XIIThe proud man was abased. For the first time in his life he was degraded in his own eyes. His own son had committed a vulgar crime and exposed himself to a vulgar punishment.In the first pain of surprise and humiliation he saw himself covering up the whole wretched episode. But he was too proud to be proud, and at the next moment he began to count with his conscience. Thus far he had tried to do what was right in Iceland, and he would do what was right to the end, whatever it might cost him.Oscar had offended against the law and he must bear its righteous punishment. It might be eight years' imprisonment, with the ruin of all his prospects, the waste of all his talents, and the wreck of all his happiness, but he must go through with it to the last hour, the last penalty, the last pang.So felt the Governor as Judge, and if as the father he felt differently it was only with a different intensity. His favorite son--the son whom he had indulged and pampered in the past--for whom he had planned and prepared so many things in the future--had committed a crime against his country and against himself, relying upon his father's love and pride to save him from the painful consequences, no matter what sacrifice it might cost him in hard-earned money or in money still to earn; no matter how much it might put him at the mercy of a scheming crew who were striving to pull him from his place! It was selfish, it was heartless, it was shameful, it was infamous, and it deserved a double punishment.Feeling more bitterly against his son than he had ever felt before against any human creature, the Governor passed the day in torment, and he was sitting alone in his room late at night, with no light but the sleepy glow from the open stove, when the door opened noiselessly and Anna entered. She looked as if she had been crying, although her eyes were dry, and the Governor reproached himself that in all his sorry summary of the consequences of his son's crime he had never once thought of his son's mother.But neither did she think of herself, and now sitting by the stove and stirring it, she began to talk of Oscar."He has fallen asleep at last," she said, "and his troubles are over for a little while anyway. He went up to his old bedroom to-night, Stephen, the one he slept in when he was a boy--when Magnus and he were boys together. I sat with him until he dropped off, and he held my hand all the time, just as he used to do after he had been naughty and you had sent him to bed without his supper. He looks quite like himself now, poor boy, and if you could see him lying there on the pillow, you would think the old days had come back, when you used to go up with the candle to look at him, and wipe the tears from his little face while he lay asleep, and stroke his curly hair. Ah, dear, how easily he could throw off his troubles in those old days, Stephen! Next morning you would hear him romping about overhead, and singing like a lark.""A shallow nature, Anna," said the Governor, "a shallow nature, on which nothing makes a serious impression--always has been, always will be.""Oh, but this will, Stephen, this will make a deep impression, and if the poor boy could only have another chance he would turn over a new leaf and set to work in good earnest, and realize all your expectations. And then think--only think, father, what a dreadful thing it would be if one brother were to drag the other into the dock--dreadful for us, I mean. We should lose both our children, for Oscar would be lost to us one way and we should never be able to look on Magnus again.""Our children have always been at war, Anna, ever since their earliest infancy.""Don't say that, Stephen. When they were little they loved each other dearly. It was not until they grew up that they were different. And then others came between them--one other anyway, and--who knows?--perhaps she has been the cause of all this trouble.""Has Oscar said so?" asked the Governor."He will say nothing against anybody," replied Anna. "That was always the way with Oscar. But if somebody tempted him and he was weak, and if our poor boy must go to prison while she----""There is a weakness that is wickedness, Anna, and must bear its pains and penalties.""Yes, I know," said Anna. "I remember you said the same words long ago when the sailor lad killed his sweetheart in a fit of drunken passion. The mother was a widow and she came to ask me to plead with you for her son. He was a good boy, she said, and if it had not been for the drink he would never have hurt any one. You spared his life, you know, and he was sent to prison. And dear me, how the poor woman kissed me and wept on my face for joy! But she came to think that for her part it might have been better if her boy had died instead of being locked up for ever. She could never forget it, and when her eldest daughter was married and her house was full of people, and everybody was happy, she suddenly remembered and ran up-stairs to cry. And then on wintry nights, when the wind was moaning over the sea and she was putting the little boys to bed, she always thought of their brother lying alone in the big brown house up the road and round the corner. