VIIThat day had been a prolonged triumph for Oscar. The festival of the Proclamation began with service in the parish church, and though the Governor and the Thingmen only had been able to pack into the little place, the churchyard outside and the home-field of the parsonage had been thronged.After the service there was a procession from the church door to the ancient place of proclamation, and Oscar had ordered and marshaled every one. First the town band, then the Governor and his executive in their gold-braided uniforms, the Bishop in his robes, the Thingmen in their scarfs, the clergy in their black cassocks and white ruffs, and finally a vast following of the people. It was a gorgeous spectacle, such as no man could remember to have seen on that spot before.The Proclamation itself was an imposing ceremony. Sitting on the law-mount as on a natural platform of lava rock, with his face to the east and the Cross of Dannebrog on his breast, the Governor read out one by one the titles and descriptions of the Acts which had been passed by Parliament; and after each of them he lifted his head and cried to the people on the plains below, "Is it Yea or Nay?" And then the people, led by Oscar, shouted "Yea."When the reading was finished the Governor cried, "Long live the King," whereupon Oscar led the cheering, three times three, and when the band struck up the national hymn he started the words of the chorus.But the last feature of the function was the best, and that was the singing of the hymn composed by Oscar himself. It was a hymn to Iceland, the cradle of the Vikings, the scene of the Sagas, the parent of parliaments, the mother of the mighty Northlands.Standing under the brant face of the law-mount with his choir of one hundred and fifty on the sloping ground in front, Oscar conducted with great vigor. His prelude pleased the people, but when he rose to the height of his argument and struck the patriotic note, his love for the stern old Northland--"Isafold! My Isafold! Great land of frost and fire,"his hearers were carried away and some of them shouted and wept.After the hymn was over the Thingmen crowded about Oscar to congratulate him and some of the country-people fell upon his neck. The Governor, too, sitting above, was the object of many congratulations. "But this is genius," said one. "An inspiration," said another. "Our Oscar will be a great musician some day," said a third. And the old man took the tributes quietly, almost silently, but with the shining face of a father proud of his favorite son.When the ceremonies ended only one name was on everybody's lips, and that was the name of Oscar Stephenson, and hundreds hummed the strains of "Isafold! My Isafold!" as they trooped off to dinner.Oscar and Helga dined together at the Inn-farm in a corner of the hall which was thronged with guests. But they were both too much excited to remain in mixed company, and after dinner they escaped to the margin of the lake and to the solitary parts of the plain. There they gathered blueberries and, partly to restrain their excitement and partly to nourish it, they talked of nothing but the wild flowers.When the sun began to sink they returned by way of the parsonage, where the Governor, with the Factor, the Bishop and certain other officials had taken their dinner apart. The little guest room was dense with smoke, like the mouth of a geyser, and the faces that came and went in it were discussing the merits and defects of the old order and the new. Both Governor and Factor were for the old, as exemplified by the day's ceremony and Oscar's hymn, but others held that changing times brought changing needs and that Iceland would be the better for a new constitution, with Free Trade and modern methods."They'll go on till midnight and never get home to-night," whispered Helga, as she slipped out with Oscar.On returning to the farm they found people striking tents and leading horses from the crowded horsefold to prepare for the return journey."I'm afraid I'm too tired to go back to-night," said Helga."Then stay--stay by all means," said Oscar."And you?" asked Helga."I must go home in any case--there's Thora," said Oscar."Your mother will look after her," said Helga.But Oscar shook his head, and ordered Gudrun, the housekeeper, to make one of the two guest-rooms ready for Helga.At that moment some young townspeople were clearing the floor for a dance and they called on Oscar and Helga to lead off with a waltz. They did so with great delight, and when the waltz was finished they joined the round dance which followed it, and then they danced a second and a third waltz, until they were flushed and hot and had to go out to cool.By this time it was dark, and the people who meant to encamp for the night had lighted fires at the mouths of their tents and were beguiling the hours with various pleasures. One of these was fortune-telling. An old woman, not thought to be overwise, was going from tent to tent, making random shots amid shrieks of laughter."And what do you see here?" said Helga, holding out her hand."Ah, this is a good hand," said the witch. "You are going to be a great lady and eat mutton and beef every day and drink golden wine and ginger.""And what do you see in this?" asked Oscar"This? Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" said the witch."What's amiss, mother?""Cold water runs between my skin and my flesh.""Is it as bad as that, old lady?""Don't ask me--don't ask me! You have a brother, haven't you?""And if I have, what about him?""Beware--beware!" said the witch, and Oscar and Helga turned away laughing.The moon rose and they wandered into the great chasm, and walked among the shadows of the toppling stones, until they came under a huge stone called Stoker, which stands like a mighty gravestone over a deep pit that is like a tomb. There they sat, with the white moon above and the red camp fires below them, and then the boiling, bubbling geyser of excitement in their breasts could be kept down no longer."You have had a great success to-day, Oscar," said Helga."So have you, Helga, so have you, for without your presence to prompt and inspire me I should have done nothing.""I am happy if I have helped you, Oscar, but you must go on now, and never look back--never.""You are right, Helga, you are right--to stop would be a sin--an unpardonable sin--almost like a sin against the Holy Ghost.""Exactly like it, Oscar, for if any one has a gift he gets it from God, and to bury it, like the man in the parable----""There would be no fear of that if I could have you beside me always, Helga.""And can't you, Oscar?"A fragrance seemed to envelop him. He felt Helga's breath upon his face. It made him tremble all over."Would to God I could, but it is impossible. You will return to Denmark----""Not I, indeed! I am not without my own ambitious also. I must go back to England, to France, to Germany, to Italy. And so must you, Oscar--you must, if you are to be true to your talents and to yourself and to the great future----""I know it, Helga, I feel it, and if I could write even one song that would stir the souls of millions it would be better than making a fortune or passing an act of parliament. But when a man has given hostages to fortune, and they are dragging him down--with silken threads, perhaps--but still down, down, down----"He was speaking out of a dry and husky throat, but she answered softly and sweetly, "Are things so absolutely irretrievable, Oscar?""Absolutely, Helga, absolutely; and henceforth and all my life long I must learn to go without your comradeship----""And what must I do?"The compulsion of passion was driving him on, but he was struggling to hold back. "Helga," he cried, "do you know what is the deadliest thing in life? It is Love. The painters paint Love as a harmless little Cupid, with a handkerchief about his eyes and a tiny bow and arrow in his hands. But Love is a great, blind, blundering monster with a two-edged sword, dealing destruction on every side."His words were as nothing, but his quivering voice sang like music in Helga's ears, and she said, "Is it Love or man that does that, Oscar--man with the false sense of right and wrong, his foolish ideals of honor?""God knows! Perhaps if I could have thought so a year ago, before I added injury to injury and brought unhappiness on others--but now--now----"A sensation of triumph came to her and she said, "Isn't it cowardly to talk like that, Oscar?""I am a coward, Helga," he answered, trembling from head to foot; "to you I can speak the truth--I am a coward, a moral coward, and I can not face the certainty----""But if," said Helga excitedly, getting closer, "you had some one beside you who had the courage of life, the defiance of life----""Helga!" cried Oscar, breathing heavily--the earth seemed to be slipping under him like an avalanche."Some one who would go on helping you, and ask nothing but your comradeship----""Helga! Helga!" He was gasping as for breath in the intoxication of his emotion."Nothing but to work with you and to conquer the world with you----""Helga! Helga! Helga!""Oscar!"There was a breathless cry from both, and then an almost inaudible whisper, "I shall not go back to-night, Helga."* * * * *When they came to themselves again they were returning--more flushed and excited than before--out of the white moonlight into the yellow mist of the smoking lamp that hung over the dancers in the hall. The young townspeople received them with a shout and called on them to join the dance they were dancing. It was called "Weaving the Cloth," and the figures were intended to represent the spinning and carding, the weaving, stretching, hammering and rolling of the thick Icelandic Vadmal.The dancers crossed and recrossed, twisted each other about, beat each other breast against breast, and finally rolled each other round and round.The music was going fast, and the dancers were singing loud and laughing louder, when there came from outside the sudden barking of dogs, followed by the clatter of the hoofs of a galloping horse. Immediately afterward there was the rattle of the metal end of a riding-whip against a window-pane, and a voice crying, "God be with you!"The new-comer did not wait for the customary answer to his salutation, but pushed the door open and entered hurriedly. It was Magnus, dusty and dirty, with a white face and wild eyes.At that moment Oscar and Helga, blushing and smiling, were in the middle of the floor, locked in each other's arms, performing the last figure of the dance, and it was thus that Magnus came face to face with them."Is she here?" he cried."She?""Thora! She is lost--I thought she might have found a horse and followed you."Then the shuffling feet stopped, and the fiddles tailed off into silence as Magnus, in broken sentences, told the story of Thora's flight to the Factor's, her disappearance with the child, and the vain search that had been made for her."But surely she would go back to Government House eventually," said Oscar. "The poor girl would go the long way round to escape observation and home by way of the lake. Did nobody think of that, and stay in the house to see?"Magnus looked like a man whose eyes, dulled by groping in a dark tunnel, had been stunned by sudden light. Before the others had recovered themselves he had turned about and was gone.At the next moment Oscar was tramping to and fro on the floor, with his clinched fists to his forehead, moaning, "My God! My God!" Helga was combing her hair and putting on her wraps.VIIIJohn, the servant at the farm, was sent over to the parsonage to tell the Governor and the Factor. He found the gentlemen settling themselves