The Prodigal Son

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, fêtes, 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:

“Garçon! 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 café 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 café 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.

It had to be a name that would sufficiently conceal his own, yet one that would be characteristic of his country, and, after much beating of the wings of memory, he decided on Christian Christiansson as a name which not only answered to the conditions, but possessed an added nobleness of meaning and associations that would forever forbid the lowering of the flag of his purpose.

But after he had concluded that Christian Christiansson was to be his name in the future, it cost him a pang to think that Oscar Stephenson was to be his name no longer. Stephen had been his father’s name and his poor father had expected him to carry it on from strength to strength and from glory to glory. Oscar had been the name his mother had known him by, and it came back to him now in the tones of her voice with the happiest memories of his boyhood. He could hear it in Thora’s voice also in the tremulous happiness of her bridal chamber, in the tender joy of her motherhood, and in the pleading accents of her despair. It was like burying something of himself to bury his name, but Oscar Stephenson was dead, and that name could be his no more.

It was early morning when he reached London, and returning to it after six months’ absence he felt like one who had been dead and was alive again. As the empty streets echoed to his footsteps his spirits rose and he looked to the future without fear. Though he was coming back friendless and nearly penniless, he saw himself as he would be some day—Christian Christiansson, the composer, rich, respected, honored perhaps, and perhaps beloved. It might be months, it might be years, but God willing, it should come! A little longer, only a little longer!

He had at first intended to look for a lodging where he would be quite unknown, but in his present elevation of feeling it seemed unnecessary to do so, and he determined to return to his old home in Short Street. When he came to Westminster Bridge, he stopped for a moment to look down at the houseless wretches who were still asleep on the benches of the embankment, and to remember the night when he had been one of them, and to think of the other night that was soon to come when the first-fruits of his new life would be in his hands.

He could see it all as in a glass that revealed the future. The curtain would be down on the new opera and there would be a great demonstration in the crowded opera-house. Again and again the singers would be recalled and then there would be loud cries for the composer. The cries would rise to a deafening clamor, and the whole audience from the royal box to the top-most gallery would be calling for the unknown man who had breathed his suffering soul into an old Saga and made the dry bones live. But the Unknown would not appear; he would not be there. Where would he be? He would be down here—here under the night sky, weeping for joy and gratitude, emptying his pockets among these homeless outcasts in memory of the night when he, too, was homeless and an outcast, and vowing never again to forget the friendless and the fallen or to be hard on the sinner and the prodigal. He could see it happening as plainly as if it had already come to pass. It should come to pass! A little longer, only a little longer!

When he reached Short Street the hearse of the Necropolis had just turned the corner and was rattling up the archway. Nearly all the window-blinds of Number One were still down, but as he hesitated at the foot of the front steps the door opened and a young woman in curl papers came out with a mop and pail. She stared at him as if he had been a stranger, but he knew her instantly.

“Don’t you remember me, Jenny?” he said.

At the sound of his voice Jenny’s face assumed a look of bewilderment; this was followed by a smile of recognition.

“Well, I never! Mr. Steevison! Is it you, sir? Ye’r so changed I wouldn’t ’a knowed ye, an’ when ye spoke ye might ’a knocked me down with a feather.”

“Can I have lodgings here again, Jenny?”

“Certingly ye can, sir. An’ ye’ve come in the nick o’ time, too. We buried the barman a week come Wednesday and ’is room ’as been just cleaned out. Come in, Mr. Steevison!”

“Hush, Jenny! That is not my name now.”

“Isn’t it really?” said Jenny, with a puzzled look, and then, as by sudden enlightenment, “Well, I’m married myself and I’ve changed my name, too. I’m Mrs. Cobb now, an’ I’ve took over the ’ouse since the missus ’as been down with the stroke, an’ my ’usband’s asleep in the cellar.”

They had stepped into the lobby by this time and putting down the pail Jenny cried over the banisters of the basement stairs:

“Jim! Jim Cobb, you bone-lazy thing, come up an’ see an old friend.”

“Don’t disturb him now! Another time! I’m tired.”

“Ye look it, sir. Ye really do. I’m afraid she’s been ‘a treatin’ ye cruel. I knowed she would. It’s always the way with them women. Ye’d better ’a stayed with me, sir—I’d ’a been real good to ye in them days and never ’a wanted nothink.—But go inside, sir, and I’ll get ye some brekfist. The kittle is just on the boil an’ ye’ll have a cup o’ tea an’ a rasher afore ye can say ‘Jack Robison.’”

