The Lifting of the Curse
The priest checked his horse. There below him, in the glow of the evening sun, was Hånger itself.
For a moment he doubted whether it could be right. He had always heard the place described as consisting of large buildings. Here, the main part was certainly of decent size, but all the rest seemed small and insignificant.
But the orchard was there. On the slope between the small houses grew tall, century-old apple trees, now in their finest bloom, making a roof of delicate white and pink above the lawn.
And the old oak was there, not yet in full leaf, but well on the way to clothe its wrinkled, knotty branches with soft, leafy green.
And the view was there, too. A view out over a marvellously fine and light and softly drawn landscape, where the ten mountain ridges and the ten lakes lay now, at the hour of sunset, decked in every imaginable hue, one height a brilliant white, and another threateningly dark; one lake like a sheet of polished steel, and its fellow behind the next hill glittering all in gold.
It was impossible to think that men who had lived all their lives within sight of such beauty could remain harsh, rough, and wild; without any thought beyond gaining riches and lands. Here, in the wonder of these surroundings, he seemed to find the explanation of all that joyous delight in splendour and magnificence that had marked his forefathers.
He sat for a long while looking at it all; at last, however, he jumped down from his seat and walked into the wood close by. Here he tied up his horse to a tree, spread out some fodder before it, and set off quietly and thoughtfully toward the house.
When he was near enough to see in between the buildings, he noticed a man and a woman sitting in the soft, bright spring evening under the great oak, on either side of a garden table. The man was reading aloud, the woman sewing. Neither had noticed him as yet.
He stopped, and walked round behind one of the outbuildings, approaching them from another direction. Close by where the two were sitting, there grew a hedge of fir trees, thick and tall. He stole along under shelter of this, coming up noiselessly and unseen. When he was near enough to hear distinctly the voice of the man reading, he lay down quietly on the ground, and moved a few twigs cautiously aside, so as to see all he wished.
He had not the slightest qualm of conscience in listening thus. “Sigrun’s whole future and my own are at stake,” he thought. “I must know the truth, by whatever means.”
At first, however, he found himself listening to nothing more than a little poem by Snoilsky. It was the story of the prisoner of war, who, when released at last, after a toilsome journey over unknown ways, finds himself one dark evening outside the poor cottage where years ago he had left his wife. Then, looking in through the window, he sees another man by her side. He understands that she has believed him dead, and he goes away into the night, preferring to disappear rather than cause her suffering. And before he goes, he fastens to the door a small leather pouch containing all the little money he has, as a gift to the poor home.
Sven Elversson read this story of love and resignation very beautifully, but the Pastor heard the words without properly grasping their meaning. His whole soul was concentrated on his wife.
Sigrun was sitting so that he could not see her face. But it was at least herself, he saw. He recognized her hair, the pretty curve of the neck; every movement of hand and arm as she sat at her work was familiar to him.
“She lives!” he said to himself, folding his hands. “It is true—it is true that she is alive.”
His heart melted with emotion. He had seen her again, but it was not as he had thought it would be. He felt no anger, no wish to call her to account for all she had made him suffer; he would not speak to her of the shame she had brought upon herself; he could only thank God with tears that she was alive, and wished to return to him.
He laid one hand over his eyes, and thought what would have become of him if Sigrun had really been dead. A bitter misanthrope, dragging through life without hope, with no interest beyond guarding his memories; a man who sought the society of other women only to deride them for not being as she, the only one in the world for him. He could see no bottom to the depth into which he must have sunk.
On the way here, he had wished in his despair that Sigrun had never made herself known. A cruel and senseless thought—how could he ever have entertained it for a moment?
All this passed through his soul now like a storm. And the voice of the reader was lost in its fury.
In the first transport of joy he had been almost on the point of springing up and hurrying forward to his wife. But he restrained himself. “No,” he thought; “there must be no trace of doubt or suspicion between us. For the sake of our happiness, I must stay here now.”
“We will not read any more this evening,” said Sigrun, when Sven Elversson had finished the poem. “I have something to say to you.”
