Thelma: a Norwegian princess ... A new edition

Book I. The Land Of The Midnight Sun, Chapter

I. " Dream by dream shot through her eyes, and each Outshone the last that lightened." Swinburne. Midnight, — without darkness, without stars ! Midnight, — and the unwearied sun stood, yet visible in the heavens, like a victorious king throned on a dais of royal purple bordered with gold. The sky above him, — his canopy, — gleamed with a cold yet lustrous blue, while across it slowly flitted a few wandering clouds of palest amber, deepening, as they sailed along, to a tawny orange. A broad stream of light, falling, as it were, from the centre of the magnificent orb, shot lengthwise across the Alten fjord, turning its waters to a mass of quivering and shifting colour that alternated from bronze to copper, — from copper to silver and azure. The surrounding hills glowed with a warm, deep violet tint, flecked here and there with touches of bright red, as though fairies were lighting tiny bonfires on their summits.

Away in the distance a huge mass of rock stood out to view, its rugged lines transfigured into ethereal loveliness by a misty veil of tender rose pink, — a hue curiously suggestive of some other and smaller sun that might have just set. Absolute silence prevailed. Not even THELMA. 2 the cry of a sea-mew or kittiwake broke the almost deathlike still ness, — no breath of wind stirred a ripple on the glassy water. The whole scene might well have been the fantastic dream of some imaginative painter, whose ambition soared beyond the limits of human skill. Yet it was only one of those million wonderful effects of sky and sea which are common in Norway, especially on the Altenfjord, where, though beyond the Arctic circle, the climate in summer is that of another Italy, and the landscape a living poem fairer than the visions of Endymion.

There was one solitary watcher of the splendid spectacle. This was a man of refined features and aristocratic appearance, who, reclining on a large rug of skins which he had throwrn down on the shore for that purpose, wras gazing at the pageant of the mid night sun and all its stately surroundings with an earnest and rapt expression in his clear hazel eyes. " Glorious ! beyond all expectation, glorious !" he murmured half aloud, as he consulted his watch and saw that the hands marked exactly twelve on the dial. " I believe I'm having the best of it, after all. Even if those fellows get the Eulalie into good position, they will see nothing finer than this." As he spoke he raised his field-glass and swept the horizon in search of a vessel, — his own pleasure yacht, — which had taken three of his friends, at their special desire, to the opposite island of Seiland, — Seiland, rising in weird majesty three thousand feet above the sea, and boasting as its chief glory the great peak of Jedke, the most northern glacier in all the wild Norwegian land.

There was no sign of a returning sail, and he resumed his study of the sumptuous sky, the colours of which were now deepening and burning with increasing lustre, while an array of clouds of the deepest purple hue swept gorgeously together beneath the sun, as though to form his footstool. " One might imagine that the trump of the Resurrection had sounded, and that all this aerial pomp, — this strange silence, — was just the pause, the supreme moment before the angels descended," he mused, with a half-smile at his own fancy, for though some thing of a poet at heart, he was much more of a cynic. He was too deeply imbued with modern fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or Resurrection trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his nature, which not. even his Oxford experiences and the chilly dulness of English materialism had been able to eradicate.

And there was something impressive in the sight of the majestic orb holding such imperial revel at midnight, — something almost unearthly in the light and life of the heavens, as compared with the reverential and seemingly wor shipping silence of the earth, — that, for a few moments, awed him into a sense of the spiritual and unseen. Mythical passages from the poets he loved came into his memory, and stray fragments of old songs and ballads he had known in his childhood returned to him with haunting persistence. It was, for him, one of those sudden halts in life which we all experience, — an instant, — when time and the world seem to stand still, as though to permit us easy breathing ; a brief space, — in which we are allowed to stop and wonder awhile at the strange unaccountable force within us, that enables us to stand with such calm, smiling audacity, on our small pin's point of the present, between the wide dark gaps of past and future ; a small hush, — in which the gigantic engines of the universe appear to revolve no more, and the immortal Soul of man itself is subjected and overruled by supreme and eternal Thought.

