She had resolutely tried to put the Prince Mirko episode out of her mind, but with slight success. She had locked Angelescu's sketch of him away in her writing-case, and rarely allowed herself to look at it, but she knew it was there, she felt its occult presence as at times she still felt the presence of Mirko's lips on hers. When, by chance, she came upon his name in the newspapers the blood would rush to her heart.

Once an ill.u.s.trated journal had published a portrait of him, accompanied by a short biographical sketch, and she cut the page out, and laid it away with her sketch. She had never heard from her dream-hero directly, but each New Year's day brought her a card from Count Angelescu--He, at least, still remembered her!

She was at a loss to explain the restlessness that often possessed her.

More often than she dared confess to herself, her work and her studies bored her; in vain did she try to throw herself entirely into her serious occupations; emptiness, the vanity of it all, would in spite of her efforts, rise up and confront her.

The truth was, her physical nature was awake and clamouring for satisfaction, and the difficulty lay in the fact that having tasted the caviare of the sophisticated pa.s.sion of a Don Juan, she could not content herself with the bread-and-b.u.t.ter of a calm, everyday affection.

Had she never been awakened, even if but partially, to the possibilities of the latent pa.s.sion within her, her life would have been calmer, less eventful and happier--if happiness lie in the absence of upheaving emotion. Requiring less of life she would have been more easily satisfied, or would have imagined herself so. The narrow boundaries of conventional contentment would have shut out the larger horizon of emotional experience, pain and soul discipline. She would have remained iron, Destiny was to make her steel tempered by fire.

She was writing in the living-room when her Aunt came in. The comfortable room, with its low-raftered ceiling and large porcelain stove looked very cheerful in the glow of the lamp. The heavy red curtains were drawn across the windows, and the red table-cloth threw a rosy reflection on the girl's face, as she leaned over her work. Her hair was like live gold in the strong light of the hanging lamp.

Fru Boyesen came in and seated herself heavily in an upholstered armchair. Ragna had raised her head on her Aunt's entrance but had not interrupted her writing. Her Aunt scanned her closely; she had come to look upon the girl as her own; she enjoyed her presence in the house, and it was her proprietary feeling that was mortified by the girl's failure to take advantage of the opportunities offered her. Astrid's engagement, especially, rankled in the good woman's mind. Here was a girl not as pretty, not as clever as Ragna, and several months younger, whose mother had not the social influence and importance she herself possessed, yet this girl was making an excellent match. It was too vexatious!

Ragna looked up and meeting her Aunt's eyes, said:

"You have been out a long time, Auntie, did you enjoy yourself?"

"No," answered Fru Boyesen, "at least not very much. I don't see, Ragna, why you can't go out and enjoy yourself like other young people instead of moping here all by yourself and spoiling your looks with all your studying. Now Astrid goes about and has a good time--she is out skating with her friends now. Why can't you be more like her?"

"So you've been to Fru Bjork's," remarked Ragna quietly.

"I've been where I pleased," said Fru Boyesen, untying her bonnet-strings and smoothing them between her plump fingers. "I don't see what it has to do with you where I go. You shouldn't take me up so.

I think you are a very strange girl--and Fru Bjork can't understand you any better than I do," she added.

"I do wish, Auntie, that you would not discuss me with Fru Bjork, or anyone else."

"Hoighty, toighty, Miss! I shall discuss whom I please, and if you will be so peculiar and different from other girls, you must expect people to talk."

"It's none of 'people's' business what I choose to do or not to do,"

returned Ragna, making little scribbles on the sheet of paper before her. When her Aunt came in, she had been asking herself if she were not really foolish in holding herself thus aloof from her fellows, but at the hint of public criticism on her actions she was up in arms again.

"Ragna, you are positively hopeless; I don't know how a niece of mine can have so little sense! If you lived in a hut in the woods or on the Desert of Sahara, you might do as you like, but here one has to consider the opinion of one's neighbours."

"Who is my neighbour?" quoted Ragna softly, smiling in spite of herself.

She knew well that to her Aunt, "public opinion" consisted of the prejudices of four or five of the foremost families of Christiania; outside of that charmed circle she had a fine disregard as to what people might think, in fact she expected people of less importance to follow her example and conform to her opinions.

The smile was unwise in that it irritated the elder lady, already ruffled by the unsuccessful visit to Dr. Tommsen.

"Oh, you may well laugh in your sleeve at me, Miss Know-it-all! The day will come when you will realise that I am in the right--and it may be too late!"

Ragna made no reply; she returned to her writing and the scratching of her pen and the ticking of the clock filled the silence. Fru Boyesen, after one or two ineffectual efforts, rose from her chair and left the room.

"It's no use," she said to herself as she puffed up the stairs--she had grown very stout of late,--"she is quite impossible. I've more than half a mind to pack her off with the Bjorks. Else Bjork is not very clever, but she has brought Astrid up to be a credit to her and I think I'll let her try her hand with Ragna. I've been a fool to let her have her own way so long,--her head is full of the stuff these atheistic professors pour into it. I'll let her go; it can't do any harm, anyhow."

If she had entertained a secret hope that Ragna would elect to stay at home with her, and incidentally conform to her wishes in general, she was disappointed, for Ragna, when the proposition was broached to her, hailed it with delight. It would afford a welcome relief, she thought, from the growing monotony of her self-chosen occupations, which consistency forbade her to change of her own accord, and would at the same time remove her from her Aunt's ever more frequent innuendoes and reproaches, besides taking her to Italy, the land of her dreams. Of late the German Romanticists had formed the subject of her study and her mind was, as so many northern minds were at that time, possessed by the "_Drang nach Italien_."