And her voice reached the listener behind the trees, full of the ring of life. Sweet as before, low and touching, with the faint little lisp.
Sven Elversson raised his head from the book and turned toward her. The Pastor saw at once that he was greatly changed. He carried his head as high as any other, and had the easy, untroubled bearing of an educated man. The slight stamp of the lay preacher, the exaggerated humility that had marked him before, were gone now.
“Yes, it is almost a pity to sit over a book on such an evening as this,” said Sven Elversson. “Better to talk.”
Sigrun hesitated a little before beginning what she had to say. She folded up her work, and put it away carefully. Then in a firm and resolute voice she said:
“It is done now, Herr Elversson.”
“What is done?” he asked carelessly. “Your work, you mean?”
“No. The thing you have asked me to do every day since I have lived under your roof. I have done it now.”
“You have...”
He had risen, greatly moved, and did not complete his sentence.
But Sigrun’s voice answered him firmly and clearly, without a tremor:
“I have written to Lotta Hedman and asked her to tell Edward the whole story. At this moment he knows I am alive. And to-morrow he is coming here to fetch me.”
“He is coming here?” Sven Elversson repeated. His voice was not firm and clear. It was faint and troubled.
“Yes,” she answered. “I have asked him to come here to Hånger. I will tell you why later on. But, first of all, I want you to tell me now if you are pleased.”
To the watcher it seemed as if the man before him changed his form and appearance before his eyes. He seemed to shrink, and the patient smile showed full and distinctly about his mouth. His eyes, that had shone so cheerfully a moment before, looked down at the ground; his arms hung loosely at his sides. And as he spoke, in answer to Sigrun’s question, his voice had the old ring of painful humility.
“Surely I am pleased, Fru Rhånge,” he said. “But it is overkind of you to speak of this as if it were my doing. I know—or I should say, I have always believed, that after the first excitement had passed over, there had not been a day but you have repented, and longed to go back. But you are thinking, perhaps, of your fear of your husband’s anger, and the harsh judgment of the world, and how I have tried to give you courage to face it all. That is all I can claim credit for.”
The listener heard and understood now, not with his ears alone, but with his whole soul. “What is true, and what is false in this?” he wondered. “God help me to find out the truth!”
Sigrun’s face he could not see, but he fancied she shrugged her shoulders a little.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “What else could there be for you to help me with?”
“It is good to remember that it is so,” said Sven Elversson, in his gentle voice. “You realized, almost at once, the great wrong you had done your husband. It was impossible that you could condemn one who loved you to a whole life of solitude and longing. I am sure, I am convinced, that you would have taken this step months before, if it had not been for your illness. You have not, until now, had strength to face the gossip and scandal it would mean. And I should be the last to blame you for the delay. I know what it is to be an outcast and disowned by one’s equals.”
There was something in Sigrun’s manner suggestive of impatience. Her voice had a touch of mischief as she answered:
“Oh, yes, I knew, Herr Elversson, that you would be pleased. But since this is the last time we shall speak together alone, I should like to tell you that it was not you alone who persuaded me to go back to my home. Your wife, too, has helped me very greatly—more, perhaps, than you yourself. I think she must have loved unspeakably,” Sigrun continued in a gentle voice; “and I have tried to learn from her how one should love.”
Sven Elversson’s face darkened.
“She was a good woman,” he said, simply, without his usual wealth of words. “We were very fond of her while she lived here among us.”
“Mor Thala has told me a great deal about her,” said Sigrun. “She went out to Grimön, it seems, the day after the schoolhouse was burnt down. She wanted to tell you that both she and the schoolmaster had done their best to make the children comfortable there. And she begged you not to take the misfortune too much to heart. You had already gained friends through that work; people had begun to realize what sort of man you were.”
