down the stairs and out into the street. If anybody could have seen him
at that moment his appearance must have seemed terrible, for his eyes
were bloodshot, and the veins on his forehead were swollen and dark. It
was now night and the second bell was ringing in the bay.
He was lunging along in the direction of the Factor's, when somebody
crossed in front of him in the thoroughfare. It was Oscar himself and he
was going in another direction. Magnus was like a man whose reason is
clogged, but he saw everything in the light of his own making. His
brother was returning from the pier after taking his baggage aboard, and
he had come ashore on a last errand. Magnus knew what errand that
was--it was to see Helga, and they were going to meet where they could
be unobserved.
The moon had risen by this time and Magnus could keep his brother in
view while he followed like a hound behind him. He saw nothing else and
was not even conscious of what streets they passed through, save that
they were going toward the upper part of the town, near to the lake, and
down the road that runs beside it.
He tried to walk softly and to make no noise, but sometimes a hard laugh
broke from his dry throat and once or twice a great sob came behind it.
He was thinking of Thora, and telling himself what he would say when
Oscar met Helga and he came face to face with them. He would say, "I
loved your wife--I'm not ashamed to say so--I loved her and gave her up
to you and you promised to cherish her, but you neglected her and
allowed her child to be stolen away. I would have given my heart's
blood to make her happy, but you made her miserable and now she is dead,
and you are here with this woman who helped to torture her. You are a
perjurer and a forger and a scoundrel and you may take that--and
that--and that--and carry the mark of my hand on your face when you go
where this wanton means to follow you!"
He was now outside the town, but he could not see or hear or think like
a Christian man, and was merely ranging along the road like a beast.
Then all at once, in the still air and the silence of all around him, he
heard the voice of some one who was saying in low, quivering, pleading
tones:
"My darling! My darling!"
Magnus knew whose voice it was! He thought he also knew what sight he
should see a moment later. It would be Oscar and Helga locked in each
other's arms as they had been when he saw them last in the dance at the
farm--flushed, hot and excited.
With his fists clinched and his teeth set hard, he plunged through a
gate that was like the gate to a garden, and then ran forward a few
paces. But he drew up suddenly, as if an unseen hand had seized his
arm. He saw where he was, and his breath seemed to leave him--he was in
the cemetery, and some twenty yards farther down the path his brother
Oscar was kneeling by the side of a grave and sobbing as if his heart
would break.
Magnus stumbled back to the road, sobered, ashamed and broken into utter
helplessness.
It might be the devil's own world, but God was in it also.
*XVI*
When the last of the "Laura's" three bells were ringing, Magnus stood
alone on the little wooden jetty going down to the bay. The whistle
screamed in the steam-pipe, the anchor-chain rattled in the hawse-holes,
and the steamer turned her head to the sea.
Then a row-boat came back from the vessel's side, bringing an elderly
lady who was trying to hide her tear-stained face from the gaze of the
boatmen and even the eyes of the night, behind the folds of a little
lace shawl which she wore over her hufa. It was Anna, and as Magnus
helped her ashore, she said:
"Give me your arm and take me home--I'm not feeling well to-night,
Magnus."
But before they had gone many paces she stopped and looked back lovingly
at the ship that was now steaming down the fiord, and said in a pitiful
voice:
"He is gone and I have lost him! My poor boy! My poor Oscar! I had
him for six and twenty years and to think it should come to this!"
She walked a few more paces and then looked back again, and said:
"I have never seen anybody so deeply affected. 'Oh, mother, mother!' he
cried at last--just like a child. I could have fancied the years had
rolled back and he was still a boy--feeling ill and helpless and wanting
to lie in his mother's lap."
Again she walked a few steps and looked back as before.
"There was nobody to see him off--nobody at all. The story must have
leaked out somewhere, and of all the people he used to call his friends
there was not one to say farewell. My poor boy! My poor Oscar! He did
wrong--very wrong--but God knows how he is suffering. We think we
punish people when we put them in prison, but what punishment is like
the pain of an awakened conscience? And Oscar is leaving everything
behind him--everything and everybody--and going away in disgrace."
Once more she walked a few steps and then she said in the voice of a
crying child:
"I shall never see him again. I pretended I should, but I know quite
well I shall not. 'Some day you will come back,' I said, 'and make
amends and wipe out everything.' And he said 'Yes' and 'Yes,' but we
both knew well it wasn't true. When the bell rang and I had to come
away he said, 'Mother, you've been the best mother a man ever had,' and
I knew it was the last word I shall ever hear from him."
After that she could not speak for some minutes and then she said, as if
trying to comfort herself:
"Perhaps God will give my boy another chance where he is going to. If
so I think he will do better, but if not----"
She could not finish what she intended to say--that God's mercy was more
terrible than the vengeance of man, and he who renounced it would surely
be destroyed.
They walked on in silence until they came to the gate of Government
House, and then Anna took her last look at the dark ship that was dying
away to an indistinguishable mass in the shades of night and the mists
of her blinding tears, and said in a brave voice:
"We must be very good to each other in future, Magnus. You are the only
son left to me now, and if you have to suffer for the sin of somebody
else you must let me help you to bear it. I will always do so as long
as I live, Magnus, and when I am gone from you God will not forget.
Good-night, Magnus! And God bless you!"
Magnus stood for some time where his mother had left him, for the
breakers of passion were still surging in his throat. Then he returned
to the jetty and dropped the remains of Helga's letter into the sea, and
they went out with the ebbing tide.
*PART V*
"_Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before_
_I swore--but was I sober when I swore?_
_And then, and then came Spring, and rose-in-hand_
_My threadbare penitence apieces tore._"
*I*
Above all other cities of the world, London is the home of the outcast,
the refuge of the disgraced and rejected, the asylum of the moral leper,
the grave of the moral suicide. She offers him obscurity and a kind of
cleansing if he will cast himself into the rolling billows of her six
millions of people, and she keeps her word but exacts her penalties.
Her penalties are homelessness, friendlessness, and loneliness, but
above all loneliness. There is no loneliness like that of London. The
loneliness of an open boat on an open sea in an impenetrable fog, or the
loneliness of a trackless heath in a blinding snowstorm, is not so
desolating to the human soul as the loneliness of London's crowded
thoroughfares, with their lines of unknown faces filing on and on.
Within a year Oscar Stephenson knew the loneliness of London to its last
pang, its utmost bitterness.
When he parted from his mother on the deck of the "Laura" she slipped a
purse into his pocket, just as she used to do when he was a boy going to
college or going away for his holiday. The purse contained gold and
notes to the value of fifty pounds, and this, with the little he had of
his own, was the whole sum of his fortune and all he had to face the
future with. He was not so young as to think it inexhaustible, or so
sanguine as to expect the world to fall at the feet of a fallen man, so
he tried to be frugal and to spend his substance prudently.
He spent his first night in London at the hotel in Trafalgar Square at
which he had stayed with Thora and Helga on their way to Italy, but
besides being too expensive for his present means the place was too full
of tragic memories, and next day he removed to a house in one of the
first of the side streets going down to the river from the Strand. His
lodging was a single room on an upper floor, having a stuffy odor of
carpets and curtains and a prospect of the neighboring roofs with
various causeways of red chimney-pots.
In this apartment Oscar Stephenson had his first experience of the
loneliness of London. He lived there six months without seeing any face
belonging to the house except the face of his landlady, and without
knowing more about his fellow-lodgers than that his neighbor in the
adjoining room never returned home at night until after the great clock
at Westminster had struck twelve, and that he whistled "Onward,
Christian Soldiers" in varying degrees of alcoholic uncertainty while he
put himself to bed.
Before the end of those six months Oscar was in debt to his landlady, he
had no regular employment and no prospect except the imminent one of
being homeless and penniless.
By what stages of quick descent he came down to this condition it would
be a needless task to tell. His story is that of the great army of the
disgraced and the castaway who fly to London as to a sanctuary and are
allowed to live only by lying at its doors. He had struggled and
failed. He was young and active, but nobody needed him. In some places
his want of references was a difficulty. In others his superior
education was a cause of suspicion. He was too good for one post and
not good enough for another. In a world full of work there was no work
for him to do.
The slow agony of those first six months kept alive the shame and misery
of his breakdown and nearly sapped his moral courage. As day followed
day and the feeling of uselessness deepened, he felt like a boy, a
friendless, abandoned boy. He had done wrong and he was ready to bear
his punishment, but the great, irresistible, unanswerable world was
using him cruelly. It would not make peace with him on any terms. It
was leaving him without hope, or counsel or encouragement or
consolation--it was leaving him alone. This sense of being of no
account, of being nothing and nobody in the world, with the terror of
sinking out of sight some day and nobody knowing or caring, was harder
to bear than poverty or even shame itself.
When the clouds looked blackest he swallowed the last remnant of his
pride and appealed to the few friends of his father in England who had
been so good to him in the careless days of his college life and so
boundlessly hospitable in the happy time of his honeymoon. He appealed
to the professor at Oxford, making a clean breast of his misdoings and
no concealment of his sufferings and asking for influence and assistance
in obtaining a sub-librarianship or such other employment as might
provide him with bread and butter, and the answer that came back was
prompt and courteous but as cold as the breath of an iceberg.
He appealed to the banker in London, asking for a junior clerkship, or a
position as messenger or even porter, and the reply he received was as
smooth as a dog's tongue and as useless for help and healing. And then
he knew by bitter knowledge that the kindness which had been shown to
him in the better time was kindness to his father's son, and that he had
wasted that heritage and was his father's son no more.
Meantime he spent his days, and a great part of his nights also, in the
streets. There he was like a piece of helpless driftwood in the roaring
current of life, always going on yet never going anywhere, always
floating along yet never making headway. The ceaseless stream in the
busy thoroughfares tormented him terribly, but the emptiness of the
obscurer streets tortured him still more, and the blankness of Sunday
morning in the Strand afflicted him most keenly of all, for it was full
of memories of Sunday morning in Iceland with its atmosphere of peace
and rest and the sound of church bells.
When he was at his lowest depths of hopelessness he sent his first
letter home.
"Dearest Mother," he wrote, sitting in his stuffy back room overlooking
the roof-tops, "You would naturally have expected to hear from me before
this, and I certainly should have written earlier, only that I have been
waiting for a long, quiet hour in which I could tell you all the news,
everything that has happened to me since we parted on the steamer and I
saw your dear face disappearing in the boat. That hour seems never to
come, so I must snatch a few moments without any more delay to say that
all is well and everything goes swimmingly."
"The dear old soul, why should I make her miserable?" he thought.
"You will easily understand that in a great city like London, especially
when one is beginning again and one has so much to do and so many people
to see, there is not an hour left for oneself and hardly a moment to
write a letter. But this does not prevent my thinking of you at all
events, and I do so every day and always."
"That's true at least," he told himself, and he went on boldly with his
affectionate fictions.
"I know that my dear little mamma will want to know first the condition
of my creature comforts and I hasten to tell her that these are as right
as can be. This is a large and handsome house just off the tide of
greatest traffic where splendid horse wagons (called omnibuses) and
upholstered sleighs on wheels (called hansoms) roll about in countless
numbers day and night, making a roar like that of the Ellida river where
it falls into the fiord. But my bedroom, in which I am writing this
letter, is quiet and cozy and homelike, and my landlady is a good little
creature who visits me daily and is always most kind and motherly."
As he went on his pen flowed freely and his handwriting became big and
reckless.
"I am making new and influential acquaintances every day, and seeing in
the flesh the faces we are all familiar with in prints. Walking in the
Park yesterday I passed the Queen, who is one of our own princesses, you
know, so I felt myself entitled to bow to her and she bowed back with
the sweetest courtesy. I see the Prime Minister frequently, for he
lives in a house that is only down the street and round the corner, and
the homes and offices of nearly all the Ministers of State are within a
stone's throw of this place. In fact one way or another I am certainly
coming in touch with the leading men in England, and when I open my
window at night I can see the light that burns in the clock-tower above
the Houses of Parliament.
"So you see that I am finding life wonderfully interesting in this
mighty maelstrom of human activity, and if I do not write as often as I
ought, my anxious little mamma is not to imagine there is anything amiss
with me, but merely to tell herself that no news is good news and that I
am immersed in many occupations.
"Perhaps if I have a lonely hour occasionally"--the pen trembled in his
fingers and the handwriting became loose and shaky--"it is when I think
about home and wonder what is happening there and what people are saying
about me now. I suppose I have no right to complain whatever it may be,
but sometimes when I am coming back to my lodging on a starry night
after a tiring day and I look up to the Milky Way and think, 'That is
the road to my country,' the thought goes to my heart like a stab that
when I left it last my father's door was closed against me, and I saw
nothing of Magnus at the end.