for the night, having talked so long that they had decided to remain until morning. But the news of Thora's disappearance altered everything."We must go back immediately," said the Governor."Bring the horses round instantly," said the Factor.Less than half an hour afterward a silent and gloomy company were going home--the Governor, the Factor, Oscar, Helga, and a various following of the sympathetic and the inquisitive.The two old friends were morose and ill-tempered, and for the first time in fifty years disposed to nag and quarrel. The Governor blamed Aunt Margret, the Factor blamed Anna; the Governor blamed Helga, the Factor blamed Oscar; the Governor blamed the Factor, and the Factor blamed the Governor. In the half light of uncertainty and suspense their friendship fell before fear, and blood was thicker than water.It was a miserable home-going to Oscar. The explanation of Thora's movements with which he had surprised Magnus soon ceased to satisfy himself and he thought of a hundred fatal consequences. Helga tried to comfort him with various plausible arguments. He had acted for the best--the best for Thora, the best for the child, the best for himself, the best for everybody--and if accident had intervened or the dreadful freaks of dementia had followed, he was not responsible and could not be blamed.But Oscar's worst sufferings were from a secret purgatory which Helga's pleadings did not touch, for the cruelest part of his remorse concerned Helga herself.The journey was long and tiresome and every step had its own peculiar misery. During the first hour the moon was shining--a brilliant moon that bathed everything in loveliness--and Oscar remembered the scene in the chasm and reflected that in the very hour of his delirious happiness Thora, perhaps, was lying dead.Then the moon died out and darkness fell--a murky darkness, blacker than the lava--and as Oscar pushed and plunged along over the stumbles of his pony, the thought came to him that if Thora were dead perhaps it was the best that could have happened to her--the best under the circumstances--saving her from the bitterness of a future which must surely come when Helga and he, struggle as they might, would have to break the bonds that bound them.And then in that dark and treacherous hour, with no face to look into his face, he felt an immense relief, remembering that if Thora was gone, the consequences of his life's error were at an end and he was free.But the dawn came--a bleared, rainy dawn, with scarfs of vapor stretching across the sun like a cataract over a blood-shot eye--and Oscar's remorse was doubled by the wounds he had inflicted upon his conscience in the darkness, and he dare not look at Helga as she rode, muffled up and silent, by his side.They were crossing the Moss Fell Heath by this time, and everything around was dark and drear. A solitary raven kept them cheerless company for a while, flying from beacon to beacon and uttering its husky cry. Oscar remembered the scenes of yesterday when the sky was blue, and their blood was warm, and then the thought came to him--like the shooting of the bolt on a man buried in a tomb--that if he was not to be henceforward the most miserable of men he must pray with all his soul and strength that when they reached the end of their journey Thora should be alive.On reaching the more inhabited districts Oscar allowed the Governor and the Factor to forge on ahead, and Helga to wait for him in the road, while he glanced off to the farmhouses and shouted up at the bedroom windows. But the result was always the same--Thora had not been seen and Magnus had been there before him.When they came to the top of the hill from which they had looked back on Reykjavik and on the Danish mail-steamer entering the fiord, the little capital floated in the mist of morning like a city in a woolly sea, and the "Laura" lay anchored outside of it; but the apprehensions of yesterday were consumed by the fears of to-day, and Oscar thought of one thing alone.They met farmers trotting out of the town on their little caravans of ponies, yet Oscar did not question them, lest he should hear the news he dare not listen to, and coming at length to the long street of the little capital, he did not raise his face to the eyes that peered at him through the curtains of upper windows, lest they should reveal the truth he dared not learn.The fear of disaster had by this time swallowed up any flicker of hope in Oscar, and when, coming up to Government House, he found a crowd of people standing in front of it, he knew too well that all was over. From that moment onward fact after fact led up to the fatal certainty.The window of Thora's bedroom--the window at which Oscar had shouted his adieus the day before--stood open, and a ladder had been raised against it. By the gate to the green a horse lay dead on the gravel--it was Magnus's horse, his magnificent Golden Mane--covered with dust and sweat, as it fell under its rider at the last step of his fearful journey.In the middle of the hall Anna and Aunt Margret stood with the Governor and the Factor, sobbing out their pitiful explanations. Afraid to return to the empty house which had been the scene of a painful memory, Anna had sat the night through with Margret at the Factor's, waiting hour after hour for the reports of the Sheriff and his constables. Nothing had been heard of Thora, but in the early morning Magnus had returned and found the door of her room locked on the inside. Then he had run for them and they had called to Thora, but received no answer, though sometimes they heard the baby crying. And now Magnus, having failed to force the door, had gone for a ladder, and he intended to climb into the room from the outside.Oscar was conscious of no more until he found himself knocking at Thora's door and calling in his agony:"Thora! Thora! Thora!"There was a heavy, staggering step inside the room; the lock was thrust back and the door thrown open."Thora!" cried Oscar again, but it was Magnus who stood before him--Magnus with a face white and set and full of anger and hatred."You were right," he said, pointing to the bed. "There she is with God--and you!"Thora lay high on the pillow, with her eyes open and her parted lips smiling, as if she had just awakened from a beautiful dream. She was dead, but her baby was alive, and it was rolling its little round head and digging its red hand into her cold, white breast.With a low, choking cry, Oscar fell to his knees at the bedside and buried his face in the bedclothes. Magnus left the room, the others entered it, and Aunt Margret lifted the living child out of the mother's breast over the father's kneeling form.IXDuring the few days before the funeral the Government House felt motionless and empty, like a room when the clock has stopped in it. Behind the drawn blinds everybody talked in whispers, as if the dead were asleep and must not be wakened. The stillness of the house centered in the room where Thora lay, and that was white and fresh with the odor of clean linen and wild flowers. In the deadened sunshine, as it filtered through the yellow blinds, there was a halo about the waxen face on the bed, and it seemed to diffuse solemnity on all around it.Anna never allowed herself to be long away from this chamber. Her fear of the room had gone, now that death had entered it. Early and late, in daylight and dark, she went to and fro in the silent place, walking softly and seeming to count the hours during which her dear girl would be above ground.The Governor did nothing from the day of Thora's death until the day of her burial. Dressed always in his official uniform he sat in his bureau, but received no one. He wrote no letters and read no books and seldom spoke at his meals. For hours together he would sit with folded arms looking fixedly at the pattern on the carpet. A shadow had fallen on him--a shadow of shame--and in the sealed chamber of his proud soul he was struggling to reconcile his conduct to himself and finding it difficult to do so.The Factor went on with his work as usual, for in the decalogue of his duty there was no maxim that forbade business, but sometimes as he turned the leaves of his ledger he looked long and saw nothing, and once, as he counted up the figures in his bank-book, the thought smote him with the force of a blow on the brain that perhaps Nature was beginning to strike a balance with him against the sum of his successors, and that the cruel bereavement which had just befallen him was the first stroke of the Nemesis which was to follow in the wake of his wealth.Aunt Margret and Helga were always at home, the one busy with the baby, which had been taken back to the Factor's, and the other with the "black" which had to be ordered for everybody.Little was known of Magnus, except that he was still in town, that he had been seen with the Sheriff and two strangers, that in spite of the trouble which had overtaken his family he was spending most of his time in the dark smoking-room of the Hotel, and that he was said to be drinking heavily.But the grief of Oscar touched and satisfied everybody. He had eaten little and had never been known to sleep. Sometimes he was seen to be sitting apart and weeping silently; sometimes he was moving from room to room, as if every spot on which his eye could rest was charged with the memory of happy days that were dead; sometimes he was heard in the white room in which Thora lay--the room in which she had been so merry and so sad, so wild with delirium and so happy with her baby--and there he was sobbing out his wild regrets in muffled cries of "Forgive me! Forgive me!" Once in the middle of the night he was heard at the harmonium in the room below the death chamber, playing softly a pitiful lament which awakened his father and mother and brought the salt tears to their eyes.The desolate soul in these ghastly hours was prostrating itself in the dust. Death strikes sternly, and Oscar in his penitence was accusing himself of every crime. He had killed Thora--not her body only, but her heart, that faithful heart which had loved him so deeply, so tenderly, so passionately.In this conscience-stricken condition he looked back on the path of his life with Thora, and every step as he now saw it seemed to be thick set with the stubble of sin and rank with the weeds of self-deception. When he returned from England he had taken Thora from Magnus, although he did not love her. It was true he had thought he loved her, but the brotherly thing would have been to stand back in silence, and if he had only done so Time itself would have undeceived him.That was the first of his offenses, and the next was no less hideous. When, being betrothed to Thora, he awoke to the certainty that his heart was with Helga, he had gone on with his bargain and led the girl who loved him into a loveless marriage. It was true he thought he was doing his duty, but behind duty was fear, fear of the world and fear of Magnus, while the courageous thing, the manly thing, even the merciful thing would have been to stop at the church door, if need be, and face the facts and take the consequences.But having cheated Thora of her love and lied to her at the altar, he had crowned the sum of his sins by exposing himself to the temptation of infidelity. It was true that Thora herself, in her innocent affection, had paved the way to this temptation; true, too, that his marriage had been an imperfect partnership; but all the same his course had been clear and he should have cut himself off from Helga at once and for ever. That he had not done so, that he had paltered with temptation was the last