of her
queenly figure, the dazzling whiteness of her slim arched throat, and
the glitter of her rich hair. She was silent--and there was something in
her manner as she confronted him that made it difficult for Mr.
Dyceworthy to speak. He hummed and hawed several times, and settled his
stiff collar once or twice as though it hurt him; finally he said with
an evident effort--
"I have found a--a--trinket of yours--a trifling toy--which, perhaps,
you would be glad to have again." And he drew carefully out of his
waistcoat pocket, a small parcel wrapped up in tissue paper, which he
undid with his fat fingers, thus displaying the little crucifix he had
kept so long in his possession. "Concerning this," he went on, holding
it up before her, "I am grievously troubled,--and would fain say a few
necessary words--"
She interrupted him, reaching out her hand for the cross as she spoke.
"That was my mother's crucifix," she said in solemn, infinitely tender
accents, with a mist as of unshed tears in her sweet blue eyes. "It was
round her neck when she died. I knew I had lost it, and was very unhappy
about it. I do thank you with all my heart for bringing it back to me!"
And the hauteur of her face relaxed, and her smile--that sudden sweet
smile of hers,--shone forth like a gleam of sunshine athwart a cloud.
Mr. Dyceworthy's breath came and went with curious rapidity. His visage
grew pale, and a clammy dew broke out upon his forehead. He took the
hand she held out,--a fair, soft hand with a pink palm like an upcurled
shell,--and laid the little cross within it, and still retaining his
hold of her, he stammeringly observed--
"Then we are friends, Froeken Thelma! . . . good friends, I hope?"
She withdrew her fingers quickly from his hot, moist clasp, and her
bright smile vanished.
"I do not see that at all!" she replied frigidly. "Friendship is very
rare. To be friends, one must have similar tastes and sympathies,--many
things which we have not,--and which we shall never have. I am slow to
call any person my friend."
Mr. Dyceworthy's small pursy mouth drew itself into a tight thin line.
"Except," he said, with a suave sneer, "except when 'any person' happens
to be a rich Englishman with a handsome face and easy manners! . . . then
you are not slow to make friends, Froeken,--on the contrary, you are
remarkably quick!"
The cold haughty stare with which the girl favored him might have frozen
a less conceited man to a pillar of ice.
"What do you mean?" she asks abruptly, and with an air of surprise.
The minister's little ferret-like eyes, drooped under their puny lids,
and he fidgeted on the seat with uncomfortable embarrassment. He
answered her in the mildest of mild voices.
"You are unlike yourself, my dear Froeken!" he said, with a soothing
gesture of one of his well-trimmed white hands. "You are generally frank
and open, but to-day I find you just a little,--well!--what shall I
say--secretive! Yes, we will call it secretive! Oh, fie!" and Mr.
Dyceworthy laughed a gentle little laugh; "you must not pretend
ignorance of what I mean! All the neighborhood is talking of you and the