The Lure of Fame

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CHAPTER I Mercantile Library

NEW YORK.

npWENTY-FIVE years ago, as the stin was sinking, reddening the rocky face of Hondalsnut, and turning the blue shadows to purple, I, Eric Probst, entered Vossevangen.

In those days but few strangers came to Norway to roam amongst their fiords and hills, and still fewer reached the tiny village, which boasted but a farmhouse or two, and a score or so of cottages of lesser size. And the few travellers who came stayed, perhaps, a day or two to fish in the lake, and then passed on out of our lives.

I was not bom under the shadow of the hills on which the snow rested in winter and spring and autumn, but no matter; I came amongst them to forget a sorrow and a crime, the bitterness of which was nigh unto death, and the simple-hearted people, whose lives were mostly bounded by the peaks which shut their village in, and the turn the valley took a few miles distant, crept into the aching, empty chamber of my heart, and I lived with them, and taught their children, and in return they loved me with a true love, and nursed and tended me when I fell sick.

Hans Olsen was a ruddy-faced, flaxen-haired little fellow of two when Mariae Brun had a daughter, who in after years was to exercise so great a control over his life. No one could say that Hans was a weakling, but when I looked first into his blue eyes I knew that Gretchen Olsen had brought no ordinary boy into the world. The child had a soul from the day upon which he began to lisp his mother's name and to hear and know her voice. Some, I know, say that the soul is co-existent with life. I cannot say, but what I mean by " soul" is the power to exercise the Divine heritage of choice between evil and good. The possession of a soul — an abstract quality unexercised — has never saved a man or woman since sin entered the world, and never will.

Hans was no ordinary boy, of that I was certain, and I used to muse upon his future, as I sat in the sun in front of the cottage door, or when I walked, book in hand, along the borders of the lake in which, when the sun sank low, the mountain-tops were wont to glass themselves, and the dark blue shadows to rest lovingly.

Strangely enough, I finished the last mile of my weary tramp up from Bergen, and entered the village, as the sun was fading from rose to grey, on the very July night that Hans was born. Two strangers entered that night the little cottage which nestled amid the pines on the hill slope above the lake, — one to open blue, baby eyes upon an unknown world, and the other to shake the dust of the day's journey from his feet, and to commence to shut his heart and bar his memory to all that he had learned, in more than thirty years, of the world which lay outside the valley.

I knocked at the first cottage to which I came, for I was weary, and that was Peter Olsen*s, who himself came to the door.

" Is there an inn ?" I asked.

"None," he replied, taking my hand in his.

My face must have fallen, for he hastened to add, as if in excuse, " Few travellers come here, sir, and those that do have a welcome, rest, and shelter, such as it is, in any cottage hereabouts, , or at the farmhouse, if there is more than one. "

"Come in," he said, "and presently I will get you food,** and I, too tired to hunt in the gathering darkness for other hospitality, gladly allowed him to draw me in, and place me in a chair near the fire, which burned on the open stone hearth.

"Tread softly," he begged. And from that, and his look of anxiety, I gathered that there was illness in the house.

When I was comfortably seated he left me, and my tired eyes must have closed in sleep, for when I opened them again, on the table, which stood in the centre of the room, was a lamp, bread, cheese, and milk. And the man who had befriended me was standing before me, and I thought that I saw tears swimming in his eyes.

"To-night," he said, "as the sun set and as your steps turned into the valley God gave me a son. And now we will eat, and give thanks. It is well that you came to keep me company in my joy."

After we had finished the meal we sat far into the night talking, and Peter Olsen told me about himself and his wife Gretchen, and, when he had done, asked me questions about myself — not inquisitively, however, but with an undisguised interest in one who had seen sights he had never seen, and heard things he had never heard.

Only the faintest echoes, wafted by some stray traveller like myself, or the packman, who came at irregular quarterly intervals, reached Vossevangen in those days from the outer world. I told him in the flickering firelight — for he had said when supper was done, " Oil is dear, sir, and we can talk by the light of the fire," and had at my assent extinguished the little lamp — all that I could tell to any man of my life and the dead past I sought to bury out of sight and memory for ever more.