cause of this terrible calamity. Thora had died because her heart was dead, and he himself had killed it.Thus the desolate soul of the unhappy man laid down its faults at the feet of God, hiding nothing, palliating nothing, and seeing everything in naked light. If to be sorry for having sinned is to be innocent, Oscar had ceased to be guilty in his pitiful, but useless, sorrow. In the dizzy hours of pain and shame, when the wheel of life goes rapidly, Oscar asked himself how it had come to pass that Thora was dead, and something whispered "Helga," and again and yet again something whispered "Helga," but his heart would not listen to that excuse. Helga had not been to blame. He alone had been at fault. He had sacrificed Thora to his ambitious dreams--his dreams of greatness, of glory. Helga had been merely the symbol of those dreams, and Thora was dead because he had tried to become a great musician.But the past was past, and when Oscar asked himself what punishment he could impose upon himself for the future, he heard but one answer. If his ambitions had been the cause of his sin, to bury them would be the true expression of his repentance. Hewouldbury them. He would bury his genius and the expectation of becoming a composer in the grave of the sweet girl he had destroyed, and go through the rest of his life in the drudgery of the nearest duty, eating the bread of affliction in obscurity and remorse.When Oscar first attempted to carry out this resolution, it was in a scene of such tragic beauty that no one who witnessed it could ever afterward wipe it out of mind. The family had gathered for that last office of love, which makes perhaps the saddest moment of human experience--sadder than the moment of turning away from the newly covered grave, sadder even that the moment of returning to the void and empty home--the moment when the coffin-lid is closed down and the beloved face disappears for ever.The death chamber was the same that in a better time had been the bridal chamber, but the air which had tingled with all exquisite thoughts of life was now heavy with the hush of death. It was night-time and the same lamp burned under the same shade, while a gilt-edged prayer-book lay in a circle of lighted candles on the little table that stood by the bed. Besides the members of the family, only two persons were present--one of the sewing-maids, who had made the wedding-dress for the cathedral, and had just put the last stitch to the garment intended for a darker house, and a joiner in his shirt-sleeves.One by one the family approached the bed to take their last look at the burden that lay on it--the Governor with a solemn tread, as if he had been approaching the presence of a king, the Factor with rigid strides and a bewildered stare, and Helga with a nervous step and a furtive glance, as if duty had called her and she wished herself away. But Anna and Aunt Margret moved about the body without dread or ceremony, laying flowers on the bosom and smoothing the soft hair that was dressed down the cheek, as if the dear dead belonged to them by right of nature, and they would give it up to no one until Earth herself, the mother of us all, should claim it for her own.The man in the shirt-sleeves had stepped forward to finish his task when the Governor held up his hand."Wait! Where is Oscar?" he asked, and then Maria, the old housemaid, who had been weeping noiselessly outside the door, was sent to fetch him.While Maria was away, Aunt Margret went up to Thora and whispered over her:"My precious, precious pet! You never changed to your stupid old auntie, did you?--not even when she kept your dear baby away from you and your sweet heart was broken! Don't think she didn't love you for all that, my precious. She loved you every minute, my own. And now that she has got your baby she intends to keep it. She will keep it as long as she lives, so don't you ever be troubled about that, Thora. Aunt Margret is going to be a mother to your little girl, and nobody in the world shall ever touch a hair of your darling's head."It was at this moment that Oscar entered the room, with old Maria creeping up behind him. His pale cheeks and sunken eyes testified to the strength of his remorse, but his step was firm and his whole figure showed intense vitality of will. He carried a bundle of papers in one hand, and they were loose and irregular, as if they had been snatched up hurriedly at the moment he was called. In the utter absorption of his mood he seemed to be unconscious of anybody or anything in the room except one thing--the thing that lay upon the bed--and walking up to it he looked down at the white face and spoke to it as if the dead--and the dead alone--could hear."Thora," he said in a calm voice, "these are the only copies of my compositions, and I wish you to take them with you. They were written in hours when your faithful heart was suffering through my fault--when I neglected you and deserted you for the sake of my foolish visions of art and greatness. That was the real cause of your death, Thora, and in punishment of myself for sacrificing your sweet life to my selfish dreams, I wish to bury the fruits of them in your grave. Take them, then, and let them lie with you and fade with you and be forgotten. I will never write another note of music as long as I live, and from this hour onward my ambitions are at an end."Saying this he put the papers beside the body of Thora and wrapped them in the long plaits of her beautiful hair."Oscar! Oscar!" cried Helga in breathless horror.The others listened and looked on, hardly realizing what Oscar had resigned, but Helga realized it, and she was trying to warn him against the life-long sacrifice. But he did not seem, to hear her, and at such a moment further remonstrance was impossible."My sweet girl," said Oscar, stretching both arms over the bed, "forgive me for all my failures of duty. Oh, what I would give to forget them now; but I can't, I can't! You are gone, and I can never make amends."Thinking to put an end to a scene which was touching everybody too deeply, the Governor signed to the man in the shirt-sleeves, but when the man stepped forward Oscar's grief broke out afresh, and in the vehemence of his sorrow his tongue lost all control of itself."Not yet!" he cried. "Oh, God! Thora! My wife! My sweet young wife! Let me look at her face again! How bright and happy it used to be, and now it is leaving me like this! Forgive me, my angel! Say you forgive me before you go! I can not live without your forgiveness! I wronged you and sinned against you, but you were good and your childlike heart was from God!"The desolate cry rang through the room, and each of those who heard the revelation of the naked soul read it by the light of his own. Helga trembled and turned to the window, the Governor and the Factor dropped their heads, but Aunt Margret cried openly in innocent sympathy, and Anna touched Oscar's arm and tried to comfort him.After a moment Oscar became more calm and even signed to the man himself, and when all was over he walked firmly and courageously out of the room.XOn the day of the funeral Oscar was weak and ill, and more fit for his bed than for a journey to the cemetery, but no one could prevail on him not to go. The morning was dull and drear, with black clouds from the mountains and some sprinklings of rain, and when the dread hour struck, and Oscar came down among the mourners, his face looked ghastly in the void and heavy air.The bell in the cathedral tower began to toll, the solemn burden was borne slowly down the stairs, and then Oscar's white face became yet more white and he would have fallen but for his father's arm which held him up.The body was first rested on the green outside the door, and while the mourners grouped themselves round in a wide half-circle to sing a parting hymn, Oscar stood bareheaded in the drizzling rain which had begun to fall.John, the servant, stood at the gate, holding Silvertop, Thora's pony, which he had brought from the farm to carry her on her last journey, and the sight of this horse seemed to be more than Oscar could bear. The coffin was laid cross-wise on the panniers and the procession began to form. It passed through deep lines of the townspeople, Oscar walking first after the body, alone, bareheaded and conscious of nothing but his grief. The bell was still tolling and a Sabbath quiet had fallen over the town.The cathedral was crowded with the same faces that had looked on at Thora's wedding, when she came down from the altar in her bloom and beauty, happy and smiling on her husband's arm; and now that she was being carried up to it, while the organ played the funeral march, and Oscar walked with drooping head behind, the people nearest the aisle said he was weeping audibly.The coffin in its pall was set down on the steps to the communion rail--the spot where Thora had knelt as a young girl to be confirmed and as a bride to be married--and then the Bishop who had been waiting to receive it delivered a consolatory address.They should not ask themselves why this sweet and lovely life had been so ruthlessly cut off. The ways of Providence were inscrutable, but God was in heaven and the Judge of all the earth did right. Neither should the family who were there to mourn take blame to themselves for what had occurred, for if it had pleased the Almighty to lay His hand on the afflicted brain of their dear departed sister. He knew best why He did so, and to what end it was done. Rather let them kneel in gratitude to God that in His mercy He had not suffered her to lift her hand against herself, and so rob them of the blessed hope of eternal life."To the young husband who is here plunged in sorrow," said the Bishop, "what can we say but that all our hearts go out to him? It seems only yesterday that he stood on this spot to make his vows before heaven and before men to love and cherish the dear girl who has been so suddenly taken away. If she had lived he would have kept his promises, and though she is gone, he will preserve the spirit of them still. The pure and innocent soul who linked her life with his life will be an abiding memory, a perpetual inspiration against sin, and when the first pangs of grief are over, a constant solace and a lasting joy."If it was possible for Oscar to look more wan and weak than when he went into the cathedral, he did so when he came out of it. The rain was now falling heavily, but when the procession was formed again for the last stage of the journey, he walked bareheaded as before.The Factor, who was behind Oscar (with Helga quivering on his arm), begged him to put on his hat, but he refused, and when the Governor, who came next with Anna, passed up an umbrella, he shook his head and sent it back. The bell tolled again, the little town sat quiet, and the townspeople who wept floods of tears for Thora, wept for Oscar even more.When the procession reached the cemetery the rain was coming down in torrents and even the priest put an overcoat over his cassock, but Oscar stood uncovered by the open grave. During the short prayer--"dust to dust"--he suffered visibly, and during the long hymn that is always sung at an Icelandic funeral, while the grave is being filled in, the hollow thuds of the falling earth seemed to beat upon his twitching face.When all was at an end he could not be drawn away until his father took him by the arm and said in a firm voice, "Come." Then with a stronger step he walked with a remnant of the broken procession across the little cemetery--the hummocked home-field of the dead--through the gate to the road--where Hans, the water-carrier in the