Absaloms Hair | Page 5

be
silent.
What these idle wooers gleaned from her stories, her characteristic
dress, her wondering eyes, and her quiet dreaminess, was not the
highest, but they expended their energy thereon; so that their
unbounded discomfiture may be imagined when, in the autumn, the

news spread that Fruken Kristen Ravn was married to Harald Kaas.
They burst into peals of derisive laughter they scoffed, they exclaimed;
the only explanation they could offer was that they had too long
hesitated to try their fortune.
There were others, who both knew and admired her, who were no less
dismayed. They were more than disappointed--the word is too weak; to
many of them it seemed simply deplorable. How on earth could it have
happened? Every one, herself excepted, knew that it would ruin her
life.
On Kristen Ravn's independent position, her strong character, her rare
courage, on her knowledge, gifts, and energy, many, especially women,
had built up a future for the cause of Woman. Had she not already
written fearlessly for it? Her tendency towards eccentricity and paradox
would soon have worn off, they thought, as the struggle carried her
forward, and at last she might have become one of the first champions
of the cause. All that was noblest and best in Kristen must predominate
in the end.
And now the few who seek to explain life's perplexities rather than to
condemn them discovered--Some of them, that the defiant tone of her
writings and her love of opposition bespoke a degree of vanity
sufficient to have led her into fallacy. Others maintained that hers was
essentially a romantic nature which might cause her to form a false
estimate both of her own powers and of the circumstances of life.
Others, again, had heard something of how this husband and wife lived,
one in each wing of the house, with different staffs of servants, and
with separate incomes; that she had furnished her side in her own way,
at her own expense, and had apparently conceived the idea of a new
kind of married life. Some people declared that the great lime-trees
near the mansion at Hellebergene were alone responsible for the
marriage. They soughed so wondrously in the summer evenings, and
the sea beneath their branches told such enthralling stories. Those grand
old woods, the like of which were hardly to be found in impoverished
Norway, were far dearer to her than was her husband. Her imagination
had been taken captive by the trees, and thus Harald Kaas had taken

HER. The estate, the climate, the exclusive possession of her part of the
house: this was the bait which she had chosen. Harald Kaas was only a
kind of Puck who had to be taken along with it. But it is doubtful
whether this conjecture was any nearer the truth. No one ever really
knew. She was not one of those whom it is easy to catechise.
Every one wearies at last of trying to solve even the most interesting of
enigmas. No one could tolerate the sound of her name when, four
months after her marriage, she was seen in a stall at the Christiania
Theatre just as in old days, though looking perhaps a little paler. Every
opera-glass was levelled at her. She wore a light, almost white, dress,
cut square as usual. She did not hide her face behind her fan. She
looked about her with her wondering eyes, as though she was quite
unconscious that there were other people in the theatre or that any one
could be looking at her. Even the most pertinacious were forced to
concede that she was both physically and mentally unique, with a
charm all her own.
But just as she had become once more the subject of general
conversation, she disappeared. It afterwards transpired that her husband
had fetched her away, though hardly any one had seen him. It was
concluded that they must have had their first quarrel over it.
Accurate information about their joint life was never obtained. The
attempts of her relations to force themselves upon them were quite
without result, except that they found out that she was enceinte,
notwithstanding her utmost efforts to conceal the fact.
She sent neither letter nor announcement; but in the summer, when she
was next seen in Christiania, she was wheeling a perambulator along
Karl Johan Street, her eyes as wondering as though some one had just
put it between her hands. She looked handsomer and more blooming
than ever.
In the perambulator lay a boy with his mother's broad forehead, his
mother's red hair. The child was charmingly dressed, and he, as well as
the perambulator, was so daintily equipped, so completely in harmony
with herself, that every one understood the reply that she gave, when,

after the usual congratulations, her acquaintances inquired,