volcanic sand and jagged mouths of extinct volcanoes, over a deep dale
of lava rocks, rutted with paths and scored with fissures, but
brightened by a farmstead here and there with its little green-roofed
elt house smoking for breakfast and its hummocked home-field gleaming
like a gem in a wilderness of waste. At the last of these farms they
stopped to rest their ponies and to refresh themselves, being now
half-way to Thingvellir, with the caravan far behind them.
An untidy man in his shirt-sleeves took possession of their ponies and a
slatternly housewife in a soiled apron brought them milk and skyr. She
was still young, but already she had three children. One of them was
whimpering at her breast, another was dragging at her skirts and the
third was bellowing for her from the floor above. She belonged to the
capital and had once been considered a beauty, but she was seven years
married and it was six since she had seen the town.
"There!" said Oscar, when they returned to the road. "That's the
patriarchal life, if you please."
"Then I'm done with it," said Helga. "Ugh! To think of being buried in
a place like that, year in year out, with three children and only one
man! It might do for Thora, but give me life, life, life!"
"And the man who gives you that may have you body and soul, perhaps?"
said Oscar.
"Body and soul," laughed Helga.
For the next hour their course lay across an almost trackless heath,
bare as a desert and flat as an inland sea. The mountains that bounded
it were stark and cold and far away--on the one side steep with running
screes and on the other side clouded with steaming vapor, which rose out
of the glistening snow. Not a house was to be seen on any side, not a
tree or a bush or a flower or a plant, and hardly a blade of grass, but
only a broad stretch of silver moss, leaden and dull, like the mold on a
dead man's face. No birds sang in that solitude, but sometimes the
wimbrel sent its long love cry across the waste; sometimes the wild swan
sped far overhead and uttered its eerie ululation, and sometimes the
raven perched on a stone and croaked out its melancholy note. A line of
beacons, broken and old, each with a projecting stone like an amputated
arm, showed the course of the road, going on and on like soldiers in
single file tramping back after a lost battle. Midway on the Heath
there was a House of Rest for travelers overtaken by the storms of
winter--a little hut, half cubicle and half stable, with nothing but a
plank bed and a truss of hay.
"Gracious heavens, what a place to be lost in in a snowstorm," said
Helga.
"But what a country for Saga and song," said Oscar, "and if some one
could set it to music, grim as its glaciers and fierce as its fires, it
would take the world by storm."
"Do it, Oscar, do it, and I'll love you," cried Helga.
"As we are commanded to love one another?" asked Oscar.
"Perhaps," laughed Helga, and when he swung her to the saddle again her
hand slipped from his shoulder and his lips touched her cheek.
After that they both sang as they cantered along, for the clouds that
had hung over Oscar had gone by this time, and if the ground was grey
the sky was blue and their blood was red and warm.
But suddenly a new scene opened at their feet--a deep plain with a
shining blue lake in the midst of it, splashed with islands like spots
on an eagle's egg and fenced by soft green fells. It was a dream in a
desolate land, a cistern of sunshine encircled by countless peaks which
stood round it clothed in white, like a surpliced choir that were
singing their hymns to God. The black lava was there as elsewhere, and
the valley was blistered with mounds and wrinkled with ruts and scored
with fissures; but the blood-root grew in the clefts of the jagged rocks
and the blueberry hung over the face of the gaping chasms, and it was
almost as if an angel had passed over the surface torn by earthquakes
and brushed it with the bloom of his wings.
This was Thingvellir, the place of the Proclamation, the Thing-place of
the Northlands, the scene of a hundred Sagas, the subject of a thousand
songs.
Oscar and Helga were now near the end of their journey and they watched
for the townspeople to overtake them. Half an hour later the caravan
came up in a cloud of dust, all noisy, but good-natured and ravenous for
breakfast. There were some shouts at the pioneers, and certain dubious
compliments, but Oscar did not hear and Helga did not heed. They took
their places behind the Governor, and went down to the law-plain in his
train.
The way to it was through a wide chasm whose parallel walls stood up on
either side of the steep causeway like the ruined street of some
prehistoric city, but thrice grander and more awesome than any work of
the hand of man, because straight from the loins of nature and rent from
the womb of the earth. There were great openings as of arches, empty
spaces as of windows, broken peaks as of pediments and curious stones as
of carvings, all shaken from their foundations and toppling as if to
fall; while over them, from beetling side to side, hung the gay flags of
the Danish man-of-war, and through them came the bright shafts of the
morning sun.
Half-way down the gorge there was a mound like a platform (the
"Law-mount" explained Oscar to Helga) and at the foot of it there was a
pool whose clear green depths looked cold and chill in the palm of the
cliffs that darkened it.
"That's the drowning pool," said Oscar. "When a woman was unfaithful to
her husband they hurled her from the rocks into the water."
"And what did they do with the unfaithful men?" laughed Helga.
From the edge of the pool a frothy river fell with a thunderous clamor
over a precipice to the valley below, where it forked into many fingers
and ran off to the margin of the lake. Beyond these rivulets there was
the rutted plain, now dotted over with tents, but having only two houses
within sight--the little wooden parsonage with its tiny church built of
stone and shingles and the Inn-farm of Magnus Stephenson.
Magnus himself stood waiting there, washed and dressed, after working
the whole night through with his man John Vidalin, to prepare for his
expected guests. And when Oscar rode up, a little excited and confused,
he received him with the cheerful face of one who had made his peace
with his brother and meant to keep it.
"How's Thora to-day?" asked Magnus, as he loosened the girths of Oscar's
saddle; and Oscar answered nervously:
"Better--that is to say--well, perhaps not so very well to-day, Magnus."
"Her child has been given back to her?" said Magnus.
"Not yet," said Oscar. "To tell you the truth, the Governor--," and
then he faltered out the sequel to his broken promise. Magnus's face
darkened, and he said:
"So the doctor has not been consulted at all?"
"No. In the teeth of the Governor's orders it was plainly
impossible----"
"And Thora is still at Government House and her child is still at the
Factor's?"
"That is so."
Magnus looked from Oscar to Helga, who now stood beside him, and his
face darkened more and more.
"John Vidalin," he cried in a thick voice over his shoulder to a man
behind him, "saddle my horse--I am going to Reykjavik."
"But Magnus," said the servant-man, "with all this work to do to-day and
all this money coming----"
"Saddle it quick," cried Magnus, like a man who was choking.
"Magnus," said Oscar, "for your own sake I think it only right to tell
you----"
But Magnus cut him short by turning on his heel.
"Let him go," said Helga, and before the people in the tents and the
Inn-farm had settled down to breakfast Magnus was riding back to town.
*II*
Meantime Thora at home was in the throes of a great temptation. She had
heard the peace-making between Magnus and her husband and had said to
herself, "Oscar will go to see Dr. Olesen at once, and the dear doctor
will say: 'Certainly, the little mother is quite well enough now to take
care of her baby--give the child back to her immediately.'" Then Oscar
would come rushing up-stairs, and her room would be the same as if a
window had blown open, and he would cry, "Hip-hip-hurrah! Doctor says
baby may come back!" and then Anna would take him by the shoulders and
turn him out and everybody would laugh.
But Oscar was long in coming, and when he came he said nothing about the
doctor. He only talked about their little Elin, and said he had just
returned from seeing her. She was so rosy and well, and she was
beginning to "notice." If you held out your finger she looked at it as
if it were the bough of a great tree, and then held it tight as if her
little body hung by it.
"I couldn't tear myself away from her, Thora," he said. "It's wonderful
what a lot of pleasure you can get out of a baby."
It was strange that Oscar did not see that he was hurting her every
minute, but she only thought, "I know what it is--he is going to take me
by surprise. He doesn't want to tell me that baby is coming until she
comes. He will bring her back as he took her away, in the night, while
I am asleep; and when I awake in the morning she will be there."
In this sweet hope Thora closed her eyes early that evening, before the
red glow of the sunset had quite gone from the walls of her room, saying
a little prayer for Oscar, and another little prayer for Elin, that she
might be as lovely as ever when she saw her in the morning; and then she
fell asleep.
When she awoke next day she listened for the baby's breathing, and
thinking she heard it she stretched out a gentle hand to the place where
the child should lie, and then with a smile she opened her eyes. But
her baby was not there, and the sun in the room died out.
When the doctor came to see her that morning he looked grave and
anxious. "I'm afraid my little patient is worrying overmuch," he said.
"The head is hot and there is some fever. She must lie quiet, perfectly
quiet for the next few days, or I won't answer for what may happen."
Only this, not a word about baby, and even when the doctor took Anna
into the nursery to give the usual instructions Thora listened intently,
but there was not a syllable about the child.
The Governor came next, with the odor of snuff on his gold-laced coat,
and he stroked Thora's arm as it lay on the counterpane, and said she
was not to worry about anything.
"My dear little daughter must get better as fast as ever she can," he
said. "She must eat more and if she wants anything she must ask for it
and she shall have it, whatever it is."
She tried to say that all she wanted was her little baby, and if they
would give her that she would soon be well, but her throat was hurting
and she could not speak.
Her own father came last, smelling of breakfast and strong tobacco, and
he rallied her in a loud voice.
"Tut, tut! This will never do! We'll have to send you away again, with
Helga to look after you. And look here, young lady, you've got to get
better soon and come and carry away that baby. She's turning our house
upside down. Nobody over there can see the sun for that little mite,
and Aunt Margret and Auntie Helga haven't a thought for anybody else."
By this time the conviction had forced itself upon Thora's mind that the
family had agreed that the child was not to be returned to her, and that
Helga was responsible for this cruel resolution. Then a fierce passion
took possession of her, such as she had never known before. She hated
her sister with a terrible hatred. Helga, who had first robbed her of
her husband, had now robbed her of her child, and throwing dust in her
people's eyes had used her weakness as an excuse and a blind. But she
would defeat her, she would defeat everybody, she would get back her
child whatever the consequences, and not all the powers of earth or
heaven or hell should take it away from her again.
The intensity of her feeling, if it could have been realized by those
about her, would have made her sweet and gentle soul unrecognizable.
She was like a feline animal robbed of its young and going out to
recover it. All the other passions and emotions that had ever possessed
her--love of her husband, affection for Anna and Aunt Margret and her
father and the Governor, pity for Magnus and tenderness toward all
living things--were burnt up by the one consuming desire--the desire for
her child. It made her terrible, it made her cruel, it made her
cunning.
Thora determined to steal back her own child.
The following day--the day of the Proclamation--would give her an
opportunity of doing so. Nearly everybody would then be at Thingvellir,
therefore her path would be more clear. Only Anna would stay at home to
attend to herself, and Aunt Margret to attend to the child. Her one
feverish anxiety was that Oscar should not stay behind as well, for if
Oscar were to remain Helga would remain also and then her scheme would
come to naught.
Thora lay awake the whole night through. Before daybreak she heard the
people shouting in the darkness; at dawn she heard the departure of the
Governor, and when Oscar called up at her window she knew that Helga was
with him, for she heard the hoofs of two horses.
When everybody had gone she lay back on her pillow with a sigh of
immense relief.
"How soon will they be back, mother?" she asked.
"Not much before midnight, I'm afraid. But you must not fret after
anybody, my child, for everything shall be done for you," said Anna.
Then the transparent young soul, in the fierce fire of its temptation,
began to lay plans for deceiving Anna and for getting her out of the
way. At one moment she said:
"Haven't you any errands to do this morning, dear--in the town, I
mean--being left alone, you know, and even the servants gone?"
"Errands? Bless your dear heart, it's like Sunday in town to-day and
not a shop open anywhere," said Anna.
At another moment Thora said:
"Mother, if you wish to go down into the kitchen to cook you needn't
think of me?"
"The cooking is all done, dear," said Anna. "Maria did it yesterday,
and I've nothing to do now but warm up the dishes on the nursery stove.
So I needn't leave you for a minute, you see."
Thora was beginning to be restless in her perplexity, but presently she
thought, "I know! I'll tell her to lie down after dinner, and then I'll
get up and dress and go."
That suggested thoughts about her clothes, which had been taken off on
the night of her attack and packed away somewhere. There would be
drawers to open and search, and that would take time and make noises.
So she said:
"Mother, dear, don't you think my clothes must be getting damp lying so
long unused?"
"Damp? In five days and the middle of summer, too!" cried Anna.
"Still, it would be nice to see them airing--it would make me think of
getting up, you know."
