The Flight
Next day Sigrun lay in bed. She had a pain in her throat, she said. No one but Lotta was allowed to go in. And Lotta was charged to tell the Pastor that her mistress was likely to be ill for some time.
She lay in bed all that day. Not until after supper, when the servants had gone to bed, did she get up. Then she dressed, and came out to Lotta in the scullery.
“Do you feel better now?”
Sigrun smiled. “Yes, Lotta, much better.”
It had been a hard day for Lotta. She was beginning to realize that Sigrun was preparing to leave her home. And she wondered what she could do to prevent such a disaster.
“I have been thinking,” said Lotta. “It seems to me you ought to go home to Stenbroträsk for Christmas. It would be much better for you, and far more proper than staying over Christmas out here like this.”
Sigrun did not seem altogether unwilling. She said no, at first, but when Lotta began to talk of the splendid Christmas they always had there, she appeared to think it worth considering.
They stayed up late again that night. Sigrun sat in silence, pondering over something she could not quite make out, and Lotta did not venture to disturb her.
A little after eleven, the door opened suddenly, and a woman stumbled into the room, took a step or two, and sank to her knees on the floor, holding out her hands.
“If there’s any human soul here, help me!” she cried. “I’m so ill, so ill. I’m burning all over.”
Sigrun’s weakness and weariness were gone in a moment. She sprang to the stranger and helped her up, put one arm round her, and supported her.
“Come with me,” she said gently. “Come over to the light and let me see what is the matter first.”
The woman stood there shaking and trembling with fever. She could not lift her feet, but shuffled helplessly, and would have fallen but for Sigrun’s aid.
Helping her over to the light, she saw that the woman’s face was terribly swollen and disfigured. Dark breaking blisters close, close together all over. And the same with her hands.
“Lotta!” said Sigrun in a low, trembling voice. “What is it?”
But there was no need for Lotta to answer. Sigrun knew as well as she did what the sickness was.
She knew, too, that it was risking death to touch the poor vagrant, yet she began resolutely stripping off her clothes, and while Lotta Hedman made the bed ready, spreading clean sheets, cool and smooth for the hot and tender skin. Sigrun gave her clean linen underclothes, and soon they had the groaning, shivering woman stretched on the bed.
And there they sat, full of pity for her, while she moaned and writhed in pain. Sigrun tried to give her water, but she seemed unable to swallow. Then the mistress turned again to Lotta, and the two sat hand in hand, silent and horrified at the power of the dreadful disease.
Soon they breathed more easily; the sick woman seemed to be quieter now, and suffering less.
And a little later, a short hour since she had first entered, she was perfectly calm and motionless. The uneven breathing stopped.
The two friends rose, laid the dead woman out where she lay, and crouched together as before, close to each other, as if petrified by the terrible dead face.
“A few days, and I shall look like that”—the same thought was in the minds of both. “Look like she does now. No one would recognize me. No one could say who it was.”
“Who can she be?” asked Lotta in a whisper. And Sigrun answered in the same low voice that it must be some poor vagrant with no home to go to.
“Her clothes were not so very bad,” she went on. “But sadly worn. Her boots are wet and trodden through; she has tramped a long way through the snow. The sickness must have come upon her on the road, and she has wandered about over the country in delirium. It must have been the light from our lamp that made her come here.”
Again they sat in silence, watching the dead. And now it was that a dreadful thought came to Sigrun.
“If I lay there in her place,” she said to herself. “Why not? Why should I not manage it so that it is Sigrun Rhånge who lies there?”
It seemed as if Lotta Hedman had read her thought; she turned to Sigrun and stared at her in breathless fear.
“No one knows her,” said Sigrun. Her voice was no longer low and whispering, but firm and decided. “No one knows where she comes from. No one can have seen her come in here. A poor vagrant without a home.”
Lotta said nothing. She would not betray her suspicions. If Sigrun were not thinking of that after all, then it would be best to say nothing.
Sigrun went on as before:
“You know what it is, Lotta—the smallpox. And she lies dead in my bed, and the bed and the whole place will have to be disinfected; we shall not be able to stay here. We should have to move over into the house. And perhaps I may have caught it myself already, and die—if I did, all would be well. But I might get better, and then I should be back in all the old misery again.”
“But it will be better now, after all you have gone through,” said Lotta eagerly. “Your husband knows he has wronged you now. He will be more careful.”
Sigrun rose, and moved the lamp into the other room.
“We must not disturb her,” she said.
“You have so many happy years before you,” said Lotta. “When you are both a little older, it will be calm and quiet for you again. And he is such a splendid man, clever and understanding.”