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had been sent away, she thought. And she was only a poor widow who washed at the hot springs."The night wind was moaning over the sea at that moment, and the Governor, who had been walking to and fro, struggling to be righteous and severe, was feeling a pain in his parched throat.He stood for some moments by the window, with his hands interlaced behind him, looking out through the dark pane on the flying moon, and then with an obvious inward effort he said:"Anna, if I acknowledge this signature we shall have nothing left--nothing but my salary. Even my salary is threatened, and if it goes we shall be without anything in the world.""Why should we think of that, Stephen?" said Anna. "We had nothing when we married, and yet we were very happy. It is true we were young then, and now we are old, but if poverty comes again we shall know better how to bear it. And if we have nothing else we will have each other--and our boys, too--both our boys--wherever they may be by that time--and neither of them will love us the less because we have given up everything--everything we had in the world--that they might still be honored and respected."The clock struck twelve in the tower of the cathedral, with a reverberant ring that passed over the sleepy town, and the Governor stopped in his restless perambulation."It is late, mother," he said, in a husky voice, "let us go to bed."XIIINext morning the Governor was in his bureau again. He was now firm and composed and waiting calmly for the officers from Copenhagen. They came early, headed by the Sheriff, and bore themselves largely, like men who were conscious that they were about to administer a painful shock.After the formal introductions the Sheriff leaned above the Governor's desk and said suavely, almost condescendingly:"These gentlemen have been anxious to show every consideration. They came on an urgent matter--I may say a most urgent matter--but they have waited five days, rather than break in upon you at a time of domestic tribulation.""I am busy this morning, Mr. Sheriff," said the Governor. "Be so good as to waste no more time than is necessary."The Sheriff gasped and fell back from the desk, whereupon the strangers stepped up to it, and one of them opening a large envelope, said in a tone of indulgent courtesy:"We have a document here, your Excellency, which claims to be drawn by your authority. Will you be good enough to see if this is your Excellency's signature?"The Governor fixed his eye-glasses leisurely, and glancing hastily, almost casually, at the paper put before him, replied promptly:"It is."The strangers looked at each other in silence before they spoke again."In that case we presume your Excellency will be prepared to honor it?""Certainly," said the Governor."Then your Excellency will be aware that the bill is already overdue and that two applications have been made for payment?"The Governor flinched at that question, but recovering himself in a moment, he said, shortly:"The bill shall be met immediately.""How soon, your Excellency--a week, a fortnight?""Three days," said the Governor. "Good-morning, gentlemen," and without more ceremony he took up his pen and began to write a letter.The Sheriff, who was perspiring visibly by this time, had edged round to the door, and after a short silence, in which nothing was heard but the scratching of the Governor's quill, the strangers bowed to his stooping forehead and backed themselves out of the room.The Governor's letter was to the Factor, asking him to come immediately. He came, looking sullen and suspicious, with the air of one who knew something already of the business for which he had been summoned."Old friend," said the Governor, "we have known each other for fifty years, and I have never yet asked you to do me a favor, but I am going to ask you now.""H'm!" said the Factor, with a cold smile."It is not for my own needs I ask it, but for one who is nearer to me than myself. We who are fathers know what that means; and we also know that a favor done once to our children is done twice to ourselves.""H'm, h'm!" said the Factor, with the same cold smile."It is a private matter--strictly private--but to you, old friend, I can reveal the secret--your godson has got himself into trouble."And then, excusing and extenuating nothing, the Governor told the story of Oscar's downfall, and the Factor listened with the impatience of one who had heard the sorry tale before."He signed my name also, you say?" said the Factor."That, too, unhappily," answered the Governor, "but you were merely made witness to the deed, and I am responsible for the money.""What are you going to do about it?" asked the Factor in a hard tone."Pay it and give the lad another chance in life," replied the Governor. "And that's why I sent for you this morning. I can find fifty thousand crowns and I want you to lend me the other fifty thousand.""Not fifty thousand cents," said the Factor. "Not fifty--to shield a criminal and to cheat the law."The Governor's face whitened, but he answered quietly, "Don't speak so fast, old friend. Remember that the offense against the law is only an offense against myself, and if I choose to forgive it the law can have nothing to say.""What about the offense against me?" said the Factor."Remember, too," continued the Governor, "that if Oscar has made free with your name he has certain claims upon your purse--there is the marriage contract.""The marriage contract was made for Thora, and Thora is dead," said