Jenny went scurrying down the stairs like an old slipper, and Oscar stepped into the barman’s parlor and sat on the shiny leather-covered sofa. He remembered that he had sat there before, he remembered who had sat with him, he remembered all that had happened since, and then for one brief moment his visions of the future failed him; his hopes and intentions sank away; everything was blotted out except the sweet and bitter memory of the woman he had loved and lost, and he broke down utterly.

XII

It takes a long time for the truth to travel from a distance, but a lie flies on the wings of the wind. The report of Oscar’s death in a gambling-house on the Riviera reached Iceland by the next steamer.

Three days before the steamer’s arrival Magnus and his mother were sitting in front of their farm at Thingvellir. Anna was spinning and Magnus was making rope by a twister turned by a small boy a dozen yards away, for it was just after the wool-plucking and a little before the hay-harvest.

The sun was setting behind the crags of the Almanagja, the blueberry ling was reddening over the green waters of the chasm, and there was no sound in the evening air save the plash of the Axe waterfall, the lowing of kine and the cry of curlew. Then over the hum of the wheel and the wis-wis of the twister came the dull thud of horses’ feet on that hollow ground and Anna stopped to listen.

“That must be the post coming,” she said, and Magnus answered, “Perhaps,” without turning to look at the road, which was still empty as far as to the top of the cleft, where it opened on to the plain.

“I wonder if there will be a letter from Oscar?”

“Why should you wonder, mother? Has he answered your letter of three years ago? Has he had the decency and humanity to reply to the news of his father’s death? No!”

“Still, I can not give up hoping. He must know by this time how you are placed with the farm, and perhaps he is only waiting until he can send you some assistance.”

Magnus made no reply, but the wis-wis of the rope was louder.

“It’s true he doesn’t know everything. He doesn’t know that his father left nothing behind him but the debt to the bank, and that the bank has been so hard——”

“Mother, if you go on talking like that I shall never get this rope finished. I don’t want anybody to help me to pay my way, and the bank shall have its money every Christmas if hard work can make it.”

“You’ll work yourself to death—that’s what you’ll do, Magnus. You sent Asher away in the winter, although he was so good at feeding the beasts when the snow was on the ground, and now that the hay has to be cut and the lambs killed, you’re discharging Jon Vidalin.”

“We’ll have to thin down somewhere, and the sooner we begin the better—it’s too late to spare when you see the bottom of the meal-barrel, you know.”

“That’s what you call thinning down—sending everybody away who can help you with the farm and keeping a houseful of women who are of no use for anything.”

“Why, which of them is of no use, mother?”

“Gudrun for one. She only milks the cows in the morning and the ewes in the evening, and I could do both myself and save her keep and wages.”

“Nonsense, mother! You’re not young enough now to get up at four o’clock winter and summer and I won’t hear of it for a moment.”

“Then there’s Maria—she’s old enough for anything, and what’s the use of her?”

“Maria’s been in the family since before I was born, and we can’t turn her away now because she’s old and rheumatic.”

“And here’s Eric,” said Anna, dropping her voice and glancing at the boy who was turning the twister.

“Eric? Poor little chap, he’s lost his father, and he only gets a lamb for his wages anyway.”

“It’s to be a sheep this year, remember, and then there’s his food— But if it’s an orphanage you want to keep, or a home for invalids——”

“Helloa! Here’s the post! And who’s this he has got with him? The Rector! The Rector and two strangers!” cried Magnus, as a canvas-covered wagon, drawn by four ponies, rumbled over the bridge above the waterfall and galloped up to the Inn-farm.

“Welcome, Rector,” said Anna.

“Thanks, Anna. These are friends from America, traveling to see the country. We should like to sleep here to-night and go on to Geyser in the morning.”

“With pleasure! Maria! Gudrun! Jon Vidalin!” cried Anna, and while the strangers were being taken to the guest-room and the horses to the stable, the Rector went indoors with Anna and Magnus and they sat and talked around the hall table.

“You look hale in spite of everything, Anna.”

“And you, too, Rector!”

“Ah, yes, old wood burns slow! But I sometimes wonder if it’s well to live long. Better go to bed early than sit up too late, I say.”