Sven Elversson made a gesture as if to indicate that he would rather hear no more of this. But Sigrun went on:
“I saw your wife at Applum, and I remember she was very plain to look at. Perhaps it was this, or perhaps something else that annoyed you, for Mor Thala says you spoke to her unkindly; more so than you had ever done to anyone else. ‘If I came to you and asked you to be my wife,’ you said scornfully, ‘then we should see how much you respected me yourself.’ And she neither blushed nor paled, but her face went ashen gray, and she stood up. ‘You say that to me in jest and without meaning,’ she said. ‘But if ever you asked me in earnest, it would be the happiest day of my life.’ And that seemed to touch you, and a couple of years after, you married her in reality, because her answer then had shown you she was a good and noble woman.”
“True, she was good and noble,” said Sven Elversson. “I must do her justice. It was strange that she should be willing to marry a man like me.”
“Mor Thala has told me,” went on Sigrun, “that it was she who advised you to move out here to Hånger. She knew the place, and knew it was all going to ruin, so you could buy it for next to nothing. She made peace about you, looked after your business, sold timber, I think it was, so that you should have money enough to live on, arranged all things in your home so as to answer more or less to the habits and needs of your upbringing, and she took in all those in need whenever you found them, and looked after them until you could find them work elsewhere. Do you not think that woman loved you?”
“No,” said Sven Elversson. “I think she was trying to love me. She fought against all that she disliked in me, but at last it was beyond her power to go on, and then she went off with Gustavsson.”
“It was not so,” said Sigrun—“not that way at all. That was not why she went. But she knew you loved someone else. You had betrayed it somehow or other. There is a book of poems that is always on your table. Mor Thala says you often read in it, but only one of them all, an Icelandic love song, by Bjarni Thorarensen.”
Sven Elversson sprang to his feet, and clutched at his breast. “What do you mean?” he cried, almost threateningly.
Sigrun lifted her hand. “I wanted to talk to you about your wife,” she said. “I shall be gone to-morrow,” she added appealingly.
He sat down once more, humble and resigned. But his eyes had lost their wonted brightness; they looked at Sigrun solemnly and sternly.
The listener bent forward in tense eagerness. He recognized Sigrun’s voice, but there was much in her manner that was strange to him. There was something about her now, a calm self-possession, a mature womanliness, that she had not had before. “She has gone through much since I last saw her,” he thought. “She never had that power of control over one who spoke with her before. No one can resist her now.”
“Let us say,” went on Sigrun again, “that your wife noticed last autumn, more distinctly than before, that you did not love her. Perhaps you read that poem oftener—how can I tell? And so she went away, but she did it in such a manner that you should not think she had gone for love of you, to make life easier for you. That was why she went with Gustavsson. I have spoken of this with your mother, and she agrees with me entirely. And Gustavsson himself told me so. ‘She came to me because Sven Elversson did not care for her’—that was what he said.”
Sven Elversson raised his hands deprecatingly.
“Why must I hear all this?” he said. “How can you think it will make me happier to know it?”
“Yes,” said Sigrun; “it is always good to know that one has been loved by one who was good. And well, too, that you need not now suspect her of deceit or fickleness. You see what it was: she was made of the same stuff as that soldier we have just read of, who came home from the wars. And so you see,” Sigrun went on, “it was she who taught me how to love. How love can pass all understanding, how it can fill one’s soul to such a degree that it lets its own body be destroyed.”
She rose up, and stood behind Sven Elversson’s chair. And in so doing, she turned so that her husband, from where he was, could see her face. At sight of it, he almost started back, before the supernatural beauty that shone in her lovely features.
She spoke quickly now, following up her thoughts without waiting for reply.
“The poem in that book of yours, Herr Elversson, that you are always reading, is called ‘A Song to Sigrun.’ And whether it were because of the name, or for some other reason, your wife believed she knew who it was you loved.”
Sven Elversson would have spoken, made some protest, or assurance, but she stopped him.
“Let me finish, that you may know how your wife could love in death as in life. Try to imagine her as a soul that is nothing but love, right down to the most unconscious depths, nothing but love, and that this soul determines to sacrifice itself for the one she loves. Finds ways and means that another would never have thought of, takes possession of another human being’s will, leads, guides, accomplishes, whispering thoughts, dictating speech, compelling all things to her wish.”