"How are they both, and how are you, and how are the Factor and Aunt
Margret, and how--oh! how is our dear little Elin? My sweet, sweet
child! What I would give to see her again! Has she grown? Is she
still as much like her poor mother? Does she 'notice?' She will begin
to babble and talk by and by. Will they bring her up to know nothing
about her father? Or perhaps to think ill of him? If I return to
Iceland some day (and I shall) to take up the broken threads of my life
again, and find that the mind of my own child has been poisoned against
me, I don't know what will happen; I believe I shall go back instantly
and wipe myself out for ever.
"But I will not think of that even as a remote possibility, and,
meantime, I am working day and night to build up a new career, and, as
you see, I am getting on splendidly. So good-by, dearest, and God bless
you, and God bless everybody at home, for we shall all be good friends
yet.--OSCAR.
"P.S.--Is Helga still in Iceland, or has the Factor carried out his
threat of sending her back to Denmark? I suppose I ought not to think
of her, having given that promise to the Governor, yet I can not help
doing so, and I can not help asking."
*II*
It was the time when a young English composer was creating some
sensation by writing an opera on the subject of "King Olaf." The theme
was one which Oscar had often proposed to himself, and raised his fancy
and emulation upon, in the delirious days when he had hoped to become a
musician, and the dazzling dreams of glory were not yet so dead that he
could restrain himself from rambling up to Covent Garden on the night of
the first performance.
He knew he was penniless and he was conscious that his clothes were
shabby and his shoes in a woful condition as he lounged by the arches
and watched the audience assemble. The carriages were rolling up and
discharging their occupants--the Queen and her ladies, the Prime
Minister and finally the King--and he was turning away feeling more
miserable and destitute than ever, when a hand touched him on the
shoulder and a familiar voice at his side said cheerily,
"Helloa! Can it be possible?"
It was Neils Pinsen, his former schoolfellow and companion, fresh and
bright in evening dress under a handsome fur-lined overcoat.
"Heard you were in London, but didn't know where to find you. Want to
see you immediately, old fellow. Where do you stay?"
As soon as he had got rid of a stifling sensation in the throat Oscar
answered him, and then Finsen said,
"Should I call upon you there, or would you prefer to come here to me?"
"I will come to you," said Oscar.
"Good! When shall it be? Will to-morrow at twelve be convenient?"
"Any time will be convenient to me."
"Happy man! Twelve to-morrow in my office, then. Glad to have found
you at last. Thought you might have looked me up and wondered what on
earth had become of you. Good-by! Busy to-night and enough work for a
regiment. By the way, if you would like to see the performance--can't
promise you a seat, but if you would care to stand at the back of the
balcony--You would? Come this way--Johnson! Take this gentleman in
front and give him anything you have left. By-by!"
Before Oscar had quite recovered his breath, he was sitting in the
half-light at the back of the upper circle, feeling miserably humiliated
and ashamed, yet tingling with a strange excitement. He never quite
knew what happened thereafter. He forgot that his money was all gone,
that he had not eaten since morning, that his trousers were frayed at
the bottom and his shoes down at the heels. He only felt that out of
the sordid conditions of the past six months he had suddenly emerged
into an atmosphere that was as the vivid breath of his soul.
When the conductor entered--it was the young composer himself--Oscar
craned forward to catch a glimpse of the man who was on the eve of
snatching the triumph which but for the hard buffetings of fate might
perhaps have been his own, and when the opera began he listened with
every faculty. It was good, it was human, it was modern, its harmony
was exquisite, its orchestration sure, its form showed mastery of the
mystery of music, and yet it lacked something. What did it lack? It
lacked the life-blood of the stern old Northland. The Englishman could
not give it that, for the root of the matter was not in him. But he
could have done so, for his blood was the blood of the Vikings, the
blood of Flosi and Snorri and Eric and Olaf and all the mighty men of
old.
Oscar did not hear his fellow-lodger go to bed that night, with his
lunging step on the stairs and his drunken whistling of "Onward,
Christian Soldiers," and next morning when his landlady came up to speak
to him, according to her wont, he was hardly conscious of what she said
except that it was some protest, some threat, and that he did not feel
it worth while to soften and sweeten her with such promises as he had
made before.
The intoxication of last night was still upon him when he set out to
keep his appointment. Music was calling to him again, calling him like
a siren, out of his friendlessness and loneliness, his humiliation and
obscurity, his poverty and shame, out of the pitiless cruelty of crowded
thoroughfares and the grimy sordidness of obscure streets, into the
glory of success and fame.
"Come in, old fellow," cried the familiar voice of yesterday, and Oscar
found himself in Finsen's office.
"Let me see," said Finsen, removing a pair of pince-nez, "how long have
you been in London?"
"Six months--nearly seven," said Oscar.
"And what have you been doing?"
"Nothing."
"Lucky chap! Nothing at all?"
"Yes, there is one thing I've been doing--I've been doing it rather
industriously."
"What's that?"
"Starving."
Finsen laughed loud, but Oscar laughed louder--he had not yet broken his
fast.
"We all go through it at some time," said Finsen, "and it's best to get
it over at the beginning. So I congratulate you, old fellow, and now to
business. I'm managing here--managing for a syndicate. Under four
eyes, as we say in Iceland, I intend to give a series of concerts and
I'm looking out for fresh material. You compose?"
"Used to do," said Oscar.
"I understand," said Finsen. "Your life has been off the tracks lately
and you'll not write much more that's worth anything until you get back
into the groove. But I know what you used to do and that's good enough
for me. I heard some of your songs from the Sagas, you remember, and I
don't mind saying that as the work of a man who was nearly self-taught
in the matter of harmony I thought them wonderful. But Helga tells
me--Helga Neilsen, I mean, I hear from her occasionally----"
Oscar flinched as if a lash had cut him.
"Helga tells me," continued Finsen, "that you did some things in Iceland
last year that beat your Saga songs to little bits, and if you think we
can try them here----"
"They're gone," said Oscar.
"I know," said Finsen. "I've heard what has become of them. But
perhaps you have copies?"
"Not a copy," said Oscar.
"Or perhaps you can remember some of them?"
"Not one."
"Even so, the case is not quite hopeless. You are a person of some
influence in Iceland?"
"Used to be," said Oscar.
"Well, I presume to think I am--my father is Sheriff and likely to be
something better--so if you care to give your consent we may recover the
things still."
A mist arose between Oscar's eyes and Finsen's face. "You surely do not
mean----?"
"Certainly I do. If the things are half as good as Helga says, they're
worth all the trouble. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on her judgment,
to give you something to go on with, and when the stuff comes to devote
a morning to trying it with the orchestra, and ask you to conduct the
rehearsal."
Finsen's figure was floating in the mist that was between it and Oscar's
eyes.
"You wish me to authorize you to exhume----"
"Why not? It's not an unheard of proceeding. And if ever there was a
moment that justified it it's now. If compositions that might give
pleasure to the world and make pots of money are lying buried in a
grave----"
"I'll starve first," said Oscar, rising from his seat.
"My dear chap," said Finsen, putting back his pince-nez, "you tell me
you're doing that already. But here's your chance of doing it no more,
and if----"
"I'll starve to death first," said Oscar, turning to the door.
"Nonsense, old fellow! If the things were doing any good where they are
I could respect your feelings. But they're not. They are merely
rotting away and they will soon disappear altogether. What your object
was in burying them you know best--I confess I thought it very
quixotic--but whatever it was it has served its purpose. And now there
they lie--works of genius, as I'm willing to believe--that might
possibly make your name and begin to make your fortune, while you----"
"I'll die in a ditch rather than touch them," said Oscar, and without a
word of farewell he flung out of the room.
No words could describe the agony he endured during the remaining hours
of that day. The intoxication of the night before was gone by this time
and he suffered the pains of the spirit that has buoyed itself up on a
bankrupt hope. If he had ever had any uncertainty about the meaning of
the blind impulse of remorse which had prompted him to bury his
compositions in his wife's grave he had none now. It was God's own
punishment to shut up the only channel to fame and success, nay to
livelihood itself, as by the door of a tomb.
Hour after hour he walked the streets, feeling that escape from the way
of life he had been living was now utterly hopeless. He would go down
and down, day by day, little by little, until he was submerged beneath
the flood, or became, but for the mercy of God, a vagabond and a
castaway.
It was long before he could bring himself to go back to his lodging and
when he did so he found that the street door would not open to the key
he carried in his pocket. He rang the bell and a little maid-of-all-work
came up as from her bedroom below stairs with curl papers in her hair
and some loose clothes about her body.
"Why did you bolt the door, my child?" he said. "Didn't you know that I
had not come home?"
"Yes, sir, but mistress told me to tell you as how your room has been
let and you can have your trunks when you pay what you owes her."
"Do you mean that I am to be turned out?"
"It ain't my fault, sir, and I'm very sorry."
Oscar and the girl stood looking vacantly at each other for a moment,
and then he turned away and walked up the street with a new
sensation--the blank, desolating sensation of not having a roof over his
head. No one knows what it means to be one night homeless in a great
city except those who have gone through it. It is not so much the
poverty of privation that is hard to bear as the sense of utter
worthlessness, of being less to the world than its dogs, for they are
cared for, or its horses for they are housed.
His money was gone, and he had no luggage in his hands to make shift to
find another lodging with, so he walked on and on, up Lower Regent
Street and across Piccadilly, through noisy throngs of people--young
women smoking cigarettes, young men laughing and singing and a
bedraggled girl being lugged along by a policeman--on and on until he
came to a wide and quiet thoroughfare where a line of broughams waited
outside a house that was brilliantly lighted up, and there he paused in
his aimless perambulation to listen to the music that was coming through
the open windows.
He had been asking himself for the hundredth time how it had come to
pass that he, so lately the pampered son of his father--who was the
Governor of his people and their upright judge--was tramping the streets
of London without a penny in his pocket or a roof to cover him, when the
door opened and an elderly gentleman came out bare-headed to escort some
ladies to their carriage. Then his stunned faculties awoke and he saw
where he was standing. He was outside the house of his father's friend,
the banker. The deep remembrance came back to him of the time, so near
yet so far away, when he himself, with Thora and Helga, had been honored
guests in that house, and lest the banker should see him, the wayfarer
he then was, skulking there at that untimely hour, he turned about and
walked quickly away.
Nothing that had happened on that evil night had wounded his feelings so
acutely, or made him feel so surely that rescue from his accursed
condition there could be none. Was it to be a part of his punishment
that even when his senses slept he was to be constantly brought up
against himself and reminded of the days that were dead? If so, life
would be unendurable, and existence an everlasting hell. Did Nature
never forget? Did God never forgive?
Half an hour afterward he was walking along the Embankment, past the
crouching and sleeping forms of the sordid things whom the city casts
out on to the river's bank by night; and looking wildly at the waters of
the Thames, glistening and glimmering under the electric light, he asked
himself why he should not end it all and have done with further torture.
What was the thought that restrained him? Was it the thought of his
dead wife whose memory was to be a safeguard against sin and a perpetual
inspiration? No!
By the inscrutable will of fate it was the thought of the one being
whose love had wrecked him--it was the thought of Helga. In spite of
the pledge he had given to the Governor, he could not help thinking of
her. No day had been so dark but he had thought of her on going to bed
at night and on awakening in the morning. She was gone, they might
never meet again, their love was a page of his life which he had crossed
out and turned down for ever, yet her eyes were in his eyes and her
smile was the only sunshine that shone upon his face.
The thought of Thora was a sweet and sacred thing which he had wrapped
up and laid by in the lavender of memory, but the thought of Helga was
warm and alive and always with him. It was with him now, and it saved
his soul from despair and his body from death.
*III*
Before Oscar's letter reached Iceland many changes had taken place
there. The estrangement of the Governor and the Factor had developed
into open antagonism. Everybody knew of it and the enemies of each had
been playing upon his hatred of the other.
The Factor was the first to suffer. The downfall of the barter trade,
which Magnus predicted, had already come to pass, and the Factor's
business had tumbled to pieces like an unbound faggot. There is always
a good reason to kill a fat ox, and while people said, "The Factor gives
the farmers what he likes for his wool and charges them what he pleases
for foreign produce," the true ground of the attack upon his business
had been his intimidation of the town at the time of Oscar's election.
Oddsson, the defeated candidate of that day, never rested until he had
established a company on the cash principle. Even then the Factor would
have borne down all opposition, for the Factor was rich while the
farmers were poor, but Oddsson had secured an ally in the most powerful
person. As the smith uses the tongs to spare his fingers, so Oddsson had
used the Governor to save his company.
