2. II.
Aasa Kværk loved her father well, but
especially in the winter. Then, while she sat
turning her spinning-wheel in the light of the
crackling logs, his silent presence always had a
wonderfully soothing and calming effect upon
her. She never laughed then, and seldom wept;
when she felt his eyes resting on her, her
thoughts, her senses, and her whole being
seemed by degrees to be lured from their hiding-place and concentrate on him; and from him
they ventured again, first timidly, then more
boldly, to grasp the objects around him. At
such times Aasa could talk and jest almost like
other girls, and her mother, to whom “other
girls” represented the ideal of womanly perfection,
would send significant glances, full of hope
and encouragement, over to Lage, and he would
quietly nod in return, as if to say that he
entirely agreed with her. Then Elsie had bright
visions of wooers and thrifty housewives, and
even Lage dreamed of seeing the ancient honor
of the family re-established. All depended on
Aasa. She was the last of the mighty race.
But when summer came, the bright visions fled;
and the spring winds, which to others bring life
and joy, to Kværk brought nothing but sorrow.
No sooner had the mountain brooks begun to
swell, than Aasa began to laugh and to weep;
and when the first birches budded up in the
glens, she could no longer be kept at home.
Prayers and threats were equally useless. From
early dawn until evening she would roam about
in forests and fields, and when late at night she
stole into the room and slipped away into some
corner, Lage drew a deep sigh and thought of
the old tradition.
Aasa was nineteen years old before she had a
single wooer. But when she was least expecting
it, the wooer came to her.
It was late one summer night; the young
maiden was sitting on the brink of the ravine,
pondering on the old legend and peering down
into the deep below. It was not the first
time she had found her way hither, where but
seldom a human foot had dared to tread. To
her every alder and bramble-bush, that clothed
the naked wall of the rock, were as familiar as
were the knots and veins in the ceiling of the
chamber where from her childhood she had
slept; and as she sat there on the brink of the
precipice, the late summer sun threw its red lustre
upon her and upon the fogs that came drifting
up from the deep. With her eyes she followed
the drifting masses of fog, and wondered, as
they rose higher and higher, when they would
reach her; in her fancy she saw herself dancing
over the wide expanse of heaven, clad in the
sun-gilded evening fogs; and Saint Olaf, the
great and holy king, came riding to meet her,
mounted on a flaming steed made of the glory
of a thousand sunsets; then Saint Olaf took her
hand and lifted her up, and she sat with him on
the flaming steed: but the fog lingered in the
deep below, and as it rose it spread like a thin,
half-invisible gauze over the forests and the
fields, and at last vanished into the infinite
space. But hark! a huge stone rolls down over
the mountain-side, then another, and another;
the noise grows, the birches down there in the
gorge tremble and shake. Aasa leaned out over
the brink of the ravine, and, as far as she could
distinguish anything from her dizzying height,
thought she saw something gray creeping slowly
up the neck-breaking mountain path; she
watched it for a while, but as it seemed to
advance no farther she again took refuge in her
reveries. An hour might have passed, or perhaps
more, when suddenly she heard a noise
only a few feet distant, and, again stooping out
over the brink, saw the figure of a man struggling
desperately to climb the last great ledge
of the rock. With both his hands he clung to
a little birch-tree which stretched its slender
arms down over the black wall, but with every
moment that passed seemed less likely to
accomplish the feat. The girl for a while stood
watching him with unfeigned curiosity, then,
suddenly reminding herself that the situation
to him must be a dangerous one, seized hold
of a tree that grew near the brink, and leaned
out over the rock to give him her assistance.
He eagerly grasped her extended hand, and
with a vigorous pull she flung him up on the
grassy level, where he remained lying for a
minute or two, apparently utterly unable to
account for his sudden ascent, and gazing around
him with a half-frightened, half-bewildered
look. Aasa, to whom his appearance was no
less strange than his demeanor, unluckily hit
upon the idea that perhaps her rather violent
treatment had momentarily stunned him, and
when, as answer to her sympathizing question
if he was hurt, the stranger abruptly rose to his
feet and towered up before her to the formidable
height of six feet four or five, she could no
longer master her mirth, but burst out into a
most vehement fit of laughter. He stood calm
and silent, and looked at her with a timid but
strangely bitter smile. He was so very different
from any man she had ever seen before;
therefore she laughed, not necessarily because
he amused her, but because his whole person
was a surprise to her; and there he stood, tall
and gaunt and timid, and said not a word, only
gazed and gazed. His dress was not the national
costume of the valley, neither was it like
anything that Aasa had ever known. On his head
he wore a cap that hung all on one side, and
was decorated with a long, heavy silk tassel.
A threadbare coat, which seemed to be made
expressly not to fit him, hung loosely on his
sloping shoulders, and a pair of gray pantaloons,
which were narrow where they ought to have
been wide, and wide where it was their duty to
be narrow, extended their service to a little
more than the upper half of the limb, and, by a
kind of compromise with the tops of the boots,
managed to protect also the lower half. His
features were delicate, and would have been called
handsome had they belonged to a proportionately
delicate body; in his eyes hovered a dreamy
vagueness which seemed to come and vanish,
and to flit from one feature to another, suggesting
the idea of remoteness, and a feeling of
hopeless strangeness to the world and all its
concerns.
“Do I inconvenience you, madam?” were the
first words he uttered, as Aasa in her usual
abrupt manner stayed her laughter, turned her
back on him, and hastily started for the house.
“Inconvenience?” said she, surprised, and
again slowly turned on her heel; “no, not that
I know.”
“Then tell me if there are people living here
in the neighborhood, or if the light deceived
me, which I saw from the other side of the
river.”
“Follow me,” answered Aasa, and she naïvely
reached him her hand; “my father's name is
Lage Ulfson Kværk; he lives in the large house
you see straight before you, there on the hill;
and my mother lives there too.”
And hand in hand they walked together,
where a path had been made between two
adjoining rye-fields; his serious smile seemed to
grow milder and happier, the longer he lingered
at her side, and her eye caught a ray of more
human intelligence, as it rested on him.
“What do you do up here in the long winter?”
asked he, after a pause.
“We sing,” answered she, as it were at random,
because the word came into her mind;
“and what do you do, where you come from?”
“I gather song.”
“Have you ever heard the forest sing?”
asked she, curiously.
“That is why I came here.”
And again they walked on in silence.
It was near midnight when they entered the
large hall at Kværk. Aasa went before, still
leading the young man by the hand. In the
twilight which filled the house, the space
between the black, smoky rafters opened a vague
vista into the region of the fabulous, and every
object in the room loomed forth from the dusk
with exaggerated form and dimensions. The
room appeared at first to be but the haunt of
the spirits of the past; no human voice, no human
footstep, was heard; and the stranger
instinctively pressed the hand he held more
tightly; for he was not sure but that he was
standing on the boundary of dream-land, and some
elfin maiden had reached him her hand to lure
him into her mountain, where he should live
with her forever. But the illusion was of brief
duration; for Aasa's thoughts had taken a
widely different course; it was but seldom she
had found herself under the necessity of making
a decision; and now it evidently devolved upon
her to find the stranger a place of rest for the
night; so instead of an elf-maid's kiss and a
silver palace, he soon found himself huddled into
a dark little alcove in the wall, where he was
told to go to sleep, while Aasa wandered over
to the empty cow-stables, and threw herself
down in the hay by the side of two sleeping
milkmaids.