"Then you shall, sweetheart, certainly you shall," said Anna, and with
the playfulness of one who indulges a child the good soul took Thora's
clothes out of a wardrobe, held them up to her one by one, and then hung
them on the chairs in front of the stove in the nursery, clucking and
crowing of the day when Thora would put them on and go down-stairs, with
wraps and scarves, and Oscar helping her.
Thora watched intently and then said:
"I haven't seen my cloak yet, mother."
"Your cloak! Your outdoor cloak! Bless me, what a heart she has to be
sure! But no, no! We'll all be dancing with delight if you need that
for the next three weeks, Thora."
The hours lagged cruelly before dinner, and after it the sun's line on
the wall was long in leaving the bed; but at last three o'clock struck
on the Bornholme clock below stairs and then Thora said:
"Mother, I'm sure you are very tired--I wish you would go to your room
and rest."
"And leave my honey alone? Not I," said Anna.
"But I want to rest myself and I can't rest unless you are resting."
"If you really think you'll sleep better----"
"I'm sure I shall," said Thora.
"Well--seeing you slept so little last night," said Anna, and Thora
began to yawn and sigh.
"I'll leave both doors open then. And see, Thora--I'll put this little
handbell on the table, and if you awake and want me--I sleep like a cat,
you know, the least noise wakens me----"
"Good night, mother," said Thora in a drowsy tone, and Anna, smiling and
nodding to herself over Thora's "error," stole on tiptoe out of the
room.
Thora listened for the last footfall in the corridor and then raised
herself in bed. She was alone at last, and the time had come to defeat
the conspiracy of love and kindness, prompted by jealousy and envy, that
had robbed her of her child. Her child, her child! She must get back
her child, whatever it might cost her!
She dropped to the floor and in doing so she brushed the hand-bell off
the table. It fell to the carpet with a deadened clang, and for a
moment she held her breath and listened. But there was no sound from
Anna's room, so she clutched at the bedclothes and stood erect. Then
the walls went round, and she knew for the first time how weak she was.
But her heart was strong if her limbs were feeble, and she found her way
to the nursery, where her clothes still hung over the backs of chairs.
It was a weary task to put them on, but her purpose never flagged. At
last she was dressed and looking at herself in the glass. Her eyes were
red, her lips were pale, and her cheeks were sucked in and white. Nobody
would know her who met her in the street, yet still if she could find
her cloak----
The Bornholme clock chimed half past three, and Thora began to steal
down the corridor. She had to go by Anna's bedroom and the door was
standing open. Anna's shawl lay on a chair within and she snatched it
up and wrapped it over her shoulders and her head. Then she went
down-stairs. Her limbs trembled under her, but not from fear, and if
anybody had tried to stop her now she would have fought like a fiend.
"My child is mine!" she thought. "What right have they to keep her from
me?"
The next moment she was in the street.
*III*
The Bornholme clock struck four. Anna awoke and hearing no sound from
Thora's room she went back to the nursery and busied herself noiselessly
at the stove.
Presently the lace curtains in the bedroom were rustled by the wind from
an open window and Anna cried through the door:
"Lie quiet, Thora--I'm making tea," and then she began to sing to
herself in the voice of her youth.
A few minutes later she said, "That sleep must have made me stupid--I've
actually put in the hot water before the tea-leaves."
Soon afterwards she sailed into Thora's room with the tea tray in both
hands and a smile on her face, saying, "Here it is, but you'll thank
your stars when Maria comes back in the morning."
She was setting down the tray on the round table by the bedside where
the hand-bell should have been, when her eyes fell on the empty bed.
Her breath jumped in her throat, and she turned her head slowly over her
shoulder, calling, "Thora!"
There was no answer; the room was empty. Anna remembered the clothes
which she had laid out on the chairs in the nursery. They were gone.
"Thora! Thora!" she cried, in an agitated whisper.
Then the smile came back to her face. "I know," she thought. "Thora
has dressed herself and gone down to the drawing-room, just to show me
what she can do."
At that thought the smile was chased away by a mighty frown. "But I'll
give it her," she thought, and downstairs she went with a determined
step and banged the drawing-room door back saying, "Really, Thora, it is
very naughty----"
But the protest died in her throat, for Thora was not there. Then her
heart shook like a leaf stiffened by hoar frost and she ran through the
house, from room to room, crying in a voice shrill with fear and
thickened by sobs, "Thora, where are you? Thora! Honey! Don't hide
yourself from me! Thora! Thora!"
At that moment Golden Mane came tolting up to the green and Magnus
entered the house. Hearing his mother's voice he ran up-stairs, and
came face to face with Anna in the corridor.
"What has happened?" he asked.
"Thora's lost," said Anna.
"Lost?"
"She coaxed me to lie down this afternoon, and while I was asleep she
got up and dressed herself, and she is gone."
"Let us be sure first," said Magnus, and the slow fellow shot through
the house like a torpedo, while Anna sat on the chair by the door of her
own room and wrung her hands and reproached herself.
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What have I done? How can I ever forgive myself?
The poor child was not herself--she didn't know what she was doing."
Magnus returned with a slow step, saying, "Be quiet, mother! Can't you
see what has happened? Thora has gone to the child."
"The child? The Factor's? God grant you may be right, Magnus. But she
hasn't mentioned the baby for two days."
"Nevertheless," said Magnus, "her poor heart has been torn to pieces by
this accursed scheme of separating her from her child, and she has gone
to join it."
"Let us go and see," said Anna. "But, oh dear, what a thing to do! And
she so ill and weak! It will kill her! Oh, why did I leave her for an
instant? What will Oscar say?"
"If Oscar's wise he will say nothing," said Magnus. "And if anything
happens, and he has any conscience, he'll damn himself to the last day
of his life."
"Don't say that, Magnus," said Anna. "If there was anything wrong we
were all to blame for it. It wasn't Oscar's fault----"
"Certainly, it was Oscar's fault," said Magnus. "It was Oscar's fault
that he allowed Helga to twist him round her finger and make you all her
miserable slaves."
"Where is my shawl? I laid it down somewhere, and now I can not find
it. But let us go. And don't be hard on your mother, Magnus. She was
trying to do her best----"
"It's not you I'm blaming, mother," said Magnus, "but if," he added, and
his words came through his clinched teeth, "if there were a law in this
infernal land to punish people like Oscar, as sure as I live I should be
the first to use it."
They were going out of the house when three men came up to the door--the
Sheriff and two strangers.
"Good evening, Mrs. Anna," said the Sheriff. "These gentlemen are
officials from Copenhagen, just arrived by the 'Laura.' They wish to
see the Governor on an important matter, and I thought perhaps you could
tell them when he will be back from Thingvellir."
"I can't say--I don't know--I am in a great hurry," said Anna.
"This young man," said the Sheriff to the strangers, "is the elder son
of the Governor, and if you would like to speak to him----"
"We should," answered the men.
"Is it so very important? My son is going out with me. Can't the matter
wait until to-morrow?" said Anna.
"Go on ahead, mother--I'll follow you presently," said Magnus, and while
Anna hurried away, he led the strangers into the Governor's office. One
of the two men took a paper from an inner breast pocket and said:
"Naturally, you know your father's handwriting?"
"I do," said Magnus.
"And of course you are familiar with his signature."
"I am."
"Will you be good enough to say if this is your father's signature?"
said the man, opening his paper and handing it to Magnus.
It was a note of hand in favor of Oscar Stephenson for an advance of one
hundred thousand crowns, signed in the name of the Governor and
witnessed by the Factor.
The world reeled round Magnus, for he saw in a moment what the paper
meant. It was almost as if his prayer to punish Oscar had been answered
on the instant. The paper rustled in his hand and for some seconds he
did not speak. Then he lifted his face and said:
"You ask me if this is my father's signature. Don't you think it would
be more proper to ask my father himself?"
"No doubt--certainly--you are right," said the stranger, "but to protect
your father--not to say yourself perhaps----"
"Perhaps," said Magnus, and he handed the paper back.
"Magnus," said the Sheriff, "I was told to watch you if you came to town
to-day, but it seems to me that somebody else in your family needs
watching a good deal more. Will you not give us your assistance?"
Magnus shuddered in the toils of his temptation. A voice within cried,
"Speak! Denounce him! Now's your time!" His lower lip quivered, his
eyelids trembled, and he answered in a hoarse voice:
"The Governor will not be back until midnight--let me come to you
to-morrow morning."
"Good!" said the Sheriff, whereupon Magnus showed them out of the house
and then fled away to the Factor's.
"That big fellow will speak when he wants to," said one of the strangers
as the three men walked down the street, "and when he doesn't the devil
himself won't make him do so."
*IV*
Of two ways to the Factor's Thora had taken the shortest and most
frequented, yet she had gone through the streets unobserved. Coming
near the house she had passed the Sheriff and the two strangers, but
they were immersed in their conversation and did not see her as she
stumbled by them with her head covered up in Anna's shawl.
Twice she had stopped to take breath, and once she had steadied herself
by a lamp-post, for she was dizzy and her ankles ached. The little
distance which had hitherto seemed so short was now a great journey, but
it came to an end at length, and she approached her father's house from
the front.
She had intended to creep up softly, enter by stealth, listen until she
learned where the child was kept, watch until Aunt Margret left the
little one alone for a moment and then steal into the room and take it.
With this purpose she ascended the stone steps to the front entrance and
gently turned the handle, but as soon as she had given the door a
noiseless push, there was the loud ringing of a bell which had not been
there before.
At the next moment there was a sound of slippered feet coming hurriedly
down-stairs and before her dizzy brain could tell what to do Aunt
Margret was peering into her face.
"Mercy me, is it you?" cried Aunt Margret, and she looked as if she were
ready to drop.
With a crushing sense of failure Thora stood silent and her heart
fluttered like a captured bird.
"Good Lord! How did you get here alone? And what on earth was Anna
doing to let you come?" said Aunt Margret.
Then with a convulsive little burst Thora said, "Anna knew nothing about
it, Aunt Margret--she was asleep--I came to see baby." And then she
broke down utterly, leaned against the doorpost and cried like a child.
The kind soul with the sharp tongue could bear no more. "And so you
shall, dear. Certainly you shall, my pretty poppet," she said with
infinite compassion. "As sure as my name is Margret Neilsen you shall,"
she said again, with stern determination. "They have left me here as a
watch-dog with an order that nobody is to come near the child, but that
was meant for somebody else--somebody who was going to steal it--so they
said--though what a grown man can want with a suckling infant it baffles
my stupid old head to see. But what a silly I am to keep you at the
door! Come up-stairs, my precious. Go before me, Thora, dear! That's
right--but not so quick--you shall see your baby soon enough. And
Thora, darling, if I haven't exactly tried to take it back to you it
wasn't because I didn't love you, and feel for you, and suffer with you,
my poor child, but because your father and Helga and even Oscar--no, the
other way, Thora--baby is in the front bedroom."
"Is she well?" said Thora, breathing quickly as she reached the landing.
"She's as well as well, and so rosy and bonny--look!" said Aunt Margret,
pushing ahead of Thora and opening the bedroom door.
But having climbed the stairs so much too rapidly, Thora paused at the
threshold of the room and held her left hand hard against her side.
"Wait! I can't go in yet," she said. "Not just yet, Aunt Margret. Is
she asleep?"
"Yes, she's fast asleep, bless her!"
"Is that her breathing?"
"No, that's the cat. Yes, it is the baby. But come, my own, come,"
said Aunt Margret, and then, holding her breath, the young mother
entered the room.
The child was sleeping in a cradle with a hood covered with light blue
lace, and its little head, streaked with yellow hair, lay red against
the white pillow. A cat purred on the floor in a warm shaft from the
setting sun, and all was sweet and peaceful.
"My baby! My baby!" cried Thora, and she sank down on her knees by the
cot and stretched her arms over it like a bird covering its nest with
her sheltering wings.
The child was awakened by the soft gale of its mother's breath on its
sleeping face and it began to cry, whereupon Thora gathered it in her
arms and lifted it out of the cot and nursed it lovingly, holding its
little plunging hand in her own hand, so thin and white and delicate.
"It's her bottle she wants, Thora," said Aunt Margret, "and here it is
ready and waiting--I keep it warm on the top of the stove."
"Let me give it her, let me give it her," cried Thora.
"Do you think you can, my pretty? But of course you can! My goodness,
it's wonderful--when a person is a mother she can do anything with a
baby. An angel seems to whisper, 'Do that,' and she does it, and it's
just right for the child."
