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Wilfrid bent toward Monsieur Becker and said in a low voice, "Who taught her that?" "I do not know," he answered. "He was gentler on the Falberg," Minna whispered to herself. Seraphita passed her hand across her eyes and then she said, smiling: "You are very thoughtful to-night, gentlemen.
They alone, perhaps, can thread their way through the tortuous channels of the reef, or flee with the battling waves to the everlasting rebuff of the Falberg whose white peaks mingle with the vaporous clouds of the pearl-gray sky, or watch with delight the curving sheet of waters, or hear the rushing of the Sieg as it hangs for an instant in long fillets and then falls over a picturesque abatis of noble trees toppled confusedly together, sometimes upright, sometimes half-sunken beneath the rocks.
To him, Seraphita was the motionless marble, light nevertheless as a vapor, which Minna had seen that day poised above the precipices of the Falberg. Could she thus stand on the edge of all gulfs without danger, without a tremor of the arching eyebrows, or a quiver of the light of the eye? If his love was to be without hope, it was not without curiosity.
Here the expanse of the fiord is broad enough to allow the sea, dashed back by the Falberg, to spend its expiring force in gentle murmurs upon the lower slope of these hills, a shore bordered with finest sand, strewn with mica and sparkling pebbles, porphyry, and marbles of a thousand tints, brought from Sweden by the river floods, together with ocean waifs, shells, and flowers of the sea driven in by tempests, whether of the Pole or Tropics.
"Ah! my father, had you been with us this morning on the summit of the Falberg, had you seen him praying, you would not ask me that question. You would say, like Monsieur Wilfrid, that he saw his Seraphita for the first time in our temple, 'It is the Spirit of Prayer." These words were followed by a moment's silence.
The mountain which receives at its base the assaults of Ocean, and at its summit the buffeting of the wild North wind, is called the Falberg. Its crest, wrapped at all seasons in a mantle of snow and ice, is the sharpest peak of Norway; its proximity to the pole produces, at the height of eighteen hundred feet, a degree of cold equal to that of the highest mountains of the globe.
"Ah, truly!" said Wilfrid, "she has nothing in common with the creatures who grovel upon this earth." "On the Falberg!" said the old pastor, "how could you get there?" "I do not know," replied Minna; "the way is like a dream to me, of which no more than a memory remains. Perhaps I should hardly believe that I had been there were it not for this tangible proof."
"My dear Seraphita, are you ill?" he said. "You look paler than usual." She turned slowly towards him, tossing back her hair like a pretty woman whose aching head leaves her no strength even for complaint. "I was foolish enough to cross the fiord with Minna," she said. "We ascended the Falberg." "Do you mean to kill yourself?" he said with a lover's terror.
The roads from Christiana to Trondhjem all turn toward the Strom-fiord, and cross the Sieg by a bridge some score of miles above its fall into the bay. The country to the north, between Jarvis and Trondhjem, is covered with impenetrable forests, while to the south the Falberg is nearly as much separated from Christiana by inaccessible precipices.
Is it any of the boys in the village? Kasper, Wilhelm, Heinrich? Only tell me, and I will knock him down at once! Do tell!" "No; it is not that." "Well, why are you crying?" "I don't know." "Do you want to run as far as the Falberg?" "No; that is not far enough." "Where do you want to go?" "Down there! down there! ever so far! where the birds are going."
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