It is of course a truism that we never fully appreciate what we have,
until some trouble or some other loss shows us all that has grown
familiar in a fresh light. Our life-long friends are only perhaps valued
at their true worth when some friendship of recent growth has proved
fleeting and full of disappointment. And though many may love their
homes, yet a home can only be properly appreciated by one who has had to
bear from the outside world contempt and misunderstanding and harsh
judgment. Fond as he had been of his home before, Frithiof had never
until now quite realized what it meant to him. But as each evening he
returned from work, and from the severe trial of an atmosphere of
suspicion and dislike, he felt much as the sailor feels when, after
tossing about all day in stormy seas he anchors at night in some harbor
of refuge. Sigrid knew that he felt this, and she was determined that he
should not even guess at her trouble. Luckily she had plenty to do, so
that it was impossible for her to sit and look her sorrow in the face,
or brood over it in idleness. It was with her certainly as she went
about her household work, with her as she and Swanhild walked through
the hot and crowded streets, and with her as she played at Madame
Lechertier’s Academy. But there was something in the work that prevented
the trouble from really preying on her mind, she was sad indeed yet not
in despair.
Nevertheless Madame Lechertier’s quick eyes noted at once the change in
her favorite.
“You are not well, _chérie_,” she said, “your face looks worn. Why, my
dear, I can actually see lines in your forehead. At your age that is
inexcusable.”
Sigrid laughed.
“I have a bad habit of wrinkling it up when I am worried about
anything,” she said. “To-day, perhaps, I am a little tired. It is so hot
and sultry, and besides I am anxious about Frithiof, it is a trying time
for him.”
“Yes, this heat is trying to the strongest,” said Madame Lechertier,
fanning herself. “Swanhild, my angel, there are some new bonbons in that
box, help yourself.”
This afternoon it happened to be a children’s class, and Madame
Lechertier invariably regaled them in the intervals of rest with the
most delicious French sweetmeats. It was a pretty sight to see the
groups of little ones, and Swanhild in her dainty Norwegian costume,
handing the bonbons to each in turn. Sigrid always liked to watch this
part of the performance, and perhaps the most comforting thought to her
just then was, that as far as Swanhild was concerned, the new life, in
spite of its restrictions and economies, seemed to answer so well. The
child was never happier than when hard at work at the academy; even on
this hot summer day she never complained; and in truth the afternoons
just brought the right amount of variety into what would otherwise have
been a very monotonous life.
“Sigrid,” said the little girl, as they walked home together, “is it
true what you said to Madame Lechertier about Frithiof feeling the heat?
Is it really that which has made him so grave the last few days?”
“It is partly that,” replied Sigrid. “But he has a good deal to trouble
him that you are too young to understand, things that will not bear
talking about. You must try to make it bright and cheerful at home.”
Swanhild sighed. It was not so easy to be bright and cheerful all by
one’s self, and of late Frithiof and Sigrid had been—as she expressed it
in the quaint Norse idiom—silent as lighted candles. People talk a great
deal about the happy freedom from care which children can enjoy, but as
a matter of fact many a child feels the exact state of the home
atmosphere, and puzzles its head over the unknown troubles which are
grieving the elders, often magnifying trifles into most alarming and
menacing sources of danger. But Frithiof never guessed either little
Swanhild’s perplexities, or Sigrid’s trouble; when he returned all
seemed to him natural and homelike; and perhaps it was as much with the
desire to be still with them as from any recollection of Donati’s words,
that on the following Sunday he set off with them to the service held
during the summer evenings at Westminster Abbey.
What impression the beautiful service made on him Sigrid could not tell,
but the sermon was unluckily the very last he ought to have heard. The
learned Oxford professor who preached to the great throng of people that
night could have understood very little how his words would affect many
of his hearers; he preached as a pessimist, he drew a miserable picture
of the iniquity and injustice of the world, all things were going wrong,
the times were out of joint, but he suggested no remedy, he did not even
indicate that there was another side to the picture. The congregation
dispersed. In profound depression, Frithiof walked down the nave, and
passed out into the cool evening air. Miserable as life had seemed to
him before, it now seemed doubly miserable, it was all a great wretched
problem to which there was no solution, a purposeless whirl of buying
and selling, a selfish struggle for existence. They walked past the
Aquarium, the dingy side streets looked unlovely enough on that summer
night, and the dreary words he had heard haunted him persistently,
harmonizing only too well with the _cui bono_ that at all times was apt
to suggest itself to his mind. A wretched, clouded life in a miserable
world, misfortunes which he had never deserved eternally dogging his
steps, his own case merely one of a million similar or worse cases.
Where was the use of it all?