There was much to be arranged for the journey, as Fru Bjork, in spite of her many travels was always fl.u.s.tered by a fresh start; Astrid was of no practical use and Ragna too much taken up with her personal preparations, and also too inexperienced a traveller to be of much help to her fussy chaperone. Fru Bjork was therefore glad to welcome an addition to the party in the shape of a spinster of uncertain age, Estelle Hagerup, who was expected to be the balance-wheel of the expedition.

Fru Boyesen devoted all her energies to getting Ragna ready, and supplied her with an amount of luggage remarkable for its bulk and variety, every possible contingency of sickness and health being provided for. Estelle Hagerup boldly risked the good lady's displeasure by declaring that at least half must be left behind, and herself undertook to separate the sheep from the goats by weeding out all but the indispensable articles. It was the reverse of Penelope's web, for what the uncompromising Estelle undid by day, Fru Boyesen and Ragna restored by stealth at night, and on her next visit, Estelle would find n.o.bby parcels and piles of books more or less skilfully concealed beneath the clothing in the boxes--and the struggle would begin again.

Fru Boyesen, having never left her native country, fondly imagined that mustard-plasters, rolls of flannel, bottles of spirit and sundry other necessities would be un.o.btainable in a strange land. Froken Hagerup heartlessly rejected all these things, but Fru Boyesen was not to be out-done and the very last day after the boxes were closed and locked, Estelle caught her stuffing two large parcels into the shawl-strap--one containing a goodly provision of soap, the other, two bags, one of flax-seed for poultices, the other of camomile flowers.

When, eventually, the time for starting came, Fru Boyesen wished she had never thought of letting Ragna go out from under her control. "Else Bjork is too soft, she will spoil her," she thought, "and the girl will come back worse than when she left. I have been criminally weak with her, but she'll ride roughshod over poor Else!"

As the luggage was being carried out of the house, an impulse seized her to have it brought back again; then she chid herself for her inconsistency.

"The little minx has upset me entirely! This is the first time in my life I haven't known my own mind!" Therefore to hide the sinking of heart she felt at the prospect of imminent loneliness, she a.s.sumed such a stern and forbidding aspect that half Christiania, a.s.sembled to see the party off, was certain that Ragna was being banished for some heinous offence.

Ragna kissed her Aunt good-bye with a light heart,--was she not faring forth to the land of her dreams?--And the separation would be but for a few months.

When Ingeborg received her sister's letter announcing the prospective journey, she burst into tears, much to the amazement of the family.

"Ragna is going, we shall never see her again!" she sobbed.

Lars Andersen reproved her sternly.

"Stop this nonsense, Ingeborg!" he ordered, "I will have none of this foolish superst.i.tion in my house. The future rests with G.o.d."

But though he spoke boldly, yet his heart sank. Ingeborg's predictions had a strange way of coming true.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

"Astrid," said Ragna, "do make haste! It will be luncheon time before we get out, and you can perfectly well finish your letter this evening."

Astrid looked up from her writing-board, nibbling her pen-holder reflectively. She was sitting near one window of the room, and by the other stood Ragna, pulling on her gloves impatiently. They had been in Rome a few weeks, and the first fervour of sight-seeing over, had fallen into a go-as-you-please sort of existence. Fru Bjork left the girls largely to their own devices; the long flight of stairs to be climbed after every outing so tired her legs and shortened her breath, that she declined to face them more than once a day, and she had conscientious scruples against eating in a restaurant, when her meals must be paid for, in any case, at the pension. Estelle Hagerup preferred to wander about alone; she would start out valiantly in the morning, her hat tied firmly on her sleek head, her skirt looped up in festoons by a series of flaps and b.u.t.tons, displaying her st.u.r.dy broad-toed boots. The very gla.s.ses perched on her prominent nose gave an earnest inquiring expression to her face. Night-fall would see her home again, tired, dusty, radiant and quite unable to give a connected account of her peregrinations. She would blissfully say:

"I am drinking in the atmosphere, I am saturating myself with the essence of Rome!" and the word "Rome" as she said it with an awed expression and bated breath suggested a h.o.a.ry cavern of antiquity, haunted by the ghosts of buried Caesars. Her short-sighted eyes would grow round and she would clasp her large bony hands ecstatically.

Good-natured Fru Bjork smiled at her enthusiasm and if the girls made fun of her at times, they did it pleasantly.

Astrid was inclined to be lazy; she enjoyed the sun and the warmth, and the picturesque figures on the Spanish Stairs, but museums and picture galleries bored her, and the churches, she declared, gave her the creeps. So it fell out that Ragna who wished to do her sight-seeing after a methodical plan, generally found herself alone. Armed with a guide book she began at the beginning, as it were, visiting first the most ancient ruins and relics, in their order, working on down to modern times. It disconcerted her to find ancient and modern mingled--as they so often were,--and at the Pantheon she resolutely shut her eyes to the monuments of the House of Savoy, until such time as she should have reached their place in history. It will be seen that her method involved no little difficulty and much returning over the same ground. It seemed pure lunacy to Astrid, who objected to being dragged over and over again to the same place to observe some addition or later adaptation which she had been forbidden to inspect on her first visit.

"It would be so easy to see it all at once," she plaintively protested, but Ragna was adamant.

Astrid therefore pleaded her delicate health and the overfatigue caused by such strenuous sight-seeing as an excuse to remain at home, where she composed lengthy epistles to her fiance with whom she was comfortably, if not pa.s.sionately, in love.

On this particular morning she was evolving a description of her impressions during a drive on the Pincio the afternoon before. She felt lazily content with the world, herself, and things in general and had no wish to bestir herself.

"I wish you weren't so awfully energetic, Ragna," she said.