Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  She was always meditating how she could surprise her mother with some uncommon performance. On one occasion she persuaded her two brothers George and Henry to get up with her between three and four o’clock in the morning, and make the kitchen fire and fill and hang on the teakettle and set the table for breakfast, thinking how surprised everybody would be to find all these things done when they came down.

  After waiting getting very sleepy and watching the teakettle boiling away, at last at sunrise the children all took their sleds and went off sliding.

  When they came back they found that nobody praised them. The old cook only said, “What have you young uns been burning out wood these two hours and others complained that “the noise those children made spoiled their morning naps;” and finally mamma said, “Don’t you ever do this again. I want you to get up when the first bell rings and not before.” And then when they found themselves sleepy and stupid in school hours and out of sorts generally, they were reminded, “It is all because you before the proper time; now remember and not do it again.”

  But at last there came an opportunity when Nelly thought she had a fair call to do something quite heroic. They had often heard the servants tell stories at the evening fireside about robbers getting into houses, and at last Nelly thought that very event had happened to them.

  Dr. Morris had gone to a neighboring city to be absent two or three days.

  Nelly had just received from a kind aunt a present of the “Arabian Nights” — a great gift in those early days when there were no children’s books. She took it up to her bedroom with her that night designing only to give a look into it before going to bed. Nelly’s bed-time was eight o’clock, but she retired at half-past seven to take a little taste of her new treasure. But pretty soon she became so absorbed with the princesses and fairies and genii and the whole world of wonders opened by her book, that she forgot all about time and space; eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock came and went, and still Nelly sat reading, her brown eyes growing wider and wider with astonishment. At last she was roused by her candle burning low and the old hall clock striking twelve.

  It was a bright moonlight windy autumn night — the wind squealing round the house and rattling doors and windows. Never in her life had she been up so late, and when she heard the clock strike, she actually shivered with excitement. Just then she heard, as she thought, stealthy footsteps passing through the hall by her room. She held her breath and listened! Yes, she was sure she plainly heard the latch of the opposite door fly up. Now the opposite room was a large chamber in which lines had been strung for drying the family wash. Nelly jumped to the conclusion it was a thief gone in to steal the clothes.

  Instantly she ran into her brothers’ room which opened into hers: “George! Henry! — wake up, there’s a robber in the house! he’s gone into the west room to steal the clothes.”

  Both boys were soon up hurrying on their clothes. “I’ll go and get father’s gun,” said George, “and Nelly, you go up garret and call Ulysses.”

  Ulysses was a colored boy of fifteen, who did the barn and out-door work in the doctor’s establishment, and as he was tall and well grown the children looked up to him as a tower of strength.

  Nelly found great difficulty in getting Ulysses awake, and after he was awake in persuading him to get up and attend to matters. Finally, however, he did get up and dress, and, seizing a heavy cudgel, made his way down the garret stairs, Nelly following. “This is the way to the room,” said Nelly.

  “I know it,” said Ulysses, making off in exactly the opposite direction for the back stairs. Nelly followed him down respectfully wondering what he would do next. He opened the outside door — it was clear bright moonlight — and before Nelly could ask a question he was gone on a full run out and away.

  Nelly shut the door and came back to meet her brothers. George had shouldered the doctor’s old gun, and Henry was marching behind him.

  “Just “think of it, boys,” she said; “Ulysses has gone and run away. Isn’t it a shame!”

  After a short council of war, the children resolved to go and lay the case before mother, and accordingly presented themselves in a body at her bedside.

  “Why, children, what in the world does this mean!” exclaimed Mrs. Morris, springing up in bed.

  “Mamma, there’s a robber in the house!” exclaimed all three at once.

  “Nonsense, you foolish children,” said Mrs. Morris; “no such thing; go right back to bed, every one of you, and don’t let me hear a word more from you to-night.”

  The children had been brought up to mind their parents, and so George set down his gun, and all of them turned round and marched in a dejected manner up to their beds again, and very soon all was still.