The Governor knew full well that Oddsson was his enemy, and that if his
party got the upper hand they would upset the old order, but he could
not resist the temptation to join him when he was trying to destroy the
Factor. By his help the preferential tariff with Denmark was broken
down and the Iceland markets were opened to English produce, and that
was the death-blow to the barter business.
For three months the Factor kept his doors open by selling at less than
cost price and buying at more than market value, but the end was sure.
It was whispered at the bank that he was parting with his securities in
stocks and shares and his estate in land and loose property, and that
sooner or later he would come down with a crash. Nobody pitied him, and
at the bottom of his tortured heart one man rejoiced.
But the smiter has often short joy of his stroke, and when Oddsson and
his party, having done with trade, turned their attention to
constitutional subjects the Factor, though he hated them, joined their
agitation. The winter had been severe, there had been many deaths among
the older members of Parliament and as often as a by-election had
occurred the Factor had thrown the weight of his remaining influence and
the force of his diminishing fortunes into the scale of reform. By the
end of the spring it had become certain that the next session of Althing
would witness the passing of a bill for the reconstruction of the
Constitution and the abolition of the Governorship.
Thus each of the two men who had stood shoulder to shoulder for fifty
years destroyed himself in destroying the other, and the prophecy of
long ago was fulfilled that if the Governor and the Factor ever ceased
to be friends they would become the bitterest of enemies.
Meantime Anna had tried to make peace and failed. When the quarrel was
young, and chiefly about the children, she had attempted a tone of
sympathetic protest. "Come, come, Stephen, pardon is the best
punishment--you must make peace with the Factor."
"He might have saved my son by the lifting of his hand and he would not
do so--I shall never make peace with him," said the Governor.
"Oscar Neilsen," said Anna, meeting the Factor in the street, "when are
you coming to see Stephen? If you stay away much longer the house-dog
will fly at you."
"The house-dog flew at me when I was there last, Anna--I shall never
trust him again," said the Factor.
When the quarrel grew old and ugly and personal to the men themselves,
Anna thought of another means of reconciliation. The child was the last
remaining link between the Governor and the Factor--it should bring them
together again. "God has always a use for these little angels," she
said.
Aunt Margret joined in the conspiracy and the two old things concocted
many schemes--all simple and transparent but womanly and good--to get
the men into the same room. They never succeeded, but a thousand beams
of sunshine shone out of the baby's cradle, and little by little the ice
that had frozen about the men's souls was seen to melt.
When the child was "shortened" it was taken over to Government House and
wheeled in its perambulator into the Governor's bureau.
"Isn't she a beauty, Stephen?" said Anna; and Aunt Margret said,
"The precious pet couldn't possibly be more like her father if she were
not so wonderfully like her mother, too."
The Governor looked down at the little face without saying a word, and
when the child blinked up at him with the eyes of Thora and the smile of
Oscar he went up-stairs to his bedroom, and Anna heard him lock the
door.
When the child cut her first tooth, and everybody according to custom
ought to have given her a "tooth-fee," the Factor, coming home at night,
found no presents on the nursery table, but the little one was propped
up under the blue lace of her hooded cradle and making the air hideous
with the divine discord of a baby's silver-mounted rattle.
"That's Stephen's present and it must have cost him a fortune," said
Aunt Margret, whereupon the Factor, weary as he was, walked out into the
road where he could hear nothing but the cold lapping of the lake.
Yet love of the little one was not bringing the two men together--it was
thrusting them still farther apart. "That man is scheming to get hold
of the child," thought the Factor. "He and his have robbed me of my
daughters and now they're trying to rob me of my granddaughter also."
"She's my son's child," thought the Governor, "and my son's child is my
child--why did I allow that man to have her?"
"No use, woman!" said Aunt Margret. "It's late to withdraw the sword
when it is thrust to the heart."
But then came Oscar's letter and Anna's hopes went up with a bound. She
was like a child herself in her joy over it. Her happiness was too
great to permit her to see holes in its picture of prosperity. Oscar
was well, he was getting on splendidly and he sent his love to
everybody.
She read the letter first to the Governor, and after he had heard it he
walked out into the home-field where the eider-ducks were building their
nests afresh on the edge of the fiord, and the fishing-smacks were
coming back to harbor. Then she took it over to the Factor's, rolled it
up in the baby's hand like another rattle, and left it with Aunt Margret
to be shown to her brother.
But that day had been a bad day with the Factor and when Oscar's letter
came back to Anna it was torn across the middle and enclosed in an empty
envelope. Anna was nearly broken-hearted at the treatment of her
treasure, for no girl of sixteen had ever so loved her first
love-letter, and she had intended to show it to everybody--to the
Bishop, the Rector, the Sheriff, and above all to Magnus.
Magnus had been coming and going at intervals throughout the winter. It
had been a hard one for him as for others, and he had begun to realize
what it would be when his father was gone and he had to bear the burden
of the monstrous mortgage. But harder to bear than any winter had been
the sight of his mother's sufferings during Oscar's silence.
"Any news yet!" he would ask, and Anna would say No and No, with
countless explanations and excuses.
So it was through the dark days, and his feeling against Oscar grew hard
as the ground he trod upon. But when the snow had gone and he went up
with the spring caravan there was Anna with a face like the rising sun,
and by that he knew that a letter must have come at last. Sure enough
in less than a minute out it came from the bosom of her embroidered
treya, torn across as the Factor had left it and she was calling on him
to write an answer to her dictation. This is what he wrote:
"MY DEAR SON: Your letter arrived safely by the last steamer and made up
by its welcome news for the long time we had to wait for it. It is so
good to hear that you are well and prosperous and enjoying your life in
the great English city. Many a time I feared it might be otherwise, but
now I have your letter and I am happy and contented.
"I am proud that my son is rising into such high and good company, and
though your father speaks little I am sure that he feels the same. He
always said that you would do great things some day, and it is not the
way of God's goodness to disappoint such expectations where they are
built on a good foundation.
"And now I have to tell you that your father is well in bodily health,
though a little oppressed by worldly anxieties, but I tell him our home
in this life is always on a steep mountain and if we trust in God there
is no reason to be afraid. As for myself, I am as well as can be
expected at my age, though my left ear troubles sometimes and my eyes
are not what they used to be for knitting and small print. But I must
not allow myself to complain, for perhaps it is a part of God's mercy to
us old people that our senses should die by degrees so that when they
come to die altogether we may not be taken unawares.
"Magnus is writing this letter and he is strong and hearty. The snow was
deep at the farm this year and he lost six of his best beasts, but his
lambs came beautifully and now they are on the mountains and his ewes
are milking well and the home-field is closed for the hay.
"I have to tell you that the one you ask about has gone back to her
mother at Copenhagen and that there are those who can not be very sorry.
Sometimes to silence the evil tongues that speak ill of you here I am
tempted to blame her for all that has happened, but who am I to judge
any one? And the worst I wish for her is that she may soon become a
God-fearing girl.
"Margret Neilsen is just as she always was, a twisted bough with plenty
of sap in it, and the Factor would be well enough but for a bad hip. He
too, like your father, is much oppressed by worldly cares and taking it
ill that they should fall so fast upon him in the evening of his days.
"And now I have to tell you of your little Elin that she is as well as
can be, and she has cut two front teeth and her hair is curling over her
forehead. She is the best child that ever was born, and when she smiles
she is so like somebody that it nearly breaks my heart to look at her.
Margret is as good to the darling as if she were her own mother, and
your father and the Factor can hardly see the sun for her. As for me it
fills my heart brimful to think how God in His goodness has sent us old
folks this little angel after our late troubles, for she is like the
spring after a hard winter when the snow and ice have stayed so long
that we think surely we shall never see the grass or hear the rivers
again, and then all at once there are the green fields and the shining
streams and all the gladness of the flowers.
"And now, though you are getting on so well, you must not be angry with
your mother for sending you a little present. Maria has been all day in
the kitchen packing your college box, and goodness knows what things she
may have put in it. But I am knitting you a pair of stockings out of
old Maggie's brown wool, and I hope you will not be ashamed to wear
them, for they will keep your feet warm in the cold weather, when the
English socks must be so thin and cottony. Then I remember how fond you
used to be of our smoked mutton, so I am telling Maria to put in some of
that too, and a few rolls of Rullapilsa.
"I dare not let the Governor know I am sending the mutton--he would
think it foolish and unnecessary--and of course, with so many good
things to eat and drink I do not expect you to offer it to your English
friends, but perhaps you can hide it in a cupboard somewhere and take a
slice when you are quite alone.
"And now I must conclude for Magnus is coming to the end of his paper.
It makes me happy to think your bedroom is comfortable and I wish I
could thank your landlady for being so kind and motherly. I may never
see her in this world, but we shall meet in heaven some day and then I
will thank her.
"And now, my dear son, in the midst of your great prosperity, do not
forget that all good things come from God and remember to put your trust
in Him. To His care I commit you, for He knows all our wants and all
our troubles and all our secrets, and His eye ever watches and His heart
never sleeps.
"Your affectionate mother,
"ANNA."
*IV*
When Oscar received his mother's letter he was living in a slum in
Westminster. It was called Short Street, and it was a typical example
of the mean streets which nearly always, and in all countries, lie near
to a great minster, like sea-wrack at the foot of a rock.
Short Street was a cul-de-sac, whereof one end was a gin-palace and the
other an archway to the railway depot of a suburban necropolis. Late at
night the inhabitants were kept from sleep by the quarreling of tipsy
men who had been turned out of the public-house, and early in the
morning they were awakened by the rumbling of the hearses that rattled
the corpses over the cobbles of the street.
Oscar's home in Short Street was at Number One, a grimy house with a
soiled card in the fanlight above the door, saying, "Lodgings for single
men." Besides himself, there were four lodgers, three of them being
porters at the funeral depot and the fourth head barman at the
public-house. The bar-man had the parlor floor, and he generally
brought home a number of noisy companions at closing time to play cards
and drink beer.
Oscar's bedroom in this house was not so much a room as a stifling
closet of miserable aspect, in which the refuse furniture seemed to make
an effort to range itself in order--a threadbare carpet, an iron
bedstead without foot or head, a painted washstand, a broken-lipped
water ewer, two or three rickety chairs, a table that was safest when it
rested against the wall, a few pictures of race-horses on the remains of
a dirty wall-paper, and a looking-glass blotched by damp, like a sheet
of ice spotted and scabbed by thaw.
His landlady lived in the basement and was never seen except on Monday
mornings, when she went round for her lodgers' rent some two or three
hours before the collector called for her own. The only person whom
Oscar saw constantly was the landlady's servant, Jenny, a typical
cockney girl of the humblest class, untidy and unclean, but as bright as
a London street sparrow, and with a big soft heart in her vulgar little
breast.
Jenny had conceived a certain affection for Oscar, based on no grounds
more personal than that he did not shout at her down the pairs of
stairs, or take liberties, or use bad language, and that he always
raised his hat when he passed her in the street.
The only effect of this sentimental attitude on Jenny's part was that
she always dressed in her clean "print" on the days when Oscar happened
to be at home to tea, and it was on one of these afternoons that she
came knocking at the door of his bankrupt garret and said, "Letter for
you, sir."
It was so long since Oscar had received a letter of any kind that he
leaped up with a kind of fear, and on taking the envelope out of Jenny's
hand and seeing it was addressed in Magnus's writing, and had been sent
on from his former lodging, he turned pale and trembled.
"Is it bad news, sir?" said Jenny. "I wouldn't 'a' brought it up on no
account if I'd knowed."
"No, no! Leave me, Jenny," said Oscar, and when the girl had gone and
he had opened the letter with nervous fingers, he read it with eyes that
were wet with tears while his cheeks were flushed with shame.
When he came to the end his heart was beating wildly and he was asking
himself if it would not be the brave and manly thing to write at once
and say that all this story of his prosperity was a miserable fiction,
that he had never been otherwise than wretched, that he was living in a
common way among common companions, doing common work which he dare not
think of, and that no words could express the secret agony of his soul
at having sunk so low. But deep as was the degradation of that bitter
hour it was not so deep as that of the following morning when Jenny came
lugging his college box up-stairs, and chattering gaily as if she had
brought him a fortune.
"The railway man said as 'ow it was as 'eavy as lead, so I give 'im
twopence for 'isself--I 'ope I did right, sir."
"Quite right, Jenny. Here's the money. You can go now."
"Can I 'elp ye to unpack it, sir? There ain't no sort o' box as I can't
unpack. My! what a long way it must 'a' come!"
"It came from Iceland, Jenny."
"Fancy that now! Pat Looney, the lorry man, 'e come from there, and the
neighbors says it's a pity 'e don't go back. They never says that about
you, though. 'He's so perlite,' they says."
