Elsket

Elsket, by Thomas Nelson Page

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Title: Elsket 1891
Author: Thomas Nelson Page
Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23017]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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Produced by David Widger

ELSKET
By Thomas Nelson Page
1891

I.
"The knife hangs loose in the sheath." --Old Norsk Proverb.
I spent a month of the summer of 188- in Norway--"Old Norway"--and
a friend of mine, Dr. John Robson, who is as great a fisherman as he is
a physician, and knows that I love a stream where the trout and I can
meet each other alone, and have it out face to face, uninterrupted by
any interlopers, did me a favor to which I was indebted for the
experience related below. He had been to Norway two years before,
and he let me into the secret of an unexplored region between the Nord
Fiord and the Romsdal. I cannot give the name of the place, because
even now it has not been fully explored, and he bound me by a solemn
promise that I would not divulge it to a single soul, actually going to
the length of insisting on my adding a formal oath to my affirmation.
This I consented to because I knew that my friend was a humorous man,
and also because otherwise he positively refused to inform me where
the streams were about which he had been telling such fabulous fish
stories. "No," he said, "some of those ------ cattle who think they own
the earth and have a right to fool women at will and know how to fish,
will be poking in there, worrying Olaf and Elsket, and ruining the
fishing, and I'll be ------ if I tell you unless you make oath." My friend
is a swearing man, though he says he swears for emphasis, not
blasphemy, and on this occasion he swore with extreme solemnity. I
saw that he was in earnest, so made affidavit and was rewarded.
"Now," he said, after inquiring about my climbing capacity in a way
which piqued me, and giving me the routes with a particularity which
somewhat mystified me, "Now I will write a letter to Olaf of the
Mountain and to Elsket. I once was enabled to do them a slight service,
and they will receive you. It will take him two or three weeks to get it,
so you may have to wait a little. You must wait at L---- until Olaf
comes down to take you over the mountain. You may be there when he
gets the letter, or you may have to wait for a couple of weeks, as he
does not come over the mountain often. However, you can amuse
yourself around L----; only you must always be on hand every night in
case Olaf comes."

Although this appeared natural enough to the doctor, it sounded rather
curious to me, and it seemed yet more so when he added, "By the way,
one piece of advice: don't talk about England to Elsket, and don't ask
any questions."
"Who is Elsket?" I asked.
"A daughter of the Vikings, poor thing," he said.
My curiosity was aroused, but I could get nothing further out of him,
and set it down to his unreasonable dislike of travelling Englishmen,
against whom, for some reason, he had a violent antipathy, declaring
that they did not know how to treat women nor how to fish. My friend
has a custom of speaking very strongly, and I used to wonder at the
violence of his language, which contrasted strangely with his character;
for he was the kindest-hearted man I ever knew, being a true follower
of his patron saint, old Isaac, giving his sympathy to all the unfortunate,
and even handling his frogs as if he loved them.
Thus it was that on the afternoon of the seventh day of July, 188-,
having, for purposes of identification, a letter in my pocket to "Olaf of
the Mountain from his friend Dr. Robson," I stood, in the rain in the
so-called "street" of L----, on the ------ Fiord, looking over the bronzed
feces of the stolid but kindly peasants who lounged silently around,
trying to see if I could detect in one a resemblance to the picture I had
formed in my mind of "Olaf of the Mountain," or could discern in any
eye a gleam of special interest to show that its possessor was on the
watch