  Mrs. Morris had just dropped into a quiet sleep, when she was roused by the tramp of men’s feet overhead, and the sound of men’s voices in conversation.

  “Well, something is going on in this house,” she exclaimed as she rose and hastily dressed herself, and lighted her candle and went out to see what the noise meant. In the kitchen she met her neighbor, farmer Rodgers, and his two sons, with axes on their shoulders, just coming down from exploring the chambers.

  “Good evening, ma’am. Your black boy got us out o’ bed. He said your house was broke into, and the doctor gone, and so the boys and I come down to see; but I guess he was mistaken. We’ve been all through and there ain’t no sign o’ any man.”

  “Indeed, I am very sorry my foolish children have made you all this trouble,” said Mrs. Morris, “though I am no less obliged for your kindness.”

  “Wal, says I to my boys, the doctor he turns out o’ his bed nights when anything’s the matter with us, and now he’s gone we ought to look out for his folks. Your boy said they heard a man in your clothes-room stealin’ your wash; but there ain’t the least sign. The wind mabbe might a-blown the door open but you can go to bed now, and be sure all’s right” So saying, farmer Rodgers and his boys departed, and peace finally settled down upon the house.

  Poor Nelly had rather a hard time of it the next day. Everybody in the house had been waked up and disturbed, and the blame of it all came upon her little busy head. Some laughed at her, and some scolded till she was ready to cry with vexation.

  “My dear child,” said her mother, “how came you to be awake so late at night? You were not sitting up, were you, at that late hour?”

  “Yes, I was, mamma,” said Nelly penitently.

  “Why, Nelly, I am astonished! What upon earth kept you up?”

  “Why, mamma, I began to read my new book, and I got so engaged that I didn’t know how time passed. I forgot all about everything.”

  “Then, Nelly, all this disturbance has come because you could not govern yourself and wait for the proper time to enjoy your book.”

  “Yes, mamma,” said Nelly mournfully.

  “Well, I shall not take away your book, Nelly.

  You have been enough punished by the trouble you see you have made; but I shall expect you to learn something by all this. There are people who don’t care much about little plain every-day duties, who are all the while trying to do something great or distinguished. They make a great deal of fuss and trouble in the world, just as you did in the house last night; but they don’t accomplish anything worth doing. Now, Nelly, it would have been more heroic in you to have put your book away and gone quietly to bed when that was your duty, than to have defended the house. People who do great and heroic things are not people who neglect little duties and go about looking for adventures; they are people who are always steady in doing the duty that lies next them. Your duty last night was to go to bed and go to sleep at eight o’clock, and leave me to take care of the house. Now I trust, Nelly, you will remember this.”

  “Indeed, I will, dear mamma,” said Nelly. And Nelly kept her word and grew up to be a strong, good woman.

  THE CASTLE OF THE WINDS.

  AWAY up to the north of Europe, between the Baltic and the North
Sea, lies a wonderful country of mountains and valleys, of ice-cold lakes, dark pines, and glaciers that melt into cataracts. A land it is of hardy fishermen and simple mountaineers, who come in their fishing-boats from the numerous islands when the Sabbath bell is echoed from one steep cliff to another, to hear the Gospel in the quaint little chapel by the side of the rock-cut gorge where the breakers leap upon one another’s backs, and tumble seaward again, powerless to pass the strong barriers.

  No people are more peaceable or gentle than these flaxen-haired, moon-faced Norse men and maidens, none more honest and industrious, toiling all day at their fishing, or tending their flocks in the grassy thals, and reading the Bible aloud at night by the light of their fish-oil lamps.

  But it was not always so. There are savage stories of the Vikings, pirate ancestors of these very people, who were the terror of the seas from Iceland to Constantinople.

  Among all the ancient warriors neither Goth nor Saracen, barbaric Gaul nor conquering Roman, could boast doughtier heroes or more cruel than the old Norsemen. Their religion was a warlike one, for while the Romans had only one war-god, Mars, all of the Norse divinities were fierce fighters, and only he who died in battle was thought worthy of heaven; but he who died on the straw-stack was a coward, and went to ut gard, the place of evil.