The little creature was now sucking vigorously with its tiny face toward
the mother's breast and its plump red hand on her pallid cheek.
"But it's you that wants milk, my child," said Aunt Margret. "Yes, and
some spirits too, and you shall have both in a minute. Lay your poor
head against this pillow, my precious, and wait while I get the
decanter."
The child was now dropping off to sleep and Thora looked lovingly down
at it and said:
"God bless my motherless baby!"
"Motherless, indeed! Who says she's motherless? She has too many
mothers, it seems to me," said Aunt Margret.
The tit slipped from the child's slackening lips, and Thora leaned down
and kissed away the drops that trickled from the little mouth.
"I wish I could die," she said. "I wish I could die now, Aunt Margret."
And Aunt Margret, who was snuffling audibly, said, "Die, indeed! Just
drink off this drop of brandy and water and don't talk such nonsense."
Thora drank the brandy and straightway her weakness left her, and with
the return of her strength the secret purpose which had brought her to
the house revived.
"I must be quick," she thought. "Anna will follow me."
The innocent selfishness of her starved and injured motherhood knew no
conscience, and she set herself to consider how she could get rid of
Aunt Margret and so carry away the child. That was a perplexing
problem, and she sat long to think it out, but accident solved it at
last.
"Goodness me," Aunt Margret was saying, "how lovely you look, sitting
there with the child! But what a fit some people would have if they
could drop in and see you! They can't, thank goodness! They're thirty
miles away, and before they get back you'll be gone, and nobody a penny
the wiser. When the cat's away the mice will play! But mercy me, what
a storm there would be if they ever came to know that I had let you
touch the little angel! I don't know which is the worst on that
subject--your father, or Oscar, or Helga. I think Helga is the worst if
you ask me. You're a Neilsen, Thora, but Helga--she's a sheep from
another sheepfold. She's so cute, and she has such ways with her. It
was Helga who put those bells on the door, and when I heard you coming
in I thought, 'It's that Sheriff again,' but you could have knocked me
down with a feather--Good gracious!"
Aunt Margret, who was looking out of the window, suddenly threw up her
hands.
"What is it?" said Thora.
"It is--no--yes, it's Anna! And the Sheriff and two officers are coming
behind her!"
"They're coming for me," cried Thora. "They want to tear me away from
my baby. Go down and stop them, Aunt Margret. Say I'm not here--say
I'm gone--say anything----"
"Hush, dear, don't excite yourself. Leave Margret Neilsen to manage
this little matter. I'll take Anna and the Sheriff into the back parlor
and tell them something. Then you'll slip out by the front and get back
home and nobody will know."
"Yes, yes, that will do," said Thora.
"You'll be as quiet as a mouse, and I'll make lots of noises."
"Yes, yes, yes."
There was the clang of a bell from below, and Aunt Margret whispered,
"There they are! Now put baby back in the cot, my own, and cover her up
with the blanket."
"Not yet, let me kiss her again, just for the last time," said Thora.
An agitated voice came from the bottom of the stairs, "Margret! Margret
Neilsen!"
"I must go--be quick," whispered Aunt Margret, and scuttling
down-stairs, she cried, "I'm coming," and then there was a rumble of
confused voices, followed by the closing of a door.
Thora was alone once more, and the feverish strength of outraged
motherhood possessed her like a madness. "They've come to take my child
again," she thought.
In a moment she had slipped off her slippers, snatched up the blanket
and wrapped it about the sleeping infant, crept down the stairs in
stocking feet and out of the house by a back passage.
*V*
Meantime a little tragi-comedy was being acted in the back parlor. Anna
was white and trembling, while Aunt Margret was looking wondrous wise
and subtle.
"Thora?" gasped Anna. "Have you seen anything of Thora?"
"Have _I_ seen anything of Thora? You must be dreaming, Anna dear."
"Then she has gone, and I was right after all," said Anna.
"Can it be possible?" said Aunt Margret.
"Magnus would have it that she had gone to see the baby, but she has
gone farther than that, poor child, and we shall never see her again."
"What a pity!" said Aunt Margret, and then Anna flew out at her.
"Margret Neilsen, don't you understand what I am saying? The poor child
was demented, and she stole out while I was asleep and goodness knows
what she has done with herself."
"Hush! Hold your tongue, Anna, and come into this room and I'll tell
you something. Magnus was right after all."
"Then she has been here?"
"She's here now--she's up-stairs this very minute."
"Oh, thank the Lord----"
"Don't speak, or the poor thing will hear you. And don't be angry with
her either, and if you brought the Sheriff to take her back----"
"I brought the Sheriff! What are you saying, you crazy woman?"
"Then can't we let her stay a little longer? It isn't every day she has
the chance----"
"She can stay all night for me, Margret."
"That is impossible--the Factor is so frightened. And then there's the
Governor----"
"That's true," said Anna.
"But she can safely stay an hour more with her child, can't she?" said
Aunt Margret.
"Just one hour more," said Anna.
"Poor thing, she was to steal out while we were talking, but we'll go up
and surprise her. And when you see her with the little mite at her
breast, looking down at it and kissing it, with such a pitiful smile,
the dear, it will fill your heart brimful. But for goodness' sake wipe
your eyes and blow your nose, Anna, and do for mercy's sake look more
cheerful. Quietly now, quietly, or she'll think the Sheriff is behind
us."
With that the two old things, snuffling as if they had colds in the
head, but struggling to smile and seem happy, went creeping up to the
bedroom.
By that time the room was empty and Thora was gone.
The women looked at each other for an instant, and then Aunt Margret ran
to the cradle. The child was gone, too.
At that moment the bell of the front door rang again. Aunt Margret
cried, "There she is," and the two women raced down-stairs to see.
It was Magnus coming in.
"Thora has been here, but she has gone--gone this very minute," cried
Anna.
"And she has taken the child along with her," cried Aunt Margret.
Without a word Magnus turned about and leapt back to the street. There
he met the Sheriff and told him what had happened. At the next minute
the two women were running hither and thither and the two men were gone
different ways.
Half an hour afterward they met at the Factor's house again. Thora and
the child had not been found. They had disappeared as utterly as if a
lava stream had swallowed them.
The women were sitting side by side with blanched faces and startled
eyes, twisting their handkerchiefs into knots.
"The doctor was quite right after all," said Anna. "They were all
right, though we thought them so hard and cruel. The poor thing wanted
to die--she told me so herself."
"She told me too--she told me this very day," said Aunt Margret.
"Is there no house in town she was accustomed to go to?" asked the
Sheriff.
"None," said Anna, and Aunt Margret said, "Thora was not like that--she
would never drink coffee or talk scandal with any one."
"Let us try again," said Magnus to the Sheriff.
The sun had set over the fiord and the black rocks of the plain were
dying out in the dusky haze of evening when the two men returned to the
Factor's for the second time. Their search had been fruitless and
Magnus's face was white and haggard.
Anna and Aunt Margret sat in the parlor window stricken with grief, but
finding a certain satisfaction in their affliction from the melancholy
glances of groups of other women who had gathered in the street.
"I knew it would be useless," said Anna. "She's gone, poor dear--I'm
afraid she's gone to heaven, poor darling."
"And taken the little innocent infant along with her," said Aunt
Margret.
"Has anybody thought of going back to Government House?" asked the
Sheriff.
"I went there first," said Magnus.
"And to the lake?"
"I went there next."
"And the jetty?"
"I went to the jetty also. But I don't believe Thora has destroyed
herself," said Magnus.
"Then she has died of exhaustion by this time and it's all the same in
any case," said Anna.
"She's in her stocking feet too--see," said Aunt Margret, showing the
slippers which Thora had left up-stairs, and falling to kissing and
weeping over them.
"There's one chance left--she may have tried to follow her husband,"
said Magnus.
"So far, and without a horse?" said the Sheriff.
"It's the last hope--I'm going to follow it up," said Magnus. "Mother,"
he added, "you had better go back home."
"I can't--I daren't--and if anything happens I'll never be able to go
into the poor girl's room again," said Anna.
Outside, in the fading light, Magnus stood for a moment wiping the
flanks of Golden Mane and patting his drooping neck.
"I suppose there isn't another horse left in the town," said the
Sheriff, "but you'll kill your splendid pony."
"Then he'll die well," said Magnus.
"Magnus," the Sheriff continued, "I intend to search every house in
Reykjavik, and if I succeed to-night I'll expect you to help us in the
morning."
"If you don't succeed I'll help you," said Magnus, with a hoarse laugh,
and at the next moment he was lost in the darkness.
*VI*
Thora had done the most natural and therefore the most unexpected thing.
Only thinking of getting back to her bed in Government House, and of
carrying the child along with her, she had taken the simplest means
toward doing so. In order to escape the Sheriff she had left her
father's house by the back, and to avoid observation from people in the
frequented thoroughfare she had taken the longer and quieter of the two
roads home.
This road led her past the lake, but she had no desire to destroy
herself. Often before she had longed for death from the depths of her
heart, but love for her child conquered all such feelings now. The way
was very long, but she did not know that she was tired; the roads were
rough, but she did not feel that they were cutting her feet; she was
going fast, but she did not realize that she was breathless. She had
only one fear--the fear of being overtaken; only one dread--the dread of
the child being torn away from her.
Clinging to the little one with feverish arms she hastened along,
weeping to herself, laughing to herself, full of a wild joy that had no
remorse, no qualms of any kind, and neither looked before nor after. It
was motherhood--the most divine, the most devilish, the most tender, the
most terrible, the most sweet, the most sublime, the most savage of all
the passions of the heart.
Reaching home at last she found the house silent, but every room wide
open, as if lately ringing with the noise of hurrying feet. Creeping
up-stairs with her precious burden she got safely back to her room, and
instantly locked the door behind her. She laughed as she did so,
thinking how Anna and Aunt Margret would follow her and find themselves
defeated.
Then she undressed and got back into bed and for one long, heavenly hour
she gave herself up to the delight of having her child--to hold it, to
nurse it, to fondle it, to kiss it, and to devour it with all her
senses. The little creature had slept during its journey through the
town, but now it awoke, and lay quiet by its mother's side while she ran
her hungry hands over its tiny body and put its clinched fists and its
feet one by one into her mouth.
After a while the child tired and began to cry, whereupon Thora
remembered for the first time that she had left its feeding-bottle
behind her. She tried to hush it, but it would not be hushed, and then
a sudden thought, a blind impulse of maternity, came to her, and she put
the little one to her breast. The child clung to it and was quiet, and
the milk, which had never come until now, instantly began to flow.
It was the crowning miracle of that joyous hour, a physical rapture such
as Thora had never known before.
After that a more tender spirit stole over her, and she looked lovingly
down at the child in her bosom and kissed it again and again, and said,
"God bless my baby."
Then in a voice so weak and silvery that it was like a voice descending
from the sky, she began to sing the child to sleep:
"Sleep, baby, sleep,
Angela bright thy slumbers keep,
Sleep, baby, sleep."
The child slept, and even while she sang Thora became aware of alternate
waves of heat and cold going over her. A vague, broken, delirious
consciousness came and went, and people seemed to be entering and
leaving the room. First it was Helga, then it was Oscar, and finally it
was Magnus. Helga was taking the child out of the bed and Oscar was
helping her, and she was trying to cry out and could not, when Magnus
appeared in the doorway.
At one moment she thought she was dead, and people were talking around
her. They were all strangers, chiefly women whom she had seen going
into the Salvation Shelter. "She's gone, poor girl," said some one, and
somebody else said, "So much the better--the poor thing's troubles are
over." "They say she tried to make away with herself," said one. "And
what wonder?" said another. "There was no place left for her in this
world." "Nobody can say she didn't love her husband," said a voice at
her feet. "That was the pity--he loved her sister," said a voice above
her. "Perhaps that was why she thought of taking her life--to leave him
free--perhaps to make him happy?" "Well, she did wrong by Magnus, but
we all know who killed her." And then everybody said in chorus, "He'll
get his reward, he'll get his reward," and she was sorry for Oscar.
At another moment she thought she was a blessed saint in paradise, with
lilies and roses around her head, but there was a thorn in her heart for
all that, and even among the joys of heaven she had a dull pain there
was no ease for, because she could not help thinking about her baby. So
she asked the dear God to let her go down to earth to see her little
Elin, and He suffered her to come and she came. Oscar and Helga were
together now, in a country that was sweet with smiling gardens and a
house that was full of gilded furniture. But she could not see her Elin
anywhere, until at length she found her in an upper room, neglected and
lonely. Then the burning tears ran down her face and she sat by her
child and comforted her, and Elin was not afraid. "Stay with me a
little longer," said the child, and she stayed with her and sang to her,
and no one heard but little Elin:
"Sleep, baby, sleep,
Angels bright thy slumbers keep,
Sleep, baby, sleep."