sleeveless waistcoat Thora had made for him, was giving water to her horse--past the Factor's house--where Aunt Margret watched at a window with the baby in her arms--and thus back to his empty home.At the foot of the stairs he excused himself when the mourners went in to their meal, and he was seen no more that day.The dinner was a cheerless thing, being served in the room that had witnessed the home-coming, and so chilled with memories of that happier event. Silently, or in whispers, the mourners bade their adieus and crept away one by one, leaving the few remaining members of the two families with wide spaces between them at the table like gaps in a toothless skull.The Governor and the Factor had not spoken since their return from the Proclamation, and the interval of silence had made the rift between the two old friends grow wide."Ah, well!" yawned the Factor, "it's all over, I suppose."Then he turned to the Governor and asked sharply, "Where is Magnus? I've seen nothing of him to-day."The Governor did not answer and Anna dropped her head, and then Helga, who was the only other person present, said quietly:"Somebody saw him at the Hotel--he did right not to come to the funeral--they say he was not quite sober.""Just like him," said the Factor. "A yell is all you hear of a wolf, and but for his last drinking bout, perhaps nothing of this would have happened."The Governor's proud face quivered, but he did not speak, and soon afterward the Factor and Helga went away.XIEarly next morning, before the household was astir, the Governor was in his bureau, ready to begin on the arrears of business, when somebody knocked at the door. It was Magnus, white and worn, but sober and serious as a judge."May I speak to you, sir?" said Magnus."Well--perhaps for a moment--come in," said the Governor.It occurred to the Governor as Magnus entered the bureau that he had come for money to help him with the farm, and he said immediately:"If you have come for financial assistance toward stock and seed and what not, I ought to tell you at once, Magnus, that I have nothing to give you. I have already spent as much on the farm as I am justified in spending--more perhaps than I ought to have spent on the inheritance of one of my sons in justice to the claims of the other one--and if it is money--ready money----""I do not come to ask for money," said Magnus. "But I come to speak about it," he added, and then he sat on a low seat and twisted his felt hat between his knees, while the Governor leaned back in his desk-chair and fingered a pen."I wish to ask," said Magnus, "whether you drew, about six months ago, a bill on the Bank of Denmark for one hundred thousand crowns."The Governor uttered a contemptuous snort and said, "Certainly not; I have never drawn a bill in my life and never shall do so. Why do you ask?""Because a bill for that amount is in town at this moment," said Magnus."Then it is a forgery--an impudent forgery--and the forger must be found and promptly punished."The Governor had risen in his chair when he looked at Magnus's drooping head and a thought occurred to him."But are you sure of what you say? Is this story true?" he asked."I have seen the paper myself," replied Magnus."And it is signed in my name?""It is signed in your name, sir, and witnessed in the name of the Factor.""That, too," said the Governor, while a painful smile came into his face. "And pray whom is this extraordinary document drawn in favor of?"Magnus did not reply immediately--he continued to twist his hat between his knees."That may help us to find the motive, and therefore the forger--who is it?""Oscar Stephenson," said Magnus."Oscar? Your brother?""Yes, sir--and the money was paid to him in Paris.""What?" cried the Governor, crossing the floor. "You tell me that Oscar--your brother Oscar--has committed a forgery? Oh, that's what you mean--don't deny it--you mean that my son is a forger?"Magnus made no answer, and after a moment the painful smile about the Governor's face broke into a more painful laugh. "But why do I trouble myself with such a trumpery story? I see how it is, Magnus--strong drink is a strong tongue--you have been drinking.""I have been drinking, sir--I was ill and I couldn't help it--but I'm sober now, and what I tell you is God's truth."Magnus rose as he said this and father and son stood face to face--the little Governor in his uniform with flushed cheeks and pigeon-breast distended, and Magnus big, black, clumsy, unkempt, and with lines of suffering in his face."And this document, you tell me, is at present in Iceland?""It is, sir--two officers of the law brought it here from Copenhagen.""Officers of the law, you say?""The bank found reasons to suspect the signatures, so they sent across to verify them.""You have talked with these men yourself, no doubt?""The Sheriff brought them to see me," said Magnus."The Sheriff, too! The Sheriff of all men!""He is to bring the two men here to-morrow morning.""So he is to bring them here to-morrow morning!"The Governor, though heated and agitated, laughed once more, and said with a sneer:"Of course, in the interests of the family, you felt it necessary to examine the signatures they showed you?""I did," said Magnus simply."And without consulting me to denounce the forger?"Magnus made no reply."And even to hint--only to hint--that perhaps you could point to the forger?"Still Magnus made no answer, and dropping his cynical tone, the Governor burst out in choking anger:"Out on you, man, out on you! I thought you were drunk, or suffering from the delusions of drink, but you are worse--you are sweltering in hatred--and it is an unnatural hatred, too--the hatred of your own flesh and blood."Magnus flinched as if a lash had cut him through the skin."You are jealous of your brother--always have been, always will be--because he is clever and successful and amiable and because everybody loves him--you are as jealous of your brother as Cain was of Abel, and this is your way of destroying him."Magnus stood with drooping head while the Governor's lash fell over him."Aren't you ashamed to stand before your father and parade the whole diabolical catalogue of your unnatural passions? You allow yourself to consort with my enemies, with Oscar's enemies, with your own enemies, if you had the sense to see it, while they try to bring him down at the highest moment of his success."The Governor was walking to and fro and lashing himself into a fury."At the deepest moment of his distress, too! Just when the poor boy is unmanned by the loss of his wife--the dear girl he loved and you insulted. But I don't believe one word of this cock-and-bull story. That accursed document is nothing but a trick to dishonor my son and to discredit me at the very time when a pack of rascals who call themselves reformers are trying to abolish the Governorship. Let them do it if they can, but while I am Governor here I'm master in this house, and Mr. Sheriff shall be suspended and those men sent back to Copenhagen.""Hadn't you better speak to Oscar first, sir?" said Magnus."Certainly, I shall, and if I find as I expect--as I am sure--that your story is a pack of falsehoods--let me never see your face again."Without a word of defense or explanation, Magnus left the room, and a few minutes afterward Oscar, at the call of the Governor, entered it.Oscar's face was as pale as yesterday, but with a different pallor, a different expression--an expression not of grief and regret, but of fear and shame."Oscar," said the Governor, "I am sorry to trouble you about business so soon after your great sorrow, but an ugly story is being told about you in town, and as every lie has its tail, it is only right that you should hear of this one immediately, so that it may be quashed without delay."Oscar's lower lip trembled--he felt the blow before it fell."Magnus--your brother Magnus--I am aware he has not been on brotherly terms with you--your mother has told me something about that--and let me say I do not sympathize with his protests and pretensions--I think them nothing but an excuse for his own selfishness--Magnus has just been here, and he tells me that a note of hand drawn in your favor for no less a sum than one hundred thousand crowns has been forged in my name. I do not believe the story and I do not want you to discuss it. I only ask you to contradict it--to contradict it flatly--or to leave me to deal with the real offender as I think best."Oscar, standing by the Governor's desk, remained for a moment quite still. Then in a voice so low that it hardly seemed to come from him, he said:"I can not contradict it, father. What Magnus has told you is true.""True? You say it istrue?"Father and son stood facing each other for some moments without a word more being spoken. Then in hot words, broken by breathless pauses, the Governor poured out question after question, to which Oscar made no answer."You received that sum and signed for it in your father's name?--in the name of your father-in-law also? One hundred thousand crowns? What has become of the money?""It is lost," said Oscar."Lost?""It was to pay the debts I had already contracted.""Was that at Monte Carlo?""Yes."There was another long silence, in which Oscar stood with quivering lips and the Governor with contracted brows."But this document--how did it come about?""I ask myself that question over and over again, father, and I fail to find an answer. I can not understand myself--I try and I can not.""Were you mad?""Sometimes I think I was--I must have been.""Did somebody tempt you--put the idea into your head?--somebody, perhaps, who helped you to lose and promised to help you to repay? If so, who was it?""I do not wish to accuse anybody, father--I suppose I have no right to do so.""Right? Don't talk to me about rights. Think about your duties--and the first of your duties is to me, not to the person, whoever it may be, who has helped to destroy you. You have pledged my credit and my honor, but I don't want to think you altogether bad, and if anybody suggested this devilish device to pay your debts, I ought to be told who it was. Was it Helga?"At the mention of that name Oscar's drooping head drooped lower still; the Governor saw this and then he understood everything."Lord God forgive us," he said, in a breathless whisper. "Then Magnus was right, after all! And the death of the poor child we buried yesterday was perhaps a part of the diabolical harvest we are reaping to-day! You needn't wince, sir--I see it's true without that."Oscar did not attempt to excuse himself, and after some moments of silence the Governor spoke again."You have deceived and disappointed me, Oscar. I thought I had one son who was an intelligent man and a gentleman, not a forger and a fool. But it is of no use to prolong a painful interview. You may go."Oscar staggered out of the room and the Governor sank into his chair.
VII
That day had been a prolonged triumph for Oscar. The festival of the Proclamation began with service in the parish church, and though the Governor and the Thingmen only had been able to pack into the little place, the churchyard outside and the home-field of the parsonage had been thronged.
After the service there was a procession from the church door to the ancient place of proclamation, and Oscar had ordered and marshaled every one. First the town band, then the Governor and his executive in their gold-braided uniforms, the Bishop in his robes, the Thingmen in their scarfs, the clergy in their black cassocks and white ruffs, and finally a vast following of the people. It was a gorgeous spectacle, such as no man could remember to have seen on that spot before.