  Nature fitted them too for sea-kings and sea-rovers. The mountains gave them tall pines for masts and stout timber for the keels of their vessels, and the sea stretched long arms up into the heart of their country, constantly wooing them and enticing them to launch out to the great ocean.

  No country has a more remarkable coast than Norway. Precipitous mountain walls traverse the country, rising nearly perpendicularly out of the sea, while the ocean creeps up between them in long chasms called fiords, enabling the largest vessels to penetrate far into the country. These fiords are often narrow, and walled by sheer precipices of solid rock, between which they seem only a fissure. Some of them are larger and exceedingly beautiful. Hardanger fiord is world-renowned for the grandeur of its scenery.

  Following up the fiords, the traveller reaches tranquil lakes and lovely valleys looked down upon by glacier-seamed, snow-capped peaks from which in winter fearful avalanches plunge into the fiords. Most beautiful of all these valleys is the Romsdal, guarded at its fiord by cliffs chat take the shapes of grotesque profiles, savage old men of the mountains, who are said to be sorcerers turned into stone by King Olaf for attempting to prevent his entrance to the valley. And who was King Olaf? Longfellow tells his story best in the Tales of a Wayside Inn. He was the young King of Norway, who after many exciting adventures became a Christian, as he understood it, and was baptized by a hermit on the shore of Sicily. Then

  “To avenge his father slain,

  And reconquer realm and reign,

  Came the youthful Olaf home.”

  But the people of Norway worshipped the old gods, and Olaf determined that in conquering the kingdom for himself he would conquer it also for Christ and preach the Gospel by his sword. It was not the way that Christ would have wished it preached, and there was little of what we understand as Christianity in Olaf’s heart or life: he was only a piratical young Viking with a zeal for a religion which he could not comprehend. Everywhere it was the sword that spoke as —

  .... “King Olaf raised the hilt

  Of iron, cross-shaped and gilt,

  And said, ‘Do not refuse;

  Count well the gain and the loss,

  Thor’s hammer or Christ’s cross:

  Choose!

  Or,

  “King Olaf said, ‘O Sea King!

  Little time have we for speaking:

  Be baptized, or thou shalt die.’”

  It was a stern kind of logic, but his arguments were for the most part convincing, and Norway became nominally a Christian country.

  There are many legendary stories connected with King Olaf, many of which we need not believe unless we choose, and among these you may rank this romance of the Romsdal sorcerers.

  In Olaf’s time there stood at the entrance of the Verblungsnaeset the fiord leading to the Romsdal, a castle called the Castle of the Winds, belonging to two ancient warlocks or sorcerers. The entrance to the castle was on the landward side, though it had a watch-tower commanding the ocean, from which hung a huge iron basket where a beacon could occasionally be seen flaming by the inhabitants of the islands up and down the coast, and by mysterious dragon-ships which hoisted answering signal lights, for the sorcerer brothers were on good terms with the Vikings, and sold them favorable winds in return for booty of merchandise and slaves. This fact was only suspected by people generally, for there was apparently no means of communication between the castle and the sea. It stood high on a sheer precipice of rock up whose perpendicular face the boldest climber would have found it impossible to clamber. Only the pirates who came on stealthy visits from time to time knew that in the cliff, behind a jutting spur close to the water’s edge, there was a concealed door almost covered by matted draperies of woodbine and ivy, and that behind the door there was a secret way, a narrow staircase, dark and winding, by which one could reach the lowest chamber of the warlocks’ dungeon keep. The dungeon keep in most castles is the prison; and visitors exploring the sorcerers’ home, if they had lifted the stone which served as a trap-door to this great well-like apartment and had peered down into the darkness, would hardly have cared to have asked the privilege of being lowered by ropes into its depths. And yet this was the castle guest-chamber. A spacious hall in size, it could be lighted by torches placed in iron brackets; it was hung with armor and surrounded with comfortable couches, and a massive table stood in the centre at which the pirates feasted, while no crevice or loophole betrayed their revelry.