A voice close beside him made him start. They were passing a corner
where two streets crossed each other, and the words that fell upon his
ear, spoken with a strange fervor yet with deep reverence, were just
these:
“Jesus, blessed Jesus!”
He glanced sharply round and saw a little crowd of people gathered
together; the words had been read from a hymn-book by a man whose whole
heart had been thrown into what he read. They broke into Frithiof’s
revery very strangely. Then immediately the people began to sing the
well-known hymn, “The Great Physician now is near,” and the familiar
tune, which had long ago penetrated to Norway, brought to Frithiof’s
mind a host of old memories. Was it after all true that the problem had
been solved? Was it true that in spite of suffering and sin and misery
the pledge of ultimate victory had already been given? Was it true that
he whose uncongenial work seemed chiefly to consist of passive endurance
had yet a share in helping to bring about the final triumph of good?
From the words read by the street preacher, his mind involuntarily
turned to the words spoken to him a few days before by a stage singer.
Donati had spoken of living the life of the crucified. He had said very
little, but what he said had the marvelous power of all essentially true
things. He had spoken not as a conventional utterer of platitudes, but
as one man who has fought and agonized and overcome, many speak to
another man who, bewildered by the confusion of the battle-field, begins
to doubt his own cause. And far more than anything actually said there
came to him the thought of Donati’s own life, what he had himself
observed of it, and what he had heard of his story from Cecil. A
wonderfully great admission was made lately by a celebrated agnostic
writer when he said that, “The true Christian saint, though a rare
phenomenon, is one of the most wonderful to be witnessed in the moral
world.” Nor was the admission much qualified by the closing remark,—“So
lofty, so pure, so attractive that he ravishes men’s souls into oblivion
of the patent and general fact that he is an exception among thousands
of millions of professing Christians.”
Frithiof’s soul was not in the least ravished into oblivion of this
fact; he was as ready as before, perhaps more ready, to admit the
general selfishness of mankind, certainly he was more than ever
conscious of his own shortcomings, and daily found pride and selfishness
and ungraciousness in his own life and character. But his love for
Donati, his great admiration for him, had changed his whole view of the
possibilities of human life. The Italian had doubtless been specially
fortunate in his parentage, but his life had been one of unusual
temptation, his extremely rapid change from great misery to the height
of popularity and success had alone been a very severe trial, though
perhaps it was what Frithiof had heard of his three years in the
traveling opera company that appealed to him most. Donati was certainly
saint and hero in one; but it was not only men of natural nobility who
were called to live this life of the crucified. All men were called to
it. Deep down in his heart he knew that even for him it was no
impossibility. And something of Donati’s incredulous scorn as he flung
back the word “impossible” in his face, returned to him now and nerved
him to a fresh attack on the uncongenial life and the faulty character
with which he had to work. The week passed by pretty well, and the
following Sunday found him tired indeed, but less down-hearted, and
better able to keep at arm’s length his old foe depression. For that
foe, though chiefly due to physical causes, can, as all doctors will
bear witness, to be a great extent held in check by spiritual energy.
The morning was so bright that Sigrid persuaded him to take a walk, and
fully intending to return in an hour’s time to his translating, he paced
along the embankment. But either the fine day, or the mere pleasure of
exercise, or some sort of curiosity to see a part of London of which he
had heard a great deal, lured him on. He crossed BlackFriars Bridge and
walked farther and farther, following the course of the river eastward
into a region, dreary indeed, yet at times picturesque, with the river
gleaming in the sunshine, and on the farther bank the Tower—solid and
grim, as befitted the guardian of so many secrets of the past. Even here
there was a quiet Sunday feeling, while something familiar in the sight
of the water and the shipping carried him back in imagination to Norway,
and there came over him an intense longing for his own country. It was a
feeling that often took possession of him, nor could he any more account
for its sudden seizures than the Swiss can account for that sick longing
for his native mountains to which he is often liable.
“It’s no use,” he thought to himself. “It will take me the best part of
my life to pay off the debts, and till they are paid I can’t go.”
He turned his eyes from the river, as though by doing so he could drag
his thoughts from Norway, when to his astonishment he all at once caught
sight of his own national flag—the well known blue and white cross on
the red ground. His breath came fast, he walked on quickly to get a
nearer view of the building from which the flag floated. Hurriedly
pushing open the door, he entered the place, and found himself in a
church, which presented the most curious contrast to churches in
general, for it was almost full of men, and the seven or eight women who
were there made little impression, their voices being drowned in the
hearty singing of the great bulk of the congregation.
They began to sing just as he entered; the tune was one which he had
known all his life, and a host of memories came back to him as he heard
once more the slow and not too melodious singing, rendered striking,
however, because of the fervor of the honest Norsemen. Tears, which all
his troubles had not called forth, started now to his eyes as he
listened to the words which carried him right out of the foreign land
back to his childhood at Bergen.
