Aasa Kvaerk 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 Kvaerk
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 Kvaerk; 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 Kvaerk. 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.