Sigrun stood full in the light from the lamp, and Lotta was astonished at the change in her. In a moment she seemed to have regained all her former beauty, more. There was a splendour of majesty and power about her now. Lotta could not help feeling that Sigrun was something higher than others; that she must be loved and protected more than all others.
“Lotta,” said Sigrun, “you see now that it was for this you were sent here from Stenbroträsk—to help me with this?”
This was speaking in a language Lotta understood. But she would not be won over so easily.
“Dear angel, it might be I was sent to hinder you,” she said.
Sigrun made Lotta sit down in one of the wicker chairs, and then, kneeling at her feet, took her hands and said in a voice of earnest conviction:
“I promised Edward once that nothing but death should make me leave him. And that is why I have not gone away before. And all this week I have prayed to God that I might die rather than be forced to break my promise. Now, though I am in fear of him, and cannot stay, it has held me back. Lotta, you understand?”
Lotta nodded reluctantly.
“And now, Lotta, God has heard my prayers. He has sent Death to me. And so I can go without breaking my word. Lotta, surely should understand that this is God’s will?”
“No more of this, Sigrun,” said Lotta, trying to rise. But her mistress held her back.
“It is God Himself helping me, Lotta,” she said. “Now I can go away without making Edward unhappy. Oh, I don’t mean he would not mourn for me a year or two, perhaps, but it would be without bitterness. But if I ran away from him—do you think he would ever allow it? He would go out to search for me everywhere, and when he found me, he might kill me. Or if I got a divorce? It would be the death of him. But to go this way—out of life altogether....”
“It would only be a quiet sorrow. He could not be jealous of Death. Don’t you see, Lotta, how much better it would be for him than anything else?”
“For him, perhaps,” said Lotta. “But for you?”
“For me,” said the young wife, with a smile that was like a light from heaven—“for me, all is good that is best for him.”
“The best thing for him would be to keep you,” said Lotta decidedly.
“But I cannot!” cried Sigrun despairingly. “You don’t know what it means to be watched every hour, never to be free. You don’t know what it is, with all these terrible scenes and quarrels and promises to be better, when it never is better, and ill-humour and misery. You don’t know what it is to go in constant fear of something dreadful happening. To be always forced to lie and hide things, though you have done nothing but what was good and right. Oh, you don’t know what it is like, or you would not ask me to go back.”
“No,” said Lotta—“no, angel dear, I did not know you had suffered like that. You have never spoken of it until yesterday and to-day. But is there no other way?”
Sigrun rose to her feet. “There is one way. And God has sent it. But Lotta Hedman will not let me take that way.”
Nothing could describe the torturing power of Sigrun’s beauty as she spoke such words as these. A witchery seemed to emanate from her being, and she knew it, and never, perhaps, had she used it so mercilessly, so victoriously as to-night.
“I am doing no wrong, Lotta,” she said. “I am going to the war, to help the wounded. That is my one desire. I am ashamed to stay at home doing nothing. You know it is what I have longed for all my life. And God is helping me, Lotta. Why will you not help me?”
What could poor Lotta Hedman say? She had never loved Sigrun as she did this night. She resisted still, knowing that Rhånge came of a family of suicides. Perhaps he would kill himself if he lost his wife. But she dared not say anything of this to Sigrun; it might only increase her fear of him.
“But you have your father and mother at home,” was all she could find to say.
“You forget the infection. I cannot go home to them now.”
She went over to Lotta and made her sit down again in the chair.
“Lotta, I am so unhappy,” she said. “Every day is an agony. Am I to suffer like this all my life?”
“But, Sigrun, how can you bring this sorrow on us all?”
“Sorrow?” said Sigrun—“sorrow? What is it, after all, to sorrow for the dead? What is it compared with sorrowing for the living? I must do it, Lotta, for Edward’s sake. Think what a man he was when I first met him. Calm, happy, eager to make his way. A good preacher, and loved by his congregation. Now—can you not see how he has changed? He is going to ruin here in poverty and loneliness. I must leave him, Lotta. If I were dead, he would find another place, another living, where he could rise to all that he meant to do when he had the ill-fortune to meet me.”
“You cannot make me see that you need do anything so dreadful.”
Sigrun shrugged her shoulders.
“I am not trying to make you believe that it is only for his sake. I do it because I am miserable, and must free myself from my misery. Oh, Lotta, if only I could really die! I know that would be the best. But, next to that, the best thing is for me to disappear. I am going to pieces; it is driving me mad. Perhaps I am mad already.”
“But do you ask me to help you go away so that I shall never see you again?” said Lotta despairingly. She had not thought to speak of herself, but she felt driven to use every argument she could find.