When she came to herself again it was dark in the bedroom, yet she was
still singing. The baby began to cry and she wished to comfort it, but
she found she could not speak. It's little body felt cold against her
breast and she wanted to cover it up in the blanket, but her arms were
heavy and she could not lift them.
There was a moment of agonized consciousness, but the good Father sealed
the senses of His suffering child again. She thought a majestic figure
entered the room, clothed all in white, and lifted the baby out of her
bosom, saying, "Suffer little children to come unto Me." She knew quite
well who It was, but when she looked a second time the figure had the
face of Magnus.
Then it seemed to her that it was she herself and not the baby that had
been lifted up, yet she felt no fear at all, nor any pain, nor any
heartache.
At that moment the women who had stood about the bed came back and they
began to sing, "Safe in the arms of Jesus"--just as she had heard them
singing it when she listened at the door of the Shelter.
She smiled and drew a deep sigh; a sweet, long breath of joy and
rapture; and then the darkness lifted and--it was day.
*VII*
That day had been a prolonged triumph for Oscar. The festival of the
Proclamation began with service in the parish church, and though the
Governor and the Thingmen only had been able to pack into the little
place, the churchyard outside and the home-field of the parsonage had
been thronged.
After the service there was a procession from the church door to the
ancient place of proclamation, and Oscar had ordered and marshaled every
one. First the town band, then the Governor and his executive in their
gold-braided uniforms, the Bishop in his robes, the Thingmen in their
scarfs, the clergy in their black cassocks and white ruffs, and finally
a vast following of the people. It was a gorgeous spectacle, such as no
man could remember to have seen on that spot before.
The Proclamation itself was an imposing ceremony. Sitting on the
law-mount as on a natural platform of lava rock, with his face to the
east and the Cross of Dannebrog on his breast, the Governor read out one
by one the titles and descriptions of the Acts which had been passed by
Parliament; and after each of them he lifted his head and cried to the
people on the plains below, "Is it Yea or Nay?" And then the people,
led by Oscar, shouted "Yea."
When the reading was finished the Governor cried, "Long live the King,"
whereupon Oscar led the cheering, three times three, and when the band
struck up the national hymn he started the words of the chorus.
But the last feature of the function was the best, and that was the
singing of the hymn composed by Oscar himself. It was a hymn to Iceland,
the cradle of the Vikings, the scene of the Sagas, the parent of
parliaments, the mother of the mighty Northlands.
Standing under the brant face of the law-mount with his choir of one
hundred and fifty on the sloping ground in front, Oscar conducted with
great vigor. His prelude pleased the people, but when he rose to the
height of his argument and struck the patriotic note, his love for the
stern old Northland--
"Isafold! My Isafold! Great land of frost and fire,"
his hearers were carried away and some of them shouted and wept.
After the hymn was over the Thingmen crowded about Oscar to congratulate
him and some of the country-people fell upon his neck. The Governor,
too, sitting above, was the object of many congratulations. "But this
is genius," said one. "An inspiration," said another. "Our Oscar will
be a great musician some day," said a third. And the old man took the
tributes quietly, almost silently, but with the shining face of a father
proud of his favorite son.
When the ceremonies ended only one name was on everybody's lips, and
that was the name of Oscar Stephenson, and hundreds hummed the strains
of "Isafold! My Isafold!" as they trooped off to dinner.
Oscar and Helga dined together at the Inn-farm in a corner of the hall
which was thronged with guests. But they were both too much excited to
remain in mixed company, and after dinner they escaped to the margin of
the lake and to the solitary parts of the plain. There they gathered
blueberries and, partly to restrain their excitement and partly to
nourish it, they talked of nothing but the wild flowers.
When the sun began to sink they returned by way of the parsonage, where
the Governor, with the Factor, the Bishop and certain other officials
had taken their dinner apart. The little guest room was dense with
smoke, like the mouth of a geyser, and the faces that came and went in
it were discussing the merits and defects of the old order and the new.
Both Governor and Factor were for the old, as exemplified by the day's
ceremony and Oscar's hymn, but others held that changing times brought
changing needs and that Iceland would be the better for a new
constitution, with Free Trade and modern methods.
"They'll go on till midnight and never get home to-night," whispered
Helga, as she slipped out with Oscar.
On returning to the farm they found people striking tents and leading
horses from the crowded horsefold to prepare for the return journey.
"I'm afraid I'm too tired to go back to-night," said Helga.
"Then stay--stay by all means," said Oscar.
"And you?" asked Helga.
"I must go home in any case--there's Thora," said Oscar.
"Your mother will look after her," said Helga.
But Oscar shook his head, and ordered Gudrun, the housekeeper, to make
one of the two guest-rooms ready for Helga.
At that moment some young townspeople were clearing the floor for a
dance and they called on Oscar and Helga to lead off with a waltz. They
did so with great delight, and when the waltz was finished they joined
the round dance which followed it, and then they danced a second and a
third waltz, until they were flushed and hot and had to go out to cool.
By this time it was dark, and the people who meant to encamp for the
night had lighted fires at the mouths of their tents and were beguiling
the hours with various pleasures. One of these was fortune-telling. An
old woman, not thought to be overwise, was going from tent to tent,
making random shots amid shrieks of laughter.
"And what do you see here?" said Helga, holding out her hand.
"Ah, this is a good hand," said the witch. "You are going to be a great
lady and eat mutton and beef every day and drink golden wine and
ginger."
"And what do you see in this?" asked Oscar
"This? Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" said the witch.
"What's amiss, mother?"
"Cold water runs between my skin and my flesh."
"Is it as bad as that, old lady?"
"Don't ask me--don't ask me! You have a brother, haven't you?"
"And if I have, what about him?"
"Beware--beware!" said the witch, and Oscar and Helga turned away
laughing.
The moon rose and they wandered into the great chasm, and walked among
the shadows of the toppling stones, until they came under a huge stone
called Stoker, which stands like a mighty gravestone over a deep pit
that is like a tomb. There they sat, with the white moon above and the
red camp fires below them, and then the boiling, bubbling geyser of
excitement in their breasts could be kept down no longer.
"You have had a great success to-day, Oscar," said Helga.
"So have you, Helga, so have you, for without your presence to prompt
and inspire me I should have done nothing."
"I am happy if I have helped you, Oscar, but you must go on now, and
never look back--never."
"You are right, Helga, you are right--to stop would be a sin--an
unpardonable sin--almost like a sin against the Holy Ghost."
"Exactly like it, Oscar, for if any one has a gift he gets it from God,
and to bury it, like the man in the parable----"
"There would be no fear of that if I could have you beside me always,
Helga."
"And can't you, Oscar?"
A fragrance seemed to envelop him. He felt Helga's breath upon his
face. It made him tremble all over.
"Would to God I could, but it is impossible. You will return to
Denmark----"
"Not I, indeed! I am not without my own ambitious also. I must go back
to England, to France, to Germany, to Italy. And so must you, Oscar--you
must, if you are to be true to your talents and to yourself and to the
great future----"
"I know it, Helga, I feel it, and if I could write even one song that
would stir the souls of millions it would be better than making a
fortune or passing an act of parliament. But when a man has given
hostages to fortune, and they are dragging him down--with silken
threads, perhaps--but still down, down, down----"
He was speaking out of a dry and husky throat, but she answered softly
and sweetly, "Are things so absolutely irretrievable, Oscar?"
"Absolutely, Helga, absolutely; and henceforth and all my life long I
must learn to go without your comradeship----"
"And what must I do?"
The compulsion of passion was driving him on, but he was struggling to
hold back. "Helga," he cried, "do you know what is the deadliest thing
in life? It is Love. The painters paint Love as a harmless little
Cupid, with a handkerchief about his eyes and a tiny bow and arrow in
his hands. But Love is a great, blind, blundering monster with a
two-edged sword, dealing destruction on every side."
His words were as nothing, but his quivering voice sang like music in
Helga's ears, and she said, "Is it Love or man that does that,
Oscar--man with the false sense of right and wrong, his foolish ideals
of honor?"
"God knows! Perhaps if I could have thought so a year ago, before I
added injury to injury and brought unhappiness on others--but
now--now----"
A sensation of triumph came to her and she said, "Isn't it cowardly to
talk like that, Oscar?"
"I am a coward, Helga," he answered, trembling from head to foot; "to
you I can speak the truth--I am a coward, a moral coward, and I can not
face the certainty----"
"But if," said Helga excitedly, getting closer, "you had some one beside
you who had the courage of life, the defiance of life----"
"Helga!" cried Oscar, breathing heavily--the earth seemed to be slipping
under him like an avalanche.
"Some one who would go on helping you, and ask nothing but your
comradeship----"
"Helga! Helga!" He was gasping as for breath in the intoxication of
his emotion.
"Nothing but to work with you and to conquer the world with you----"
"Helga! Helga! Helga!"
"Oscar!"
There was a breathless cry from both, and then an almost inaudible
whisper, "I shall not go back to-night, Helga."
* * * * *
When they came to themselves again they were returning--more flushed and
excited than before--out of the white moonlight into the yellow mist of
the smoking lamp that hung over the dancers in the hall. The young
townspeople received them with a shout and called on them to join the
dance they were dancing. It was called "Weaving the Cloth," and the
figures were intended to represent the spinning and carding, the
weaving, stretching, hammering and rolling of the thick Icelandic
Vadmal.
The dancers crossed and recrossed, twisted each other about, beat each
other breast against breast, and finally rolled each other round and
round.
The music was going fast, and the dancers were singing loud and laughing
louder, when there came from outside the sudden barking of dogs,
followed by the clatter of the hoofs of a galloping horse. Immediately
afterward there was the rattle of the metal end of a riding-whip against
a window-pane, and a voice crying, "God be with you!"
The new-comer did not wait for the customary answer to his salutation,
but pushed the door open and entered hurriedly. It was Magnus, dusty
and dirty, with a white face and wild eyes.
At that moment Oscar and Helga, blushing and smiling, were in the middle
of the floor, locked in each other's arms, performing the last figure of
the dance, and it was thus that Magnus came face to face with them.
"Is she here?" he cried.
"She?"
"Thora! She is lost--I thought she might have found a horse and
followed you."
Then the shuffling feet stopped, and the fiddles tailed off into silence
as Magnus, in broken sentences, told the story of Thora's flight to the
Factor's, her disappearance with the child, and the vain search that had
been made for her.
"But surely she would go back to Government House eventually," said
Oscar. "The poor girl would go the long way round to escape observation
and home by way of the lake. Did nobody think of that, and stay in the
house to see?"
Magnus looked like a man whose eyes, dulled by groping in a dark tunnel,
had been stunned by sudden light. Before the others had recovered
themselves he had turned about and was gone.
At the next moment Oscar was tramping to and fro on the floor, with his
clinched fists to his forehead, moaning, "My God! My God!" Helga was
combing her hair and putting on her wraps.
*VIII*
John, the servant at the farm, was sent over to the parsonage to tell
the Governor and the Factor. He found the gentlemen settling themselves
for the night, having talked so long that they had decided to remain
until morning. But the news of Thora's disappearance altered
everything.
"We must go back immediately," said the Governor.
"Bring the horses round instantly," said the Factor.
Less than half an hour afterward a silent and gloomy company were going
home--the Governor, the Factor, Oscar, Helga, and a various following of
the sympathetic and the inquisitive.
The two old friends were morose and ill-tempered, and for the first time
in fifty years disposed to nag and quarrel. The Governor blamed Aunt
Margret, the Factor blamed Anna; the Governor blamed Helga, the Factor
blamed Oscar; the Governor blamed the Factor, and the Factor blamed the
Governor. In the half light of uncertainty and suspense their
friendship fell before fear, and blood was thicker than water.
It was a miserable home-going to Oscar. The explanation of Thora's
movements with which he had surprised Magnus soon ceased to satisfy
himself and he thought of a hundred fatal consequences. Helga tried to
comfort him with various plausible arguments. He had acted for the
best--the best for Thora, the best for the child, the best for himself,
the best for everybody--and if accident had intervened or the dreadful
freaks of dementia had followed, he was not responsible and could not be
blamed.