The Proclamation itself was an imposing ceremony. Sitting on the law-mount as on a natural platform of lava rock, with his face to the east and the Cross of Dannebrog on his breast, the Governor read out one by one the titles and descriptions of the Acts which had been passed by Parliament; and after each of them he lifted his head and cried to the people on the plains below, "Is it Yea or Nay?" And then the people, led by Oscar, shouted "Yea."
When the reading was finished the Governor cried, "Long live the King," whereupon Oscar led the cheering, three times three, and when the band struck up the national hymn he started the words of the chorus.
But the last feature of the function was the best, and that was the singing of the hymn composed by Oscar himself. It was a hymn to Iceland, the cradle of the Vikings, the scene of the Sagas, the parent of parliaments, the mother of the mighty Northlands.
Standing under the brant face of the law-mount with his choir of one hundred and fifty on the sloping ground in front, Oscar conducted with great vigor. His prelude pleased the people, but when he rose to the height of his argument and struck the patriotic note, his love for the stern old Northland--
"Isafold! My Isafold! Great land of frost and fire,"
"Isafold! My Isafold! Great land of frost and fire,"
"Isafold! My Isafold! Great land of frost and fire,"
his hearers were carried away and some of them shouted and wept.
After the hymn was over the Thingmen crowded about Oscar to congratulate him and some of the country-people fell upon his neck. The Governor, too, sitting above, was the object of many congratulations. "But this is genius," said one. "An inspiration," said another. "Our Oscar will be a great musician some day," said a third. And the old man took the tributes quietly, almost silently, but with the shining face of a father proud of his favorite son.
When the ceremonies ended only one name was on everybody's lips, and that was the name of Oscar Stephenson, and hundreds hummed the strains of "Isafold! My Isafold!" as they trooped off to dinner.
Oscar and Helga dined together at the Inn-farm in a corner of the hall which was thronged with guests. But they were both too much excited to remain in mixed company, and after dinner they escaped to the margin of the lake and to the solitary parts of the plain. There they gathered blueberries and, partly to restrain their excitement and partly to nourish it, they talked of nothing but the wild flowers.
When the sun began to sink they returned by way of the parsonage, where the Governor, with the Factor, the Bishop and certain other officials had taken their dinner apart. The little guest room was dense with smoke, like the mouth of a geyser, and the faces that came and went in it were discussing the merits and defects of the old order and the new. Both Governor and Factor were for the old, as exemplified by the day's ceremony and Oscar's hymn, but others held that changing times brought changing needs and that Iceland would be the better for a new constitution, with Free Trade and modern methods.
"They'll go on till midnight and never get home to-night," whispered Helga, as she slipped out with Oscar.
On returning to the farm they found people striking tents and leading horses from the crowded horsefold to prepare for the return journey.
"I'm afraid I'm too tired to go back to-night," said Helga.
"Then stay--stay by all means," said Oscar.
"And you?" asked Helga.
"I must go home in any case--there's Thora," said Oscar.
"Your mother will look after her," said Helga.
But Oscar shook his head, and ordered Gudrun, the housekeeper, to make one of the two guest-rooms ready for Helga.
At that moment some young townspeople were clearing the floor for a dance and they called on Oscar and Helga to lead off with a waltz. They did so with great delight, and when the waltz was finished they joined the round dance which followed it, and then they danced a second and a third waltz, until they were flushed and hot and had to go out to cool.
By this time it was dark, and the people who meant to encamp for the night had lighted fires at the mouths of their tents and were beguiling the hours with various pleasures. One of these was fortune-telling. An old woman, not thought to be overwise, was going from tent to tent, making random shots amid shrieks of laughter.
"And what do you see here?" said Helga, holding out her hand.
"Ah, this is a good hand," said the witch. "You are going to be a great lady and eat mutton and beef every day and drink golden wine and ginger."
"And what do you see in this?" asked Oscar
"This? Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" said the witch.
"What's amiss, mother?"
"Cold water runs between my skin and my flesh."
"Is it as bad as that, old lady?"
"Don't ask me--don't ask me! You have a brother, haven't you?"
"And if I have, what about him?"
"Beware--beware!" said the witch, and Oscar and Helga turned away laughing.
The moon rose and they wandered into the great chasm, and walked among the shadows of the toppling stones, until they came under a huge stone called Stoker, which stands like a mighty gravestone over a deep pit that is like a tomb. There they sat, with the white moon above and the red camp fires below them, and then the boiling, bubbling geyser of excitement in their breasts could be kept down no longer.
"You have had a great success to-day, Oscar," said Helga.
"So have you, Helga, so have you, for without your presence to prompt and inspire me I should have done nothing."
"I am happy if I have helped you, Oscar, but you must go on now, and never look back--never."
"You are right, Helga, you are right--to stop would be a sin--an unpardonable sin--almost like a sin against the Holy Ghost."
"Exactly like it, Oscar, for if any one has a gift he gets it from God, and to bury it, like the man in the parable----"
"There would be no fear of that if I could have you beside me always, Helga."
"And can't you, Oscar?"
A fragrance seemed to envelop him. He felt Helga's breath upon his face. It made him tremble all over.
"Would to God I could, but it is impossible. You will return to Denmark----"
"Not I, indeed! I am not without my own ambitious also. I must go back to England, to France, to Germany, to Italy. And so must you, Oscar--you must, if you are to be true to your talents and to yourself and to the great future----"
"I know it, Helga, I feel it, and if I could write even one song that would stir the souls of millions it would be better than making a fortune or passing an act of parliament. But when a man has given hostages to fortune, and they are dragging him down--with silken threads, perhaps--but still down, down, down----"
He was speaking out of a dry and husky throat, but she answered softly and sweetly, "Are things so absolutely irretrievable, Oscar?"
"Absolutely, Helga, absolutely; and henceforth and all my life long I must learn to go without your comradeship----"
"And what must I do?"
The compulsion of passion was driving him on, but he was struggling to hold back. "Helga," he cried, "do you know what is the deadliest thing in life? It is Love. The painters paint Love as a harmless little Cupid, with a handkerchief about his eyes and a tiny bow and arrow in his hands. But Love is a great, blind, blundering monster with a two-edged sword, dealing destruction on every side."
His words were as nothing, but his quivering voice sang like music in Helga's ears, and she said, "Is it Love or man that does that, Oscar--man with the false sense of right and wrong, his foolish ideals of honor?"
"God knows! Perhaps if I could have thought so a year ago, before I added injury to injury and brought unhappiness on others--but now--now----"
A sensation of triumph came to her and she said, "Isn't it cowardly to talk like that, Oscar?"
"I am a coward, Helga," he answered, trembling from head to foot; "to you I can speak the truth--I am a coward, a moral coward, and I can not face the certainty----"
"But if," said Helga excitedly, getting closer, "you had some one beside you who had the courage of life, the defiance of life----"
"Helga!" cried Oscar, breathing heavily--the earth seemed to be slipping under him like an avalanche.
"Some one who would go on helping you, and ask nothing but your comradeship----"
"Helga! Helga!" He was gasping as for breath in the intoxication of his emotion.
"Nothing but to work with you and to conquer the world with you----"
"Helga! Helga! Helga!"
"Oscar!"
There was a breathless cry from both, and then an almost inaudible whisper, "I shall not go back to-night, Helga."
* * * * *
When they came to themselves again they were returning--more flushed and excited than before--out of the white moonlight into the yellow mist of the smoking lamp that hung over the dancers in the hall. The young townspeople received them with a shout and called on them to join the dance they were dancing. It was called "Weaving the Cloth," and the figures were intended to represent the spinning and carding, the weaving, stretching, hammering and rolling of the thick Icelandic Vadmal.
The dancers crossed and recrossed, twisted each other about, beat each other breast against breast, and finally rolled each other round and round.
The music was going fast, and the dancers were singing loud and laughing louder, when there came from outside the sudden barking of dogs, followed by the clatter of the hoofs of a galloping horse. Immediately afterward there was the rattle of the metal end of a riding-whip against a window-pane, and a voice crying, "God be with you!"
The new-comer did not wait for the customary answer to his salutation, but pushed the door open and entered hurriedly. It was Magnus, dusty and dirty, with a white face and wild eyes.
At that moment Oscar and Helga, blushing and smiling, were in the middle of the floor, locked in each other's arms, performing the last figure of the dance, and it was thus that Magnus came face to face with them.
"Is she here?" he cried.
"She?"
"Thora! She is lost--I thought she might have found a horse and followed you."
Then the shuffling feet stopped, and the fiddles tailed off into silence as Magnus, in broken sentences, told the story of Thora's flight to the Factor's, her disappearance with the child, and the vain search that had been made for her.
"But surely she would go back to Government House eventually," said Oscar. "The poor girl would go the long way round to escape observation and home by way of the lake. Did nobody think of that, and stay in the house to see?"
Magnus looked like a man whose eyes, dulled by groping in a dark tunnel, had been stunned by sudden light. Before the others had recovered themselves he had turned about and was gone.
At the next moment Oscar was tramping to and fro on the floor, with his clinched fists to his forehead, moaning, "My God! My God!" Helga was combing her hair and putting on her wraps.