“Any new trouble in town lately?”

“The Factor is down at last, poor fellow.”

“You mean that he’s——”

“Bankrupt, and about to be sold up—business, office, everything.”

“Poor Margret Neilsen!”

“What about the child?” asked Magnus.

“I think he would part with it now. To tell you the truth, he is feeling bitterly about Oscar just at present. ‘A dove doesn’t come out of a raven’s egg,’ he said yesterday.”

“He said that?”

“So the new Minister says—but then it was the Minister who made him bankrupt.”

“But I thought they were such friends; and when poor Stephen was petitioning the King——”

“Then you haven’t heard what happened about Thora.”

“Thora?” said Magnus.

“Poor Thora’s grave, I mean. It makes the blood run between my skin and my flesh to think about it.”

“Tell us,” said Anna.

And then the Rector told them how the Minister, acting under instructions received from abroad, had ordered Thora’s grave to be opened and certain musical compositions which had been buried in it to be taken out; how this had been done and the papers despatched to England; how the Factor had heard of it, and, being furious, had threatened an action against the Minister; and finally how the Minister, to cut the ground under the Factor’s feet, had caused the bank to make him a bankrupt.

During the progress of the Rector’s story Magnus sat without saying a word, but every moment his cheeks grew whiter and his eyes glared and his lips quivered. Meantime Anna covered her face and said:

“It must have been Neils who did that. I never liked the boy—he was always too much like his father—and now that he is——”

“It wasn’t Neils, Anna. It was Oscar.”

“Oscar?” said Magnus, and his hands clutched the corners of the table.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I couldn’t have believed it of Oscar. But who knows how he may have been tempted? Perhaps he was poor, yes, perhaps after all he was in want and they offered him money. There are such ups and downs in these foreign countries—perhaps he was starving in the streets of London——”

“He wasn’t in London at all, Anna. He was at Monte Carlo, or Nice, or somewhere.”

“Then you mean he only wanted the money to—the same as before, when he—I won’t believe it!”

“Be quiet, mother,” said Magnus, with the hoarse croak of a raven, and then turning to the Rector, “Who did it—the work itself, I mean?”

“Hans, the sailor—they could get nobody else, it seems.”

“Hans, the sailor,” repeated Magnus, in the same hoarse croak, and while the table creaked under the clutch of his great hands, his face grew hard and ugly.

During the remainder of that day Magnus went about without speaking to any one, and next morning, after the strangers had started on their journey, he saddled Silvertop and rode off toward Reykjavik. Anna saw him go, and calling to Jon Vidalin, she said:

“Take the fastest horse and ride to town by the low road and find Hans, the sailor. Tell him to fly before Magnus comes and never to come back again.”

XIII

When Magnus returned to the farm three days afterward he was like another man. His face was no longer hard and ugly, it was as soft as a tender woman’s, and he was smiling down at something that looked like a huge bundle which he carried on the saddle in front of him. Anna saw him crossing the bridge, and she ran out to meet him.

“Goodness me!” she cried. “Is it the child?”

“Yes, it is the child, mother,” said Magnus, and out of a mountain of rugs and shawls came little Elin, now in her fifth year, and she was dropped into Anna’s arms.

“The darling! What a great girl she has grown! So she has come to see her gran’ma?”

“Yes, gran’ma,” said the child.

“And here are her clothes—all of them,” said Magnus, swinging a satchel off his shoulders.

“Then she has come for good! And she is going to live with her gran’ma and Uncle Magnus!”

“And Silvertop and the sheeps and the doggies,” said the little one.

“So she shall, bless her! Jon Vidalin, see to the master’s pony. Eric, where are you? Ah! that’s a good boy—carry the satchel into the house. Maria, did you ever see anything so bonny? But, Magnus, how ever did the Factor come to part with her?”

“He wouldn’t at first, for all his worries and the hard things he had been saying. And when he came to it at last he wanted me to promise that if Margret Neilsen died before himself he should have the child back again.”

“You didn’t agree to that, Magnus?”

“I said the girl should choose for herself if she was old enough, and at last he consented.”

“But what about Margret Neilsen?”

“That was harder still. ‘I promised her mother I should keep her as long as I lived,’ she said.”

“Ah, poor thing! She didn’t know what was to happen.”

“‘I wouldn’t part with her to anybody in the world hut Anna,’ she said.”