Peter Olsen asked few questions, save those concerning outward things, putting none of those embarrassing ones that nine men out of ten would have done under similar circumstances. All that I cared to tell him of that world of which he knew so little, of its sights and sounds, and doings and sufferings, he listened to eagerly enough, with his hands on his knees and body bent forward, but a sound in the chamber above would recall him from the enchanted land, and he would look at me askance, and then rise up and creep, with the tender, appealing clumsiness of a strong, big man treading softly, to the bottom of the narrow little closed-in stairway. Hearing nothing to alarm him, he would nod and smile, and then return to his seat, and, speaking softly, bid me continue.

We sat talking through the long night, until the gray dawn came with its chill, and then, at sunrise, the woman who had watched by the side of the mother and child in the upper room came down.

The cold of daybreak must have sent both of us to sleep, for it was not until the little door at the foot of the stairway swung back with a reluctant creak that I became conscious of chilling limbs and of the light struggling through the small panes of the window, and that the snow patches were turned to blood by the glow of the sunrise on the hills opposite, above the dark green belt of pines.

Peter Olsen rose, and led the woman from the narrow stairway to the fire, anxiously asking for his wife and the child.

"She is well, Peter," she replied, with a smile, as she knelt to warm her hands.

"And the child— little Hans— Mariae ?" he asked.

"Hans! So early named," she laughed. "He? oh! well, but sleepy. They both sleep. You will hear him soon enough. But you forget your guest, Peter."

The man turned to me. His face was flushed, but not with confusion, for he made no excuse, but said simply, placing his hand, brown and strong it looked, on my arm, " He is a stranger, but he will know."

The woman — her name was Mariae Brun — fetched water from the spring outside, and put the kettle on to boil, swung from the hook in the chimney. She was busying herself with the preparations for breakfast when the cry of little Hans caught her ear. The cry of a helpless child has always seemed to me the saddest thing in the world, except one thing I know and which I have suffered, and in an instant

Mariae sprang to her feet, and, with a smile at Olsen's anxious, startled face, passed up the stairs.

He said nothing for several minutes; and I watched his face, listening, anxious, intent on that child's cry, and lost to me, oblivious of aught else. It was not a handsome one, but strong, open, frank and tender, such as women cannot but love. The eyes were gray, deep — more a poet's than a peasant's eyes, though through all the years I knew him he spoke honest, homespun prose, and read no poetry save the Psalms. His hair was fine as a woman's, flaxen, curling in short crisp curls, which clustered thickly on his broad forehead. He was tall — above six of your English feet — and well made. And as I looked at him, indeed, I thought he was like Harald Leofric, whose portrait once hung in my old home, near Christiania.

As he stooped and built up the dying fire, with fingers which held the frail sticks as if they were too small to give a sense of touch, placing the leaves and twigs almost as softly as snow falls, lest the noise of their weight should disturb his dear ones upstairs, he said apologetically, ''We so seldom see strangers that we can only welcome them, and give them what we have. Ours is poor fare for you, sir, but what we have shall be ready as soon as Mariae comes down. A babe, a wee morsel tho' it be, oversets so small a home as ours, and "

"Peter!" sounded Mariae's voice softly from the stairway.

"Aye," answered Peter from the hearth, "is aught wrong ?"

"Nay, nay," replied the woman's voice chidingly, "only come. Gretchen wants to see thee, and the babe^little Hans — he will be opening his eyes at the sunlight"

Peter needed no second bidding, and in a moment I heard Mariae crying, " Hush ! hush ! man," as he fingered his way up the staircase, which was none too wide for his broad shoulders, nor too high for his many inches.

In a little while he came down again. I had sat listening to the lowered voices upstairs very contentedly, and taking my hand, he said, with a smile on his lips, " The boy has his mother's mmmmmmmm.

eyes, I shall be full of content if he has her heart also."

Breakfast was as merry a meal as Mariae Brun would let it be ; for when Peter raised his voice, for sheer joy, in forgetfulness, she would chide him sharply and he would scarce dare speak, until joy again conquered.

At the end of the meal I rose to go. Whither I knew not, for I had merely come to the village because I wished to get away from every one and everything I had ever known, and most of all from the memories which, once fair and fragrant, were now as the autumn leaves of a withered, hopeless past.

