Chapter XII: Love’s Shadow

Evening fell rapidly; the shadows deepened into black, impalpable clouds.

Slowly the _Mercur_ steamed up the narrow Magerosund behind the bare, rocky island of Magero, on which stands the North Cape. On either side rose, sheer from the rolling waters, the dark, black, inaccessible rocks, the home of thousands of sea-birds.

As daylight faded the scene became inexpressibly grand. The merry little company had assembled below in the shabby little saloon, where somebody was playing the old piano. Only Paul and Thyra were on deck, standing near the chart-room, hand in hand, and watching the northern twilight fast deepening into night.

Thyra, for the first time since leaving Vardo, felt a weight of sadness upon her soul. What was it? The gloom, the oppression of twilight in that remote and barren place through which destiny was carrying her; or was it the mere reflection of Paul’s unwonted seriousness?

She spoke, raising her beautiful eyes to his, but he remained silent, his cigarette between his teeth, his gaze fixed straight before him.

The light was being run up to the mast-head, the music ceased, and the only sound was the rhythmic throbbing of the engines and the hiss of the angry sea. An infinite sadness, a mystery of fearful shadow fell blacker and blacker from the heavens.

Why had her father so suddenly and inexplicably allowed her marriage to Paul? This thought again recurred to her as she stood leaning upon the rail in silence. It was certainly most generous of him to make that sacrifice—to allow her to marry and leave him to lead his life alone in that dismal settlement of the Far North. Yet she felt that there was a reason—some strong reason—of which she was being kept in ignorance.

True, she loved Paul with all her heart. Yet, somehow, when she came to analyse her feelings, she regarded the future, the embarrassments of the first days of marriage, with just the slightest trepidation.

Surely her soul was becoming involved in the shadows darkening her!

Together they paced the slippery deck, sometimes with difficulty, owing to the heavy roll of the Polar Sea. Her lover buttoned her coat tightly at the throat, and tightened the splendid blue fox around her throat, for the wind was biting.

The ship’s bell clanged out the time of day, and the mast-head light showed brighter in the darkness.

A strange sense of oppression had fallen upon her. She was not guilty of folly in action, but certainly her words were strange. Paul found them amusing, yet they distressed him.

Though seemingly calm, Thyra could not hide that she was under the dominion of some fixed idea. What was she thinking about?

He halted, and at a point secluded from the view of any sailor who might be on deck, he embraced her tenderly, imprinting a fond kiss upon her soft, white cheek. And yet, even as he held her in his arms, he felt her far, immeasurably far, away from him.

What could it mean?

“Aren’t you happy, my darling?” he asked at last.

Paul’s searching question had its echo in her soul also. What was it that they lacked? They were both of them strong and young, the girl told herself. Paul loved her ardently, blindly; he lived only for her; and he was so good-looking. His fine, passionate eyes, his soft white hands, his clear-cut features possessed a magic which intoxicated her.

Since leaving Vardo, three days before, they had been skirting that northern iron-bound coast, spending greater part of their time on deck, standing or sitting hand in hand. The stern grandeur of the scenery was everywhere impressive; the gloom of that silent coast alternated with the gaiety of Captain Martin and his officers, and the merry strains of the old piano below. True, the sea was rough, but was she not essentially a child of the sea?

As they steamed along in the gathering gloom, black masses of rock reared themselves perpendicularly out of the waters, rising directly from the deeply cut fjords, and, riven and cleft, towered precipitously upwards or leaned threateningly over. On their heads lay masses of ice stretching for miles, covering whole districts and scaring away all life save the torrents to which they themselves gave birth.

The midsummer sun had disappeared. No longer at midnight it stood large and blood-red on the horizon, its veiled brilliance reflected alike from the ice-covered mountains and from the ocean, as Dick and Owen had witnessed it, for the brief summer in that dread wilderness of rock and icy sea had passed.

There is a bewildering, overwhelming charm about that northern latitude—that region of silence and mystery—a charm that is unlike any in the whole wide world. It is a charm that grips the heart unconsciously, and yet so firmly that all who have sailed the Arctic seas, or travelled on those barren lands of the far north, strangely enough, are ever eager and ever long to return once again to those islands and skerries and that maze of bays, sounds and straits of the northern coast of Lapland, which possesses for the southerner an attraction as magnetic as they do for the compass of the mariner.

As the darkness deepened, the steamer slowly passed beneath a high black cliff rising sheer from the water, which, the girl pointed out to her lover, was one of the largest bird-covered bergs of the district, the home of millions of eider-duck.

“How strange it is,” she remarked for want of something to say, for she saw that he seemed troubled, “that only two causes can move the sea-birds—the eider-ducks, auks, gulls, terns, oyster-catchers, and the rest—to visit the land: the joyous springtime sense of new-awakening love, and the mournful foreboding of approaching death.”