Oscar allowed the girl to open the box and empty it of its contents, and
as she did so she chirped away like the street sparrow that she was,
while he sat with the mist of his boyish associations floating up to him
from the happy past.
"Well, I never!" she cried, sitting back on her heels as she knelt
before the box. "Polonies! And sausages! And pickled tongues! And
hams! Why, you won't 'ave to buy nothin' to eat for months! Isn't that
lucky now? Just when you're 'out' too! Is it a present?"
"Yes, it is a present, Jenny."
"They must think somethin' of ye as sends ye a present like this," said
Jenny, and then, after a moment, in a fluttering voice, "Is it a laidy,
sir?"
"It's my mother," said Oscar.
"Your mother!" said Jenny, in a tone of relief. "Well, that's what I do
call a mother--being good to anybody like this."
"She has been good to me all my life, Jenny, and all my life I've
treated her badly."
Jenny looked at him strangely as if something surprised and pained her.
"You have, sir?"
"Shamefully, Jenny, yet she has forgiven me again and again."
Jenny was silent for a moment and then she said, "Mothers is like that,
isn't they? Now there's Jim Cobb, the shandry man, 'e knocks 'is mother
about somethin' cruel, but she never 'aves 'im up for it, never!
Mothers is proper good!"
"Is your mother good to you, Jenny?"
"Me? I'm an orfling," said Jenny, and then, lowering her voice to a
tone of confidence, she added, "I don't mind tellin' you, but I am! I
always tells the other lodgers as my mother was one o' them girls as ye
see at the Aquarium at nights covered with silks and diamonds."
"And was she?"
A look of dejection crossed Jenny's face. "I don't see as she could
'ave been, because they say at the Orflinage as I was born in Holloway
when my mother was doin' time."
By this time the contents of the box were ranged on the table and
chairs, and Jenny was sitting back on her heels again to look at them.
"There! They're as pretty as a 'am and beef shop! And I do believe as
that's what your mother meant 'em for too. Jim Cobb, 'e wanted me to set
one up with 'im, but not me! Not as I 'ave any objections to the 'am and
beef business, and if anybody else thought of starting it----"
Jenny's hint was interrupted by the sound of a vehicle stopping suddenly
outside the house.
"Now, I bet ye I know who that is," she said with a wink. "It's that
blessed Jim Cobb again. He's always a-wantin' me to go for a ride in
'is shandry."
But going to the window she cried, "Goodness! It's a handswim cab! And
there's a laidy a-gettin' out of it!"
"A lady?"
"You can't see 'er now--she's on the steps. There she is," cried Jenny,
as a rat-tat came to the street door, "and me not 'ad time to comb my
'air yet!"
With an indefinable feeling of mingled fear and hope which there was yet
no cause for, Oscar stood on the landing and listened while Jenny ran
down the stairs. When the street door was opened he heard his own name
in a voice that sent the blood to his head and made him reel with
dizziness. A moment later Jenny came back with a face that looked white
even under the smudges that soiled it, and she said in the same
fluttering voice as before:
"I thought as much. It's you she's askin' for. I've took 'er into the
barman's parlor--'e won't be 'ome till tea."
Oscar went down-stairs slowly, but when he got to the bottom his breath
was coming and going in gusts, and his heart was beating against his
breast as with the blows of a hammer. The parlor door stood ajar and a
perfume he knew was coming out to him. After a moment he pushed the
door open and then she whom he expected to see was standing before him,
she herself, more radiantly beautiful than ever, with something soft and
white about her neck and a face shining with smiles.
How much he lived in that moment no one could say. A hundred emotions
coursed through his soul like the flash of flame--joy, delight, pain,
shame, the rapture of seeing her, the humiliation of being found in such
a common place, the degradation of being ill-clad and obviously poor,
but above all love--the uncontrollable love that leads men on to
happiness and victory or to ruin and death. His face broke up, tears
burst from his eyes and holding out both hands he cried--
"Helga! My God! Helga!"
*V*
Helga appeared to be not less excited than Oscar himself. She was
genuinely moved to see how the joy he had in meeting her affected him,
and when he had kissed both her hands she kissed one of his and tears
which she could not keep back came to her eyes also. There was a shiny
leather-covered sofa in the room and they sat on it side by side and
hand in hand.
"I have never, never been so glad," he said.
"And I am glad too," she said. "Let me look at you again, Oscar. A
little paler, and perhaps a little thinner, but otherwise not changed in
the least."
"Yet you have changed a great deal, Helga."
"Grown older, have I?"
"Grown lovelier and more beautiful than ever."
At that she leaned her face toward him and he kissed her, and for some
moments they could not restrain their fondness. Helga was the first to
recover self-possession.
"And now let us talk seriously," she said, but Oscar was still quivering
with excitement and, having brushed away his tears, he laughed
hysterically.
"How long have you been in London?" he asked.
"A month--a month to-morrow," she replied.
"And to think that I have never known it until now! But how did you come
to leave Copenhagen?"
"That's just what I am trying to tell you. My father, for some unknown
reason, elected to reduce my mother's income by half, so something had
to be done. Then I remembered Neils Finsen and the wonderful things he
used to say about my voice."
"Finsen!" repeated Oscar, in a graver tone.
"So I wrote to him, and he answered that if I would come to London he
would have experts to hear me, and then they would see what could be
done."
"Well? Well?"
"Well, I came, and the experts heard me, and they concluded that my
voice was quite unusual--the most promising soprano they had found for
years."
"And now?"
"Now I'm at the Royal Academy of Music, and by and by I am to go to
Paris for two years, three years, perhaps four to study under Marchesi
or Bonby and to attend an acting class, and finally I am to be taken to
Monte Carlo or Nice in representations of "Faust" and "Someo," as a
first step toward taking London by storm as Marguerite or
Juliette--there!"
"And Finsen is doing all this for you?"
"Well, yes, so to speak, I suppose I must say that."
"Is he to pay your expenses?"
"I really don't know who is to pay them, but I've signed a contract to
come out under his management and to refund everything when I am fairly
launched. And now about yourself, Oscar?"
"About me?"
"It's nearly a year since I saw you last. What have you been doing?"
Oscar made a clumsy laugh. "Oh, I'm like the lilies of the field--I
toil not, neither do I spin."
But his forced gaiety broke down badly, and he said more soberly, "Don't
ask me what I've been doing, Helga."
Helga's eyes wandered around the room for a moment and then she said, "I
know! Neils told me something about it, and he wished me to say----"
Before she could finish Oscar had risen to his feet. "If you come from
Finsen I know what your errand is, and I would rather die----"
"_No, no, no,_" said Helga, clinging to his nervous hand. "Sit down.
It's not that at all. Listen!"
He sat and the sweetness of her look banished all his fears.
"They're giving what they call promenade concerts at Covent Garden, and
a few days ago there was some difference with the leader of the
orchestra. It seemed desirable to make a change and the question was
who the new leader ought to be. Naturally I thought of you."
"Of me?"
"Why not? Didn't I see what you could do with those hundred and fifty
numskulls at Thingvellir?"
"But Covent Garden!"
"My dear Oscar, I've seen every leader they have here, and while they
are all your superiors in knowledge and experience, there's not one of
them with a tittle of your magnetism and genius. So I said, 'Neils, if
you want the finest leader that London has ever seen let me go and fetch
him!'"
"But you can't know, Helga--you can't imagine--if you had the least idea
of what I've gone through to live--merely to live----"
Helga looked around the room again and she said, "Can't I see? Haven't
I got eyes? But if you were to tell me that nobody has had any use for
you in the meanest work that is ever done by the commonest men, I should
still say what I said to Finsen."
Oscar's throat was hurting him. The thought of Helga's faith and
championship broke down his self-control. He never allowed himself to
think there could be any selfish ground for it.
"What do you wish me to do, Helga?" he asked.
"To meet me in Finsen's office at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning."
"But I vowed I could never set foot in the place again."
"You didn't know then that _I_ should ask you. And I do ask you,
Oscar."
He remembered the promise he had given to his father; he reflected on
the danger of reopening a page of his life which he had crossed out and
turned down as for ever; he thought of Finsen and his interest in Helga
and the hold he would have of her through her hopes and ambitions; and
his will was like a broken withe, for the controlling destiny of his
life was leading him on.
"You will be there, will you not?" she whispered, and Oscar answered:
"Yes."
She leaned her face forward again, and again he kissed her and then she
rose to go.
"Where are you staying?" he asked, and she told him. It was in a
fashionable apartment-house on the edge of the Green Park.
"Does Finsen live there also?"
"Well, yes, he lives in the same building. And you must live there,
too. I shall want to see you constantly. There are a thousand things I
want you to do for me. But now I must be off."
He could not let her go, and they renewed their caresses. "It will seem
like a dream when you are gone," he said. "I shall hardly be able to
believe you have been here, or that you will ever come back again."
"Don't say that. I told you in Iceland that I should come to you if you
didn't come to me, and I've kept my word, haven't I?"
"My dear, dear Helga!"
"It wasn't quite good of you to go away without giving me an opportunity
of seeing you again."
"I know, I know!"
"You had a certain duty to me, you know, after what had passed----"
"Hush, dear, hush!"
"But I'm willing to believe it was the fault of other people."
"Don't let us speak of it, Helga," said Oscar, and his arms, which had
been about her in a close embrace, slackened away and fell.
It was easier to part with her after that, but before he opened the door
he kissed her again, and when he helped her into the hansom he put her
fingers to his lips.
He stood bare-headed on the pavement oblivious to all surroundings until
the cab had rounded the corner of the public house and Helga had waved
to him through the glass. Then he became aware that the sight in that
sordid slum of so lovely a girl, so beautifully dressed and with a
hansom waiting for her, had brought the neighbors to their doors, and
that the women were thumbing their apron-strings and grinning to each
other across the rails.
When he reentered the house Jenny passed him in the lobby with a
stealthy and guilty air which seemed to say that her poor tortured
little soul had not resisted the temptation to listen and to watch.
He returned to the parlor for a moment and the perfume of Helga's
presence was still to be felt there over the odor of dead ale and
tobacco. Never had he envied the barman before, but at that moment he
would have given all he possessed to keep this room for the rest of the
day, that he might sit on the sofa where Helga had sat, and lay his hand
on the table where her hand had rested and kiss the carpet where her
feet had trod.
He was like a man moving in a dream, and when he went back to his own
apartment he was not conscious of his squalid surroundings. The dirty
wall-paper, the threadbare carpet and the blotched looking-glass
humiliated and compromised him no longer. His body was still in his
bankrupt garret, but his soul was far away. It was in another world--a
world that was bright with Helga's eyes as its sun and stars, for he was
going over again the time he had spent with her, every word of it, every
tone, every look, every gesture.
This lasted the whole of the day and when darkness fell a curtain seemed
to have fallen on the life he had been living during the past twelve
months. The mire and slime of vulgar associations, the degradation of
common companionship, the sense of loneliness, of friendlessness, of
being nothing and nobody, the deep remembrance of being homeless and
hopeless and helpless and useless--all this had gone. That passage of
his life was over now, and never, never, never would its pain and shame
come back to him again. He had passed through it because he had sinned;
but if he had sinned he had suffered, and God Himself had seen that he
had suffered enough.
His eyes were wet when he lay down on his soiled pillow, but he fell
asleep in a blissful condition and in the first dream of the night he
was back with Helga. Once in the dark hours he awoke and heard the
deadened hum of the barman and his friends at their cards and ale; and
again he awoke in the dawn and then he heard the hearse of the
necropolis thundering up Short Street and rumbling under the archway at
the top of it.
At eleven o'clock that morning he went to Covent Garden, and again and
again at eleven the following mornings he went there. On the tenth
morning he called to Jenny, who had grown shy of him and was leaving his
breakfast on a tray outside his door, and said:
"Jenny, I wish you to tell your mistress that I shall be leaving this
lodging in another week."
Then Jenny's white and wistful face broke down utterly, and with a crack
in her voice, and the ghost of a smothered sob in it, she said:
"I knowed as it 'ud come to this. The minit I set eyes on 'er I said as
she'd take ye away from me--_an' she 'as._"
*VI*
The Governor never knew that Oscar had broken faith with him.
When the time came for the next session of Althing, a Bill for the
reform of the Constitution, reenacting the abolition of the Governorship
and the appointment of a Minister, was passed by a large majority. But
an Act involving a constitutional change had to be voted by two
Parliaments and therefore a dissolution of Althing became necessary.
The time of dissolution was at the discretion of the Governor, and he
might have delayed it until the fever for reform had passed. Instead of
doing so he decided to dissolve immediately, thus feeding the agitation
and precipitating his own fate.