But Oscar's worst sufferings were from a secret purgatory which Helga's
pleadings did not touch, for the cruelest part of his remorse concerned
Helga herself.
The journey was long and tiresome and every step had its own peculiar
misery. During the first hour the moon was shining--a brilliant moon
that bathed everything in loveliness--and Oscar remembered the scene in
the chasm and reflected that in the very hour of his delirious happiness
Thora, perhaps, was lying dead.
Then the moon died out and darkness fell--a murky darkness, blacker than
the lava--and as Oscar pushed and plunged along over the stumbles of his
pony, the thought came to him that if Thora were dead perhaps it was the
best that could have happened to her--the best under the
circumstances--saving her from the bitterness of a future which must
surely come when Helga and he, struggle as they might, would have to
break the bonds that bound them.
And then in that dark and treacherous hour, with no face to look into
his face, he felt an immense relief, remembering that if Thora was gone,
the consequences of his life's error were at an end and he was free.
But the dawn came--a bleared, rainy dawn, with scarfs of vapor
stretching across the sun like a cataract over a blood-shot eye--and
Oscar's remorse was doubled by the wounds he had inflicted upon his
conscience in the darkness, and he dare not look at Helga as she rode,
muffled up and silent, by his side.
They were crossing the Moss Fell Heath by this time, and everything
around was dark and drear. A solitary raven kept them cheerless company
for a while, flying from beacon to beacon and uttering its husky cry.
Oscar remembered the scenes of yesterday when the sky was blue, and
their blood was warm, and then the thought came to him--like the
shooting of the bolt on a man buried in a tomb--that if he was not to be
henceforward the most miserable of men he must pray with all his soul
and strength that when they reached the end of their journey Thora
should be alive.
On reaching the more inhabited districts Oscar allowed the Governor and
the Factor to forge on ahead, and Helga to wait for him in the road,
while he glanced off to the farmhouses and shouted up at the bedroom
windows. But the result was always the same--Thora had not been seen
and Magnus had been there before him.
When they came to the top of the hill from which they had looked back on
Reykjavik and on the Danish mail-steamer entering the fiord, the little
capital floated in the mist of morning like a city in a woolly sea, and
the "Laura" lay anchored outside of it; but the apprehensions of
yesterday were consumed by the fears of to-day, and Oscar thought of one
thing alone.
They met farmers trotting out of the town on their little caravans of
ponies, yet Oscar did not question them, lest he should hear the news he
dare not listen to, and coming at length to the long street of the
little capital, he did not raise his face to the eyes that peered at him
through the curtains of upper windows, lest they should reveal the truth
he dared not learn.
The fear of disaster had by this time swallowed up any flicker of hope
in Oscar, and when, coming up to Government House, he found a crowd of
people standing in front of it, he knew too well that all was over.
From that moment onward fact after fact led up to the fatal certainty.
The window of Thora's bedroom--the window at which Oscar had shouted his
adieus the day before--stood open, and a ladder had been raised against
it. By the gate to the green a horse lay dead on the gravel--it was
Magnus's horse, his magnificent Golden Mane--covered with dust and
sweat, as it fell under its rider at the last step of his fearful
journey.
In the middle of the hall Anna and Aunt Margret stood with the Governor
and the Factor, sobbing out their pitiful explanations. Afraid to
return to the empty house which had been the scene of a painful memory,
Anna had sat the night through with Margret at the Factor's, waiting
hour after hour for the reports of the Sheriff and his constables.
Nothing had been heard of Thora, but in the early morning Magnus had
returned and found the door of her room locked on the inside. Then he
had run for them and they had called to Thora, but received no answer,
though sometimes they heard the baby crying. And now Magnus, having
failed to force the door, had gone for a ladder, and he intended to
climb into the room from the outside.
Oscar was conscious of no more until he found himself knocking at
Thora's door and calling in his agony:
"Thora! Thora! Thora!"
There was a heavy, staggering step inside the room; the lock was thrust
back and the door thrown open.
"Thora!" cried Oscar again, but it was Magnus who stood before
him--Magnus with a face white and set and full of anger and hatred.
"You were right," he said, pointing to the bed. "There she is with
God--and you!"
Thora lay high on the pillow, with her eyes open and her parted lips
smiling, as if she had just awakened from a beautiful dream. She was
dead, but her baby was alive, and it was rolling its little round head
and digging its red hand into her cold, white breast.
With a low, choking cry, Oscar fell to his knees at the bedside and
buried his face in the bedclothes. Magnus left the room, the others
entered it, and Aunt Margret lifted the living child out of the mother's
breast over the father's kneeling form.
*IX*
During the few days before the funeral the Government House felt
motionless and empty, like a room when the clock has stopped in it.
Behind the drawn blinds everybody talked in whispers, as if the dead
were asleep and must not be wakened. The stillness of the house
centered in the room where Thora lay, and that was white and fresh with
the odor of clean linen and wild flowers. In the deadened sunshine, as
it filtered through the yellow blinds, there was a halo about the waxen
face on the bed, and it seemed to diffuse solemnity on all around it.
Anna never allowed herself to be long away from this chamber. Her fear
of the room had gone, now that death had entered it. Early and late, in
daylight and dark, she went to and fro in the silent place, walking
softly and seeming to count the hours during which her dear girl would
be above ground.
The Governor did nothing from the day of Thora's death until the day of
her burial. Dressed always in his official uniform he sat in his
bureau, but received no one. He wrote no letters and read no books and
seldom spoke at his meals. For hours together he would sit with folded
arms looking fixedly at the pattern on the carpet. A shadow had fallen
on him--a shadow of shame--and in the sealed chamber of his proud soul
he was struggling to reconcile his conduct to himself and finding it
difficult to do so.
The Factor went on with his work as usual, for in the decalogue of his
duty there was no maxim that forbade business, but sometimes as he
turned the leaves of his ledger he looked long and saw nothing, and
once, as he counted up the figures in his bank-book, the thought smote
him with the force of a blow on the brain that perhaps Nature was
beginning to strike a balance with him against the sum of his
successors, and that the cruel bereavement which had just befallen him
was the first stroke of the Nemesis which was to follow in the wake of
his wealth.
Aunt Margret and Helga were always at home, the one busy with the baby,
which had been taken back to the Factor's, and the other with the
"black" which had to be ordered for everybody.
Little was known of Magnus, except that he was still in town, that he
had been seen with the Sheriff and two strangers, that in spite of the
trouble which had overtaken his family he was spending most of his time
in the dark smoking-room of the Hotel, and that he was said to be
drinking heavily.
But the grief of Oscar touched and satisfied everybody. He had eaten
little and had never been known to sleep. Sometimes he was seen to be
sitting apart and weeping silently; sometimes he was moving from room to
room, as if every spot on which his eye could rest was charged with the
memory of happy days that were dead; sometimes he was heard in the white
room in which Thora lay--the room in which she had been so merry and so
sad, so wild with delirium and so happy with her baby--and there he was
sobbing out his wild regrets in muffled cries of "Forgive me! Forgive
me!" Once in the middle of the night he was heard at the harmonium in
the room below the death chamber, playing softly a pitiful lament which
awakened his father and mother and brought the salt tears to their eyes.
The desolate soul in these ghastly hours was prostrating itself in the
dust. Death strikes sternly, and Oscar in his penitence was accusing
himself of every crime. He had killed Thora--not her body only, but her
heart, that faithful heart which had loved him so deeply, so tenderly,
so passionately.
In this conscience-stricken condition he looked back on the path of his
life with Thora, and every step as he now saw it seemed to be thick set
with the stubble of sin and rank with the weeds of self-deception. When
he returned from England he had taken Thora from Magnus, although he did
not love her. It was true he had thought he loved her, but the
brotherly thing would have been to stand back in silence, and if he had
only done so Time itself would have undeceived him.
That was the first of his offenses, and the next was no less hideous.
When, being betrothed to Thora, he awoke to the certainty that his heart
was with Helga, he had gone on with his bargain and led the girl who
loved him into a loveless marriage. It was true he thought he was doing
his duty, but behind duty was fear, fear of the world and fear of
Magnus, while the courageous thing, the manly thing, even the merciful
thing would have been to stop at the church door, if need be, and face
the facts and take the consequences.
But having cheated Thora of her love and lied to her at the altar, he
had crowned the sum of his sins by exposing himself to the temptation of
infidelity. It was true that Thora herself, in her innocent affection,
had paved the way to this temptation; true, too, that his marriage had
been an imperfect partnership; but all the same his course had been
clear and he should have cut himself off from Helga at once and for
ever. That he had not done so, that he had paltered with temptation was
the last cause of this terrible calamity. Thora had died because her
heart was dead, and he himself had killed it.
Thus the desolate soul of the unhappy man laid down its faults at the
feet of God, hiding nothing, palliating nothing, and seeing everything
in naked light. If to be sorry for having sinned is to be innocent,
Oscar had ceased to be guilty in his pitiful, but useless, sorrow. In
the dizzy hours of pain and shame, when the wheel of life goes rapidly,
Oscar asked himself how it had come to pass that Thora was dead, and
something whispered "Helga," and again and yet again something whispered
"Helga," but his heart would not listen to that excuse. Helga had not
been to blame. He alone had been at fault. He had sacrificed Thora to
his ambitious dreams--his dreams of greatness, of glory. Helga had been
merely the symbol of those dreams, and Thora was dead because he had
tried to become a great musician.
But the past was past, and when Oscar asked himself what punishment he
could impose upon himself for the future, he heard but one answer. If
his ambitions had been the cause of his sin, to bury them would be the
true expression of his repentance. He _would_ bury them. He would bury
his genius and the expectation of becoming a composer in the grave of
the sweet girl he had destroyed, and go through the rest of his life in
the drudgery of the nearest duty, eating the bread of affliction in
obscurity and remorse.
When Oscar first attempted to carry out this resolution, it was in a
scene of such tragic beauty that no one who witnessed it could ever
afterward wipe it out of mind. The family had gathered for that last
office of love, which makes perhaps the saddest moment of human
experience--sadder than the moment of turning away from the newly
covered grave, sadder even that the moment of returning to the void and
empty home--the moment when the coffin-lid is closed down and the
beloved face disappears for ever.
The death chamber was the same that in a better time had been the bridal
chamber, but the air which had tingled with all exquisite thoughts of
life was now heavy with the hush of death. It was night-time and the
same lamp burned under the same shade, while a gilt-edged prayer-book
lay in a circle of lighted candles on the little table that stood by the
bed. Besides the members of the family, only two persons were
present--one of the sewing-maids, who had made the wedding-dress for the
cathedral, and had just put the last stitch to the garment intended for
a darker house, and a joiner in his shirt-sleeves.
One by one the family approached the bed to take their last look at the
burden that lay on it--the Governor with a solemn tread, as if he had
been approaching the presence of a king, the Factor with rigid strides
and a bewildered stare, and Helga with a nervous step and a furtive
glance, as if duty had called her and she wished herself away. But Anna
and Aunt Margret moved about the body without dread or ceremony, laying
flowers on the bosom and smoothing the soft hair that was dressed down
the cheek, as if the dear dead belonged to them by right of nature, and
they would give it up to no one until Earth herself, the mother of us
all, should claim it for her own.
The man in the shirt-sleeves had stepped forward to finish his task when
the Governor held up his hand.
"Wait! Where is Oscar?" he asked, and then Maria, the old housemaid,
who had been weeping noiselessly outside the door, was sent to fetch
him.
While Maria was away, Aunt Margret went up to Thora and whispered over
her:
"My precious, precious pet! You never changed to your stupid old
auntie, did you?--not even when she kept your dear baby away from you
and your sweet heart was broken! Don't think she didn't love you for all
that, my precious. She loved you every minute, my own. And now that she
has got your baby she intends to keep it. She will keep it as long as
she lives, so don't you ever be troubled about that, Thora. Aunt
Margret is going to be a mother to your little girl, and nobody in the
world shall ever touch a hair of your darling's head."
It was at this moment that Oscar entered the room, with old Maria
creeping up behind him. His pale cheeks and sunken eyes testified to
the strength of his remorse, but his step was firm and his whole figure
showed intense vitality of will. He carried a bundle of papers in one
hand, and they were loose and irregular, as if they had been snatched up
hurriedly at the moment he was called. In the utter absorption of his
mood he seemed to be unconscious of anybody or anything in the room
except one thing--the thing that lay upon the bed--and walking up to it
he looked down at the white face and spoke to it as if the dead--and the
dead alone--could hear.