Beyond Vossevangen I knew several other villages lay, smaller than it, and that at length I should come to the scattered fisher-huts which lay close down to the waters of the Naero fiord, and then I should doubtless wander to and fro, seeking the rest which, when I entered the village the night before, I had seemed to find, and the peace and forgetfulness of self and the past which had come to me in the watches of the night.

When I rose Peter Olsen was sitting at the table lost in his happiness, and he did not seem to know my meaning.

I touched him upon the shoulder, and asked him what I might give him. Then he looked up, and his face flushed red. "Sir," he said, " you are not going ?" And, as I took out my purse — it was a heavy one, for poverty was not one of my misfortunes — pushing my hand back, he continued, " Peter Olsen is not so poor that he needs payment for a night's rest and food."

I saw that he meant it, and so I did not persist, but put my purse back in my pocket, and I was the one ashamed. I did not answer his implied question as to where I was going, and he did not repeat it, and so, after grasping his hand, and wishing him, the mother, and the babe well, I went out of the house sadly into the sunshine, which lit upon the dewy diamonds on the grass of the hill-side, and turned them into points of sparkling light.

Again I was a wanderer with a past, but no future, and as I made my way down the rough path, from which the loose stones started under my feet, I had an aching heart.

I must have gone less than a third of a mile past the last house along the main cart-road of the village, which was almost as rough and more dusty than the other, when I heard hurrying footsteps, and a voice calling —

"Stay! stay!"

When I turned I saw Peter Olsen, hatless, and hot with hurrying, a few yards behind. He came along with the stride of a young giant, and with his big chest heaving.

At length he reached me, and seized my hand.

"Sir," he said, "I should not have let you go. I have run hard so that I might not lose you. You must stay with us, if you will." He saw that I was about to protest, for he added hurriedly: "You have never said that you needed rest, and that you sought a home, but your face told me that it is so. I am happy, I have all I want; come, stay with us until you wish to leave our quiet village. We are a simple people, and know little of the world outside the valley, but we have never neglected the fatherless nor turned a stranger from our doors. "

I did not, could not speak for a moment, and so he went on, the words coming from his heart quickly, so that he spoke not slowly, like the peasant he was, but like one whose soul stirs, and lifts him to som.ething better and higher than himself.

" If I let you go, Gretchen will never forgive me, for she has a large, warm heart for strangers and wanderers, being an orphan and without kindred herself. And I can ill bear hard words from her sweet lips, or a frown to cloud her face, which is like no other woman's on earth."

"Come," he said, as he saw I still hesitated, " I must not idle, for there are now three mouths instead of two which need food."

I still hesitated, and then he said simply: "And you shall help me if you will. I often need two pair of hands; and now Gretchen is lost to me for a time, and the grass needs mowing and tying to the poles."

This conquered me. I was still of some use, and the possibilities of manual labor opened up a new vista, in which was the promise of peace.

We went back together along the white road, past the few cottages in which at so late an hour of the day only the infirm and the little ones were left. These gazed upon me — a stranger — with curious, friendly eyes, and gave both of us greeting.

At the cottage door Peter gave me a squaremade reaping hook, bound to the handle with a thong tightened by a wedge of pine, and, he shouldering a scythe, we set out to climb the hillside to the grass patch of lighter green which lay, oblong and distinct, against the darker shades of the pines.

And thus I came to the village amid the hills, and stayed, and became one of the simple folk, to whom crime seemed unthought of, and sin almost unknown.

Chapter II

SPHERE is little to tell of concerning my life during the next few months. Peter, with my help, got in the hay from the upper pastures ere the autumn rains, which were very heavy that year, swept down into the valley. Of an evening, when fine enough, I would sit on the moss-grown boulder outside the cottage, and watch the sunset die from ofiE the higher peaks and the blue shades of night creep up the valley, and over hill and dale, and gaze at the dark lake which lay like a black pearl, with the sheen upon it, almost, as it were, at our feet.

I was generally tired at night, for ere I came to Vossevangen I was unaccustomed to labor with my hands, and knew nothing of the peace which comes when the body is tired with honest, hard toil, and nothing of the scent of God's earth at dawn and eve. I did not think much — for to do so brought me face to face with the

past, and all I was anxious to forget. But I used to close my eyes, when the light grew so dim that the valley was only like a black streak below, and dream dreams, and see visions into which every now and again Peter's voice or Gretchen's baby song, which she sang to little Hans, soft and low, would come from the distance of the settle near the door, and break in upon the visions that I saw and the dreams which came to me with the shadows over the hill. And often when the moon rose over the peaks, flooding the valley with light, pure and cold as a woman's kiss with no love in it (and I had known what that was), and drawing a broad pathway of silver across the bosom of the lake from shore to shore, I sat on, and listened without thought to Gretchen's crooning song : —

Bissam, bissam Baadne.

