Thelma | Page 4

in the heavens, like a victorious king
throned on a dais of royal purple bordered with gold. The sky above
him,--his canopy,--gleamed with a cold yet lustrous blue, while across
it slowly flitted a few wandering clouds of palest amber, deepening, as
they sailed along, to a tawny orange. A broad stream of light falling, as
it were, from the centre of the magnificent orb, shot lengthwise across
the Altenfjord, turning its waters to a mass of quivering and shifting
color that alternated from bronze to copper,--from copper to silver and
azure. The surrounding hills glowed with a warm, deep violet tint,
flecked here and there with touches of bright red, as though fairies were
lighting tiny bonfires on their summits. Away in the distance a huge
mass of rock stood out to view, its rugged lines transfigured into
ethereal loveliness by a misty veil of tender rose pink,--a hue curiously

suggestive of some other and smaller sun that might have just set.
Absolute silence prevailed. Not even the cry of a sea-mew or kittiwake
broke the almost deathlike stillness,--no breath of wind stirred a ripple
on the glassy water. The whole scene might well have been the
fantastic dream of some imaginative painter, whose ambition soared
beyond the limits of human skill. Yet it was only one of those million
wonderful effects of sky and sea which are common in Norway,
especially on the Altenfjord, where, though beyond the Arctic circle,
the climate in summer is that of another Italy, and the landscape a
living poem fairer than the visions of Endymion.
There was one solitary watcher of the splendid spectacle. This was a
man of refined features and aristocratic appearance, who, reclining on a
large rug of skins which he had thrown down on the shore for that
purpose, was gazing at the pageant of the midnight sun and all its
stately surroundings, with an earnest and rapt expression in his clear
hazel eyes.
"Glorious! beyond all expectation, glorious!" he murmured half aloud,
as he consulted his watch and saw that the hands marked exactly twelve
on the dial. "I believe I'm having the best of it, after all. Even if those
fellows get the Eulalie into good position they will see nothing finer
than this."
As he spoke he raised his field-glass and swept the horizon in search of
a vessel, his own pleasure yacht,--which had taken three of his friends,
at their special desire, to the opposite island of Seiland,--Seiland, rising
in weird majesty three thousand feet above the sea, and boasting as its
chief glory the great peak of Jedke, the most northern glacier in all the
wild Norwegian land. There was no sign of a returning sail, and he
resumed his study of the sumptuous sky, the colors of which were now
deepening and burning with increasing lustre, while an array of clouds
of the deepest purple hue, swept gorgeously together beneath the sun as
though to form his footstool.
"One might imagine that the trump of the Resurrection had sounded,
and that all this aerial pomp,--this strange silence,--was just the pause,
the supreme moment before the angels descended," he mused, with a

half-smile at his own fancy, for though something of a poet at heart, he
was much more of a cynic. He was too deeply imbued with modern
fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or Resurrection
trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his
nature, which not even his Oxford experiences and the chilly dullness
of English materialism had been able to eradicate. And there was
something impressive in the sight of the majestic orb holding such
imperial revel at midnight,--something almost unearthly in the light and
life of the heavens, as compared with the referential and seemingly
worshipping silence of the earth,--that, for a few moments, awed him
into a sense of the spiritual and unseen. Mythical passages from the
poets he loved came into his memory, and stray fragments of old songs
and ballads he had known in his childhood returned to him with
haunting persistence. It was, for him, one of those sudden halts in life
which we all experience,--an instant,--when time and the world seem to
stand still, as though to permit us easy breathing; a brief space,--in
which we are allowed to stop and wonder awhile at the strange
unaccountable force within us, that enables us to stand with such calm,
smiling audacity, on our small pin's point of the present, between the
wide dark gaps of past and future; a small hush,--in which the gigantic
engines of the universe appear to revolve no more, and the immortal
Soul of man itself is subjected and over-ruled by supreme and eternal
Thought. Drifting away on those delicate imperceptible lines that lie
between reality and