Many things befall the man whose day is done, and the measure of the
Governor's errors was not yet full. When the time came to select the
candidates it was found that the constituency for which Oscar had
sat--the capital--was once more without its man, and to everybody's
astonishment the Governor himself, in order to secure a voice in the
popular assembly, determined to stand for it.
This unusual step on the Governor's part created great excitement, but
the fever increased tenfold when it was announced that the Factor
intended to oppose him.
Never had popular feeling run so high as on the night when the Governor
and the Factor had to confront each other on the same hustings. The
better people stayed away, being sorry and ashamed that these two
friends of fifty years should claw each other face to face like eagles,
but the baser sort were reveling in the prospect of that spectacle and
the Artisan's Institute was crowded.
"You learn a lot when your servants quarrel," they told each other, and
they were not to be disappointed.
The Sheriff was in the chair, and it was clear from the beginning that
his life-long rivalry of the Governor did not prompt him to restrain
either candidate from making a fool of himself. Bad luck is a quick
voter and the Governor played into the Sheriff's hands without suspicion
and without delay.
The once silent and dignified man had lost all reticence and
self-control, and when his time came to speak he flung innuendoes on
every side. If you hate a man all his deeds are hateful, and coming at
length to the Factor's business life the Governor said:
"Never is selfishness satisfied, my friends. Will you commit the care
of your public purse to one who in order to grasp all is losing all and
hurling himself into bankruptcy and want?"
This thrust was received with ironical cheers and counter cheers, not
unmixed with derisive laughter, and when the Factor's turn came he said
with a humorous leer over a face that was white as death:
"A blunt knife should seek the joints and not hack at the solid bone.
But if it comes to asking conundrums I'll ask one also: Will you commit
the care of your public purse to one whose son was banished from the
country because he was a forger and a thief?"
This charge against Oscar, often whispered, but never before publicly
uttered, fell on the reeking crowd with the effect of a thunderbolt, and
before the audience had recovered from its astonishment the Governor was
on his feet again, against all rule and order, saying in a loud voice:
"And will you commit the charge of your public morality to a man who in
his youth contracted an alliance with an abandoned woman and only
married his mistress after his first daughter had been born a bastard?"
This was the climax of sensation. The chewing and spitting crowd were
silent, save for the sound of their audible breathing which was like the
hissing in-wash of an ebbing wave. The Factor was pallid and
speechless, as if the Governor's cruel word had struck all sensibility
as well as sneering out of his face, while the Governor faced him with
bloodshot eyes and blazing cheeks and lips that quivered convulsively.
Thus the two men stood for a long moment with scarcely a yard's space
between them, and then a big man was seen to be parting the people at
the back of the platform and coming forward with great strides. It was
Magnus, and he was making for his father as if to take him forcibly
away.
But before the Governor had seen him, or could be conscious of his
presence, another hand, an unseen hand, had been laid upon his shoulder.
With a blow on the brain that was like a stroke from heaven, the
Governor had realized that in returning the insult of the Factor, in his
mad wrath and blind passion, he had outraged the memory of Thora, and
that Thora was in her grave, and he had loved her better than any human
soul that was not of his own flesh and blood. Then the noisome place in
its ghastly silence spun round him, and with a low whine like that of a
poisoned dog he fell heavily to the floor. Magnus took him up and
carried him home--he had a stroke of paralysis.
There was only one nomination for the capital, the Factor was returned
unopposed, and when the writs came back from the country it was found
that the reform party had a larger majority than before.
The Governor made a slow recovery, but he was moving about by the time
that Althing was next in session and when the constitutional question
came up again he hobbled down to Parliament House on two sticks, in
spite of all remonstrance, and took a seat in his little room
overlooking the legislative chamber.
The debate was short and not exciting, and no one looked toward the
alcove in which the Governor sat in his faded uniform, a doddering
shadow of his old authority, but many cruel sallies of clumsy wit were
aimed in that direction. The Governor grew more and more indignant, and
at length he rose, frothing at the lips, to protest against unmerited
insult, and was put down by the Speaker, who had formerly been his own
private secretary.
The Act was passed by acclamation; there was much cheering, with the
usual nine hurrahs after "God save the King," and then the fallen man
was carried home.
In the middle of the night he had a second seizure, and he never left
his room again. But as soon as he had recovered his speech he occupied
his time dictating petitions to the King praying him not to give his
sanction to an Act that was designed to degrade his servant.
After a few weeks Magnus came to persuade his father and mother to leave
Government House and make their home at the farm.
"It's of no use to resist Parliament, sir," he said. "The new Minister
will be appointed presently, and why should you wait until he turns you
out? Come to Thingvellir--I'm strong, I can work for all of us."
But his father flew at him in a fury. "How dare you make such a
proposition?" he said. "And how dare you show your face in this house?
Don't you know that you have been the cause of everything? If it had
not been for what you did at the beginning none of this mischief would
have happened. As for the new Minister, if he comes here to turn me out
tell him to bring my coffin with him--do you hear me?--tell him to bring
my coffin."
The idea that Magnus was really to blame for all that had occurred,
being the first cause and origin of the trouble, grew upon the Governor
day by day, so that Oscar seemed to be without fault and even came to be
regarded as a martyr. He called upon Anna to read Oscar's letter to him
again, and when he had heard it a second time he was so seized by the
idea that the Prime Minister of England was a friend of his son's that
he had himself propped up in bed in order that he might write to Oscar
with his own hand calling on him to defeat his father's enemies.
"You have great influence now, Oscar, and you must save your father from
the machinations of these malicious scoundrels, of whom the worst and
most devilish is the Factor."
That was what he thought he was writing, but his poor brain was far gone
by this time and the paper he scribbled on over the counterpane was
merely covered with unintelligible curves and strokes which Anna could
not send on to Oscar.
When it seemed certain that the intensity of the Governor's wrath would
kill him, and that he would die with nothing in his heart but hatred of
the Factor, Anna and Aunt Margret put their heads together and thought
of a way to soften his feelings and sweeten his end. It centered in the
child as before. "A little child shall lead them," they said.
They took little Elin to the Governor's bedroom, and left her to play on
the floor. She had grown to be the sweetest thing, with an angel's
face, a little beam of spring sunshine that ran about the room and
talked. But the only effect of her presence was to make the sick man
stretch his arms to a safe near the head of his bed and take out a roll
of papers.
Nobody knew what the papers were, except that they were old and that
they crinkled in his stiff fingers. He kept them under his pillow at
all times save when his bed was being made and then he smuggled them
into the breast of his night-shirt.
When the women talked of Elin and all her pretty ways and sweet
mysteries of childish make-believe, the Governor talked of Oscar.
Although his memory was confused about recent events it was wondrously
clear about distant ones, and he had countless stories of Oscar as a
child. Some of them were humorous and he would laugh at them as well as
he could with his distorted face, but all were meant to show that Oscar
was not like other children, and when he had come to an end he would
say:
"My son is a great man now, as I always said he would be, and when he
gets my letter you'll see what he will do."
Meantime the Act had been sent over to Denmark and the Sheriff had been
called across to Copenhagen. There was only one thing that this could
mean, and in the absence of telegraphic communication the little capital
sat waiting for the return of the steamer that was to bring the Sheriff
back. She was due on a Sunday night, and the bell-ringers of the
cathedral stood ready to ring a peal in honor of the new Minister.
The Governor heard that the "Laura" was expected and he conceived the
idea that Oscar was coming with her to bring the King's veto and to
scatter his father's enemies. He was very ill that day, and Doctor
Olesen had said he might not last until morning. But he would have
nobody to nurse him, and Magnus, who had come at his mother's call, but
dared not show his face to his father, sat on the stairs outside the
door.
Aunt Margret was coming and going during the whole of the day, and
toward evening the Factor himself was seen tramping to and fro outside
the house, looking up at intervals at the Governor's windows with a face
in which the madness of love and fear was fighting with the greater
madness of pride and wrath. At length Anna went out to him and said:
"Oscar Neilsen, come into the house to see your old friend."
"Not till he asks me--not till he asks me," said the Factor; whereupon
Anna went indoors again and whispered over the bed of the dying man:
"Stephen, the Factor is outside, and he only wants to be asked to come
in."
"He must come in on his knees then," said the Governor, and that was the
end of everything.
The steamer did not arrive that night, and the bell-ringers went to bed.
But at daybreak, when the fishing-boats in the bay were breaking through
a veil of mist and the sunlight was glistening on the mountain-tops, the
bells began to ring merrily, for the "Laura" was sailing up the fiord
with flags floating from stem to stern.
Magnus heard the bells, and then a shuffling movement in his father's
bedroom. A little later he heard the hurrahs of people cheering in the
streets, and then a smothered echo of the same sound at the other side
of his father's door.
"Hurrah!" "Hurrah!" cried the people outside.
"Hur-a! Hur-a! Hur-a-a--" echoed the voice within.
At the next moment the house shook as with a heavy fall and Magnus burst
into his father's bedroom. His father lay in his night-shirt on the
floor. He was dead, but his face was smiling and in his withered hands
were the crinkled papers on which Oscar in his boyhood had scribbled his
childish compositions.
Later the same day Magnus wrote to Oscar: "This is to tell you that our
father died this morning. I think he died happy."
But the mail did not leave until the end of the week, and under Magnus's
message Anna wrote for herself: "He loved you to the last, and we hav
berrid him next to our dere Thora."
*VII*
When Oscar received the news of his father's death he was near the close
of what he had believed to be the happiest period of his life. His
success as a leader of orchestra had been substantial and immediate, and
when the concerts at Covent Garden came to an end he had been offered
engagements in other quarters.
"There! Didn't I know what I was talking about?" Helga said. "But this
is nothing to the reputation you will make when you consent to appear as
a composer."
"Ah, that is past praying for!" Oscar answered with a shake of the head,
but all the same he was pleased and happy.
On leaving his dismal lodgings in Short Street, he took rooms in the
same house with Helga and Finsen at the corner of Piccadilly and the
Green Park. There the three friends lived the innocent lives of
children, observing few of the restrictions which society imposes on the
manners and conduct of men and women.
Helga's sitting-room was the general rendezvous, and the men used it
with the utmost freedom. Oscar, in particular, was nearly always to be
found there, except in the mornings when Helga was at the Academy and in
the evenings when he was himself at the theater.
No hour was too early and hardly any hour too late for Oscar to call on
Helga. He ate with her, played with her, sang with her, read with her
and helped her with her lessons. Mozart, Cherubini, Ouseley, Macfarren,
Parry, and again Mozart--their work was all play and their play was all
music.
Helga was more than satisfied that Oscar should be always with her,
always assisting her, always praising and encouraging and inspiring her,
and he on his part was entirely happy to devote himself to her service.
To think for a moment that this was all she wished for, all she wanted
with him, was more than his heart was capable of.
On their off days, and nights they went to other concerts and
opera-houses; attended the English cathedral services and the masses at
Catholic Oratories; heard the old masterpieces over and over again;
became familiar with nearly every new opera, oratorio, symphony, and
voluntary, and studied the methods of most of the great singers and
players who appeared in London. It was one long feast of music eaten at
the table of love.
They had their social pleasures too, and kept open house on Sundays.
Sometimes they supped or dined at restaurants with their new friends,
who were chiefly Finsen's friends, and then brought their hosts back to
Helga's rooms for cards and conversation until one, two, or three
o'clock in the morning. It was a reckless, irresponsible, unconventional
life, a little like the life Oscar had lived at college, a little like
the life Helga had lived with her mother at Copenhagen, and more than a
little dangerous, though they never thought of that.
Oscar found only one cause for uneasiness and that concerned Finsen. A
certain pride which he felt at first in Finsen's interest in the girl he
loved, the girl who loved him, soon gave place to jealousy. He was
jealous of Finsen's hold over Helga, his control of her career, his
power over her destiny. Little by little this became a gnawing anxiety
until at length every pleasant word Helga exchanged with Finsen, and
every smile she gave him, seemed to go to Oscar's heart like a stab.
He spoke to her on the subject, and she only laughed at him for his
folly. Her endearing words and caresses dissipated his uneasiness for a
time, but it always came back. Sometimes it seemed to him that Finsen
presumed on his position as the one who was finding the ways and means,
and that Finsen's friends interpreted this attitude according to the
morality of the atmosphere they lived in. At length to ease the secret
gnawing at his heart Oscar proposed that they should marry. Why not?
There was no longer any impediment, and there would be an end of
damaging misconceptions.
Remembering the past he thought Helga would have received his proposal
with delight, but times had changed since they were together in Iceland
and a cheerless smile hung about her lips as she shook her head. She
showed him how fatal marriage at this stage would be to a girl in her
position,--fatal to her aims, her ambitions, her standing with the
public, and above all with the men to whom she had to look for
favors--until he felt almost as much ashamed as if he had proposed a
guilty thing.