Drifting away on those delicate imperceptible lines that lie between reality and dreamland, the watcher of the midnight sun gave himself up to the half-painful, half-delicious sense of being drawn in, absorbed, and lost in infinite imaginings, when the intense stillness around him was broken by the sound of a voice singing, a full, rich contralto, that rang through the air with the clearness of a golden bell. The sweet liquid notes were those of an old Norwegian mountain melody, one of those wildly pathetic folk-songs that seem to hold all the sorrow, wonder, wist fulness, and indescribable yearning of a heart too full for other speech than music. He started to his feet and looked around him for the singer. There was no one visible. The amber streaks in the sky wrere leaping into crimson flame ; the Fjord glowed like the burning lake of Dante's vision ; one solitary sea-gull winged its graceful, noiseless flight far above, its white pinions shimmer ing like jewels as it crossed the radiance of the heavens.

Other sign of animal life there was none. Still the hidden voice rippled on in a stream of melody, and the listener stood amazed and enchanted at the roundness and distinctness of every note that fell from the lips of the unseen vocalist. i — THELMA. 4 " A woman's voice," he thought ; " but where is the woman ?" Puzzled, he looked to the right and left, then out to the shining Fjord, half expecting to see some fisher-maiden rowing along, and singing as she rowed, but there was no sign of any living creature. While he waited, the voice suddenly ceased, and the song was replaced by the sharp grating of a keel on the beach. Turning in the direction of this sound, he perceived a boat being pushed out by invisible hands towards the water's edge from a rocky cave that jutted upon the Fjord, and, full of curiosity, he stepped towards the arched entrance, when, — all suddenly and unexpectedly, — a girl sprang out from the dark interior, and, standing erect in her boat, faced the intruder.

A girl of about nineteen she seemed, taller than most women, — with a magnificent uncovered mass of hair, the colour of the midnight sunshine, tumbled over her shoulders, and flashing against her flushed cheeks and dazzlingly fair skin. Her deep blue eyes had an astonished and certainly indignant expression in them, while he, utterly unprepared for such a vision of loveliness at such a time and in such a place, was for a moment taken aback and at a loss for words. Recovering his habitual self-possession quickly, how ever, he raised his hat, and, pointing to the boat, which was more than half-way out of the cavern, said simply : " May I assist you ?" She was silent, eyeing him with a keen glance which had some thing in it of disfavour and suspicion. "I suppose she doesn't understand English," he thought, "and I can't speak a word of Norwegian.

I must talk by signs." And forthwith he went through a laboured pantomime of gesture, sufficiently ludicrous in itself, yet at the same time ex pressive of his meaning. The girl broke into a laugh — a laugh of sweet amusement which brought a thousand new sparkles of light into her lovely eyes. " That is very well done," she observed graciously, speaking English with something of a foreign accent. " Even the Lapps would understand you, and they are very stupid, poor things !" Half vexed by her laughter, and feeling that he was somehow an object of ridicule to this tall, bright-haired maiden, he ceased his pantomimic gestures abruptly and stood looking at her with a slight flush of embarrassment on his features. "I know your language," she resumed quietly, after a brief pause, in which she had apparently considered the stranger's appearance and general bearing.

" It was rude of me not to have answered you at once. You can help me if you will. The keel has caught among the pebbles, but we can easily move it between us." And, jumping lightly out of her boat, she grasped its edge firmly with her strong white hands, exclaiming gaily, as she did so, "Push!" Thus adjured, he lost no time in Complying with her request, and, using his great strength and muscular force to good purpose, the light little craft was soon well in the water, swTaying to and fro as though with impatience to be gone. The girl sprang to her seat, discarding his eagerly proffered assistance, and, taking both oars, laid them in their respective rowlocks, and seemed about to start, when she paused and asked abruptly : "Are you a sailor?" He smiled. " Not I ! Do I remind you of one ?" ' You are strong, and you manage a boat as though you were accustomed to the work.