the Factor."There is the child," said the Governor."I hold the child now and I am prepared to provide for it in the future," said the Factor, "but I will have nothing more to do with a man who has forged my name, and if any further claim is made--on my business or estate or what not--I will protest against it and publish my reasons for doing so.""Oscar Neilsen," said the Governor, "there is something I have not told you, something I did not intend to tell you, but I must tell it to you now. I have reason to believe--to be confident--that for the trouble in which Oscar finds himself Helga is partly responsible.""Can you prove that, Stephen Magnusson?" said the Factor."If I can not prove it," replied the Governor, "it is because my son--whatever his faults and follies--is still a gentleman; and if you do not know it by this time it is because your daughter is not a lady.""Speak for your own, Stephen Magnusson, and leave mine to me," said the Factor."Therefore," continued the Governor, "when I pay this money--and I shall pay it--you will have the satisfaction to know that though I am a poor man and you are a rich one, I am discharging your debt as well as mine."With that, red and angry, the Governor walked to the door and opened it. The Factor looked at him in blank amazement, and for one swift instant his better nature conquered his greed and he saw what a pitiful thing it was that after fifty years of friendship they should quarrel thus about their children. But one sword draws another from its sheath, and he snapped his fingers contemptuously and strode out of the room.Then the Governor sent for the manager of the Bank of Iceland."Manager," he said, "I wish you to arrange a loan of one hundred thousand crowns on the security of my farm at Thingvellir.""The farm is hardly worth so much, sir--I say it is hardly worth so much," said the manager. "But in your case there can be little difficulty--none whatever if you are willing to pay the higher interest--I say none whatever if you are willing to pay the higher interest.""I agree," said the Governor, "and let the deed be drawn without delay."XIVHaving gone through the material part of his preparations the Governor had now a spiritual and more trying ordeal before him, and he went out into the home-field to think over it. Leaving the town behind he walked, with hands, as usual, interlaced behind him, as far as to the margin of the fiord.It was a beautiful morning. The light was wonderful, a silvery light that made the light of other days seem dull and leaden, full of innumerable sparkles like the stars that are sown in snow. The waters of the fiord were heaving slowly under a quivering haze, and on the sea outside--wide, vast, stretching far away--a number of fishing-boats, with their white sails bellied to a breeze that could not be felt on shore, were going on and on as if sailing into the sky. The mail-steamer was lying at anchor in the bay, getting up steam for her voyage back to England, and a flock of lighters, painted white, were floating about her black hull, like sea-fowl at the foot of a lava rock. The gulls were calling high up in the air, and from the sheltered side of a little island the last of the year's eider-duck were coaxing or driving their young ones into the sea to prepare them for their flight to far-off lands.It was a cruelly beautiful morning, one of those radiant days when Nature in her indifference to man and his sufferings, seems to conjure up every joyous sound and sight that can trouble the bitterest waters of memory--when the very sunshine seems to break one's heart.At length the proud man who was walking through the hummocked home-field, with head bent low by the sorrow of a wrecked and shattered hope, saw plainly what he had to do. In love no less than anger, in justice no less than duty, he had to cast off forever his favorite son, the pride of his heart and the hope of his life.As soon as he returned to the house he sent up-stairs for Oscar. After some moments Oscar came down slowly, looking more ill and weak than ever, and stood by the stove with drooping head like a prisoner about to receive his sentence. The Governor glanced up at his son from over the rims of his eye-glasses, and at first his heart failed him, but after a moment he steeled himself to his task and began to speak in a steady voice."I have sent for you to tell you," he said, "that for your mother's sake--I prefer to put it so--I have acknowledged that signature and am preparing to pay the money you have wasted. To do so I am compelled to mortgage every pennyworth of property we possess, so that apart from my official salary I shall soon have nothing. Worse than that I have had to eat up your brother's inheritance in order to purchase your liberty, and whether I had a right to do so God alone can say."Oscar shivered as from cold; the Governor saw this, waited a moment, and then went on."The condition on which I make this sacrifice is that you leave Iceland immediately. You will sail by the 'Laura,' which goes back this evening, and, as your honor is my honor, I will give it out that your health is broken after the death of your wife, and that you have gone away to recruit."The Governor paused a second time, and when he spoke again his voice was thick and hoarse."I shall not expect you to come back soon--I shall not expect you to