"Thora," he said in a calm voice, "these are the only copies of my
compositions, and I wish you to take them with you. They were written
in hours when your faithful heart was suffering through my fault--when I
neglected you and deserted you for the sake of my foolish visions of art
and greatness. That was the real cause of your death, Thora, and in
punishment of myself for sacrificing your sweet life to my selfish
dreams, I wish to bury the fruits of them in your grave. Take them,
then, and let them lie with you and fade with you and be forgotten. I
will never write another note of music as long as I live, and from this
hour onward my ambitions are at an end."
Saying this he put the papers beside the body of Thora and wrapped them
in the long plaits of her beautiful hair.
"Oscar! Oscar!" cried Helga in breathless horror.
The others listened and looked on, hardly realizing what Oscar had
resigned, but Helga realized it, and she was trying to warn him against
the life-long sacrifice. But he did not seem, to hear her, and at such
a moment further remonstrance was impossible.
"My sweet girl," said Oscar, stretching both arms over the bed, "forgive
me for all my failures of duty. Oh, what I would give to forget them
now; but I can't, I can't! You are gone, and I can never make amends."
Thinking to put an end to a scene which was touching everybody too
deeply, the Governor signed to the man in the shirt-sleeves, but when
the man stepped forward Oscar's grief broke out afresh, and in the
vehemence of his sorrow his tongue lost all control of itself.
"Not yet!" he cried. "Oh, God! Thora! My wife! My sweet young wife!
Let me look at her face again! How bright and happy it used to be, and
now it is leaving me like this! Forgive me, my angel! Say you forgive
me before you go! I can not live without your forgiveness! I wronged
you and sinned against you, but you were good and your childlike heart
was from God!"
The desolate cry rang through the room, and each of those who heard the
revelation of the naked soul read it by the light of his own. Helga
trembled and turned to the window, the Governor and the Factor dropped
their heads, but Aunt Margret cried openly in innocent sympathy, and
Anna touched Oscar's arm and tried to comfort him.
After a moment Oscar became more calm and even signed to the man
himself, and when all was over he walked firmly and courageously out of
the room.
*X*
On the day of the funeral Oscar was weak and ill, and more fit for his
bed than for a journey to the cemetery, but no one could prevail on him
not to go. The morning was dull and drear, with black clouds from the
mountains and some sprinklings of rain, and when the dread hour struck,
and Oscar came down among the mourners, his face looked ghastly in the
void and heavy air.
The bell in the cathedral tower began to toll, the solemn burden was
borne slowly down the stairs, and then Oscar's white face became yet
more white and he would have fallen but for his father's arm which held
him up.
The body was first rested on the green outside the door, and while the
mourners grouped themselves round in a wide half-circle to sing a
parting hymn, Oscar stood bareheaded in the drizzling rain which had
begun to fall.
John, the servant, stood at the gate, holding Silvertop, Thora's pony,
which he had brought from the farm to carry her on her last journey, and
the sight of this horse seemed to be more than Oscar could bear. The
coffin was laid cross-wise on the panniers and the procession began to
form. It passed through deep lines of the townspeople, Oscar walking
first after the body, alone, bareheaded and conscious of nothing but his
grief. The bell was still tolling and a Sabbath quiet had fallen over
the town.
The cathedral was crowded with the same faces that had looked on at
Thora's wedding, when she came down from the altar in her bloom and
beauty, happy and smiling on her husband's arm; and now that she was
being carried up to it, while the organ played the funeral march, and
Oscar walked with drooping head behind, the people nearest the aisle
said he was weeping audibly.
The coffin in its pall was set down on the steps to the communion
rail--the spot where Thora had knelt as a young girl to be confirmed and
as a bride to be married--and then the Bishop who had been waiting to
receive it delivered a consolatory address.
They should not ask themselves why this sweet and lovely life had been
so ruthlessly cut off. The ways of Providence were inscrutable, but God
was in heaven and the Judge of all the earth did right. Neither should
the family who were there to mourn take blame to themselves for what had
occurred, for if it had pleased the Almighty to lay His hand on the
afflicted brain of their dear departed sister. He knew best why He did
so, and to what end it was done. Rather let them kneel in gratitude to
God that in His mercy He had not suffered her to lift her hand against
herself, and so rob them of the blessed hope of eternal life.
"To the young husband who is here plunged in sorrow," said the Bishop,
"what can we say but that all our hearts go out to him? It seems only
yesterday that he stood on this spot to make his vows before heaven and
before men to love and cherish the dear girl who has been so suddenly
taken away. If she had lived he would have kept his promises, and
though she is gone, he will preserve the spirit of them still. The pure
and innocent soul who linked her life with his life will be an abiding
memory, a perpetual inspiration against sin, and when the first pangs of
grief are over, a constant solace and a lasting joy."
If it was possible for Oscar to look more wan and weak than when he went
into the cathedral, he did so when he came out of it. The rain was now
falling heavily, but when the procession was formed again for the last
stage of the journey, he walked bareheaded as before.
The Factor, who was behind Oscar (with Helga quivering on his arm),
begged him to put on his hat, but he refused, and when the Governor, who
came next with Anna, passed up an umbrella, he shook his head and sent
it back. The bell tolled again, the little town sat quiet, and the
townspeople who wept floods of tears for Thora, wept for Oscar even
more.
When the procession reached the cemetery the rain was coming down in
torrents and even the priest put an overcoat over his cassock, but Oscar
stood uncovered by the open grave. During the short prayer--"dust to
dust"--he suffered visibly, and during the long hymn that is always sung
at an Icelandic funeral, while the grave is being filled in, the hollow
thuds of the falling earth seemed to beat upon his twitching face.
When all was at an end he could not be drawn away until his father took
him by the arm and said in a firm voice, "Come." Then with a stronger
step he walked with a remnant of the broken procession across the little
cemetery--the hummocked home-field of the dead--through the gate to the
road--where Hans, the water-carrier in the sleeveless waistcoat Thora
had made for him, was giving water to her horse--past the Factor's
house--where Aunt Margret watched at a window with the baby in her
arms--and thus back to his empty home.
At the foot of the stairs he excused himself when the mourners went in
to their meal, and he was seen no more that day.
The dinner was a cheerless thing, being served in the room that had
witnessed the home-coming, and so chilled with memories of that happier
event. Silently, or in whispers, the mourners bade their adieus and
crept away one by one, leaving the few remaining members of the two
families with wide spaces between them at the table like gaps in a
toothless skull.
The Governor and the Factor had not spoken since their return from the
Proclamation, and the interval of silence had made the rift between the
two old friends grow wide.
"Ah, well!" yawned the Factor, "it's all over, I suppose."
Then he turned to the Governor and asked sharply, "Where is Magnus?
I've seen nothing of him to-day."
The Governor did not answer and Anna dropped her head, and then Helga,
who was the only other person present, said quietly:
"Somebody saw him at the Hotel--he did right not to come to the
funeral--they say he was not quite sober."
"Just like him," said the Factor. "A yell is all you hear of a wolf,
and but for his last drinking bout, perhaps nothing of this would have
happened."
The Governor's proud face quivered, but he did not speak, and soon
afterward the Factor and Helga went away.
*XI*
Early next morning, before the household was astir, the Governor was in
his bureau, ready to begin on the arrears of business, when somebody
knocked at the door. It was Magnus, white and worn, but sober and
serious as a judge.
"May I speak to you, sir?" said Magnus.
"Well--perhaps for a moment--come in," said the Governor.
It occurred to the Governor as Magnus entered the bureau that he had
come for money to help him with the farm, and he said immediately:
"If you have come for financial assistance toward stock and seed and
what not, I ought to tell you at once, Magnus, that I have nothing to
give you. I have already spent as much on the farm as I am justified in
spending--more perhaps than I ought to have spent on the inheritance of
one of my sons in justice to the claims of the other one--and if it is
money--ready money----"
"I do not come to ask for money," said Magnus. "But I come to speak
about it," he added, and then he sat on a low seat and twisted his felt
hat between his knees, while the Governor leaned back in his desk-chair
and fingered a pen.
"I wish to ask," said Magnus, "whether you drew, about six months ago, a
bill on the Bank of Denmark for one hundred thousand crowns."
The Governor uttered a contemptuous snort and said, "Certainly not; I
have never drawn a bill in my life and never shall do so. Why do you
ask?"
"Because a bill for that amount is in town at this moment," said Magnus.
"Then it is a forgery--an impudent forgery--and the forger must be found
and promptly punished."
The Governor had risen in his chair when he looked at Magnus's drooping
head and a thought occurred to him.
"But are you sure of what you say? Is this story true?" he asked.
"I have seen the paper myself," replied Magnus.
"And it is signed in my name?"
"It is signed in your name, sir, and witnessed in the name of the
Factor."
"That, too," said the Governor, while a painful smile came into his
face. "And pray whom is this extraordinary document drawn in favor of?"
Magnus did not reply immediately--he continued to twist his hat between
his knees.
"That may help us to find the motive, and therefore the forger--who is
it?"
"Oscar Stephenson," said Magnus.
"Oscar? Your brother?"
"Yes, sir--and the money was paid to him in Paris."
"What?" cried the Governor, crossing the floor. "You tell me that
Oscar--your brother Oscar--has committed a forgery? Oh, that's what you
mean--don't deny it--you mean that my son is a forger?"
Magnus made no answer, and after a moment the painful smile about the
Governor's face broke into a more painful laugh. "But why do I trouble
myself with such a trumpery story? I see how it is, Magnus--strong
drink is a strong tongue--you have been drinking."
"I have been drinking, sir--I was ill and I couldn't help it--but I'm
sober now, and what I tell you is God's truth."
Magnus rose as he said this and father and son stood face to face--the
little Governor in his uniform with flushed cheeks and pigeon-breast
distended, and Magnus big, black, clumsy, unkempt, and with lines of
suffering in his face.
"And this document, you tell me, is at present in Iceland?"
"It is, sir--two officers of the law brought it here from Copenhagen."
"Officers of the law, you say?"
"The bank found reasons to suspect the signatures, so they sent across
to verify them."
"You have talked with these men yourself, no doubt?"
"The Sheriff brought them to see me," said Magnus.
"The Sheriff, too! The Sheriff of all men!"
"He is to bring the two men here to-morrow morning."
"So he is to bring them here to-morrow morning!"
The Governor, though heated and agitated, laughed once more, and said
with a sneer:
"Of course, in the interests of the family, you felt it necessary to
examine the signatures they showed you?"
"I did," said Magnus simply.
"And without consulting me to denounce the forger?"
Magnus made no reply.
"And even to hint--only to hint--that perhaps you could point to the
forger?"
Still Magnus made no answer, and dropping his cynical tone, the Governor
burst out in choking anger:
"Out on you, man, out on you! I thought you were drunk, or suffering
from the delusions of drink, but you are worse--you are sweltering in
hatred--and it is an unnatural hatred, too--the hatred of your own flesh
and blood."
Magnus flinched as if a lash had cut him through the skin.
"You are jealous of your brother--always have been, always will
be--because he is clever and successful and amiable and because
everybody loves him--you are as jealous of your brother as Cain was of
Abel, and this is your way of destroying him."
Magnus stood with drooping head while the Governor's lash fell over him.
"Aren't you ashamed to stand before your father and parade the whole
diabolical catalogue of your unnatural passions? You allow yourself to
consort with my enemies, with Oscar's enemies, with your own enemies, if
you had the sense to see it, while they try to bring him down at the
highest moment of his success."
The Governor was walking to and fro and lashing himself into a fury.
"At the deepest moment of his distress, too! Just when the poor boy is
unmanned by the loss of his wife--the dear girl he loved and you
insulted. But I don't believe one word of this cock-and-bull story.
That accursed document is nothing but a trick to dishonor my son and to
discredit me at the very time when a pack of rascals who call themselves
reformers are trying to abolish the Governorship. Let them do it if
they can, but while I am Governor here I'm master in this house, and Mr.
Sheriff shall be suspended and those men sent back to Copenhagen."
"Hadn't you better speak to Oscar first, sir?" said Magnus.
"Certainly, I shall, and if I find as I expect--as I am sure--that your
story is a pack of falsehoods--let me never see your face again."
Without a word of defense or explanation, Magnus left the room, and a
few minutes afterward Oscar, at the call of the Governor, entered it.