Also you look as if you had been at sea." " Rightly guessed !" he replied, still smiling ; " I certainly have been at sea ; I have been coasting all about your lovely land. My yacht went across to Seiland this afternoon." She regarded him more intently, and observed, with the critical eye of a woman, the refined taste displayed in his dress, from the very cut of his loose travelling-coat to the luxurious rug of fine fox-skins that lay so carelessly cast on the shore at a little distance from him. Then she gave a gesture of hauteur and half-contempt. "You have a yacht? Oh! then you are a gentleman. You do nothing for your living ?"' "Nothing, indeed!" and he shrugged his shoulders with a mingled air of weariness and self-pity, "except one thing — I live !" " Is that hard work ?" she inquired wonderingly.

" Very !" They were silent then, and the girl's face grew serious as she rested on her oars, and still surveyed him with a straight, candid gaze, that, though earnest and penetrating, had nothing of bold ness in it. It was the look of one in whose past there were no THELMA. secrets— the look of a child who is satisfied with the present and takes no thought for the future. Few women look so after they have entered their teens. Social artifice, affectation, and the insatiate vanity that modern life encourages in the feminine nature — all these things soon do away with the pellucid clearness and steadfastness of the eye — the beautiful, true, untamed expres sion, which, though so rare, is, when seen, infinitely more be witching than all the bright arrows of coquetry and sparkling invitation that flash from the glances of well-bred society dames, who have taken care to educate their eyes if not their hearts.

This girl was evidently not trained properly ; had she been so, she would have dropped a curtain over those wide, bright windows of her soul ; she would have remembered that she was alone with a strange man at midnight — at midnight, though the sun shone ; she would have simpered and feigned embarrassment, even if she could not feel it. As it happened, she did nothing of the kind, only her expression softened and became more wistful and earnest, and when she spoke again her voice was mellow with a suave gentleness that had something in it of compassion. " If you do not love life itself," she said, " you love the beautiful things of life, do you not ? See yonder ! There is what we call the meeting of night and morning. One is glad to be alive at such a moment. Look quickly ! The light soon fades."

She pointed towards the east. Her companion gazed in that direction, and uttered an exclamation, — almost a shout, — of wonder and admiration. Within the space of the past few minutes the aspect of the heavens had completely changed. The burning scarlet and violet hues had all melted into a transparent yet brilliant shade of pale mauve, — as delicate as the inner tint of a lilac-blossom, — and across this stretched two wing-shaped gos samer clouds of watery green, fringed with soft primrose. Between these cloud-wings, as opaline in lustre as those of a dragon-fly, the face of the sun shone like a shield of polished gold, while his rays, piercing spear-like through the varied tints of emerald, brought an unearthly radiance over the landscape — a lustre as though the moon were, in some strange way, battling with the sun for mastery over the visible universe, though, looking southward, she could dimly be perceived, the ghost of herself — a poor, fainting, pallid goddess, — a_perishing Diana.

Bringing his glance down from the skies, the young man turned it to the face of the maiden near him, and was startled at her marvellous beauty — beauty now heightened by the effect of the changeful colours that played around her. The very boat in which she sat glittered with a bronze-like, metallic brightness as it heaved gently to and fro on the silvery green water ; the mid night sunshine bathed the falling glory of her long hair, till each thick tress, each clustering curl, appeared to emit an amber spark of light. The strange, weird effect of the sky seemed to have stolen into her eyes, making them shine with witch-like brilliancy, the varied radiance flashing about her brought into strong relief the pureness of her profile, drawing as with a fine pencil the out lines of her noble forehead, sweet mouth, and rounded chin.