[Illustration:
Sörg o kjare fader du, Jeg wil ik-ke
sör-ge, Ik-ke med be kym-ret hu,
Om min frem-tid spör-ge. Sörg du for mig
al min tid, Sörg for mig og mi-ne; Gud al-mæg-tig
naa-dig, blid, Sörg for al-le di-ne!]
Translation.
“Care, oh, dear Father, Thou,
I will not care;
Not with troubled mind
About my future ask.
Care thou for me all my life,
Care for me and mine;
God Almighty, gracious, good,
Care for all Thine!”
An onlooker, even a foreigner not understanding the language, could not
fail to have been touched by the mere sight of this strange gathering in
the heart of London,—the unpretentious building, the antique look of the
clergyman in his gown and Elizabethan ruff, the ranks of men—numbering
nearly four hundred—with their grave, weather-beaten faces, the greater
number of them sailors, but with a sprinkling of business men living in
the neighborhood, and the young Norseman who had just entered, with his
pride broken down by memories of an old home, his love of Norway leading
him to the realization that he was also a citizen of another country,
and his stern face softened to that expression which is always so full
of pathos—the expression of intent listening.
In the Norwegian church the subject of the sermon is arranged throughout
the year. On this second Sunday after Trinity it was on the Gospel for
the day, the parable of the Master of the House who made a great supper,
and of the guests who “all with one consent began to make excuse.” There
was nothing new in what Frithiof heard; he had heard it all in the old
times, and, entirely satisfied with the happiness of self-pleasing, had
been among the rich who had been sent empty away. Now he came poor and
in need, and found that after all it is the hungry who are “filled with
good things.”
Very gradually, and helped by many flashes of light which had from time
to time come to him in his darkest hours, he had during the last two
years groped his way from the vague and somewhat flippant belief in a
good providence, which he had once announced to Blanche as his creed,
and had learnt to believe in the All-Father. His meeting with Donati had
exercised, and still continued to exercise, an extraordinary influence
over him; but it was not until this Sunday morning, in his own national
church, not until in his own language he once more heard the entreaty,
“Come, for all things are now ready!” that he fully realized how he had
neglected the life of Sonship.
With an Infinite Love belonging to him by right, he had allowed himself
to be miserable, isolated, and bitter. To many distinct commands he had
turned a deaf ear. To One who needed him and asked his love he had
replied in the jargon of the nineteenth century, but in the spirit of
the old Bible story, that practical matters needed him and that he could
not come.
When the preacher went on to speak of the Lord’s Supper, and the
distinct command that all should come to it, Frithiof began to perceive
for the first time that he had regarded this service merely as the
incomprehensible communication of a great gift—whereas this was in truth
only one side of it, and he, also, had to give himself up to One who
actually needed him. It was characteristic of his honest nature that
when he at last perceived this truth he no longer made excuse but
promptly obeyed, not waiting for full understanding, not troubling at
all about controversial points, but simply doing what he recognized as
his duty.
And when in a rapid survey of the past there came recollections of
Blanche and the wrong she had done him, he was almost startled to find
how quietly he could think of her, how possible it had become to blot
out all the resentful memories, all the reproachful thoughts that for so
long had haunted him. For the first time he entirely forgave her, and in
the very act of forgiving he seemed to regain something of the
brightness which she had driven from his life, and to gain something
better and truer than had as yet been his.
All the selfish element had died out of his love for her; there remained
only the sadness of thinking of her disgrace, and a longing that, even
yet, the good might prevail in her life. Was there no recovery from such
a fall? Was no allowance to be made for her youth and her great
temptations? If she really repented ought not her husband once more to
receive her; and give her the protection which he alone could give?
Kneeling there in the quiet he faced that great problem, and with eyes
cleared by love, with his pride altogether laid low, and knowing what it
was both to forgive and to be forgiven, he saw beyond the conventional
view taken by the world. There was no escaping the great law of
forgiveness laid down by Christ, “If he repent, forgive him.” “Forgive
even as also ye are forgiven.” And if marriage was taken as a symbol of
the union between Christ and the Church, how was it possible to exclude
the idea of forgiveness for faithlessness truly repented of? Had he been
in Lord Romiaux’s place he knew that he must have forgiven her, that if
necessary he must have set the whole world at defiance, in order once
more to shelter her from the deadly peril to which, alone, she must
always be exposed.
And so it happened that love turned to good even the early passion that
had apparently made such havoc of his life, and used it now to raise him
out of the thought of his own trouble and undeserved disgrace, used it
to lift him out of the selfishness and hardness that for so long had
been cramping an otherwise fine nature.