"But why should you be jealous?" she said, approaching him to embrace
him. "If _he_ is so there may certainly be some cause."
She put her arms about his neck and added, "Business is business, you
know, and I may have to do things in the future which neither of us
could wish--unless," she whispered, laying her head on his breast, "my
bad boy will at length consent to be true to himself and to his genius
and promise to write the great works I know he can write, and let me
sing them all over the world. Then," she cried with passion, while her
eyes shone and her arms clutched his neck, "then he will see what I can
do."
To this, and such as this, Oscar answered, "No, no," or, "It's
impossible," or "Don't let us talk of it;" but Helga's endearing words
and caresses, again and again repeated, were like the water from sunny
streams which trickles between the snow and the frozen rock and brings
down the avalanche at last.
The days passed--they kept no count of them--six months, a year, a year
and a half, and at length the time approached when Helga, according to
the program which had been mapped out for her, was to leave the Academy
of Music and begin her lessons in Paris. The prospect of an early
separation was a constant nightmare to Oscar, who was striving in vain
to devise schemes to prevent it, when that secret play of fate which men
call chance, helped out by the blind strivings of human passion, brought
him unexpectedly to the end he aimed at.
One day Finsen came dashing into Helga's sitting-room with his mouth
full of news. The syndicate which held the theater and Casino in one of
the principal towns of the Riviera had applied to him to recommend a
leader of orchestra who should be capable of controlling a season of
opera; he had recommended Oscar; his recommendation had been accepted,
and it had been left to him to conclude terms with the company's servant
and to despatch him without delay.
If a desire to separate Oscar from Helga had been a part of Finsen's
plan his hopes were instantly frustrated, for Helga herself cried:
"Splendid! But if Oscar is to control the opera season why can't I go
also? He can put me into small parts under an assumed name in that
distant place where I can never be recognized, and that will be better
practise for the stage than all the acting-classes in Christendom."
"Admirable idea!" shouted Oscar, and Finsen--not half-convinced--was
compelled to agree.
It was while Oscar's heart rode high on this last freak of fortune,
while he was preparing for his flight to the Riviera and while Helga was
writing to Paris to postpone her lessons, that the letter came from
Iceland and fell on him like a thunderbolt. The sight of a black-edged
envelope addressed in Magnus's handwriting sent the blood rushing to his
head. It was long before he could gather courage to open it. Feeling
numb and faint he put the letter in his pocket and went out into the
park to breathe and to think.
He had not written to his mother since the early days in his first
lodging, being afraid to write from Short Street from dread of
disclosing his poverty or from Piccadilly from fear of saying anything
about Helga. As a consequence he had heard nothing from home since
Anna's letter; the only news that had reached him had come through
Finsen by way of his father and concerned public matters chiefly--the
fall of the barter trade, the passing of the new Act and the progress of
the elections.
Some one belonging to him was dead--who could it be? For no other reason
than that little Elin was the youngest and frailest he concluded that it
must be the child. His poor motherless darling! He reproached himself
with having thought so little of her amid the appeals of an absorbing
passion. Yet he had thought of her: he had thought he would go back for
her some day, as it was his right and duty to do, and so make amends to
Thora in the care and love he would bestow on her child. But perhaps
that atonement was impossible now and his sweet child was with her
mother in heaven.
Oscar thought that of all disasters that could befall him at home the
death of his child would be the worst, but when at length he opened his
letter and found that it was his father who was gone from him his grief
was greater still. His dear father who had loved him better, perhaps,
than any one else in the world, and whom he had rewarded the worst! He
remembered the forgery and felt choked with shame; he thought of the
promise to break with Helga and felt crushed by remorse. His father,
who had pampered him and cherished such high hopes for him that should
never be realized, never justified now, was dead far away in Iceland,
and had loved him to the last!
Sitting on a bench under a tree he was trying to read again, as well as
he could for the fading light and the blinding mist in his eyes, the
written sob of his mother's misspelled postscript, when a park-keeper
touched him on the shoulder to say the gates were closing, and then the
dull hum of London's burrowing mazes fell on his ear again.
Helga had expected him in her room that afternoon to make the last
arrangements for their journey, but the sun set, the evening closed, the
night fell and he did not come. Next morning he walked in with drooping
head and a dejected step and she saw that something had occurred.
"You have had bad news, Oscar--what is it?"
"My father is dead," he answered, and after that they sat for some
moments without speaking.
Then Helga recovered herself--her brain had been going like a
fly-wheel--and she said, scarcely above her breath:
"Well, what do you intend to do?"
"I intend to go hack," said Oscar.
"Back to Iceland?"
"Yes--to my mother and my child."
He lifted his eyes and looked at her, and at the sight of her face, so
full of pain and disappointment the blood rushed from his heart, and he
said:
"Helga, why shouldn't you go with me? Why shouldn't we marry and go
back together? I know it is a good deal to ask, dear, but we should be
everything to each other, and I should make up to you for any sacrifice
by my devotion and love. What matter if we have to forget our cherished
dreams and aspirations? Life is the fulfilment of duty, and our duty is
at home--mine is at all events--and if you will share it, if you will go
back with me----"
He stopped suddenly and dropped his head on his hands and his elbows on
his knees. With every word he uttered the impossibility and folly of
what he proposed forced itself upon him, and the blood that had flamed
up to his head fell back to the depths of his heart.
Helga sat a moment without speaking; then she said in a steady voice:
"I'm sorry, very sorry, but it's impossible! If I had nothing and
nobody else to think about I should have to think of Neils. He has
spent money upon me and I have given him a contract, therefore I can't
run away from him like that."
Oscar drew deep, gasping breaths and answered, "Then I must go alone.
It will be hard, terribly hard, but I must go. There is the mortgage--I
must take up that burden now that my father is gone--I can not let
anybody else be borne down by it. And then there is the child--I've not
done too much for her hitherto, and it is my duty, my sacred duty----"
"The child is all right, Oscar. Aunt Margret is taking care of her.
Nothing you could do for the little mite would be half as good as is
being done for her already. As for the mortgage, you can bear that
burden just as well in England as in Iceland! Better--far better!
You'll earn more money here--ten times, a hundred times more. And then
think of the difficulty of beginning over again under the old
conditions. Everybody must know everything by this time. They do--I
know they do!"
She rose, and standing over him she stroked his hair--the uncombed curls
of his fair hair--and said, softly:
"No, no, dear! You can never go back to Iceland until you go back rich
and famous. And you may! I say you may! And then I, too, perhaps----"
But he covered his ears with his hands, for what Helga was saying
sounded like mockery.
"Meantime you can not think of leaving me--especially now when I want
your help so badly--and when everything depends upon it--my work and my
future."
She dropped to her knees by his side and put her arms around his neck.
"Say you will not leave me, dearest! Say you will not!"
She loaded him with caresses, she addressed him by every endearing name,
she conquered him. He felt that the impulse to go back to Iceland--the
impulse of duty--was overcome by the rapture of love, and that he must
stay where Helga was, whatever happened.
"I belong to you, body and soul, Helga--do as you like with me," he
said.
"And you will go to the Riviera?"
"Yes."
If he had known what he was saying he would rather have called upon the
river to carry him to its lowest depths and count him in the death-roll
of its damned. But none of us can foresee the future. We must all bow
before the Unknown.
*VIII*
The engagement on the Riviera was completely successful and Oscar
covered himself with honor, but when the opera season came to an end he
declined all offers to come back.
Finsen was there. Under cover of professional and fraternal interest he
had made frequent visits to Oscar and Helga during the course of the
season, and at the close of it he was staying at the same hotel. Oscar
was nervous, fretful, and unhappy. The secret gnawing anxiety which had
oppressed him in London had returned with redoubled force.
Helga's love of the gaiety and grandeur of the life of the Riviera was
only too evident, and Finsen set himself to feed it. He fed it by every
art and resource of a full purse and an open hand. Races, regattas,
fetes, flowers--he gave her everything that was being enjoyed by other
women living in abundance. Oscar protested, but she laughed at his
protests or tried to coax him out of his jealousy. Her caresses and
endearments were beginning to fail of their old effect. In spite of
himself he was beginning to feel a certain contempt for her, and at some
moments even a sort of hatred which tore his heart to pieces.
For his own part Oscar hated the life of the Riviera. What nature had
done for the place was good, but what man had done was bad. The soft
air, the blue sky, the deep blue sea, the smiling gardens, the flowers,
the oleanders, the orange groves, the scent of the resin and then the
still nights and the nightingale--could anything be more enchanting?
Yet this paradise of nature, this God-blest corner of the earth was
degraded by every gross desire that was at war with beauty and art and
genius and the everlasting laws of life.
But Oscar's hatred of the Riviera was due to a cause more personal than
his moral revolt--a poignant memory of the past. In the Casino which
stood in the middle of the gardens, beyond the brilliant hall and the
noisy orchestra, there was an inner room, guarded by keen-eyed
door-keepers and watched by spies, where men and women sat about a
green-topped table in a dusky and clammy silence; and at the end of that
room, in the darkest part of it there was an alcove, almost covered by
palms, where two persons could sit unseen. Helga and he had once sat
there, and she had pleaded with him to do something that his soul shrank
from, and he had done it. "Why not?" she had said. "He will never hear
of it, and it will only be a matter of form. My luck must change, it
must, and then we will pay back this money and everything will be wiped
out. Do, Oscar, for me, please!"
From fear of reviving this memory Oscar had avoided the Casino during
his present visit. That was easy enough to do while the opera season
lasted, but when it was over, and his work no longer wanted him, it was
hard to see Helga go off with Finsen night after night, and to wander
round the Casino like an uneasy spirit that could find no rest while
they were inside of it. The jealousy that was rankling in his breast
could not bear that ordeal long and when Helga said, "What nonsense!
You needn't play--why should you?" he followed her into the
gambling-house.
He saw the usual sights there, and found the usual company gathered
about the tables--all middle-class whatever their rank and station--the
middle-class financier, the middle-class millionaire, the middle-class
baron, the middle-class peer, the middle-class duchess smoking her
cigarettes, and then the prostitute in her feathers and the black-leg in
his diamonds, as well as reputable men and virtuous women, for the
gambling-house knows no distinctions of means or morality or intellect
and is the high court of the devil's democracy.
On the night of Oscar's first visit Helga played and lost; and seeing
the strained look in her face his very soul felt sick and he walked out
into the gardens. On the second night she lost again and he saw her
borrow from Finsen who stood behind her. On the third night it was
Finsen who played and he won largely, and then Helga, who sat by his
side, seemed to be intoxicated by excitement and delight.
Next day she showed him a costly jewel which Finsen had bought for her
out of his winnings. "For luck!" she said, and when Oscar protested
against the present, she said:
"But why shouldn't I take it? Every penny he spends on me makes me more
necessary to him for the future. Come, dear, don't be jealous. Didn't
I tell you that I should have to do things that neither of us could
wish?"
At this, and such as this, Oscar's sense of shame was choking him. His
feeling for Helga was now in a perpetual alternation between love and
hate. He loved her, he hated her, he despised her, he was proud of her,
and this red riot in his blood was driving him to despair.
At one moment he thought her nature was utterly selfish, and that she
would sacrifice anything and anybody to gain her ends; at the next
moment he believed she loved him with an unselfish love, but that her
disposition was such that she had to struggle between her love for him
and her love for luxury and success, and therefore she was as much an
object for pity as himself.
Sometimes, when he walked in the gardens of the Casino, he remembered
how Thora had suffered as he was suffering now; and then, while the
nightingale sang unseen above his head and the peace of the night
soothed his soul, he told himself he was rightly punished. As he had
done so he was being done by, and now the manly thing was to leave Helga
and go away; and then if she loved him she would suffer, too, and that
would be his best revenge.
But at other times, when he saw Helga wearing the bracelets and brooches
which Finsen had given her he felt that flight was impossible; that he
must fight this man with his own weapons and subdue this woman on her
own terms.
Yet how was he to do it? When he asked himself that question one
answer, and one only, came back to him with every breath he drew in that
atmosphere of gamblers, the old, delusive, mocking answer--he must do it
by means of play.
But while he had money enough for his own needs he had none for the
gambling-table, and it was not at first that he saw a way to the means
with which to begin. Suddenly an idea came to him--he would make the
man himself find the means--and without waiting to consider this,
without pausing to count the cost, with his pulses throbbing painfully
and his heart leaping with a devilish joy, he hurried into the Casino
and drew Finsen aside to the alcove covered by palms, and said, in a
false and tremulous voice:
"Old friend, do you remember the first time I called on you at Covent
Garden?"
"When you said you were starving--perfectly."