It touched the scarlet of her bodice, and brightened the quaint old silver clasps she wore at her waist and throat, till she seemed no longer an earthly being, but more like some fair wandering sprite from the legendary Norse kingdom of Alfheim, the " abode of the Luminous Genii." She was gazing upwards, — heavenwards, — and her expression was one of rapt and almost devotional intensity. Thus she remained for some moments, motionless as the picture of an expectant angel painted by Raffaelle or Correggio ; then reluctantly and with a deep sigh she turned her eyes towards earth again. In so doing she met the fixed and too visibly admiring gaze of her companion. She started, and a wave of vivid colour flushed her cheeks. Quickly recovering her serenity, however, she saluted him slightly, and, moving her oars in unison, was on the point of departure.

Stirred by an impulse he could not resist, he laid one hand detainingly on the rim of her boat. " Are you going now ?" he asked. She raised her eyebrows in some little surprise and smiled. " Going ?" she repeated. " Why, yes ! I shall be late in getting home as it is." " Stop a moment," he said eagerly, feeling that he could not let this, beautiful creature leave him as utterly as a midsummer night's dream without some clue as to her origin and destination. " Will you not tell me your name ?" She drew herself erect with a look of indignation. THELMA. 8 " Sir, I do not know you. The maidens of Norway do not give their names to strangers." "Pardon me," he replied, somewhat abashed. "I mean no offence. We have watched the midnight sun together, and— and — I thought " He paused, feeling very foolish, and unable to conclude his sentence.

She looked at him demurely from under her long, curling lashes. "You will often find a peasant-girl on the shores of the Altenfjord watching the midnight sun at the same time as your self," she said, and there was a suspicion of laughter in her voice. " It is not unusual. It is not even necessary that you should remember so little a thing." " Necessary or not, I shall never forget it," he said with sudden impetuosity. " You are no peasant ! Come ; if I give you my name will you still deny me yours ?" Her delicate brows drew together in a frown of haughty and decided refusal. "No names please my ears save those that are familiar," she said, with intense coldness. "We shall not meet again. Farewell !" And without further word or look, she leaned gracefully to the oars, and pulling with a long, steady, resolute stroke, the little boat darted away as lightly and swiftly as a skimming swallow out on the shimmering water.

He stood gazing after it till it became a distant speck sparkling like a diamond in the light of sky and wave, and when he could no more watch it with unassisted eyes, he took up his field-glass and followed its course attentively. He saw it cutting along as straightly as an arrow, then suddenly it dipped round to the westward, apparently making straight for some shelving rocks, that projected far into the Fjord. It reached them ; it grew less and less — it disappeared. At the same time the lustre of the heavens gave way to a pale pearl-like uniform gray tint, that stretched far and wide, folding up as in a mantle all the regal luxury of the Sun-king's palace. The subtle odour and delicate chill of the coming dawn stole freshly across the water. A light haze rose and obscured the opposite islands.

Something of the tender melancholy of autumn, though it was late June toned down the aspect of the before brilliant landscape. A lark rose swiftly from its nest in an adjacent meadow, and, soaring higher and higher, poured from its tiny throat a cascade of delicious melody. The midnight sun no longer shone at midnight; his face smiled with a sobered serenity through the faint early mists of approaching morning.

Chapter II

"Viens done — je te chanterai des chansons que les esprits des cimetieres m'ont apprises !" — Maturin. " Baffled !'' he exclaimed, with a slight vexed laugh, as the boat vanished from his sight. " By a woman, tco ! Who would have thought it ?" Who would have thought it, indeed ! Sir Philip Bruce Erring ton, Baronet, the wealthy and desirable parti for whom many matchmaking mothers had stood knee-deep in the chilly though sparkling waters of society, ardently plying rod and line with patient persistence, vainly hoping to secure him as a husband for one of their highly proper and passionless daughters, — he, the admired, long-sought-after "eligible," was suddenly rebuffed, flouted -—by whom ? A stray princess, or a peasant ? He vaguely won dered, as he lit a cigar and strolled up and down on the shore, meditating, with a puzzled, almost annoyed expression on his handsome features.