come back at all. Inasmuch as you have done your best--or worst--to wreck my happiness I will ask you to consider that henceforth our lives are to run in different courses, and that for my own part I wish to see you no more."The Governor's voice was now husky and indistinct, but still he struggled on."You will look to yourself for your livelihood in the future, but that--with your talents, little as you have made of them hitherto--should not be difficult. Whatever happens here I shall never expect you to do anything for me, or for your mother, but if fortune should favor you, and you are able to repay your brother, your conscience may be the easier and--though I do not pity him, for his heart was hard--the earth on my grave the lighter."The Governor paused for the last time, cleared his throat, and then said in a firmer tone:"Only one word more. I thought perhaps your father-in-law might have done something for you, but apart from a promise to provide for the child, he will do nothing. Therefore, as I have reason to fear that his daughter Helga was at the root of the trouble which has so nearly wrecked us all, and perhaps a first cause of the death of our dear Thora, I will ask you to promise me--for your own sake more than mine--to hold no further intercourse with him or his--do you promise?"There was silence for some moments and then a muffled sob came as from the stove itself:"I promise."After that there was silence again for a perceptible period, and then a voice--a strange voice that was like a cry said:"That is all. And now--good-by and--and God help you!"Choking with emotion and blind with tears, Oscar turned about to acknowledge the justice of his punishment--to say that he deserved everything--everything and more--a hundred-fold more--but he found himself alone. His father had fled from the room.XVWhen Magnus heard of what his father had done, his wrath knew no measure. On the day when he found Thora dead in her bed he had said to himself, "Oscar has done this and he must be made to suffer." But there was no legal way to punish a man who had tortured his wife to death by every refinement of hypocrisy and pretense, and it was at the height of his anger that the offense against his father's property had come to him with its diabolical temptation. "Use me," it whispered, "the damnable spirit of the world understands me better," and after a struggle in which the devils seemed to fight for his soul, he yielded.He thought he knew the price he would have to pay and that was the reason he did not join his family at the funeral. Everybody would loathe him for giving up his brother to the punishment he deserved. His own mother would turn from him, and after his father, being confronted by poverty, had allowed the law to take its course, he would hate and despise the son who had saved him from beggary.But no matter! When he stood up in court and said, "This is Oscar Stephenson's handwriting, for he is a forger and a thief," and a thrill of horror ran through the crowded room, and every eye turned on him with contempt, he would say to his secret heart, "He killed her, and he had to suffer, and there was no other way than this!"Yet that was not what had happened. His father had saved Oscar from the just punishment of his infamous offense. And how had he saved him? By making him--Magnus--pay the price of Oscar's riotous living abroad. Thus the vengeance which he had vowed upon his brother had recoiled upon himself, and while his rightful inheritance was wiped out, while the farm on which he had built his last hopes was embarrassed beyond the possibility of redemption, and he was ruined for the rest of his life, the man for whom and by whom he was ruined--ruined in his affections as well as his fortunes--was to be allowed to steal away amid a croaking chorus of sympathy and pity under the cloak of broken health and a broken heart!What a devil's world it was in which infamy could masquerade as honor and hypocrisy as grief! When Magnus thought in this way his eyesight grew dull and his hearing dense and he felt a cold pain at the back of his neck. Then he began to use again the only remedy he had recourse to when his head was bad--he began to drink.But sitting in the darkest corner of the smoking-room of the hotel, every word he heard--every conversation that filtered through the smoke and noise and his deadened senses--seemed to stimulate the idea which had taken possession of him--it was the devil's own world and God had nothing whatever to do with it!At one moment a student ran into the room and shouted, above the laughter and singing of his fellow-students, "Boys, what do you think? Oscar Stephenson is sailing by the 'Laura' to-night!" And thereupon a babel of voices cried, "Really!" "Never!" "You don't say so!" "True enough--smashed up for good and going abroad for an indefinite period!" "Not a bit of it! Oscar isn't the sort to be broken up like that. Six months abroad and he'll be home again as bright and fresh as ever.""So he will," thought Magnus, but his heart was fierce and bitter.At another moment the chairman of the Town Board came in panting and cried, "News, gentlemen, news! Oscar Stephenson has resigned his seat in Parliament!" "Impossible!" "Listen!" and the little fat man read, out of his rasping, asthmatical throat, from a sheet smelling of damp paper and printer's ink a letter from Oscar to his constituents. Broken in health and happiness--compelled to go abroad--impossible to fix date of return--consequently forced to tender resignation--deeply grieved and disappointed--but set the duties too high to ask his constituents to wait, etc.