"You offered me something if I would sell you some compositions of mine
that are buried in Iceland."
"And you said you would die in a ditch first."
"Would you still be disposed to take your chance with them?"
"Why not? My father is Minister now--there ought to be no difficulty."
"And you would be prepared to pay me the money at once?"
"Certainly--as soon as you are ready to sign the necessary
authorization."
"I'm ready to sign it now," said Oscar in the same tremulous voice.
Within ten minutes everything was settled, and Oscar was pocketing the
notes that were being paid on Finsen's account from the treasury of the
Casino. His hands were trembling, his lips quivering, and his face was
white.
"So you're caught by the fever at last, old fellow," laughed Finsen.
"And what you wouldn't do before to feed your stomach, you are doing now
to feed your luck."
"Just so, to feed my luck," said Oscar.
That night Oscar played carefully and won. The following night he
played more freely and won again. On the third night he took the bank
and won once more. He took the bank on the fourth, fifth, sixth, and
many succeeding nights with the same result. Such a rapid and unbroken
run of luck had scarcely ever been seen. The manager of the Casino, a
plausible person with a rubicund face, congratulated Oscar. The "house"
had rarely had a banker so popular as well as so fortunate, and it
rejoiced in his success.
Meantime Oscar was never for a moment his own man. He seemed to be
laboring under a wild intoxication of soul. In a fortnight he had
become rich, but he had no love for money for himself and he heaped it
upon Helga. There were presents to outshine Finsen's, excursions in
steam launches and in automobiles and even some social entertainments.
The winsome and remarkable-looking young leader of the opera, with his
handsome if reckless sister-in-law, became objects of attention. They
gave one or two dinners in the restaurant of the Casino, where the rich
of all nations ate their food in the glitter of a thousand diamonds and
to the music of an orchestra in red coats and black silk stockings.
Then the change came--the inevitable change. One night it became
evident that the tide of Oscar's luck had turned. He did not flinch--he
doubled his risk and played on. The ebb set in with frightful rapidity,
and every night he increased his stakes, and lost his money with a
smile. At the end of a week Helga, who had been transported with
rapture became pallid with alarm.
"Your luck is leaving you--hadn't you better stop?" she said, but he
would not listen.
He touched bottom at last. Sitting in his usual seat he called for
fresh counters, and said with a laugh, "Life or death--this is my last."
"Do you mean that?" said Helga, and he nodded and laughed again.
Finsen had been punting silently at the other side of the table, and now
Helga went over to him and stood behind his chair. It was only the
straw that told how the wind was blowing, but Oscar saw it and his
twitching face grew red.
The inscrutable gods of chance seemed to hover over the table. A
greater risk than that of money depended on the issue of the nest coup,
and both men knew it.
When the cards had been cut Oscar served them slowly, very slowly, and
when he came to the last card his trembling fingers seemed loath to turn
it. He turned it at last with a rapid movement and at the same moment
he rose from his seat and laughed.
He had lost, and the clammy silence was broken.
"Are you going?" asked Helga, in a listless tone, with wandering eyes.
"Certainly. And you?"
"Not yet--Neils is winning splendidly."
Then in a moment, as in the twinkling of an eye, his month-long
intoxication of soul left him and he saw where he was and what he had
done. He had taken money from Finsen to permit the grave of his wife to
be opened, and he had gambled with that money and lost it!
When he saw things in this way he could scarcely stand upright, but with
an effort he walked out of the gambling-room, down the corridor where
the spies were watching, past the restaurant where the sluggards were
smoking, through the hall where the band was playing and out into the
garden.
There he looked for a dark place and sat on a bench under a tree. The
night was clear and quiet, the stars were out, and the sea was singing
in the distance, but he could hear nothing except an owl that was
hooting somewhere in the eaves. Oh, for the snows of his own country to
cool his hot forehead! Oh, for the storms of Iceland to silence the
babel in his brain!
When he thought of his conduct he hated himself, and when he remembered
his temptation he hated Helga also. The one hatred counteracted the
other or he would have destroyed himself. He must live, if only to
subdue Helga, to bring her to his feet and then to cast her off forever!
How was he to do this? There was one way, but it was closed to
him--closed by the vow he had made when he stood by the open coffin of
his wife and, in punishment of himself for having neglected her and
sinned against her, he had sworn before God to bury his ambitions in her
grave and never write another line of music as long as he lived.
If he could only wipe out that vow, if he could only begin again, if he
could only say to himself some day, "Oscar Stephenson is dead!" But
that could never be and Oscar Stephenson must go on to the end, trailing
the slag of his burned-out life behind him.
Deciding to return to England immediately, he walked back to the hotel
and asked for his bill. When it was given to him he found that the
money remaining in his purse was hardly sufficient to discharge his debt
and pay the expense of his journey. Without a moment's thought he sat
down and wrote to Helga:
"DEAR HELGA:--I want to go back to London by the midnight train and I
find I am a little short for my railway ticket. Send me a hundred
francs by the messenger who brings you this letter, and for mercy's sake
do not keep him too long waiting--I can not live in this place another
night.
"OSCAR."
He had lavished so many presents upon her that he never dreamt she could
refuse him, but this was the answer that came back:
"DEAREST OSCAR:--How unlucky! I've just this very minute lost my last
sou, and you don't like me to borrow from Finsen. But, you bad boy, you
can not be in earnest about going off at midnight. It's impossible!
Your devoted
"HELGA."
Oscar had nothing that he could turn into money except his watch, and
that was his father's gift and all he had to remember him by, but after
a sharp struggle he called for the manager, and parted with his
keepsake.
When his bill was paid and his luggage ready, the clock across the
gardens was striking eleven. He had still an hour to spare, and
bitterly as he felt toward Helga he could not go away without saying
good-by to her, so he walked for that purpose by the shore road to the
side door of the Casino.
It was there that his fate encountered him.
*IX*
As he was going into the Casino he met the manager, who greeted him
effusively.
"Ah, Mr. Stephenson, they told me you were going away--I'm glad to see
it isn't true!"
"It is quite true, sir," said Oscar.
"Why should you? The season isn't at an end yet."
"But my money is," said Oscar; whereupon the manager laughed, put his
arm through Oscar's and walked back with him toward the baccarat-room,
whispering:
"Mr. Stephenson, I told you the house liked to see you take the hank.
The game is good when you are in the chair. Now there are a few
gentlemen here to-night who would play high if they had the proper
inducement. Don't go, Mr. Stephenson."
"But I'm penniless--don't you understand me?--penniless."
"Come this way."
They were in the baccarat-room by this time and the manager was drawing
Oscar toward the alcove.
"I must ask you to excuse me. I have a lady to speak to, and my train
to catch," said Oscar.
"Listen for a moment," said the manager, and then with a glance toward
the company who stood absorbed and silent under the bright light in the
middle of the room, he added, in a low voice, "Mr. Stephenson, I suggest
that you return to the table and take the bank. When you call for
counters they will be provided. If you lose your first coup the loss
will be the loss of the house, and if you win the gain will be your
own."
Oscar laughed, and chopping the air impatiently with a pair of gloves
which he carried in his hand, he said, "Do you run this house on
philanthropic lines then?"
"Hush! At your second coup you will call for fresh cards as you have a
right to do, and when you receive them you--you will win. You
understand me? You will win!"
The impatient chopping ceased and Oscar stood looking steadfastly at the
man's eyes.
"At your next coup and your next you will call for cards as before and
at the end of your fourth coup you will rise from the table."
"And then?"
"Then you will divide your earnings with the house, and be richer than
you have ever been in your life."
Oscar had listened first with astonishment, then with indignation, and
finally with ungovernable wrath. "How dare you? What do you take me
for?" he said in a loud, choking voice, and lifting his hand he smote
the man with his gloves across his ruddy and smiling face.
The unexpectedness of the attack compelled the manager to utter a
startled cry, and in a moment the people from the table were crowding
round, asking, "What is it? What's happened?"
But the manager recovered himself in an instant and said: "It's nothing!
The gentleman misunderstood something I was saying to him. I beg of you
to resume the play."
Helga had come up with the rest, and when the others had returned to the
table she drew Oscar into the alcove and said: "Tell me what occurred."
He told her, and still trembling with unsatisfied anger, he added: "This
is what I have come down to, Helga--that a man can think it safe to make
a proposal to me like that! Can you wonder that I want to get out of
this place--this atmosphere of cheats and cheating? And yet people talk
of the honor of the gambling-house! They might as well talk of the
morality of hell."
Helga was sitting with her head down and her fingers--which sparkled
with some of Oscar's presents--interlaced upon her knee.
"You might have spared me one of these, Helga," he said, touching her
rings. "We could have replaced it some day, whereas I've had to part
with the watch my father gave me, and I can never replace that."
"I didn't want you to go, Oscar, that's why I didn't send you the
hundred francs--I didn't want you to go away without me."
"Do you mean that, Helga? Really mean it? You do? Then come with me
now! I came to say good-by, but how can I leave you behind in a place
like this? It will destroy you as it has destroyed others. It will sap
away your health and spirit and talent and charm and everything a woman
wants to keep. Helga," he said, rising to his feet, "I am nearly
distracted by what has occurred to-night, but I know what I am saying.
If you will throw in your lot with me--with me only--I will devote my
whole life to your welfare, and do everything you wish. If there is
anything you want me to do for you I will do it. Do you understand me,
Helga?"
"Yes, Oscar."
"Then let us go back to London--to our own world, our own work, Helga."
"I should like to--dearly like to."
"Then why not?"
"If I throw in my lot with you--with you only--I must break with
Finsen--and I'm in Finsen's debt.
"I know! Oh, I know!"
"If I could only repay him somehow! But I have nothing!"
"You have your jewels, Helga."
"They are not enough. And besides, how could I part with a present of
yours, Oscar? But if there were any other way of getting money----"
"Helga, what are you thinking of?"
"I am thinking that if this is an atmosphere of cheats and cheating
perhaps you have been cheated also."
"Helga!" His voice was tremulous with protest.
"Would it be so very wrong to do to them as they have done to you,
Oscar?"
"Helga! Helga!" His tremulous voice was breaking into gasps of
helplessness.
"I suppose it would, but how happy I should be if we could go back
together, and live for each other and our art, and have nothing and
nobody else to think about!"
Oscar was standing by her side and quivering like a frightened horse.
There were some moments of silence in which nothing could be heard but
the call of the croupier in the middle of the room. Then a waiter went
noiselessly by the mouth of the alcove carrying an empty tray to his own
quarters, and by a sudden impulse, in a thick croupy voice Oscar called
to him:
"Garcon! My compliments to the manager! Say I am sorry for what
occurred just now, and if he is still of the same mind I will take the
bank."
A few minutes later Oscar, who had thrown off his overcoat and hat, was
taking the banker's chair at the baccarat-table. The people seated about
it welcomed him with nods and smiles, and when he called for counters
and received a huge pile of ivory ones a bald-headed man with a sinister
face said, "I congratulate you, sir! It isn't everybody who can revive
his credit as quickly as that."
"What does it mean?" whispered Finsen to Helga, whereupon Helga
whispered back:
"Don't ask me yet," and then she walked up to Oscar and stood close
behind his chair.
There were a few strange faces about the table, including an English
lord and an American financier. The manager of the Casino stood
watching from the back. Stakes were high for the first coup and the
bank lost it.
"I'm afraid the luck is still against you, sir," said the bald-headed
man.
"I'll try again," said Oscar. "Fresh cards, please!"
The stakes were higher for the second coup, and the bank won it.
"That's better," said the bald-headed man.
"Another pack of cards, please!" said Oscar.
When the money was on the table for the third coup it was seen to be
double what it had been for the second. The bank won once more.
"But this is like your old luck, sir," said the bald-headed man.
"Another pack!" cried Oscar, and he swept all his winnings into the
bank.
The money for the fourth coup was four times what it had been for the
third. The bank won again, and then Oscar rose from the table.
"But aren't you going to give us our revenge, sir?" asked the American.
"This is mine," said Oscar, as he left the chair.
Helga's face was quivering with excitement and delight. There were tears
in her eyes as she congratulated Oscar, and she looked as if she were
going to kiss him.
"If you will step this way, Mr. Stephenson--" the manager's suave voice
was saying, when all at once a commotion broke out behind.
"Croupier," said a voice with a nasal accent, "I will trouble you to
examine them cards," whereupon the manager swung round with an aggrieved
expression.
"Surely, sir, you do not mean to say, to imply----"
"I can only say I'll trouble the croupier to examine them last three
packs of cards."
In the confusion that followed Finsen came up to Helga, who was now
trembling by Oscar's side and said: "You had better let me take you out
of this."