He was not accustomed to slights of any kind, however trifling ; his position being commanding and envi able enough to attract flattery and friendship from most people. He was the only son of a baronet as renowned for eccentricity as for wealth. He had been the spoilt darling of his mother ; and now, both his parents being dead, he was alone in the world, heir to his father's revenues and entire master of his own actions. And as part of the penalty he had to pay for being rich and good-looking to boot, he was so much run after by women that he found it hard to understand the haughty indifference with which he had just been treated, by one of the most fair, if not the fairest, of her sex. He was piqued, and his amour propre was wounded. " I'm sure my question was harmless enough," he mused, half crossly.

" She might have answered it." io THELMA. He glanced out impatiently over the Fjord. There was no sign of his returning yacht as yet. "What a time those fellows are!" he said to himself. "If the pilot were not on board, I should begin to think they had run the Eulalie aground." He finished his cigar and threw the end of it into the water ; then he stood moodily watching the ripples as they rolled softly up and caressed the shining brown shore at his feet, thinking all the while of that strange girl, so wonderfully lovely in face and form, so graceful and proud of bearing, with her great blue eyes and masses of dusky gold hair. His meeting with her was a sort of adventure in its way — the first of the kind he had had for some time. He was subject to fits of weariness or caprice, and it was in one of these that he had suddenly left London in the height of the season, and had started for Norway on a yachting cruise with three chosen companions, one of whom, George Lorimer, once an Oxford fellow-student, was now his "chum " — the Pythias to his Damon, the fidus Achates of his closest confidence.

Through the unexpected wakening up of energy in the latter young gentleman, who was usually of a most sleepy and indolent disposition, he happened to be quite alone on this particular occasion, though, as a general rule, he was accompanied in his rambles by one if not all three of his friends. Utter solitude was with him a rare occurrence, and his present experi ence of it had chanced in this wise. Lorimer the languid, Lori mer the lazy ; Lorimer, who had remained blandly unmoved and drowsy through all the magnificent panorama of the Norwegian coast, including the Sogne Fjord and the toppling peaks of the Justedal glaciers; Lorimer, who had slept peacefully in a hammock on deck, even while the yacht was passing under the looming splendours of Melsnipa ; Lorimer, now that he had arrived at the Altenfjord, then at its loveliest in the full glory of the continuous sunshine, developed a new turn of mind, and began to show sudden and abnormal interest in the scenery.

In this humour he expressed his desire to " take a sight " of the midnight sun from the island of Seiland, and also declared his resolve to try the nearly impossible ascent of the great Jedke glacier. Errington laughed at the idea. " Don't tell me," he said, " that you are going in for climbing. And do you suppose I believe that you are interested— you of all people — in the heavenly bodies?" " Why not ?" asked Lorimer, with a candid smile. " I'm not in the least interested in earthly bodies, except my own. The sun's a jolly fellow. I sympathize with him in his present condition. He's in his cups — that's what's the matter— and he can't be persuaded to go to bed. I know his feelings perfectly ; and I want to survey his gloriously inebriated face from another point of view. Don't laugh, Phil ; I'm in earnest !

And I really have quite a curiosity to try my skill in amateur mountaineering. Jedke's the very place for a first effort. It offers difficulties, and" — this with a slight yawn — "I like to surmount difficulties; it's rather amusing." His mind was so evidently set upon the excursion, that Sir Philip made no attempt to dissuade him from it, but excused him self from accompanying the party on the plea that he wanted to finish a sketch he had recently begun. So that when the Eulalie got up her steam, weighed anchor, and swept gracefully away towards the coast of the adjacent islands, her owner was left, at his desire, to the seclusion of a quiet nook on the shore of the Altenfjord, where he succeeded in making a bold and vivid picture of the scene before him. The colours of the sky had, however, defied his palette, and after one or two futile attempts to transfer to his canvas a few of the gorgeous tints that illumined the landscape, he gave up the task in despair, and resigned himself to the dolce far niente of absolute enjoyment.