--"That means he's not coming back!" "But, good heavens, does he know what he's giving up? Why, there's nothing that's not within the man's reach--absolutely nothing!" "I wonder the Governor has allowed him to do it!"And then Magnus laughed out loud in the fierce bitterness of his heart.After that the voices were lower for a little while, and when Magnus heard them again somebody was saying, "But a man can love a woman too much altogether. Breaking your life to pieces because you've lost your wife isn't brave, it isn't manly." "Perhaps not, but it's human," said somebody else, "and if Oscar Stephenson is smashed up by the death of Thora Neilsen, he's in the right of it, I say.""So do I," cried Magnus, and laughing wildly, he dropped his head over his arms on the table. What a devil's own world it was to be sure!There was some whispering and then two louder voices: "Poor fellow! So unlike his brother! Going it fast, they say!" "His father was pretty hard on him, though!" "Not harder than he deserved, poor devil!"The poison in the soul of Magnus was fermenting every moment. Hearing the contemptuous pity with which he was contrasted with his brother--his brother who had wrought all the evil--his temples beat furiously and one wild thought expelled all other thoughts from his brain. If there was no law to punish Oscar, if his father had conspired to help Oscar to escape and if the hypocritical community agreed to cover up his fault, one thing at least remained--before Oscar left Iceland he must meet with him! Then if this was the devil's own world let the devil look after his elect!Magnus's mind was weltering in this thought as in a boiling sulphur pit when the captain of the "Laura" came into the smoking-room with the agent of the steamship company, and seating themselves near to him, began to converse apart. "Then he will have to put up with a bed in the hold, for all the berths are gone," said the captain. "But why can't he wait for the next steamer?" "I'll tell you why," whispered the agent, "because the Factor's daughter is to sail by the Vesta and there seem to be reasons why they should not meet." "So that's it, is it? But their fathers are fools not to know that they'll meet on the other side if they want to."Overhearing this conversation, Magnus lifted his head from his arms, drank a large tumbler of brandy and water to the last drop, and walked heavily out of the house. He had not been conscious of the passing of time, but the darkness was now closing in, porters were hurrying with luggage toward the pier and the first of the "Laura's" three bells was ringing.Magnus was like a man who could not see or hear properly. More than once he collided with people on the parapet, and being big and strong he brushed them out of the way. Some of them cursed him, but he did not stop. His clouded faculties were conscious of one idea only--that he must go to Government House and meet Oscar face to face before he sailed.Reaching his former home he found the door open, as usual on an autumn evening, and nobody in porch or hall. Avoiding his father's door, he walked up-stairs and turned mechanically toward the apartments which had lately been occupied by Oscar. But that was a part of the house sacred to his memory of Thora, and even in this hour of passion and pain something whispered to his tortured conscience, and he turned away. A moment later he was in Oscar's bedroom on the upper floor.The furniture was in disorder, the carpet was awry, and articles of apparel were scattered about as if somebody had been packing trunks, but the trunks were gone and there was nobody in the room. Magnus was about to go when his eyes were arrested by papers on a desk. Among sheets of music and scraps from newspapers there were the remains of a letter doubled up and torn across.Magnus knew the handwriting--it was Helga's--and without any compunction he put the pieces together and read the letter:"Oscar:--As soon as I heard that the Governor had spoken to you on the fatal subject, I confessed everything to my father and took my own share of the transaction. Of course, he was furious, and now he vows that I must go back immediately to my mother in Copenhagen. That does not trouble me, seeing that you are leaving Iceland, but I must see you before you go. In spite of all you say, and notwithstanding any promise you may have given to anybody, it is impossible that we can part like this. It would be too selfish and too cowardly not to give me the chance of seeing you for the last time. Your steamer sails at nine o'clock--come to me at half-past eight. If you do not come I may even follow you to London--Iwilldo so if----"Magnus read no more, but ramming the pieces into his pocket he plunged down the stairs and out into the street. If anybody could have seen him at that moment his appearance must have seemed terrible, for his eyes were bloodshot, and the veins on his forehead were swollen and dark. It was now night and the second bell was ringing in the bay.He was lunging along in the direction of the Factor's, when somebody crossed in