Sleep, my darling baby, Close thy dear eyes in slumber ; Angels hover o'er thee now, Angels without number.

Sweet be the dreams they weave for thee, Blest may thy slumber ever be ; Swiftly, my baby, close thine eyes, Close thine eyes in slumber.

Angels hover o'er thee now.

Breathing softly on thy brow ; Tenderly they watch o'er thee. Those bright ones without number.

Every now and again Peter's deeper tones would chime in —

Bissam, bissam Baadne.

and I could hear the mother chide him. Softly little Hans stirred. "You will wake him, Peter.*'

When the night got chill, and not till then, I used to return to the house, and we three would gather round the fire, and Peter would question me of the world from out which I had come, whilst Gretchen rocked the cradle with her feet, and knitted with hands which never seemed idle.

In both mind and heart these two were simple children and no more, loving each other with a love which had nothing but love in view, and living at peace with their neighbors and themselves. She being a woman was the more curious of the two concerning the things of which I spoke, and she knew more than he, having learned something from the packman who came at long intervals, selling things of which the villagers had need.

When I spoke of the fine dresses and gayety of Christiania, she would pause entranced, and lay her knitting in her lap, but her mother's heart never allowed her feet to still at the cradle, and all the time I was speaking and she listening the sound of the wooden rockers upon the stone floor went on with deadened thud unceasingly.

During the long evenings of the winter which followed my coming I used to read to Peter and Gretchen, and when the nights were not too dark, nor the snow too deep, some of the villagers would come and listen, the men smoking their pipes, and the women knitting, or sheltering the children they brought with them in their arms or amid their skirts, when the wind rushed with a moan down the hill-side, causing the house and children to tremble, and the women to murmur, "God guard those who travel to-night." Sometimes, indeed, Karl, the old village pastor, would come and listen, and often take a turn at the reading when my voice got husky and thick, and when Peter took down one of the faggots they had left behind he would laugh his free, happy laugh, and say, " Sir, this is the wood we burnt whilst you read us *The Swans' Song,' " or " *This bundle warmed us whilst we listened to *The Snow Maiden.* "

And so it was. The winter passed away, and the spring came, and found me still an inmate of Peter Olsen 's home, and with, as yet, no heart-hunger for the world I had left behind.

I had never before spent a spring in the country, and that one in the village amid the hills will never die from out my memory.

The new life of the earth, the coming forth of the herbs and plants, and the grass appearing from beneath the snow — patches of tenderest restful green fringed with chastest white — were all marvels which touched my sense of beauty, and through it my heart. And the odor of the pines, carried on the soft breeze of

April, and the showers, which wreathed the hilltops with rainbow hues, and beat the scent of pines and flowers back down to earth again, all ministered to my enjoyment and forgetfulness.

In April we planted the potatoes, and I worked side by side with Peter Olsen and the others, the women, their gay kerchiefs blots of color in the fields, with baskets swung from their shoulders, dropping the pieces into the holes the dibbles left in the soil. After the planting was done there came a few weeks of comparative laziness, and I was sitting reading one morning, just outside the door, when Pastor Karl came up the hillside, and asked to speak with me.

We went away down toward the village, and then he said, calling me by my Christian name, " Eric, you're a man who has quarrelled with the outside world. But it is not for you to till the ground and reap the crops, you are meant for better things. You are young and I am old, but you have seen the world, and I scarcely at all. You have found it vain, so you say, but I have known nothing of it for nearly forty years, and I have been thinking during the winter evenings that I am grown too old, and my sight almost too dim, for the work of teaching the children, and you could do this thing better than I."

I looked at the tall figure, which was as yet scarcely bowed with the burden of many years, at my side, and upon the white hair which strayed in the breeze from beneath the closefitting cap, and then at the face, kindly and serene with the peace that comes of a good and well-spent life, into which none of the baser sins had intruded. There was no sign of failing, and I was about to protest when he continued, asking simply —

" There are nearly sixty children in the village and the neighborhood round about, and the room in which they met last year is too small, and so I have spoken to three or four of the elder men, and they will put up a schoolhouse near the church. Will you teach them?"