Sven Elversson shook his head. Very gently, but immovably, he said:
“Now you are talking like Lotta Hedman.”
“Yes,” said Sigrun, “I am talking like Lotta Hedman. I know it. And I will not deny that it was Lotta Hedman who taught me to believe in the power of the dead. But how do you know she is not right? What star was it that led the dying woman to me of all others? And whence came the thought that so compelled me? You know how timid and sensitive I am. It is true that I had been lying there thinking of flight, but what made me do it in such a way? There were other means I could have chosen. But from the moment your wife lay there dead in my bed, I could not think of any other. And why was Lotta Hedman unable to resist? Why did Gustavsson come after I had gone, and not before? What made him so quiet and submissive all that day? Why were we not discovered? Why was my money stolen? Why was nothing found out after? I had certainly no deep-laid plans of my own. How did all this come about, Herr Elversson, unless it were that the woman who loved you, in the power of her endless love, had resolved to lead the woman you loved to you?”
She had spoken eagerly, as one inspired, overwhelmed by the miracle she felt she had shared. But there was no trace of passion in her voice. The listener behind the trees marked that well. Sigrun was speaking to the man who loved her in the firm assurance that he understood she did not love him.
Sven Elversson felt the same. His voice was thick with emotion, but it never changed into the tone of passion.
“Be it so then! Let us talk like Lotta Hedman, if you wish. But if the dead woman’s soul sent you here, might it not be as well for torture and punishment? She knew that my love could only increase, just as she knew that you could never come to love me in return.”
“Yes,” said Sigrun, with the same strange note of lofty inspiration, almost as if she were speaking to one from another world, “she knew that, yes. And she knew, too, that, if there had not been something in you that protected you against all love but hers, you would not have allowed me to stay here at Hånger. But she believed, perhaps, that some sweetness might come into your life by your teaching me how life should be lived. Might not that have been her aim? Afterward, when you are old, when all that flames and burns now is cooled, then you will think of this winter at Hånger as a time of happiness.”
He shook his head.
“Not now,” she said, “but after, and to your last hour. For I believe, as I said just now, that it was all to this one end, that you might teach me how life should be lived. What was I, a few months back, before I came here? I was not wicked; I meant well to all, but I was timid; I tried to do well, but mostly it went as best might be. There was no plan in my life. I did not know that one could be good and true, faithful and kind, under whatever circumstances. And that is what I have learned here with you; to detest all that pollutes the soul. That is what I take with me now, back to my home and my husband. He shall see that I am changed, and he will have more trust in me than before. We shall be happy now, and we have you to thank for our happiness. And you must think of us and be glad.”
He took one of her hands in his, bent over it, and wept.
“To-morrow, when Edward comes,” she said, “I will tell him all this, and he will understand and thank you.”
Sven Elversson started up in dismay.
“Is he to know...”
“Yes,” she said. “I shall tell him that you love me, and he shall learn how she who is dead loved you. I will tell him all. You must see that there can be no more darkness, no more secrets between us. He shall know how it was I learned the secret of love. I will tell him that it does not care for promises and commandments, but knows its own law only. It cares for nothing, thinks of nothing, but the beloved. And it goes away when it is best; when it would bring suffering to stay. And I will tell Edward of all this here, at Hånger, where his fathers lived, in a place where nature itself is at once gentle and great. For he can be so, too—gentle and great.”
The listener moved in his place. He felt shame at spying thus upon these two. He would have stepped forward and spoken openly and freely with Sigrun and the man who loved her, whom she tried to comfort and give courage now she was about to leave him.
But as he looked about for a way to go, he noticed something he had not seen before; out of a heap of stones immediately before him stood an old gatepost.
There was no gate, and no post on the other side. The thing stood there alone, so rotten and decayed that it needed all the struts and supports about it to keep it standing.
Pastor Rhånge started. He had not seen the thing before, but he had not been looking that way. At first, he was convinced that it must be hallucination; that there was no gatepost there in reality; then it occurred to him that it might have been left standing as a curiosity.