front of him in the thoroughfare. It was Oscar himself and he was going in another direction. Magnus was like a man whose reason is clogged, but he saw everything in the light of his own making. His brother was returning from the pier after taking his baggage aboard, and he had come ashore on a last errand. Magnus knew what errand that was--it was to see Helga, and they were going to meet where they could be unobserved.The moon had risen by this time and Magnus could keep his brother in view while he followed like a hound behind him. He saw nothing else and was not even conscious of what streets they passed through, save that they were going toward the upper part of the town, near to the lake, and down the road that runs beside it.He tried to walk softly and to make no noise, but sometimes a hard laugh broke from his dry throat and once or twice a great sob came behind it. He was thinking of Thora, and telling himself what he would say when Oscar met Helga and he came face to face with them. He would say, "I loved your wife--I'm not ashamed to say so--I loved her and gave her up to you and you promised to cherish her, but you neglected her and allowed her child to be stolen away. I would have given my heart's blood to make her happy, but you made her miserable and now she is dead, and you are here with this woman who helped to torture her. You are a perjurer and a forger and a scoundrel and you may take that--and that--and that--and carry the mark of my hand on your face when you go where this wanton means to follow you!"He was now outside the town, but he could not see or hear or think like a Christian man, and was merely ranging along the road like a beast. Then all at once, in the still air and the silence of all around him, he heard the voice of some one who was saying in low, quivering, pleading tones:"My darling! My darling!"Magnus knew whose voice it was! He thought he also knew what sight he should see a moment later. It would be Oscar and Helga locked in each other's arms as they had been when he saw them last in the dance at the farm--flushed, hot and excited.With his fists clinched and his teeth set hard, he plunged through a gate that was like the gate to a garden, and then ran forward a few paces. But he drew up suddenly, as if an unseen hand had seized his arm. He saw where he was, and his breath seemed to leave him--he was in the cemetery, and some twenty yards farther down the path his brother Oscar was kneeling by the side of a grave and sobbing as if his heart would break.Magnus stumbled back to the road, sobered, ashamed and broken into utter helplessness.It might be the devil's own world, but God was in it also.XVIWhen the last of the "Laura's" three bells were ringing, Magnus stood alone on the little wooden jetty going down to the bay. The whistle screamed in the steam-pipe, the anchor-chain rattled in the hawse-holes, and the steamer turned her head to the sea.Then a row-boat came back from the vessel's side, bringing an elderly lady who was trying to hide her tear-stained face from the gaze of the boatmen and even the eyes of the night, behind the folds of a little lace shawl which she wore over her hufa. It was Anna, and as Magnus helped her ashore, she said:"Give me your arm and take me home--I'm not feeling well to-night, Magnus."But before they had gone many paces she stopped and looked back lovingly at the ship that was now steaming down the fiord, and said in a pitiful voice:"He is gone and I have lost him! My poor boy! My poor Oscar! I had him for six and twenty years and to think it should come to this!"She walked a few more paces and then looked back again, and said:"I have never seen anybody so deeply affected. 'Oh, mother, mother!' he cried at last--just like a child. I could have fancied the years had rolled back and he was still a boy--feeling ill and helpless and wanting to lie in his mother's lap."Again she walked a few steps and looked back as before."There was nobody to see him off--nobody at all. The story must have leaked out somewhere, and of all the people he used to call his friends there was not one to say farewell. My poor boy! My poor Oscar! He did wrong--very wrong--but God knows how he is suffering. We think we punish people when we put them in prison, but what punishment is like the pain of an awakened conscience? And Oscar is leaving everything behind him--everything and everybody--and going away in disgrace."Once more she walked a few steps and then she said in the voice of a crying child:"I shall never see him again. I pretended I should, but I know quite well I shall not. 