VIII
John, the servant at the farm, was sent over to the parsonage to tell the Governor and the Factor. He found the gentlemen settling themselves for the night, having talked so long that they had decided to remain until morning. But the news of Thora's disappearance altered everything.
"We must go back immediately," said the Governor.
"Bring the horses round instantly," said the Factor.
Less than half an hour afterward a silent and gloomy company were going home--the Governor, the Factor, Oscar, Helga, and a various following of the sympathetic and the inquisitive.
The two old friends were morose and ill-tempered, and for the first time in fifty years disposed to nag and quarrel. The Governor blamed Aunt Margret, the Factor blamed Anna; the Governor blamed Helga, the Factor blamed Oscar; the Governor blamed the Factor, and the Factor blamed the Governor. In the half light of uncertainty and suspense their friendship fell before fear, and blood was thicker than water.
It was a miserable home-going to Oscar. The explanation of Thora's movements with which he had surprised Magnus soon ceased to satisfy himself and he thought of a hundred fatal consequences. Helga tried to comfort him with various plausible arguments. He had acted for the best--the best for Thora, the best for the child, the best for himself, the best for everybody--and if accident had intervened or the dreadful freaks of dementia had followed, he was not responsible and could not be blamed.
But Oscar's worst sufferings were from a secret purgatory which Helga's pleadings did not touch, for the cruelest part of his remorse concerned Helga herself.
The journey was long and tiresome and every step had its own peculiar misery. During the first hour the moon was shining--a brilliant moon that bathed everything in loveliness--and Oscar remembered the scene in the chasm and reflected that in the very hour of his delirious happiness Thora, perhaps, was lying dead.
Then the moon died out and darkness fell--a murky darkness, blacker than the lava--and as Oscar pushed and plunged along over the stumbles of his pony, the thought came to him that if Thora were dead perhaps it was the best that could have happened to her--the best under the circumstances--saving her from the bitterness of a future which must surely come when Helga and he, struggle as they might, would have to break the bonds that bound them.
And then in that dark and treacherous hour, with no face to look into his face, he felt an immense relief, remembering that if Thora was gone, the consequences of his life's error were at an end and he was free.
But the dawn came--a bleared, rainy dawn, with scarfs of vapor stretching across the sun like a cataract over a blood-shot eye--and Oscar's remorse was doubled by the wounds he had inflicted upon his conscience in the darkness, and he dare not look at Helga as she rode, muffled up and silent, by his side.
They were crossing the Moss Fell Heath by this time, and everything around was dark and drear. A solitary raven kept them cheerless company for a while, flying from beacon to beacon and uttering its husky cry. Oscar remembered the scenes of yesterday when the sky was blue, and their blood was warm, and then the thought came to him--like the shooting of the bolt on a man buried in a tomb--that if he was not to be henceforward the most miserable of men he must pray with all his soul and strength that when they reached the end of their journey Thora should be alive.
On reaching the more inhabited districts Oscar allowed the Governor and the Factor to forge on ahead, and Helga to wait for him in the road, while he glanced off to the farmhouses and shouted up at the bedroom windows. But the result was always the same--Thora had not been seen and Magnus had been there before him.
When they came to the top of the hill from which they had looked back on Reykjavik and on the Danish mail-steamer entering the fiord, the little capital floated in the mist of morning like a city in a woolly sea, and the "Laura" lay anchored outside of it; but the apprehensions of yesterday were consumed by the fears of to-day, and Oscar thought of one thing alone.
They met farmers trotting out of the town on their little caravans of ponies, yet Oscar did not question them, lest he should hear the news he dare not listen to, and coming at length to the long street of the little capital, he did not raise his face to the eyes that peered at him through the curtains of upper windows, lest they should reveal the truth he dared not learn.
The fear of disaster had by this time swallowed up any flicker of hope in Oscar, and when, coming up to Government House, he found a crowd of people standing in front of it, he knew too well that all was over. From that moment onward fact after fact led up to the fatal certainty.
The window of Thora's bedroom--the window at which Oscar had shouted his adieus the day before--stood open, and a ladder had been raised against it. By the gate to the green a horse lay dead on the gravel--it was Magnus's horse, his magnificent Golden Mane--covered with dust and sweat, as it fell under its rider at the last step of his fearful journey.
In the middle of the hall Anna and Aunt Margret stood with the Governor and the Factor, sobbing out their pitiful explanations. Afraid to return to the empty house which had been the scene of a painful memory, Anna had sat the night through with Margret at the Factor's, waiting hour after hour for the reports of the Sheriff and his constables. Nothing had been heard of Thora, but in the early morning Magnus had returned and found the door of her room locked on the inside. Then he had run for them and they had called to Thora, but received no answer, though sometimes they heard the baby crying. And now Magnus, having failed to force the door, had gone for a ladder, and he intended to climb into the room from the outside.
Oscar was conscious of no more until he found himself knocking at Thora's door and calling in his agony:
"Thora! Thora! Thora!"
There was a heavy, staggering step inside the room; the lock was thrust back and the door thrown open.
"Thora!" cried Oscar again, but it was Magnus who stood before him--Magnus with a face white and set and full of anger and hatred.
"You were right," he said, pointing to the bed. "There she is with God--and you!"
Thora lay high on the pillow, with her eyes open and her parted lips smiling, as if she had just awakened from a beautiful dream. She was dead, but her baby was alive, and it was rolling its little round head and digging its red hand into her cold, white breast.
With a low, choking cry, Oscar fell to his knees at the bedside and buried his face in the bedclothes. Magnus left the room, the others entered it, and Aunt Margret lifted the living child out of the mother's breast over the father's kneeling form.
IX
During the few days before the funeral the Government House felt motionless and empty, like a room when the clock has stopped in it. Behind the drawn blinds everybody talked in whispers, as if the dead were asleep and must not be wakened. The stillness of the house centered in the room where Thora lay, and that was white and fresh with the odor of clean linen and wild flowers. In the deadened sunshine, as it filtered through the yellow blinds, there was a halo about the waxen face on the bed, and it seemed to diffuse solemnity on all around it.
Anna never allowed herself to be long away from this chamber. Her fear of the room had gone, now that death had entered it. Early and late, in daylight and dark, she went to and fro in the silent place, walking softly and seeming to count the hours during which her dear girl would be above ground.
The Governor did nothing from the day of Thora's death until the day of her burial. Dressed always in his official uniform he sat in his bureau, but received no one. He wrote no letters and read no books and seldom spoke at his meals. For hours together he would sit with folded arms looking fixedly at the pattern on the carpet. A shadow had fallen on him--a shadow of shame--and in the sealed chamber of his proud soul he was struggling to reconcile his conduct to himself and finding it difficult to do so.
The Factor went on with his work as usual, for in the decalogue of his duty there was no maxim that forbade business, but sometimes as he turned the leaves of his ledger he looked long and saw nothing, and once, as he counted up the figures in his bank-book, the thought smote him with the force of a blow on the brain that perhaps Nature was beginning to strike a balance with him against the sum of his successors, and that the cruel bereavement which had just befallen him was the first stroke of the Nemesis which was to follow in the wake of his wealth.
Aunt Margret and Helga were always at home, the one busy with the baby, which had been taken back to the Factor's, and the other with the "black" which had to be ordered for everybody.
Little was known of Magnus, except that he was still in town, that he had been seen with the Sheriff and two strangers, that in spite of the trouble which had overtaken his family he was spending most of his time in the dark smoking-room of the Hotel, and that he was said to be drinking heavily.
But the grief of Oscar touched and satisfied everybody. He had eaten little and had never been known to sleep. Sometimes he was seen to be sitting apart and weeping silently; sometimes he was moving from room to room, as if every spot on which his eye could rest was charged with the memory of happy days that were dead; sometimes he was heard in the white room in which Thora lay--the room in which she had been so merry and so sad, so wild with delirium and so happy with her baby--and there he was sobbing out his wild regrets in muffled cries of "Forgive me! Forgive me!" Once in the middle of the night he was heard at the harmonium in the room below the death chamber, playing softly a pitiful lament which awakened his father and mother and brought the salt tears to their eyes.
The desolate soul in these ghastly hours was prostrating itself in the dust. Death strikes sternly, and Oscar in his penitence was accusing himself of every crime. He had killed Thora--not her body only, but her heart, that faithful heart which had loved him so deeply, so tenderly, so passionately.
In this conscience-stricken condition he looked back on the path of his life with Thora, and every step as he now saw it seemed to be thick set with the stubble of sin and rank with the weeds of self-deception. When he returned from England he had taken Thora from Magnus, although he did not love her. It was true he had thought he loved her, but the brotherly thing would have been to stand back in silence, and if he had only done so Time itself would have undeceived him.
That was the first of his offenses, and the next was no less hideous. When, being betrothed to Thora, he awoke to the certainty that his heart was with Helga, he had gone on with his bargain and led the girl who loved him into a loveless marriage. It was true he thought he was doing his duty, but behind duty was fear, fear of the world and fear of Magnus, while the courageous thing, the manly thing, even the merciful thing would have been to stop at the church door, if need be, and face the facts and take the consequences.
But having cheated Thora of her love and lied to her at the altar, he had crowned the sum of his sins by exposing himself to the temptation of infidelity. It was true that Thora herself, in her innocent affection, had paved the way to this temptation; true, too, that his marriage had been an imperfect partnership; but all the same his course had been clear and he should have cut himself off from Helga at once and for ever. That he had not done so, that he had paltered with temptation was the last cause of this terrible calamity. Thora had died because her heart was dead, and he himself had killed it.