I did not answer at once, and we had passed most of the cottages, from out which the children came to wave their tiny little hands to the pastor, whom they loved, and had reached the tiny church, with its pointed wooden spire, ere I had thought of what I should answer.

We entered the gate, which had never been locked during the forty years the pastor had ministered there. More than once he had spoken warmly of the locking of the churches in the towns, saying, "It shall never be said that I have shut the door of God's house against any poor soul who sought for peace and refuge there." As we walked up the path, between the green graves, with the grass upon them grown long during the past winter, and many of the wooden crosses still bowing as if under the weight of snow, I spoke.

" There is truth in what you say, Pastor Karl, but I must have time to think over it. I fear I have scarce patience to teach, and that I am too embittered to chain the little ones* hearts to me as you have done. Let me think of it. I will come to you on Friday, and give my answer."

"So be it, Eric," simply replied the pastor, after which we spoke no more of the subject, but went round and saw where the new scnoolhouse was to be.

One fine June morning saw me within the newly finished building, with its white wood walls, benches, and rough desks, the village schoolmaster, with a flock of some sixty sunnyhaired children around me — boys and girls ranging in age from four to fourteen.

For the first few weeks all was strange, and the children seemed to fear me. Then came a morning, a very beautiful one, when the sunbeams seemed to have every color, and to play like living things amongst the fair locks of the children who sat near the windows, and when the heat was such that I had to have the outer door open, so that the noises of the village and the lowing of the cattle came in to us, softened by the distance but distinct. At length the lessons were done, the books put aside, and the children ready to go; but they lingered, and I could see by their faces that something was to happen.

I was still sitting at my raised desk, from which I could see everything that went on, when little Gabrielle Moller came up, with her pretty face flushed, and tears of nervousness starting to her eyes. I do not know why I did it, but I caught her up, and, placing her on my knees, kissed her. In a minute her fear seemed gone, and she said quite steadily, " Please, master, will you tell us a story? all about the 'Seven Brothers*; Thomas said that you knew it, and the others told me to ask you."

"Yes, presently," I replied, and then they went away.

When I came out they had gathered round the old cedar in the churchyard, and I sat upon one of its gnarled roots, with the ring of expectant faces round me. Before I had finished several flaxen heads rested upon my knees, and ere I rose the barrier between the hearts of the children and my aching, empty heart was broken down, and into it something of the children's pure lives and love had crept.

From year to year my life presented little of change, save that new children came to the little schoolhouse, upon which the lichen and moss had begun to grow, and others the angels kissed and took them away.

I will pass on to the day little Hans' second birthday came round, when another stranger came to the village, and this time the baby eyes which opened, and the baby arms which were lifted so weak and appealing, were those of a girl child — the daughter of Mariae Brun, and they called her " Ulrica."

Olaf Brun's cottage lay but a stone's throw further down the hillside from Peter Olsen *s, and the former told me the news as I passed up from the schoolhouse at midday.

A few weeks later I saw little Hans at the Bruns* door, on legs which would scarce carry him, sturdy though he was, and Gretchen called to me to come in and see little Ulrica.

Young babies are not pretty save to their mothers, who look upon them with eyes of tenderness, which see not as others see, and may be have the faculty for piercing the veil which hides the future of the child, but even to me Ulrica seemed different from other young children I had seen. Her baby eyes were brighter and more intelligent-looking than is usual, and her lips had a sweet line which time never altered. And I think that her soul slumbered in her from the first, to awaken later on in the music of her own voice.

Summer waned and came again, and passed away down the valley twice. Hans was now four, sturdy and strong, following me with steps which grew firmer day by day, and always willing to take the path which led to the cottage down below, where Ulrica, now two years old, would crawl about, chasing the sunbeams on the floor, and trying to grasp them with her baby fingers, or would sleep peacefully (while he watched) in the old wooden cradle in which her mother before her had lain.

Hans was ever her guardian, bringing her flowers when she was able to grasp them, and raspberries, which grew wild on the hills, when Mariae Brun ceased to forbid such things.