“Why should you not see me again, after a few years?” said Sigrun. “Listen, and I will tell you all my plan. I will go on foot the first few miles, till I come to a parish where no one knows me. There I can get a cart to take me to the nearest station. Then by train to Göteborg, and from there to America. There I can enter a training school for nurses, and then go to the war. You see, there is nothing impossible about it. And when a few years have passed, I can write for you.”
“Do not try to persuade me,” said Lotta. “I should have to tell all sorts of lies, and I could never do it.”
With indescribable bitterness Sigrun answered:
“I have had to lie every day since I was married.”
Lotta Hedman was overwhelmed; her heart was wrung with pity. “Let her have her will,” she said to herself. And at the same time, she was so full of anxiety at what Sigrun was about to do that she began to weep.
“God was willing to help me,” said Sigrun, “but Lotta Hedman would not.”
“But, Sigrun,” cried Lotta, dashing away a tear with the back of her hand, “will you force me to help you ruin yourself? You ask me to help you in something so dreadful that I tremble at the very thought. You will no longer have a name among the living. You will go out into the world without friends, or parents, without even being able to say where you come from. It will be misery if you succeed, and shameful and terrible if you are found out.”
But her words were of no avail. The young mistress was as firmly resolved as before. But she ceased begging and persuading now; she began to threaten.
“Lotta, mark my words; if you will not help me as I ask, then to-morrow I go to the verger’s to him who is waiting for me there.”
“You would never do that,” said Lotta.
“I would do anything. Anything but go back to the old life.”
Before Lotta could reply to this, something happened. There was a sound of footsteps approaching from outside—a cautious tread, but heavy and distinct. The sound did not stop at the entrance, but continued round the house. Once or twice again it was heard; then it died away.
Sigrun made a sign to Lotta, who hurried to a window, drew aside the curtain, and looked out into the snowy-clear night.
“It was the farm lad,” she said.
The beautiful woman drew herself up. Her eyebrows contracted, her head was raised, her eyes shot a furious glance at someone who was not there.
“He has done that every night,” she said, “since I moved over here. It is by his master’s orders. He is watching. Listening to hear if I have a lover with me.”
Lotta said nothing. She was beginning to give up all further resistance.
“And you, Lotta; you think Edward will change? Well, there you can see. Does he trust me now any more than before? Sending a boy to spy on me?”
She raised her voice as she spoke; the insult of her husband’s suspicion wounded every fibre of her being.
“It can never come right between them after this,” thought Lotta. “He has killed all the love that was in her. Perhaps it is best that she should go.”
And so it was that Lotta Hedman gave way before the sudden conviction that Sigrun’s love for her husband was dead or dying, though she would not admit it herself—was not even, perhaps, aware of it.
Lotta protested no more. She did not assent in words, but she ceased to oppose.
Some time passed in hasty preparations. Sigrun took off her rings and borrowed a change of clothing from Lotta. A little underclothing and the six hundred kronor she packed away in a leather bag, likewise belonging to Lotta, who further had to provide a cloak and kerchief. It was essential that nothing of Sigrun’s own clothing should be missing.
When Sigrun was nearly ready, she turned suddenly to Lotta and stood still.
“Lotta, you understand that all this has been brought about by the hand of God? Do not fear either for me or for yourself.”
Her courage and presence of mind were admirable in their way. She showed not the least hesitation or fear.
But when all was ready, there came a hard moment at the last.
“I am leaving so much that is dear to me,” she said. The tears flowed down her cheeks; she seemed to realize at once the full seriousness of the irrevocable step she was about to take.
“Now I shall never look at the little picture of Stenbroträsk again, that comforted me so many times. And the locket with the portrait of my little girl—I dare not take that either.”
“That, at least, you might take, I think,” said Lotta. “But you need not go at all,” she added.
“And, Lotta, you know there is one of the cows I was so fond of. Look after her a little when you can.”
She moved toward the door.
“Don’t forget, Lotta, when my Christmas rose comes out, to put it on Edward’s writing-table.”
Then she kissed Lotta Hedman for the first time, and went away.
Sigrun had not been gone more than a quarter of an hour when Lotta again heard footsteps outside—a light, careful tread, not the heavy tramp of the farm lad. The moment she heard it, she thought to herself: “What a mercy! It is Sigrun come back again after all.”
But no sooner had she drawn the bolt and opened the door than she found herself face to face with a strange man. No wonder the poor girl was terrified. Never in her life had she felt so sinful and conscience-stricken as now.
“Eh, Lotta, Lotta,” she thought to herself. “It is beginning already.”
The fellow was poorly dressed, with a big slouch hat. Evidently, some sort of a vagabond. “For Heaven’s sake, don’t come in here,” said Lotta, placing herself in his way. “We’ve smallpox in the house, and there’s one lying dead inside there.”