But while he was looking at the post, the opportunity for declaring himself had passed.
The two had gone on speaking; he perceived now that Sigrun was talking of another subject altogether.
“But is it possible,” she was saying, “that you do not know how it all happened? Mor Thala told me once that you were ill with fever at the time, and delirious; that you could remember nothing of it all.”
Sven Elversson made no answer.
“I understand you do not wish me to speak of this at all,” said Sigrun, “but I do so want to speak to you about it. Remember, to-morrow I shall not be here.”
“I took my part in it, of course,” said Sven Elversson, “but I was so ill I remember nothing. Afterward, I heard the others talking about it, and I reproached them. But then they said I had no call to say anything, for I had been in it, too. And then I remembered, that they had forced me to...”
He had spoken with the greatest effort, the words seeming to force themselves painfully through his lips. And he could not finish.
“You fancied you remembered,” said Sigrun. “You know well enough it is impossible that you should have done it really. You would rather have died.”
“I did it,” he said. “Do not try to think otherwise.”
“But I do think otherwise,” said Sigrun, “and I want you to know that. All the time I have been here under your roof, I have felt convinced that it was not true. No one who knows you could believe it.”
Sven Elversson bent forward and grasped her hand. And very earnestly and simply he said:
“You have been very good to me this evening. I can never thank you enough for this hour.”
She understood his meaning, and refrained from pursuing the subject further.
“But at least you must let me thank you for these months at Hånger. I shall always think of this as the true home of charity. And I will try to make my own home like yours.”
“You can leave that till to-morrow,” he said.
She rose to her feet.
“Do not go yet. It is the last evening.”
“Then read a little of Snoilsky.”
He opened the book, but closed it again.
“It is too dark to read.”
“Then say something you know without the book. Let me hear Bjarni Thorarensen’s ‘Song to Sigrun.’ I have often wanted to ask you, but I never dared.”
Sven Elversson made a gesture as if to refuse.
“I shall not be here to-morrow,” she said again, with a note in her voice impossible to resist.
And he began to recite the Icelandic poet’s passionate prayer to his love not to forsake him even though she should die and go to dwell in the mansions of heaven. “‘Do not think I could not kiss a dead bride, or that I could not lay my arm about the waist of one pale in death and wrapped for burial.’”
He sat with his face turned away from her, his head bowed forward, his eyes resting on some point in the far distance.
But all that he had kept in check so well while they had been speaking, all that the soft enchantment of the evening, and the presence of the woman he loved, had not availed to loose, was freed in him now by the wild and powerful fervour of love that glowed through the poet’s word. All his pent-up feeling poured out now in his voice.
“‘Does not the summer sun kiss with like warmth the ice-clad mountain peak and the reddest rose? Are not white lilies loveliest of all flowers?’” Sven Elversson’s voice trembled in the rush of the storm of love that raged within him.
Sigrun listened tensely for a few moments. Then suddenly she turned away, so that he should not see her face.
It was turned now toward the listener behind the trees. And he saw how, with features convulsed with passion, she, too, gave way to an outburst of feeling. Her eyes closed in pain, her hands were clenched together and her lips moved in silent plaint. Her husband could not hear the words, but from the movement of her lips he fancied he could read what she said.
“And I can never tell him—never!”
“‘Come to me in autumn, when the winds rage over black waters,’” Sven Elversson went on, his voice one impassioned cry. “‘At midnight, when the moon is hidden in stormy clouds.’”
The listener in his hiding-place shuddered with chilly dread. He saw Sigrun lift her arms with a gesture of intense longing. He saw how the whispering lips again and again shaped their cry of agony:
“And I can never tell him—never!”
“‘Sink with thy snow-cold breast to my heart,’” murmured Sven Elversson, in a breaking voice, “‘and rest there, maiden from the grave, till thou hast loosed my soul from the fetters of life.’”
The Pastor glanced away from his wife, and looked toward the post. It seemed as if it had stood there till this hour for a single purpose—to remind him that he came of a race never known to endure a wrong—a race that knew how to take vengeance.