“I was not aware of that,” he said, gazing up at the towering wall of black rock. “You have studied the birds, I suppose?”

“A little,” she laughed. “It’s curious that not even winter, with its long night, its cold, and its storms, can drive them to the land; they are proof to all the terrors of the North. They may alight, but only for a short time, often on a solitary island in the sea to oil their feathers more thoroughly than can be done in the water. But when with the sun’s first brightness love stirs in their breasts, all—young and old alike—though they may have thousands of miles to swim and fly, strive to reach the place where they themselves first saw the light of day. And if, in mid-winter, months after the breeding-places have been left desolate, a sea-bird feels death in his heart, he hastens, as long as his strength holds out, that he may, if possible, die in the place where he was cradled.”

“It is surely much the same with us,” he said, holding her hand. “We would all of us, if we could, die in the place where we were born.”

He spoke mechanically. The truth was that his thoughts were far away from that gloomy solitude. Before him had arisen a vision of the past—a recollection of sunshine and brightness, of sweet-smelling violets and carnations, of pretty women and well-dressed men; of a land where man had enhanced the beauties of nature until it seemed almost a terrestrial Paradise. And as he gazed upon the scene he saw two faces—a man’s and a woman’s—faces that he had believed until an hour ago he would never again recall.

The man—that man who alone knew the terrible truth—had risen against him, risen as though from the sea! He had come on board, and had met him face to face!

Thyra, in ignorance of the reason of her lover’s silence, stood by his side in uneasiness.

Try how she would, she could not account for that strange feeling of oppressive sadness, precursory of evil. Something was not right. Of that she felt convinced.

And yet what could it be? Her father, devoted as he was to her, was taking her to her aunt’s in Trondhjem, where she was to be married to Paul. Afterwards they were to live in St. Petersburg. They had decided upon the Russian capital in preference to Moscow. Before they had left Vardo, Paul and her father had spent some hours together, and what her lover had said had apparently entirely satisfied the old captain.

“Soon,” Paul was saying, as with her soft hand in his they both fixed their gaze upon the dark waters, “soon you will be mine, my own dear wife. Then we shall be happy—so happy,” he added in a strange voice.

“Aren’t we supremely happy now, Paul?” she asked. “Surely this journey should be the happiest in all our lives!”

He bit his lip. But in the darkness she could not see the hard expression upon his countenance.

“It is. Of course it is,” he assured her with an uneasy laugh. Yet his thoughts were all of that man. Richard Jervoise, in the saloon below, the man with whom he must sit and eat at the same table in half an hour. Then a moment later he said: “I never anticipated, dearest, that we should be traveling south so soon. All this seems a dream, Thyra—a dream too sweet to be a reality.” And his fingers closed tightly upon hers.

“Yes,” she declared, turning her face, half buried as it was in her furs, towards his with a passionate look in her eyes, filled with the light of unshed tears. “I know, Paul, how fondly you love me. Need I say that I love you, dearest, just as fervently, and that I am very, very happy?”

“Are you?” he cried quickly. “Do you know that from your attitude to-day I began to suspect that you had been filled by some grave apprehensions—that something had caused you uneasiness.”

“Did you?” she laughed with well-feigned carelessness. “How absurd! Why, Paul, I’m the happiest girl in all the world. I have your love. What more can I desire?”

“That’s right,” he exclaimed cheerily. “Love, peace, happiness—all that makes life worth living lie before us. Therefore why let these dispirited surroundings influence our thoughts? In Petersburg my friends will welcome you warmly, and you will soon be mistress of your own home.”

“And you, dear heart,” she said, clinging to him, “will be my husband. Ah! Paul, my Paul, I want nothing else in all the world—only you.”

He bent until his lips touched hers.

Yet as she returned his passionate caress his conscience smote him. What would she, who trusted him so entirely and implicitly, she so innocent of the world and its pleasures and its pitfalls, think of him if she knew the shameful truth?

She clung to him, for where they stood no one could witness their embrace. He loved her, yet he feared—feared that tall, athletic, straight-eyed Englishman who had once before crossed his path in that far-off southern land, and who now, at the very moment of his triumph, had risen a living witness of his dishonour!

As he held her slim form close to his breast, covering her dainty mouth with his kisses, yet standing unsteadily on the slippery deck owing to the long roll of the sea, he reflected. His brain was awhirl. True, Dick Jervoise could, if he chose, tell a strange and bitter truth. Yet was not that hateful Englishman utterly in his power, after all?

Could he not, if he so wished, crush him so completely that any word he uttered in retaliation would be disbelieved?

And his lips tightened into a hard smile, even as he pressed them again to those of the sweet, innocent girl whose pure soul he possessed and whose intense love was all-consuming.