Thus the desolate soul of the unhappy man laid down its faults at the feet of God, hiding nothing, palliating nothing, and seeing everything in naked light. If to be sorry for having sinned is to be innocent, Oscar had ceased to be guilty in his pitiful, but useless, sorrow. In the dizzy hours of pain and shame, when the wheel of life goes rapidly, Oscar asked himself how it had come to pass that Thora was dead, and something whispered "Helga," and again and yet again something whispered "Helga," but his heart would not listen to that excuse. Helga had not been to blame. He alone had been at fault. He had sacrificed Thora to his ambitious dreams--his dreams of greatness, of glory. Helga had been merely the symbol of those dreams, and Thora was dead because he had tried to become a great musician.
But the past was past, and when Oscar asked himself what punishment he could impose upon himself for the future, he heard but one answer. If his ambitions had been the cause of his sin, to bury them would be the true expression of his repentance. Hewouldbury them. He would bury his genius and the expectation of becoming a composer in the grave of the sweet girl he had destroyed, and go through the rest of his life in the drudgery of the nearest duty, eating the bread of affliction in obscurity and remorse.
When Oscar first attempted to carry out this resolution, it was in a scene of such tragic beauty that no one who witnessed it could ever afterward wipe it out of mind. The family had gathered for that last office of love, which makes perhaps the saddest moment of human experience--sadder than the moment of turning away from the newly covered grave, sadder even that the moment of returning to the void and empty home--the moment when the coffin-lid is closed down and the beloved face disappears for ever.
The death chamber was the same that in a better time had been the bridal chamber, but the air which had tingled with all exquisite thoughts of life was now heavy with the hush of death. It was night-time and the same lamp burned under the same shade, while a gilt-edged prayer-book lay in a circle of lighted candles on the little table that stood by the bed. Besides the members of the family, only two persons were present--one of the sewing-maids, who had made the wedding-dress for the cathedral, and had just put the last stitch to the garment intended for a darker house, and a joiner in his shirt-sleeves.
One by one the family approached the bed to take their last look at the burden that lay on it--the Governor with a solemn tread, as if he had been approaching the presence of a king, the Factor with rigid strides and a bewildered stare, and Helga with a nervous step and a furtive glance, as if duty had called her and she wished herself away. But Anna and Aunt Margret moved about the body without dread or ceremony, laying flowers on the bosom and smoothing the soft hair that was dressed down the cheek, as if the dear dead belonged to them by right of nature, and they would give it up to no one until Earth herself, the mother of us all, should claim it for her own.
The man in the shirt-sleeves had stepped forward to finish his task when the Governor held up his hand.
"Wait! Where is Oscar?" he asked, and then Maria, the old housemaid, who had been weeping noiselessly outside the door, was sent to fetch him.
While Maria was away, Aunt Margret went up to Thora and whispered over her:
"My precious, precious pet! You never changed to your stupid old auntie, did you?--not even when she kept your dear baby away from you and your sweet heart was broken! Don't think she didn't love you for all that, my precious. She loved you every minute, my own. And now that she has got your baby she intends to keep it. She will keep it as long as she lives, so don't you ever be troubled about that, Thora. Aunt Margret is going to be a mother to your little girl, and nobody in the world shall ever touch a hair of your darling's head."
It was at this moment that Oscar entered the room, with old Maria creeping up behind him. His pale cheeks and sunken eyes testified to the strength of his remorse, but his step was firm and his whole figure showed intense vitality of will. He carried a bundle of papers in one hand, and they were loose and irregular, as if they had been snatched up hurriedly at the moment he was called. In the utter absorption of his mood he seemed to be unconscious of anybody or anything in the room except one thing--the thing that lay upon the bed--and walking up to it he looked down at the white face and spoke to it as if the dead--and the dead alone--could hear.
"Thora," he said in a calm voice, "these are the only copies of my compositions, and I wish you to take them with you. They were written in hours when your faithful heart was suffering through my fault--when I neglected you and deserted you for the sake of my foolish visions of art and greatness. That was the real cause of your death, Thora, and in punishment of myself for sacrificing your sweet life to my selfish dreams, I wish to bury the fruits of them in your grave. Take them, then, and let them lie with you and fade with you and be forgotten. I will never write another note of music as long as I live, and from this hour onward my ambitions are at an end."
Saying this he put the papers beside the body of Thora and wrapped them in the long plaits of her beautiful hair.
"Oscar! Oscar!" cried Helga in breathless horror.
The others listened and looked on, hardly realizing what Oscar had resigned, but Helga realized it, and she was trying to warn him against the life-long sacrifice. But he did not seem, to hear her, and at such a moment further remonstrance was impossible.
"My sweet girl," said Oscar, stretching both arms over the bed, "forgive me for all my failures of duty. Oh, what I would give to forget them now; but I can't, I can't! You are gone, and I can never make amends."
Thinking to put an end to a scene which was touching everybody too deeply, the Governor signed to the man in the shirt-sleeves, but when the man stepped forward Oscar's grief broke out afresh, and in the vehemence of his sorrow his tongue lost all control of itself.
"Not yet!" he cried. "Oh, God! Thora! My wife! My sweet young wife! Let me look at her face again! How bright and happy it used to be, and now it is leaving me like this! Forgive me, my angel! Say you forgive me before you go! I can not live without your forgiveness! I wronged you and sinned against you, but you were good and your childlike heart was from God!"
The desolate cry rang through the room, and each of those who heard the revelation of the naked soul read it by the light of his own. Helga trembled and turned to the window, the Governor and the Factor dropped their heads, but Aunt Margret cried openly in innocent sympathy, and Anna touched Oscar's arm and tried to comfort him.
After a moment Oscar became more calm and even signed to the man himself, and when all was over he walked firmly and courageously out of the room.
X
On the day of the funeral Oscar was weak and ill, and more fit for his bed than for a journey to the cemetery, but no one could prevail on him not to go. The morning was dull and drear, with black clouds from the mountains and some sprinklings of rain, and when the dread hour struck, and Oscar came down among the mourners, his face looked ghastly in the void and heavy air.
The bell in the cathedral tower began to toll, the solemn burden was borne slowly down the stairs, and then Oscar's white face became yet more white and he would have fallen but for his father's arm which held him up.
The body was first rested on the green outside the door, and while the mourners grouped themselves round in a wide half-circle to sing a parting hymn, Oscar stood bareheaded in the drizzling rain which had begun to fall.
John, the servant, stood at the gate, holding Silvertop, Thora's pony, which he had brought from the farm to carry her on her last journey, and the sight of this horse seemed to be more than Oscar could bear. The coffin was laid cross-wise on the panniers and the procession began to form. It passed through deep lines of the townspeople, Oscar walking first after the body, alone, bareheaded and conscious of nothing but his grief. The bell was still tolling and a Sabbath quiet had fallen over the town.
The cathedral was crowded with the same faces that had looked on at Thora's wedding, when she came down from the altar in her bloom and beauty, happy and smiling on her husband's arm; and now that she was being carried up to it, while the organ played the funeral march, and Oscar walked with drooping head behind, the people nearest the aisle said he was weeping audibly.
The coffin in its pall was set down on the steps to the communion rail--the spot where Thora had knelt as a young girl to be confirmed and as a bride to be married--and then the Bishop who had been waiting to receive it delivered a consolatory address.
They should not ask themselves why this sweet and lovely life had been so ruthlessly cut off. The ways of Providence were inscrutable, but God was in heaven and the Judge of all the earth did right. Neither should the family who were there to mourn take blame to themselves for what had occurred, for if it had pleased the Almighty to lay His hand on the afflicted brain of their dear departed sister. He knew best why He did so, and to what end it was done. Rather let them kneel in gratitude to God that in His mercy He had not suffered her to lift her hand against herself, and so rob them of the blessed hope of eternal life.
"To the young husband who is here plunged in sorrow," said the Bishop, "what can we say but that all our hearts go out to him? It seems only yesterday that he stood on this spot to make his vows before heaven and before men to love and cherish the dear girl who has been so suddenly taken away. If she had lived he would have kept his promises, and though she is gone, he will preserve the spirit of them still. The pure and innocent soul who linked her life with his life will be an abiding memory, a perpetual inspiration against sin, and when the first pangs of grief are over, a constant solace and a lasting joy."
If it was possible for Oscar to look more wan and weak than when he went into the cathedral, he did so when he came out of it. The rain was now falling heavily, but when the procession was formed again for the last stage of the journey, he walked bareheaded as before.
The Factor, who was behind Oscar (with Helga quivering on his arm), begged him to put on his hat, but he refused, and when the Governor, who came next with Anna, passed up an umbrella, he shook his head and sent it back. The bell tolled again, the little town sat quiet, and the townspeople who wept floods of tears for Thora, wept for Oscar even more.
When the procession reached the cemetery the rain was coming down in torrents and even the priest put an overcoat over his cassock, but Oscar stood uncovered by the open grave. During the short prayer--"dust to dust"--he suffered visibly, and during the long hymn that is always sung at an Icelandic funeral, while the grave is being filled in, the hollow thuds of the falling earth seemed to beat upon his twitching face.
