their works, the Gospellers can’t make a very proud showin’, an’
that’s a fact. They’re responsible for a few suicides, and they’ve
sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an’ I don’t
see as they’ve made the rest of us much better than we were before.
I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little Dane as I
want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of him and
sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his knees out
on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the
corn, an’ I had to fire him. That’s about the way it goes. Now
there’s Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer
in all this section—called all the dances. Now he’s got no ambition
and he’s glum as a preacher. I don’t suppose we can even get him to
come in to-morrow night.”
“Eric? Why, he must dance, we can’t let him off,” said Margaret,
quickly. “Why, I intend to dance with him myself!”
“I’m afraid he won’t dance. I asked him this morning if he’d help us
out and he said, ‘I don’t dance now, any more,’” said Lockhart,
imitating the labored English of the Norwegian.
“‘The Miller of Hoffbau, the Miller of Hoffbau, O my Princess!’”
chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.
The red on his sister’s cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
mischievously. “We’ll see about that, sir. I’ll not admit that I am
beaten until I have asked him myself.”
Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the
heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay
through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several
occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him.
To-night Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with
Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had
broken to the side-saddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as
she did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides at
home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She was occupied
with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling with more
thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before. He rode
with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as though he
wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in his
brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he
knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first
appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.
Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not
afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects
before him when his father went down off the North Cape in the long
Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent horror of
seafaring life, had followed her brother to America. Eric was
eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with
a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede’s; hair as yellow
as the locks of Tennyson’s amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce,
burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women. He had in
those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even
said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to
levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of
those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a
scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation
had sobered him, and he grew more and more like the clods among
which he labored. It was as though some red-hot instrument had
touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which
respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of
exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away. It is a painful
thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen,
leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite
hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes
almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with others
it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man’s
heart to die.
Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year
before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy
hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.
The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his
people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that
night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin
across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down
upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work. “_If thine
eye offend thee, pluck it out_,” et cetera. The pagan smile that
once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when
it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of
the cross has been, joy will not come again. This man understood
things literally: one must live without pleasure to die without
fear; to save the soul it was necessary to starve the soul.
The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavaliePK*ŹK*3÷Wł´
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