From his half-pleasing, half-melancholy reverie the voice of the unknown maiden had startled him, and now, — now she had left him to resume it if he chose. — left him, in chill displeasure, with a cold yet brilliant flash of something like scorn in her wonderful eyes. Since her departure the scenery, in some unaccountable way, seemed less attractive to him ; the songs of the birds, who were all awake, fell on inattentive ears ; he was haunted by her face and voice, and he was, moreover, a little out of humour with himself for having been such a blunderer as to give her offence, and thus leave an unfavourable impression on her mind. " I suppose I was rude," he considered after a while. " She seemed to think so, at any rate. By Jove ! what a crushing look she »ave me ! A peasant ? Not she ! If she had said she was THELMA. 12 an empress I shouldn't have been much surprised.

But a mere common peasant, with that regal figure and those white hands ! I don't believe it. Perhaps our pilot, Valdemar, knows who she is; I must ask him." All at once he bethought himself of the cave whence she had emerged. It was close at hand — a natural grotto, arched and apparently lofty. He resolved to explore it. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was not yet one o'clock in the morning, though the voice of the cuckoo called shrilly from the neighbouring hills, and a circling group of swallows flitted around him, their lovely wings glistening like jewels in the warm light of the ever-wakeful sun. Going to the entrance of the cave, he looked in. It was formed of rough rock, hewn out by the silent work of the water, and its floor was strewn thick with loose pebbles and polished stones.

Entering it, he was able to walk upright for some few paces, then suddenly it seemed to shrink in size and to become darker. The light from the opening gradually narrowed into a slender stream too small for him to see clearly where he was going ; thereupon he struck a match. At first he could observe no sign of human habitation, not even a rope, or chain, or hook, to intimate that it was a customary shelter for a boat. The match went out quickly, and he lit another. Looking more carefully and closely about him, he perceived on a projecting shelf of rock a small antique lamp, Etruscan in shape, made of iron, and wrought with curious letters. There was oil in it, and a half-burnt wick ; it had evidently been recently used. He availed himself at once of this useful adjunct to his explorations, and lighting it, was able by the clear and steady flame it emitted to see everything very distinctly.

Right before him was an uneven flight of steps leading down to a closed door. He paused and listened attentively. There was no sound but the slow lapping of the water near the entrance ; within, the thick ness of the cavern walls shut out the gay carolling of the birds, and all the cheerful noises of awakening nature. Silence, chill ness, and partial obscurity are depressing influences, and the warm blood flowing through his veins ran a trifle more slowly and coldly as he felt the sort of uncomfortable eerie sensation which is ex perienced by the jolliest and most careless traveller, when he first goes down to the catacombs in Rome. A sort of damp, earthy shudder creeps through the system, and a dreary feeling of general hopelessness benumbs the faculties ; a morbid state of body and mind which is only to be remedied by a speedy return to the warm sunlight, and a draught of generous wine.

Sir Philip, however, held the antique lamp aloft, and descended the clumsy steps cautiously, counting twenty steps in all, at the bottom of which he found himself face to face with the closed door. It was made of hard wood, so hard as to be almost like iron. It was black with age, and covered with quaint carvings and inscriptions ; but in the middle, standing out in bold relief among the numberless Runic figures and devices, was written in large well-cut letters the word — € S. iE II fifl <a. . " By Jove !" he exclaimed, " I have it ! The girl's name, of course ! This is some private retreat of hers, I suppose, — a kind of boudoir like my Lady Winsleigh's, only with rather a difference." And he laughed aloud, thinking of the dainty gold-satin hang ings of a certain room in a certain great mansion in Park Lane, where an aristocratic and handsome lady-leader of fashion had as nearly made love to him as it was possible for her to do without losing her social dignity.