“I always said Margret Neilsen was as good as gold.”

“‘And I wouldn’t part with her now,’ she said, ‘only Anna is in such trouble.’”

“Trouble?”

“Give the child to Maria and come into the house, mother.”

The sunshine died off Anna’s face; she saw what was coming.

“Here, take her in and give her some barley cake and syrup, and for goodness’ sake, woman, don’t sniffle as if you had a cold. What is it, Magnus? Am I the only one who doesn’t know? Tell me plainly—is he in disgrace again?”

“Have courage, mother,” said Magnus.

She looked at him and understood everything. “Wait,” she said, and she went down on her knees in the hall and prayed for some moments. After that she got up, pale but calm, and said:

“Now tell me everything—I am ready.”

Magnus told her what he had heard and all that had happened: how he had gone to town with murder in his heart, intending to punish Hans, the sailor; how some one had warned him and Hans had taken refuge in a schooner that was to sail for Norway; how he had hired a boat to follow the man when the mail steamer dropped anchor in the bay and somebody shouted from the deck that Oscar was dead, and it was the same as if a hand from heaven had stopped him.

“Dead, did he say?”

“Dead in France, he said, and he threw down a Danish newspaper. Here it is, mother, but God knows if I should read you the report in it.”

“Read it,” said Anna.

He read it—it was the same which had appeared in Paris—and she listened without drawing breath.

“Then he died in a gaming-house—by his own hand, too—and to save himself from further disgrace!”

Magnus did not attempt to speak, and presently Anna’s tears began to flow. After a few moments she wept bitterly and prayed aloud, now for Oscar, that God would forgive him; now for Elin, that God would protect the little orphan; finally for herself, that God would have pity upon her and let her die.

Magnus went over to the dresser for a bowl, dipped it in the water-crock, and gave her a drink, and after that she seemed better.

“My poor Oscar!” she said. “He wasted his life, poor boy! Such a precious life, too! Such talents! There wasn’t anything he couldn’t master. Everybody said what great things he would do some day. And to think it should come to this! I never expected to thank God that his father was dead, but I do now. Oh, God, I thank Thee— But what am I saying?”

After a few minutes more she began to blame herself for everything that had happened.

“I didn’t bring him up properly. I could never be strict with children. And he was always so sweet, and even when he was naughty he was so loving. Everybody loved that child. Yes, it was my fault, and God ought to punish me. Almighty Father, be merciful to my poor boy, and if I was to blame——”

“Mother! Mother!” said Magnus, and she stopped in her self-reproaches, waiting for a loving word to comfort and support her, but Magnus said no more.

A few minutes later all she had suffered at Oscar’s hands was wiped out of her mind and the wayward sinner had become a saint.

“He never changed to me, never, and even when he grew to be a man he always kissed me going to bed, just as he used to do when he was a boy. He was so good to his mother. Both my sons have been good to me. No mother ever had such good sons——”

“Mother!” said Magnus, and again she waited, but Magnus did not speak.

At length she checked her tears and began to comfort herself with the thought that if Oscar had taken his own life it must have been in madness, therefore God would not hold him accountable.

“And if he died in disgrace, perhaps it was only because he wanted to come back rich, so that he could pay the mortgage and make us all happy. I used to think of that and pray for it so often. But now if he could only come back poor—I shouldn’t care how poor—as poor as the prodigal in the parable——”

“Mother!” cried Magnus. “I can’t hear you talk like this—I can’t and I won’t. Oscar is dead, but he treated you shamefully.”

“Don’t say that, Magnus.”

“But I do say it. I say you were the best mother to him a son ever had, and the only return he made to you for your care and loving-kindness was to neglect you and forget you.”

“Don’t say it, my son.”

“I will say it, mother. And I’ll say, too, that Oscar lived in disgrace and died in disgrace, and now that he is gone I am not going to pretend that I wish he could come back again.”

“Magnus! Magnus!”

“I don’t wish it. If he came back poor, what right would he have to bring his poverty here? And if he came back rich, what reason to expect that his money would make amends to us for the evil days we have had through him? I don’t believe in the return of the prodigal, mother, and I don’t believe in the parable, either. That may be the way in the other world, but it isn’t the way in this one, and it shouldn’t be—I say it shouldn’t be.”