Oscar saw Helga hesitate, then take one step away from him and stop, but
when somebody in the throng about the table cried excitedly: "The bank
ought to be impounded," he saw her drop her head and follow Finsen out
of the room.
"Come this way, Mr. Stephenson," whispered the manager, and while most
of the company were still crowding about the croupier he half-led,
half-pushed Oscar through a small door to a private corridor, and a
moment afterward there was a roar from the other side of it.
"Stay here. Leave everything to me. I'll do the best I can," said the
manager, and then Oscar found himself alone in a small room, quite dark
and silent, save for the glimmering of lamps in the garden and the
deadened rumble of the tumult he had left behind.
How long he stayed there he never knew. It seemed like an hour, but it
could hardly have been more than a few minutes. The tumult grew louder,
then there was the report of a pistol-shot, and then the noises frayed
off to silence.
Unable to restrain himself any longer, and delirious with a wild desire
to face the consequences of his conduct, whatever they might be, Oscar
was opening the door of his room when the manager returned to it,
bringing his hat, overcoat, and gloves.
"I've done the best I could for you," said the manager, panting and
gasping. "I have told them you have shot yourself, and your friends
have supported that explanation. You must get away at once. You must
catch the midnight train to Paris. You've only four minutes, but you'll
do it if you run. Here is a second-class ticket to London. Good night!
And remember," said the man, as Oscar was passing through a private door
to the garden, "remember--_Oscar Stephenson is dead_."
*X*
Oscar was just able to control his faculties long enough to reach the
railway-station, find the train, and search out an empty second-class
compartment and then he collapsed utterly. He was like a beast that has
been smitten in the shambles and is shattered in every sense and nerve.
Looking up at the lamp in the roof and seeing smoke floating above it,
he thought at first the carriage must be afire, but looking again the
smoke was gone and then he knew his sight had suffered and he supposed
he must be going blind. There was a roaring noise in his ears and he
thought it was the roaring of the train, but when the train stopped the
noise continued, and then he knew that his hearing was injured and he
supposed he must be going deaf. Two officials came into the carriage to
examine the tickets, but though he saw their lips moving he could not
hear what they said, or rightly grasp what they wanted, until they were
turning to go, and then the noise in his head slid off for a moment and
he heard one of them say to the other, "Drunk, poor devil!"
This lasted through the dark hours of the night, and when the morning
dawned his experiences were yet more terrible. At the first gleam of
light his stunned soul awoke, and with a sharp pain like the after-pain
of a bullet wound, he realized where he was and what he was doing. He
was flying from the consequences of perhaps the most base and infamous
conduct a man could be capable of--conduct the more base and infamous
because there was no law to punish it.
Low as he had sunk hitherto he had never sunk so low as this. This was
as low as man could go and live in the face of other men and the eye of
the light. And he had descended to this depth, he, Oscar Stephenson,
son of the Governor of his country! When he thought of his father he
thanked God that death had taken him before this disgrace befell.
Every artery in his body seemed to bleed, every tendon to be torn. When
the sun rose on him in his ghastly solitude it seemed to sere his very
brain and he pulled the blind down to shut it out.
Then the women passengers began to move about the corridor of the train
and he thought of Helga. Although it seemed so long ago as almost to
belong to another existence, he could still see her frightened face as
she sidled away from him last night and left him standing alone at that
hideous moment when it seemed certain that he must pay the penalty of
the offense to which she had tempted him. He despised her for her
cowardice; he loathed her for her treachery; he hated her for herself;
and he told himself that never again as long as he lived should love of
Helga hold dominion over him.
At one moment he found himself cursing her. At the next he found
himself weeping. Could it be Helga whom he was thinking of like this?
Helga, who had been so much to him during so many years, who had come so
very close to him, nearer than his father, nearer than his mother,
nearer--Heaven forgive him!--than his wife or child? Helga, who had been
with him early and late, a soft voice always at his ear, a sweet
presence always at his heart, a spirit, a support, an inspiration?
Helga, whom he had loved and should always love, let her do what she
would with him, let him do what he would with her? God pity him! God
help him!
Yet his tenderness and tears were stronger than his hatred and rage, and
he resolved that for her perfidy and selfishness, Helga should be
punished, and that he should punish her. There was no longer any need
to ask himself how this was to be done. The words that had rumbled in
his ears like the roll of a muffled drum when he ran from the gardens of
the Casino were rumbling in his ears still. _Oscar Stephenson is dead_!
At first he could not be sure that the manager had really spoken them,
so exactly did they echo the wish that had been bubbling within his own
breast. But Oscar Stephenson was dead indeed, and the words that might
have crushed him with shame moved him more than a trumpet.
If Oscar Stephenson was dead, then the vow he had made in Thora's
death-chamber was dead also! That vow had been intended to punish
himself for his infidelity and for all his failures of love and duty, by
denying himself the gratification of his greatest pride, the realization
of his highest hopes. But what pride could be gratified and what hopes
realized to Oscar Stephenson if his name was wiped out, his identity
lost, and he was dead to all the world except himself?
The feverish soul in its hour of suffering found the reasoning
sufficient, and Oscar thought he saw as in a glass everything that he
had to do. He had to take another name, to bury himself in London and
to set to work on the only task he was fit for! He had to write an
opera, as he was now free to do, since Oscar Stephenson was dead, and he
was living in the name of another man.
The scene was to be in his own country, among the lonesome grandeur of
its untrodden glaciers and the stark sublimity of its burned-out plains,
and the story was to be from one of the fiery Sagas of the same stern
old land. And when, after many days, many months, perhaps years, eating
the bread of poverty in loneliness and obscurity, he had finished his
task, and had sent it out like a dove from the ark, men were to know
that a new voice had come among them and the name of Iceland was to be
on the lips of the world.
Then when people asked each other, who was he that in the darkness of
years of labor had learned all the art and mystery of music, he would
give no sign because his lips would be sealed, but there would be one
who would read his secret. It would be Helga, and she would come back
to him in shame if not remorse and throw herself at his feet and cry: "I
did wrong, forgive me, and take me back to your heart!"
And then he would answer and say: "You came between me and my sweet
young wife; you persuaded me to the act that broke her heart and killed
her; you tempted me to the crime that ruined my father and to the
offense that destroyed myself, and then you left me to bear my
punishment alone. Therefore, I have wiped you out of my life; I have
cut you off as I would cut off a rotten limb that threatened to drag the
whole body down to death. I love you--yes, I can never cease to love
you--that is the punishment I shall always bear--but there can be
nothing more between us--we part now forever--your course lies that way,
mine this. Farewell!"
As the train rolled along he found a delirious joy in this prospect,
which began and ended with the idea that Oscar Stephenson was dead. In
the light of that thought he looked back on the past of his life and
many things that had been hard to understand became plain. Again and
again he had tried to stop on his downward course and he could not do
so. Before he could rise out of the degradation of his past life he had
had to drink his cup to the dregs, to go down to the depths, to be
covered by darkness and the shadow of death! But at last Oscar
Stephenson was dead! Thank God! Thank God!
How strange that at the moment when Helga was tempting him to the
infamous act, which if it had succeeded would have made him her slave
and the slave of sin forever, she was leading him by one of Death's
terrific strides to life and liberty! How mysterious and how mighty,
aye, and how cynical also, were the powers of Destiny, whose
supernatural wings hovered over the lives of men and women and moved
their little motives of love and hate and revenge and selfishness like
pawns on the chess-board of Fate!
It was in this mood he reached Paris, and having some three hours to
wait before his train started for Calais, he walked through the streets
until he came to the center of the city, and then sat outside a cafe to
eat a roll of bread and drink a cup of coffee. It was six o'clock, and
the news-vendors were crying the evening papers. He bought one to
beguile the time of waiting, and had not yet opened it when he saw his
own name standing out from the front page as if it had been printed in a
different ink.
For some moments thereafter a mist seemed to float between the newspaper
and his eyes, but he read the paragraph at last.
It was a telegram from Nice, headed: "Suicide in a Casino," giving a
mangled version of the events of last night, clearly inspired by the
manager to protect himself and his house, and closing with the words:
"The deceased, who was from Iceland, is understood to be a son of the
late much-respected Governor-General of that country."
*XI*
The paper slipped from Oscar's fingers and his transport of rapture
passed. He told himself that this report would go far, that it would
reach Iceland, that his mother would hear of it, and that his child
would be told that she was fatherless.
Little Elin was too young to feel grief, but could he allow his mother
to believe that he was dead and to weep for him as for one who was lost
to her forever? That would be too cruel; it would be impossible; he
would write to his mother immediately; he would write privately saying
he was still alive and that part of the report was untrue.
But then came the chilling thought that though he might dispose of the
fiction of his death he could not get rid of the fact of his offense,
and that when his mother pictured him as one who was flying from the
consequences of his conduct, skulking in a slum and hiding his face from
the faces of his friends, there would be something in the shame of that
end more bitter than death itself, and even his own mother would wish
that he had died.
He had not thought of this before, and in the confusion and pain of it
he got up from the table at the cafe and began to walk the streets
again. After a while he found himself ascending the steps of the
Madeline, hardly knowing what he was doing, except that he was trying to
pass the time by following a stream of people into the building.
It was the hour of Benediction, the most beautiful, the most tender, the
most moving of all the offices of the Catholic Church. The congregation
were chiefly women, and among ladies in silks, whose carriages stood
outside, were some flower-sellers from the flower-market round the
corner, for there is only one caste in the commune of the Cross. One
poor woman who took a chair and knelt close beside Oscar, had the sad
and storm-beaten face that the Cross draws to it in every church in the
country, for its empire is the empire of the oppressed and bereaved and
broken-hearted.
"_Somebody's_ mother," thought Oscar, as she crossed herself and sighed.
But when she raised her weary eyes to the figure of the world-mother
above the altar, her sad face softened and smiled and it was almost as
if an angel had come down and whispered to her.
Then as the sweet music swelled through the great church the hard lump
rose to Oscar's throat, and thinking of his own mother so far away, he
told himself that if she believed he was really dead the angel of Death
would comfort her. His faults would be forgiven, his errors would be
forgotten, and the dust of death would cover all his transgressions. She
would be happier in his death than she had ever been in his life, and
though it was a sore thing to think of that, the pain would be his, not
hers, and her poor heart would be at ease.
He thought of Magnus, too, how his hatred would be appeased when he
heard that his brother was dead, and all the flames of his rage
extinguished. Then he thought of his enemies at home, how they would
cease to revile him, and how he would pass out of shame, reproach, and
contempt into the charity of silence and the peace of forgetfulness.
Finally he thought of his little Elin, his sweet motherless daughter,
how she would hear no more hard words spoken of her father, but would
grow up to think of him merely as one who had died early. Oh, blessed
and merciful death which can make those who hate us hate us less and
those who love us love us more!
It was bitter to comfort himself with the thought that he was dead--dead
in disgrace and in a foreign country, with no mother's tears falling on
his face and no child weeping by his side, that tragic consolation of
the dying. But just at that moment the music ceased, the bell tinkled at
the altar, and raising his eyes as the priest elevated the host the awe
deepened about him, and he told himself that it was not he who was dead
at all but only his sin and misery, and that he might rise, if he would,
out of the shadow of death into another and better life.
Then, almost before he knew it, the thought had become a prayer, and he
found himself praying that he might be permitted to begin again, to put
the past behind him, and to think of the lost days of his life hitherto
as seed that was not dead though he had trampled it into the clay. Out
of the heart came the only songs that went to the heart, and out of his
shame and suffering in that future he had foreshadowed for himself the
voice might come that would speak to other souls as stained with sin as
his.
Yet who was he to speak to any one? Only a prodigal in a far country
who had wasted his substance in riotous living, and having come to
himself at last, now that no man would give to him, was turning his eyes
homeward and crying, "Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before
thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son!"
The service came to an end and the people rose to go. As Oscar rose,
too, he told himself that in actual fact he would go back home some day.
A little longer, only a little longer, and he would return to Iceland.
His father would be gone, yes, his poor father would be gone, but his
mother would be there, and he would make amends to her for everything
she had suffered for his sake and wipe all tears from her eyes. His
child would be there also, and he would claim her as he had always
intended to do, and though she might not even know his face, she would
hear the voice of nature calling her and she would come to him and he
would be a father to her, guiding and protecting her, and she would be a
daughter to him, cheering and comforting him, and her love would be his
solace for all the pains of life. A little longer, only a little
longer!
When he came out of the great church he felt himself lifted into a purer
air, where he was no longer a fugitive from the vengeance of his
fellow-men, but a pardoned soul born again in a blessed resurrection;
and when he had settled in the train for Calais he set himself to
consider what other name he should be known by in that new existence
which he had just begun.