Oscar's face was as pale as yesterday, but with a different pallor, a
different expression--an expression not of grief and regret, but of fear
and shame.
"Oscar," said the Governor, "I am sorry to trouble you about business so
soon after your great sorrow, but an ugly story is being told about you
in town, and as every lie has its tail, it is only right that you should
hear of this one immediately, so that it may be quashed without delay."
Oscar's lower lip trembled--he felt the blow before it fell.
"Magnus--your brother Magnus--I am aware he has not been on brotherly
terms with you--your mother has told me something about that--and let me
say I do not sympathize with his protests and pretensions--I think them
nothing but an excuse for his own selfishness--Magnus has just been
here, and he tells me that a note of hand drawn in your favor for no
less a sum than one hundred thousand crowns has been forged in my name.
I do not believe the story and I do not want you to discuss it. I only
ask you to contradict it--to contradict it flatly--or to leave me to
deal with the real offender as I think best."
Oscar, standing by the Governor's desk, remained for a moment quite
still. Then in a voice so low that it hardly seemed to come from him,
he said:
"I can not contradict it, father. What Magnus has told you is true."
"True? You say it is _true_?"
Father and son stood facing each other for some moments without a word
more being spoken. Then in hot words, broken by breathless pauses, the
Governor poured out question after question, to which Oscar made no
answer.
"You received that sum and signed for it in your father's name?--in the
name of your father-in-law also? One hundred thousand crowns? What has
become of the money?"
"It is lost," said Oscar.
"Lost?"
"It was to pay the debts I had already contracted."
"Was that at Monte Carlo?"
"Yes."
There was another long silence, in which Oscar stood with quivering lips
and the Governor with contracted brows.
"But this document--how did it come about?"
"I ask myself that question over and over again, father, and I fail to
find an answer. I can not understand myself--I try and I can not."
"Were you mad?"
"Sometimes I think I was--I must have been."
"Did somebody tempt you--put the idea into your head?--somebody,
perhaps, who helped you to lose and promised to help you to repay? If
so, who was it?"
"I do not wish to accuse anybody, father--I suppose I have no right to
do so."
"Right? Don't talk to me about rights. Think about your duties--and
the first of your duties is to me, not to the person, whoever it may be,
who has helped to destroy you. You have pledged my credit and my honor,
but I don't want to think you altogether bad, and if anybody suggested
this devilish device to pay your debts, I ought to be told who it was.
Was it Helga?"
At the mention of that name Oscar's drooping head drooped lower still;
the Governor saw this and then he understood everything.
"Lord God forgive us," he said, in a breathless whisper. "Then Magnus
was right, after all! And the death of the poor child we buried
yesterday was perhaps a part of the diabolical harvest we are reaping
to-day! You needn't wince, sir--I see it's true without that."
Oscar did not attempt to excuse himself, and after some moments of
silence the Governor spoke again.
"You have deceived and disappointed me, Oscar. I thought I had one son
who was an intelligent man and a gentleman, not a forger and a fool.
But it is of no use to prolong a painful interview. You may go."
Oscar staggered out of the room and the Governor sank into his chair.
*XII*
The proud man was abased. For the first time in his life he was
degraded in his own eyes. His own son had committed a vulgar crime and
exposed himself to a vulgar punishment.
In the first pain of surprise and humiliation he saw himself covering up
the whole wretched episode. But he was too proud to be proud, and at
the next moment he began to count with his conscience. Thus far he had
tried to do what was right in Iceland, and he would do what was right to
the end, whatever it might cost him.
Oscar had offended against the law and he must bear its righteous
punishment. It might be eight years' imprisonment, with the ruin of all
his prospects, the waste of all his talents, and the wreck of all his
happiness, but he must go through with it to the last hour, the last
penalty, the last pang.
So felt the Governor as Judge, and if as the father he felt differently
it was only with a different intensity. His favorite son--the son whom
he had indulged and pampered in the past--for whom he had planned and
prepared so many things in the future--had committed a crime against his
country and against himself, relying upon his father's love and pride to
save him from the painful consequences, no matter what sacrifice it
might cost him in hard-earned money or in money still to earn; no matter
how much it might put him at the mercy of a scheming crew who were
striving to pull him from his place! It was selfish, it was heartless,
it was shameful, it was infamous, and it deserved a double punishment.
Feeling more bitterly against his son than he had ever felt before
against any human creature, the Governor passed the day in torment, and
he was sitting alone in his room late at night, with no light but the
sleepy glow from the open stove, when the door opened noiselessly and
Anna entered. She looked as if she had been crying, although her eyes
were dry, and the Governor reproached himself that in all his sorry
summary of the consequences of his son's crime he had never once thought
of his son's mother.
But neither did she think of herself, and now sitting by the stove and
stirring it, she began to talk of Oscar.
"He has fallen asleep at last," she said, "and his troubles are over for
a little while anyway. He went up to his old bedroom to-night, Stephen,
the one he slept in when he was a boy--when Magnus and he were boys
together. I sat with him until he dropped off, and he held my hand all
the time, just as he used to do after he had been naughty and you had
sent him to bed without his supper. He looks quite like himself now,
poor boy, and if you could see him lying there on the pillow, you would
think the old days had come back, when you used to go up with the candle
to look at him, and wipe the tears from his little face while he lay
asleep, and stroke his curly hair. Ah, dear, how easily he could throw
off his troubles in those old days, Stephen! Next morning you would
hear him romping about overhead, and singing like a lark."
"A shallow nature, Anna," said the Governor, "a shallow nature, on which
nothing makes a serious impression--always has been, always will be."
"Oh, but this will, Stephen, this will make a deep impression, and if
the poor boy could only have another chance he would turn over a new
leaf and set to work in good earnest, and realize all your expectations.
And then think--only think, father, what a dreadful thing it would be if
one brother were to drag the other into the dock--dreadful for us, I
mean. We should lose both our children, for Oscar would be lost to us
one way and we should never be able to look on Magnus again."
"Our children have always been at war, Anna, ever since their earliest
infancy."
"Don't say that, Stephen. When they were little they loved each other
dearly. It was not until they grew up that they were different. And
then others came between them--one other anyway, and--who
knows?--perhaps she has been the cause of all this trouble."
"Has Oscar said so?" asked the Governor.
"He will say nothing against anybody," replied Anna. "That was always
the way with Oscar. But if somebody tempted him and he was weak, and if
our poor boy must go to prison while she----"
"There is a weakness that is wickedness, Anna, and must bear its pains
and penalties."
"Yes, I know," said Anna. "I remember you said the same words long ago
when the sailor lad killed his sweetheart in a fit of drunken passion.
The mother was a widow and she came to ask me to plead with you for her
son. He was a good boy, she said, and if it had not been for the drink
he would never have hurt any one. You spared his life, you know, and he
was sent to prison. And dear me, how the poor woman kissed me and wept
on my face for joy! But she came to think that for her part it might
have been better if her boy had died instead of being locked up for
ever. She could never forget it, and when her eldest daughter was
married and her house was full of people, and everybody was happy, she
suddenly remembered and ran up-stairs to cry. And then on wintry
nights, when the wind was moaning over the sea and she was putting the
little boys to bed, she always thought of their brother lying alone in
the big brown house up the road and round the corner. It wouldn't have
been so bad if he had been sent away, she thought. And she was only a
poor widow who washed at the hot springs."
The night wind was moaning over the sea at that moment, and the
Governor, who had been walking to and fro, struggling to be righteous
and severe, was feeling a pain in his parched throat.
He stood for some moments by the window, with his hands interlaced
behind him, looking out through the dark pane on the flying moon, and
then with an obvious inward effort he said:
"Anna, if I acknowledge this signature we shall have nothing
left--nothing but my salary. Even my salary is threatened, and if it
goes we shall be without anything in the world."
"Why should we think of that, Stephen?" said Anna. "We had nothing when
we married, and yet we were very happy. It is true we were young then,
and now we are old, but if poverty comes again we shall know better how
to bear it. And if we have nothing else we will have each other--and
our boys, too--both our boys--wherever they may be by that time--and
neither of them will love us the less because we have given up
everything--everything we had in the world--that they might still be
honored and respected."
The clock struck twelve in the tower of the cathedral, with a
reverberant ring that passed over the sleepy town, and the Governor
stopped in his restless perambulation.
"It is late, mother," he said, in a husky voice, "let us go to bed."
*XIII*
Next morning the Governor was in his bureau again. He was now firm and
composed and waiting calmly for the officers from Copenhagen. They came
early, headed by the Sheriff, and bore themselves largely, like men who
were conscious that they were about to administer a painful shock.
After the formal introductions the Sheriff leaned above the Governor's
desk and said suavely, almost condescendingly:
"These gentlemen have been anxious to show every consideration. They
came on an urgent matter--I may say a most urgent matter--but they have
waited five days, rather than break in upon you at a time of domestic
tribulation."
"I am busy this morning, Mr. Sheriff," said the Governor. "Be so good as
to waste no more time than is necessary."
The Sheriff gasped and fell back from the desk, whereupon the strangers
stepped up to it, and one of them opening a large envelope, said in a
tone of indulgent courtesy:
"We have a document here, your Excellency, which claims to be drawn by
your authority. Will you be good enough to see if this is your
Excellency's signature?"
The Governor fixed his eye-glasses leisurely, and glancing hastily,
almost casually, at the paper put before him, replied promptly:
"It is."
The strangers looked at each other in silence before they spoke again.
"In that case we presume your Excellency will be prepared to honor it?"
"Certainly," said the Governor.
"Then your Excellency will be aware that the bill is already overdue and
that two applications have been made for payment?"
The Governor flinched at that question, but recovering himself in a
moment, he said, shortly:
"The bill shall be met immediately."
"How soon, your Excellency--a week, a fortnight?"
"Three days," said the Governor. "Good-morning, gentlemen," and without
more ceremony he took up his pen and began to write a letter.
The Sheriff, who was perspiring visibly by this time, had edged round to
the door, and after a short silence, in which nothing was heard but the
scratching of the Governor's quill, the strangers bowed to his stooping
forehead and backed themselves out of the room.
The Governor's letter was to the Factor, asking him to come immediately.
He came, looking sullen and suspicious, with the air of one who knew
something already of the business for which he had been summoned.
"Old friend," said the Governor, "we have known each other for fifty
years, and I have never yet asked you to do me a favor, but I am going
to ask you now."
"H'm!" said the Factor, with a cold smile.
"It is not for my own needs I ask it, but for one who is nearer to me
than myself. We who are fathers know what that means; and we also know
that a favor done once to our children is done twice to ourselves."
"H'm, h'm!" said the Factor, with the same cold smile.
"It is a private matter--strictly private--but to you, old friend, I can
reveal the secret--your godson has got himself into trouble."
And then, excusing and extenuating nothing, the Governor told the story
of Oscar's downfall, and the Factor listened with the impatience of one
who had heard the sorry tale before.
"He signed my name also, you say?" said the Factor.
"That, too, unhappily," answered the Governor, "but you were merely made
witness to the deed, and I am responsible for the money."
"What are you going to do about it?" asked the Factor in a hard tone.
"Pay it and give the lad another chance in life," replied the Governor.
"And that's why I sent for you this morning. I can find fifty thousand
crowns and I want you to lend me the other fifty thousand."
"Not fifty thousand cents," said the Factor. "Not fifty--to shield a
criminal and to cheat the law."
The Governor's face whitened, but he answered quietly, "Don't speak so
fast, old friend. Remember that the offense against the law is only an
offense against myself, and if I choose to forgive it the law can have
nothing to say."
"What about the offense against me?" said the Factor.
"Remember, too," continued the Governor, "that if Oscar has made free
with your name he has certain claims upon your purse--there is the
marriage contract."
"The marriage contract was made for Thora, and Thora is dead," said the
Factor.
"There is the child," said the Governor.
"I hold the child now and I am prepared to provide for it in the
future," said the Factor, "but I will have nothing more to do with a man
who has forged my name, and if any further claim is made--on my business
or estate or what not--I will protest against it and publish my reasons
for doing so."
"Oscar Neilsen," said the Governor, "there is something I have not told
you, something I did not intend to tell you, but I must tell it to you
now. I have reason to believe--to be confident--that for the trouble in
which Oscar finds himself Helga is partly responsible."
"Can you prove that, Stephen Magnusson?" said the Factor.
"If I can not prove it," replied the Governor, "it is because my
son--whatever his faults and follies--is still a gentleman; and if you
do not know it by this time it is because your daughter is not a lady."