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

“As for Oscar, I tried to forgive him—you know I did—but there are some crimes that seem to be past forgiveness, and when I think of this last one against Thora I’m not sorry he never came back—I shouldn’t have been able to keep my hands off him. I was thinking of him when I was following Hans, and if he had returned with the ship that brought the news of his death it would have been God help both him and me.”

“But, my son, your brother is only just dead, and it is your duty to forgive him whatever he did.’

“He died to me long ago, mother—before he went away from Iceland—and now that he is dead indeed, I thank God he can never come back again.”

“Well, the Lord knows best what He is doing,” said Anna, and then her tears came again, whereupon Magnus, seeing what he had done, walked over to her and kissed her. He had never done that in the whole course of his life before, so her tears flowed faster than ever. And then he went out of the house, muttering to himself:

“Ah, well! My God! My God!”

That night when the bell in the hall rang for prayers, and little Elin sat in her grandmother’s lap and the farm-servants trooped in with the awesome looks of persons who knew what shadow hung over the little house among the lonely hills, Magnus, in his quality of family priest, took up the Bible and hymn-book at the place where Anna opened for him. The chapter was from second Samuel, and it ended with the verse:

“And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.”

The hymn was—

“Meek and low, meek and low,
I shall soon my Jesus know.”

When the singing ended, the farm-servants went out one by one, each saying to Magnus:

“God give you a good night!”

And Magnus answered, as well as he could for the emotion that mastered him:

“And you! And you!”

XIV

In the house of sorrow God closes the hearts of little children so that they may not break. Little Elin had been bright and happy the whole evening through. She was a merry little sprite whose laughter—like the rippling of a sunny stream—set everybody else laughing. Old Maria was at a loss to say which of her parents she resembled most. When the child laughed, Maria said: “There’s a deal of the father in the little one,” and when she listened and looked up sideways Maria thought there was a deal of the mother, too.

Anna put her to bed, and while she was being undressed her little tongue went like a shuttle. Existence had gone rapidly since she arrived, and she was full of stories: how she had gone to the chasm with Maria to pluck blueberries, and two big, black ravens, sitting on a crag, had looked down at her and croaked; how she had gone to the cow-house with Eric to see the cows milked, and Gudrun (to her infinite glee) had squirted some of the milk at her; and, above all, how all alone she had found a pet lamb and it was brown, because it had lost its mother, and lived in the elt-house, because its father had run away from it, and how it put its cold nose against her face and said, “Bah!” and its name was “Maggie.”

“Maggie shall come and waken you in the morning, darling,” said Anna.

“Shall she come in here, gran’ma?”

“Yes, dear,” said Anna, and then the sunny stream of the child’s laughter rippled through the room.

“But now it’s late, and good little girls must be as quiet as mice.”

“Yes, gran’ma”—in a breathless whisper.

“This is to be your own little bedroom always, dearest, and gran’ma has made it nice, so that it may do for you when you grow up.”

“Yes, gran’ma”—another breathless whisper.

“That is the wardrobe for your clothes, and this is your little chest of drawers, and that—up there on the wall—that is your mamma’s guitar and you will learn to play it some day.”

“Yes, gran’ma”—the whisper was growing a little weary.

“The next room is the guest-room, and Uncle Magnus always sleeps there, except when there are strangers, so if you knock in the night he is sure to hear you.”

“Yea, gran’ma”—the whisper was getting slow and weary.

“Gran’ma wants you to be such a good girl to Uncle Magnus. He loved your dear, sweet mother so much. Oh, so much, but he lost her——”

“Same as Maggie’s mother?”—there was a sudden burst of wakefulness.

“Maggie’s mother was only a sheep, darling.”

“Oh!”

“But now God has given you to Uncle Magnus to make up to him for everything, so you must be as good as good to him.”

“Yes, gran’ma”—the whisper was becoming faint.

“When you grow up to be a big, big girl, and grandma isn’t here, you must love him and comfort him just the same as if he had been your own father.”

“Ye—es, gran’ma.”

“And if anybody ever comes and wants to take you away from him, you mustn’t go—you must always stay with Uncle Magnus.”

“Ye—es, gran’——”

“That’s a good girl! And now climb up into bed, and grandma will kiss you and tuck you in for the night.”

“And will Maggie come in the morning?”

“Yes, dearest.”

“Good night, gran’ma.”

“Good night, my own darling.”

“Goo—nigh—gran’—ma.”