The two by the table said no word after the poem was finished. Sigrun rose hurriedly and went into the house. Sven Elversson walked the opposite way, through the trees, and past the gatepost, down to a little quiet pool, where he stood, looking down into the water. He had passed within a few steps of the listener, but without noticing him.
And Rhånge felt that this man who loved Sigrun must die.
It would be easy enough. Just creep up behind him and throw him into the water. He felt, too, that this man would not even attempt to defend himself. He would greet death as a welcome friend.
It was a perilous moment. Then to the mind of the excited man came a thought which saved him. It had lain, no doubt, all ready in the depths of his soul for long, but only now did it rise up to his consciousness.
“Once you drove out that man from your church because of what he had done to the dead; what is this you would do yourself to the living?”
This thought it was that restrained him in that difficult hour. Was not life a thousand times more sacred than death? How could he, who had refused to admit Sven Elversson into his church, be now so savage as to entertain the thought of ending a fellow creature’s life, of separating soul from body, to commit an act which held more than any could understand, and the consequences of which might go on through an eternity of eternities?
When he looked again toward the pool where Sven Elversson had stood, he was gone.
And something more was gone—the gatepost. Afterward, he thought that, in the struggle with temptation, he must have gone over to it himself, and flung it down with its supports; that it had fallen, and had been so utterly rotten and decayed that it had dropped with out a sound, leaving nothing but crumbling dust behind.
But he was not sure that it was so. He thought also that the thing had stood in his own soul; that it was his own violent, reckless, savage nature, with its supports of inherited habit and ingrown prejudice and sense of rights long held, that had fallen.
For that it had fallen, he felt now with wonder and relief. He knew it, from the mighty train of gentle thoughts that flowed through his soul.
He knew it, from the power of self-sacrificing love that filled him now.
He realized it from the joy he now felt in being a priest. He thought of his life, how he was at once a husbandman tending the fruits of the earth, and a shepherd of souls, head of a household and leader of a congregation, master and ruler and the helping minister of all—and now, for the first time, he felt that he truly loved his work, as the noblest and greatest and happiest of all.
He was happy, on this lovely evening in spring, as he drove back alone over the desolate, barren, unbeautiful mountain tract, toward his own poor home.
And he looked back, marvelling, at the thing which had saved him; for it was not his love, nor his priestly office, but the thought of the sacredness and majesty of life. A thought that had grown up slowly out of Sven Elversson’s ill-fate and now stood firm and clear in its maturity.
When Sigrun came out next morning into the garden, she saw that the book of poems had been left on the table, and went to fetch it in.
But, on taking it up, she found something between the leaves. And, looking to see, she found a small purse of yellow leather.
It was thrust in just at the page where stood the verses of the prisoner returned from the wars, and it contained her two plain rings, one other ring, also her husband’s gift, and a few small trinkets.
She wondered at this, trying to think what it could mean. And then at last she understood. And, trembling with emotion, she began to weep.
So it was Sven Elversson found her.
At first she could make no answer to his anxious questioning. Then at last she sobbed out:
“Edward was here last night, and heard all we said. He saw that I loved you, and he left this for me.”
“Love me!” cried Sven Elversson. “You love me?”
“Yes,” said Sigrun. “And Edward saw it, but he is not angry with me. My love, he will not come to fetch me now. He tells me to stay here and be yours now.”
Later in the day, Lotta Hedman came over to Hånger with a message from the Pastor, asking Sigrun how she wished matters now to be arranged.
And she had much to tell, and among other things this: that, on the previous night, she had seen the old homestead of Hånger for the first time rise up in all its ancient grandeur. She had seen the old woman sitting at the window, and the gatepost, and all the rest.
Then, suddenly, she saw the old woman lift her hands to Heaven, and her face shone with joy.
And a voice was heard declaring:
“The trollfolk of Hånger are loosed from the curse.”
And at the same moment, the old woman who had watched so long sank into dust and vanished, and the gatepost fell, and house after house collapsed, and Lotta Hedman knew that deliverance had come at last, and that she would never see that vision again.