When all was at an end he could not be drawn away until his father took him by the arm and said in a firm voice, "Come." Then with a stronger step he walked with a remnant of the broken procession across the little cemetery--the hummocked home-field of the dead--through the gate to the road--where Hans, the water-carrier in the sleeveless waistcoat Thora had made for him, was giving water to her horse--past the Factor's house--where Aunt Margret watched at a window with the baby in her arms--and thus back to his empty home.
At the foot of the stairs he excused himself when the mourners went in to their meal, and he was seen no more that day.
The dinner was a cheerless thing, being served in the room that had witnessed the home-coming, and so chilled with memories of that happier event. Silently, or in whispers, the mourners bade their adieus and crept away one by one, leaving the few remaining members of the two families with wide spaces between them at the table like gaps in a toothless skull.
The Governor and the Factor had not spoken since their return from the Proclamation, and the interval of silence had made the rift between the two old friends grow wide.
"Ah, well!" yawned the Factor, "it's all over, I suppose."
Then he turned to the Governor and asked sharply, "Where is Magnus? I've seen nothing of him to-day."
The Governor did not answer and Anna dropped her head, and then Helga, who was the only other person present, said quietly:
"Somebody saw him at the Hotel--he did right not to come to the funeral--they say he was not quite sober."
"Just like him," said the Factor. "A yell is all you hear of a wolf, and but for his last drinking bout, perhaps nothing of this would have happened."
The Governor's proud face quivered, but he did not speak, and soon afterward the Factor and Helga went away.
XI
Early next morning, before the household was astir, the Governor was in his bureau, ready to begin on the arrears of business, when somebody knocked at the door. It was Magnus, white and worn, but sober and serious as a judge.
"May I speak to you, sir?" said Magnus.
"Well--perhaps for a moment--come in," said the Governor.
It occurred to the Governor as Magnus entered the bureau that he had come for money to help him with the farm, and he said immediately:
"If you have come for financial assistance toward stock and seed and what not, I ought to tell you at once, Magnus, that I have nothing to give you. I have already spent as much on the farm as I am justified in spending--more perhaps than I ought to have spent on the inheritance of one of my sons in justice to the claims of the other one--and if it is money--ready money----"
"I do not come to ask for money," said Magnus. "But I come to speak about it," he added, and then he sat on a low seat and twisted his felt hat between his knees, while the Governor leaned back in his desk-chair and fingered a pen.
"I wish to ask," said Magnus, "whether you drew, about six months ago, a bill on the Bank of Denmark for one hundred thousand crowns."
The Governor uttered a contemptuous snort and said, "Certainly not; I have never drawn a bill in my life and never shall do so. Why do you ask?"
"Because a bill for that amount is in town at this moment," said Magnus.
"Then it is a forgery--an impudent forgery--and the forger must be found and promptly punished."
The Governor had risen in his chair when he looked at Magnus's drooping head and a thought occurred to him.
"But are you sure of what you say? Is this story true?" he asked.
"I have seen the paper myself," replied Magnus.
"And it is signed in my name?"
"It is signed in your name, sir, and witnessed in the name of the Factor."
"That, too," said the Governor, while a painful smile came into his face. "And pray whom is this extraordinary document drawn in favor of?"
Magnus did not reply immediately--he continued to twist his hat between his knees.
"That may help us to find the motive, and therefore the forger--who is it?"
"Oscar Stephenson," said Magnus.
"Oscar? Your brother?"
"Yes, sir--and the money was paid to him in Paris."
"What?" cried the Governor, crossing the floor. "You tell me that Oscar--your brother Oscar--has committed a forgery? Oh, that's what you mean--don't deny it--you mean that my son is a forger?"
Magnus made no answer, and after a moment the painful smile about the Governor's face broke into a more painful laugh. "But why do I trouble myself with such a trumpery story? I see how it is, Magnus--strong drink is a strong tongue--you have been drinking."
"I have been drinking, sir--I was ill and I couldn't help it--but I'm sober now, and what I tell you is God's truth."
Magnus rose as he said this and father and son stood face to face--the little Governor in his uniform with flushed cheeks and pigeon-breast distended, and Magnus big, black, clumsy, unkempt, and with lines of suffering in his face.
"And this document, you tell me, is at present in Iceland?"
"It is, sir--two officers of the law brought it here from Copenhagen."
"Officers of the law, you say?"
"The bank found reasons to suspect the signatures, so they sent across to verify them."
"You have talked with these men yourself, no doubt?"
"The Sheriff brought them to see me," said Magnus.
"The Sheriff, too! The Sheriff of all men!"
"He is to bring the two men here to-morrow morning."
"So he is to bring them here to-morrow morning!"
The Governor, though heated and agitated, laughed once more, and said with a sneer:
"Of course, in the interests of the family, you felt it necessary to examine the signatures they showed you?"
"I did," said Magnus simply.
"And without consulting me to denounce the forger?"
Magnus made no reply.
"And even to hint--only to hint--that perhaps you could point to the forger?"
Still Magnus made no answer, and dropping his cynical tone, the Governor burst out in choking anger:
"Out on you, man, out on you! I thought you were drunk, or suffering from the delusions of drink, but you are worse--you are sweltering in hatred--and it is an unnatural hatred, too--the hatred of your own flesh and blood."
Magnus flinched as if a lash had cut him through the skin.
"You are jealous of your brother--always have been, always will be--because he is clever and successful and amiable and because everybody loves him--you are as jealous of your brother as Cain was of Abel, and this is your way of destroying him."
Magnus stood with drooping head while the Governor's lash fell over him.
"Aren't you ashamed to stand before your father and parade the whole diabolical catalogue of your unnatural passions? You allow yourself to consort with my enemies, with Oscar's enemies, with your own enemies, if you had the sense to see it, while they try to bring him down at the highest moment of his success."
The Governor was walking to and fro and lashing himself into a fury.
"At the deepest moment of his distress, too! Just when the poor boy is unmanned by the loss of his wife--the dear girl he loved and you insulted. But I don't believe one word of this cock-and-bull story. That accursed document is nothing but a trick to dishonor my son and to discredit me at the very time when a pack of rascals who call themselves reformers are trying to abolish the Governorship. Let them do it if they can, but while I am Governor here I'm master in this house, and Mr. Sheriff shall be suspended and those men sent back to Copenhagen."
"Hadn't you better speak to Oscar first, sir?" said Magnus.
"Certainly, I shall, and if I find as I expect--as I am sure--that your story is a pack of falsehoods--let me never see your face again."
Without a word of defense or explanation, Magnus left the room, and a few minutes afterward Oscar, at the call of the Governor, entered it.
Oscar's face was as pale as yesterday, but with a different pallor, a different expression--an expression not of grief and regret, but of fear and shame.
"Oscar," said the Governor, "I am sorry to trouble you about business so soon after your great sorrow, but an ugly story is being told about you in town, and as every lie has its tail, it is only right that you should hear of this one immediately, so that it may be quashed without delay."
Oscar's lower lip trembled--he felt the blow before it fell.
"Magnus--your brother Magnus--I am aware he has not been on brotherly terms with you--your mother has told me something about that--and let me say I do not sympathize with his protests and pretensions--I think them nothing but an excuse for his own selfishness--Magnus has just been here, and he tells me that a note of hand drawn in your favor for no less a sum than one hundred thousand crowns has been forged in my name. I do not believe the story and I do not want you to discuss it. I only ask you to contradict it--to contradict it flatly--or to leave me to deal with the real offender as I think best."
Oscar, standing by the Governor's desk, remained for a moment quite still. Then in a voice so low that it hardly seemed to come from him, he said:
"I can not contradict it, father. What Magnus has told you is true."
"True? You say it istrue?"
Father and son stood facing each other for some moments without a word more being spoken. Then in hot words, broken by breathless pauses, the Governor poured out question after question, to which Oscar made no answer.
"You received that sum and signed for it in your father's name?--in the name of your father-in-law also? One hundred thousand crowns? What has become of the money?"
"It is lost," said Oscar.
"Lost?"
"It was to pay the debts I had already contracted."
"Was that at Monte Carlo?"
"Yes."
There was another long silence, in which Oscar stood with quivering lips and the Governor with contracted brows.
"But this document--how did it come about?"
"I ask myself that question over and over again, father, and I fail to find an answer. I can not understand myself--I try and I can not."
"Were you mad?"
"Sometimes I think I was--I must have been."
"Did somebody tempt you--put the idea into your head?--somebody, perhaps, who helped you to lose and promised to help you to repay? If so, who was it?"
"I do not wish to accuse anybody, father--I suppose I have no right to do so."
"Right? Don't talk to me about rights. Think about your duties--and the first of your duties is to me, not to the person, whoever it may be, who has helped to destroy you. You have pledged my credit and my honor, but I don't want to think you altogether bad, and if anybody suggested this devilish device to pay your debts, I ought to be told who it was. Was it Helga?"
At the mention of that name Oscar's drooping head drooped lower still; the Governor saw this and then he understood everything.
"Lord God forgive us," he said, in a breathless whisper. "Then Magnus was right, after all! And the death of the poor child we buried yesterday was perhaps a part of the diabolical harvest we are reaping to-day! You needn't wince, sir--I see it's true without that."
Oscar did not attempt to excuse himself, and after some moments of silence the Governor spoke again.
"You have deceived and disappointed me, Oscar. I thought I had one son who was an intelligent man and a gentleman, not a forger and a fool. But it is of no use to prolong a painful interview. You may go."
Oscar staggered out of the room and the Governor sank into his chair.