The man did not make off at once, as Lotta had expected. He stood in the doorway, looking round the room.
And before she could guess his intention, he had thrust her aside, and strode across to the entrance of the little room beyond, looking in at the bed where the dead woman lay.
But Lotta gave him no time for close observation. She rushed after him and threw her arms about him, pulled him away, and closed the bedroom door.
The man made no resistance. He seemed to think she was anxious to keep him away from infection.
“It won’t hurt me,” he said. “I’ve got it already if I’m to have it. The woman in there is my wife. She was taken bad a couple of days ago, and this morning she was delirious and ran off.”
It was evident that he was speaking the truth—and the whole of Sigrun’s plan was thus of no avail. Lotta felt as if the place were falling about her ears.
“But—who are you, then?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly a stranger here,” said the man in a calm, quiet voice. “I’m a knife-grinder, and they know me here at the vicarage. I was here only a week ago, doing the scissors and knives. I go about with my horse and cart and grindstone from place to place, and I’ve not what you could call a proper house of my own for nursing sick folk. When Ruth was taken bad, I was going to get her down to a hospital, but then she ran away, poor creature. I’ve been wandering about looking for her all day. I wonder how she managed to get here.”
Worse and worse. Lotta felt as if the ground beneath her feet were giving way. But, in her confusion, she yet made one more endeavour to save her friend.
“But it’s not your wife lying there,” she said. “It’s my dear mistress.”
“Eh?” said the knife-grinder. “The pretty mistress—is she dead? Did they let her lie out here in an outhouse and die?”
“She wished it so herself,” said Lotta Hedman.
“Why, then, I beg pardon for tramping in like I did,” said the man. “I’ll have to be seeking Ruth somewhere else.”
He was a little, withered man, with a dark skin and one shoulder constantly thrust up, which gave him a look of sullenness and discontent. Lotta remembered well that the last time he had been at the vicarage he had been rude and troublesome. But now, in the presence of sickness and death, he was quiet and humble.
To Lotta’s great relief, he moved toward the door. But then he stopped. There before him lay a pair of wet, downtrodden boots.
“But—these are Ruth’s,” he said. “What does this mean?”
Lotta’s resourcefulness was at an end. She could find nothing for it now but to tell him the truth.
Sigrun had reached beyond the church and cemetery of Algeröd, and was just crossing the bridge over the little stream when she heard Lotta Hedman’s voice calling to her.
A moment later a sledge drew up beside her, and Lotta came forward and told her what had happened, telling her, at the same time, that the knife-grinder had promised to say nothing.
The man himself was sitting on the sledge, looking sullen and angry, but he spoke as calmly and peaceably as before.
“It’s this way,” he said. “I don’t like the fashion of it, having Ruth put away and buried under another name. But I’ll stick by what I’ve said for the rest. Young mistress can get up in the sledge here, and I’ll drive her back to the vicarage, and nobody the wiser. I’ll be as silent as a stone wall.”
Sigrun walked over to the man. She had tied a black kerchief round her head, but now she thrust it back.
“And all for that, I’m to go back to my misery?” she asked.
The man seemed uneasy. He cast a hasty glance at her and looked away.
“She is dead. What does it matter in whose name she is buried?” said Sigrun, in a voice trembling with desperation.
“I don’t see it’s acting fairly by Ruth,” said the man stubbornly.
“No,” said Sigrun. “It is not, I know. But do not think that I am going back home after this. That I shall not do.”
She pointed toward the river, gleaming darkly between the snow-covered banks.
“I will go that way, if need be,” she said.
She stood before him, firm and resolute. And the stem earnestness of her face told him clearly enough that she would do as she said.
He turned his face away, as if fearing to look at her.
“I know she’d have a better sort of burial and all that,” he said. “And it’s no great matter to me, after all, seeing she wasn’t my lawful wife, so to speak, though she’d been going about with me these two months. But it seems to me...”
Lotta gave a cry. Sigrun had hurried away, and stood now crouching by the rail at the side of the bridge, trying to get under.
“For the Lord’s sake!” cried the man, rushing toward her. “Don’t go and harm yourself! I’ll do as you say.”
“Remember, I will never go back to it all again,” said Sigrun.
“No; you’ll have no need. I’ll keep silent all right.”
“Sigrun is wonderful to-night,” thought Lotta. “No one can resist her; she does as she pleases with us all.”
And indeed it seemed so. The little ill-humoured fellow could not do enough for her.
“I haven’t my proper cart with me to-night,” he said. “I borrowed a sledge this morning to go out looking for Ruth. But that’ll make it the easier, perhaps, for me to drive you on a bit of the way. It’s not so easy to go tramping in the snow for them that’s used to sitting warm and comfortable at home.”