"Speak for your own, Stephen Magnusson, and leave mine to me," said the
Factor.
"Therefore," continued the Governor, "when I pay this money--and I shall
pay it--you will have the satisfaction to know that though I am a poor
man and you are a rich one, I am discharging your debt as well as mine."
With that, red and angry, the Governor walked to the door and opened it.
The Factor looked at him in blank amazement, and for one swift instant
his better nature conquered his greed and he saw what a pitiful thing it
was that after fifty years of friendship they should quarrel thus about
their children. But one sword draws another from its sheath, and he
snapped his fingers contemptuously and strode out of the room.
Then the Governor sent for the manager of the Bank of Iceland.
"Manager," he said, "I wish you to arrange a loan of one hundred
thousand crowns on the security of my farm at Thingvellir."
"The farm is hardly worth so much, sir--I say it is hardly worth so
much," said the manager. "But in your case there can be little
difficulty--none whatever if you are willing to pay the higher
interest--I say none whatever if you are willing to pay the higher
interest."
"I agree," said the Governor, "and let the deed be drawn without delay."
*XIV*
Having gone through the material part of his preparations the Governor
had now a spiritual and more trying ordeal before him, and he went out
into the home-field to think over it. Leaving the town behind he
walked, with hands, as usual, interlaced behind him, as far as to the
margin of the fiord.
It was a beautiful morning. The light was wonderful, a silvery light
that made the light of other days seem dull and leaden, full of
innumerable sparkles like the stars that are sown in snow. The waters
of the fiord were heaving slowly under a quivering haze, and on the sea
outside--wide, vast, stretching far away--a number of fishing-boats,
with their white sails bellied to a breeze that could not be felt on
shore, were going on and on as if sailing into the sky. The
mail-steamer was lying at anchor in the bay, getting up steam for her
voyage back to England, and a flock of lighters, painted white, were
floating about her black hull, like sea-fowl at the foot of a lava rock.
The gulls were calling high up in the air, and from the sheltered side
of a little island the last of the year's eider-duck were coaxing or
driving their young ones into the sea to prepare them for their flight
to far-off lands.
It was a cruelly beautiful morning, one of those radiant days when
Nature in her indifference to man and his sufferings, seems to conjure
up every joyous sound and sight that can trouble the bitterest waters of
memory--when the very sunshine seems to break one's heart.
At length the proud man who was walking through the hummocked
home-field, with head bent low by the sorrow of a wrecked and shattered
hope, saw plainly what he had to do. In love no less than anger, in
justice no less than duty, he had to cast off forever his favorite son,
the pride of his heart and the hope of his life.
As soon as he returned to the house he sent up-stairs for Oscar. After
some moments Oscar came down slowly, looking more ill and weak than
ever, and stood by the stove with drooping head like a prisoner about to
receive his sentence. The Governor glanced up at his son from over the
rims of his eye-glasses, and at first his heart failed him, but after a
moment he steeled himself to his task and began to speak in a steady
voice.
"I have sent for you to tell you," he said, "that for your mother's
sake--I prefer to put it so--I have acknowledged that signature and am
preparing to pay the money you have wasted. To do so I am compelled to
mortgage every pennyworth of property we possess, so that apart from my
official salary I shall soon have nothing. Worse than that I have had
to eat up your brother's inheritance in order to purchase your liberty,
and whether I had a right to do so God alone can say."
Oscar shivered as from cold; the Governor saw this, waited a moment, and
then went on.
"The condition on which I make this sacrifice is that you leave Iceland
immediately. You will sail by the 'Laura,' which goes back this
evening, and, as your honor is my honor, I will give it out that your
health is broken after the death of your wife, and that you have gone
away to recruit."
The Governor paused a second time, and when he spoke again his voice was
thick and hoarse.
"I shall not expect you to come back soon--I shall not expect you to
come back at all. Inasmuch as you have done your best--or worst--to
wreck my happiness I will ask you to consider that henceforth our lives
are to run in different courses, and that for my own part I wish to see
you no more."
The Governor's voice was now husky and indistinct, but still he
struggled on.
"You will look to yourself for your livelihood in the future, but
that--with your talents, little as you have made of them
hitherto--should not be difficult. Whatever happens here I shall never
expect you to do anything for me, or for your mother, but if fortune
should favor you, and you are able to repay your brother, your
conscience may be the easier and--though I do not pity him, for his
heart was hard--the earth on my grave the lighter."
The Governor paused for the last time, cleared his throat, and then said
in a firmer tone:
"Only one word more. I thought perhaps your father-in-law might have
done something for you, but apart from a promise to provide for the
child, he will do nothing. Therefore, as I have reason to fear that his
daughter Helga was at the root of the trouble which has so nearly
wrecked us all, and perhaps a first cause of the death of our dear
Thora, I will ask you to promise me--for your own sake more than
mine--to hold no further intercourse with him or his--do you promise?"
There was silence for some moments and then a muffled sob came as from
the stove itself:
"I promise."
After that there was silence again for a perceptible period, and then a
voice--a strange voice that was like a cry said:
"That is all. And now--good-by and--and God help you!"
Choking with emotion and blind with tears, Oscar turned about to
acknowledge the justice of his punishment--to say that he deserved
everything--everything and more--a hundred-fold more--but he found
himself alone. His father had fled from the room.
*XV*
When Magnus heard of what his father had done, his wrath knew no
measure. On the day when he found Thora dead in her bed he had said to
himself, "Oscar has done this and he must be made to suffer." But there
was no legal way to punish a man who had tortured his wife to death by
every refinement of hypocrisy and pretense, and it was at the height of
his anger that the offense against his father's property had come to him
with its diabolical temptation. "Use me," it whispered, "the damnable
spirit of the world understands me better," and after a struggle in
which the devils seemed to fight for his soul, he yielded.
He thought he knew the price he would have to pay and that was the
reason he did not join his family at the funeral. Everybody would loathe
him for giving up his brother to the punishment he deserved. His own
mother would turn from him, and after his father, being confronted by
poverty, had allowed the law to take its course, he would hate and
despise the son who had saved him from beggary.
But no matter! When he stood up in court and said, "This is Oscar
Stephenson's handwriting, for he is a forger and a thief," and a thrill
of horror ran through the crowded room, and every eye turned on him with
contempt, he would say to his secret heart, "He killed her, and he had
to suffer, and there was no other way than this!"
Yet that was not what had happened. His father had saved Oscar from the
just punishment of his infamous offense. And how had he saved him? By
making him--Magnus--pay the price of Oscar's riotous living abroad.
Thus the vengeance which he had vowed upon his brother had recoiled upon
himself, and while his rightful inheritance was wiped out, while the
farm on which he had built his last hopes was embarrassed beyond the
possibility of redemption, and he was ruined for the rest of his life,
the man for whom and by whom he was ruined--ruined in his affections as
well as his fortunes--was to be allowed to steal away amid a croaking
chorus of sympathy and pity under the cloak of broken health and a
broken heart!
What a devil's world it was in which infamy could masquerade as honor
and hypocrisy as grief! When Magnus thought in this way his eyesight
grew dull and his hearing dense and he felt a cold pain at the back of
his neck. Then he began to use again the only remedy he had recourse to
when his head was bad--he began to drink.
But sitting in the darkest corner of the smoking-room of the hotel,
every word he heard--every conversation that filtered through the smoke
and noise and his deadened senses--seemed to stimulate the idea which
had taken possession of him--it was the devil's own world and God had
nothing whatever to do with it!
At one moment a student ran into the room and shouted, above the
laughter and singing of his fellow-students, "Boys, what do you think?
Oscar Stephenson is sailing by the 'Laura' to-night!" And thereupon a
babel of voices cried, "Really!" "Never!" "You don't say so!" "True
enough--smashed up for good and going abroad for an indefinite period!"
"Not a bit of it! Oscar isn't the sort to be broken up like that. Six
months abroad and he'll be home again as bright and fresh as ever."
"So he will," thought Magnus, but his heart was fierce and bitter.
At another moment the chairman of the Town Board came in panting and
cried, "News, gentlemen, news! Oscar Stephenson has resigned his seat
in Parliament!" "Impossible!" "Listen!" and the little fat man read,
out of his rasping, asthmatical throat, from a sheet smelling of damp
paper and printer's ink a letter from Oscar to his constituents. Broken
in health and happiness--compelled to go abroad--impossible to fix date
of return--consequently forced to tender resignation--deeply grieved and
disappointed--but set the duties too high to ask his constituents to
wait, etc.--"That means he's not coming back!" "But, good heavens, does
he know what he's giving up? Why, there's nothing that's not within the
man's reach--absolutely nothing!" "I wonder the Governor has allowed
him to do it!"
And then Magnus laughed out loud in the fierce bitterness of his heart.
After that the voices were lower for a little while, and when Magnus
heard them again somebody was saying, "But a man can love a woman too
much altogether. Breaking your life to pieces because you've lost your
wife isn't brave, it isn't manly." "Perhaps not, but it's human," said
somebody else, "and if Oscar Stephenson is smashed up by the death of
Thora Neilsen, he's in the right of it, I say."
"So do I," cried Magnus, and laughing wildly, he dropped his head over
his arms on the table. What a devil's own world it was to be sure!
There was some whispering and then two louder voices: "Poor fellow! So
unlike his brother! Going it fast, they say!" "His father was pretty
hard on him, though!" "Not harder than he deserved, poor devil!"
The poison in the soul of Magnus was fermenting every moment. Hearing
the contemptuous pity with which he was contrasted with his brother--his
brother who had wrought all the evil--his temples beat furiously and one
wild thought expelled all other thoughts from his brain. If there was
no law to punish Oscar, if his father had conspired to help Oscar to
escape and if the hypocritical community agreed to cover up his fault,
one thing at least remained--before Oscar left Iceland he must meet with
him! Then if this was the devil's own world let the devil look after
his elect!
Magnus's mind was weltering in this thought as in a boiling sulphur pit
when the captain of the "Laura" came into the smoking-room with the
agent of the steamship company, and seating themselves near to him,
began to converse apart. "Then he will have to put up with a bed in the
hold, for all the berths are gone," said the captain. "But why can't he
wait for the next steamer?" "I'll tell you why," whispered the agent,
"because the Factor's daughter is to sail by the Vesta and there seem to
be reasons why they should not meet." "So that's it, is it? But their
fathers are fools not to know that they'll meet on the other side if
they want to."
Overhearing this conversation, Magnus lifted his head from his arms,
drank a large tumbler of brandy and water to the last drop, and walked
heavily out of the house. He had not been conscious of the passing of
time, but the darkness was now closing in, porters were hurrying with
luggage toward the pier and the first of the "Laura's" three bells was
ringing.
Magnus was like a man who could not see or hear properly. More than once
he collided with people on the parapet, and being big and strong he
brushed them out of the way. Some of them cursed him, but he did not
stop. His clouded faculties were conscious of one idea only--that he
must go to Government House and meet Oscar face to face before he
sailed.
Reaching his former home he found the door open, as usual on an autumn
evening, and nobody in porch or hall. Avoiding his father's door, he
walked up-stairs and turned mechanically toward the apartments which had
lately been occupied by Oscar. But that was a part of the house sacred
to his memory of Thora, and even in this hour of passion and pain
something whispered to his tortured conscience, and he turned away. A
moment later he was in Oscar's bedroom on the upper floor.
The furniture was in disorder, the carpet was awry, and articles of
apparel were scattered about as if somebody had been packing trunks, but
the trunks were gone and there was nobody in the room. Magnus was about
to go when his eyes were arrested by papers on a desk. Among sheets of
music and scraps from newspapers there were the remains of a letter
doubled up and torn across.
Magnus knew the handwriting--it was Helga's--and without any compunction
he put the pieces together and read the letter:
"Oscar:--As soon as I heard that the Governor had spoken to you on the
fatal subject, I confessed everything to my father and took my own share
of the transaction. Of course, he was furious, and now he vows that I
must go back immediately to my mother in Copenhagen. That does not
trouble me, seeing that you are leaving Iceland, but I must see you
before you go. In spite of all you say, and notwithstanding any promise
you may have given to anybody, it is impossible that we can part like
this. It would be too selfish and too cowardly not to give me the
chance of seeing you for the last time. Your steamer sails at nine
o'clock--come to me at half-past eight. If you do not come I may even
follow you to London--I _will_ do so if----"