  In the upper rooms of the castle the sorcerers carried on their observations and incantations of stars and storm-clouds, of the wind and sea, the lightning and the thunder. And carved their magic rune-sticks or almanacs. Really it’ was very like a signal-service station, but the ignorant landsmen and mariners looked upon the prophecies of these old wizards as something quite supernatural, and when they foretold areas of rain in the northwest, stationary barometer, easterly to southerly winds with maximum and minimum thermometer, cyclones in Iceland, and the probable weather indications in the Mediterranean, the common people gaped their awe and admiration, and the pirates did them golden duty.

  When a boy of twelve, Olaf was brought to the castle to be instructed in the mysteries of religion and in such other matters as it might become a young prince to know. It was a dull, lonely life for the boy. He disliked his teachers; and as they professed to be on intimate terms with the old Scandinavian gods he grew to dislike them as well. He longed for companionship with other children, but there were no lads of his own age at the castle, and he grew up restless, moody and discontented.

  One day there appeared among the servants a blueeyed baby-girl about three years of age. Where she came from, Olaf did not know; he saw only that she was a stranger in the castle like himself, and that she was homesick and unhappy. He patted her shining head stealthily at first, and finally under the good-natured connivance of the cook made her acquaintance and spent his hour of recreation playing with her in the great kitchen over the court, a narrow yard on all sides of the castle-walls, but open to the sky.

  The child’s name was Signe; she could tell Olaf only that she had come in a ship and that she wanted her mother. Olaf, to comfort her, told her the legends of the gods; of Odin or Woden, greatest of all, and of his wife Frigg, from whom we name our Wednesday and Friday, and of Thor, the thunderer, who struck the mountains with the hammer and caused the avalanches.

  “Force rule the worlds still,”

  he might have told her.

  “Has ruled it, shall rule it; —

  Meekness is weakness,

  Strength is triumphant,

  Over the whole earth

  Still is it Thor’s-Day!” the castle, with only the memory of Olaf and his stori
es to comfort her. The wizards grew older, more hideous and, more ill-tempered. Their beards swept their girdles, and their eyes glowed like sullen coals under their ashy eyebrows. Events were happening in the political and in the religious world which did not suit them. The people were falling away from their old religion and their old king, and a usurper was sailing into all the fiords of Norway, who proclaimed himself the regent of a new king called Christ.

  Each night the warlocks wailed to the winds from the parapets of their castle:

  “It is the reign of the Jotuns, for Baldur is dead!”

  “If Baldur is dead,” thought Signe, “perhaps this is the corning of the new heavens and the new earth.

  But the wizards thought not so. A great sacrifice had been proclaimed at the temple of Baldur. Ninety-nine various species of animals and birds and ninety-nine human beings were to be among the victims. The sorcerers were called upon to furnish three of these last from among their slaves, and they had determined that Signe should be of the number.

  She sat a prisoner in her little chamber looking out through its barred lancet window across the stormy sea. She knew her fate, and that even now the sorcerers were absent at the temple of Baldur preparing for the ceremonies. At dawn they would come for her and for the other victims. It was indeed the reign of the Jotuns, and to whom could she pray, since Baldur was dead? How the wind raged around the castle towers, and how the breakers leaped and beat themselves upon the cliff! It seemed as if Ægir, god of the sea, and Frey, god of the wind, were engaged in their last mortal struggle with the Jotuns. Perhaps the end of the world would come before the morrow and there would be no sacrifice.

  She could see a ship beating along the coast against the wind, striving in vain to enter the fiord. She watched it in apathetic despair. Why did it strive so hard after the unattainable? Everything was at cross purposes; it was useless for man to attempt anything now until the new god should ascend his throne and put down the Jotuns. She pressed her face against the iron bars and prayed to the new diety, whose name she did not know, to hasten his coming. “And if,” she thought, “my sacrifice will help usher in the new day, then I am content to die.’