'Some day you will come back,' I said, 'and make amends and wipe out everything.' And he said 'Yes' and 'Yes,' but we both knew well it wasn't true. When the bell rang and I had to come away he said, 'Mother, you've been the best mother a man ever had,' and I knew it was the last word I shall ever hear from him."After that she could not speak for some minutes and then she said, as if trying to comfort herself:"Perhaps God will give my boy another chance where he is going to. If so I think he will do better, but if not----"She could not finish what she intended to say--that God's mercy was more terrible than the vengeance of man, and he who renounced it would surely be destroyed.They walked on in silence until they came to the gate of Government House, and then Anna took her last look at the dark ship that was dying away to an indistinguishable mass in the shades of night and the mists of her blinding tears, and said in a brave voice:"We must be very good to each other in future, Magnus. You are the only son left to me now, and if you have to suffer for the sin of somebody else you must let me help you to bear it. I will always do so as long as I live, Magnus, and when I am gone from you God will not forget. Good-night, Magnus! And God bless you!"Magnus stood for some time where his mother had left him, for the breakers of passion were still surging in his throat. Then he returned to the jetty and dropped the remains of Helga's letter into the sea, and they went out with the ebbing tide.PART V"Indeed, indeed, repentance oft beforeI swore--but was I sober when I swore?And then, and then came Spring, and rose-in-handMy threadbare penitence apieces tore."IAbove all other cities of the world, London is the home of the outcast, the refuge of the disgraced and rejected, the asylum of the moral leper, the grave of the moral suicide. She offers him obscurity and a kind of cleansing if he will cast himself into the rolling billows of her six millions of people, and she keeps her word but exacts her penalties. Her penalties are homelessness, friendlessness, and loneliness, but above all loneliness. There is no loneliness like that of London. The loneliness of an open boat on an open sea in an impenetrable fog, or the loneliness of a trackless heath in a blinding snowstorm, is not so desolating to the human soul as the loneliness of London's crowded thoroughfares, with their lines of unknown faces filing on and on.Within a year Oscar Stephenson knew the loneliness of London to its last pang, its utmost bitterness.When he parted from his mother on the deck of the "Laura" she slipped a purse into his pocket, just as she used to do when he was a boy going to college or going away for his holiday. The purse contained gold and notes to the value of fifty pounds, and this, with the little he had of his own, was the whole sum of his fortune and all he had to face the future with. He was not so young as to think it inexhaustible, or so sanguine as to expect the world to fall at the feet of a fallen man, so he tried to be frugal and to spend his substance prudently.He spent his first night in London at the hotel in Trafalgar Square at which he had stayed with Thora and Helga on their way to Italy, but besides being too expensive for his present means the place was too full of tragic memories, and next day he removed to a house in one of the first of the side streets going down to the river from the Strand. His lodging was a single room on an upper floor, having a stuffy odor of carpets and curtains and a prospect of the neighboring roofs with various causeways of red chimney-pots.In this apartment Oscar Stephenson had his first experience of the loneliness of London. He lived there six months without seeing any face belonging to the house except the face of his landlady, and without knowing more about his fellow-lodgers than that his neighbor in the adjoining room never returned home at night until after the great clock at Westminster had struck twelve, and that he whistled "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in varying degrees of alcoholic uncertainty while he put himself to bed.Before the end of those six months Oscar was in debt to his landlady, he had no regular employment and no prospect except the imminent one of being homeless and penniless.By what stages of quick descent he came down to this condition it would be a needless task to tell. His story is that of the great army of the disgraced and the castaway who fly to London as to a sanctuary and are allowed to live only by lying at its doors. He had struggled and failed. He was young and active, but nobody needed him. In some places his want of references was a difficulty. In others his superior education was a cause of suspicion. He was too good for one post and not good enough for another. In a world full of work there was no work for him to do.The slow agony of those first six months kept alive the shame and misery of his breakdown and nearly sapped his moral courage. As day followed day and the feeling of uselessness deepened, he felt like a boy, a friendless, abandoned boy. He had done wrong and he was ready to bear his punishment, but the great, irresistible, unanswerable world was using him cruelly. It would not make peace with him on any terms. It was leaving him without hope, or counsel or encouragement or consolation--it was leaving him alone. This sense of being of no account, of being nothing and nobody in the world, with the terror of sinking out of sight some day and nobody knowing or caring, was harder to bear than poverty or even shame itself.When the clouds looked blackest he swallowed the last remnant of his pride and appealed to the few friends of his father in England who had been so good to him in the careless days of his college life and so boundlessly hospitable in the happy time of his honeymoon. He appealed to the professor at Oxford, making a clean breast of his misdoings and no concealment of his sufferings and asking for influence and assistance in obtaining a sub-librarianship or such other employment as might provide him with bread and butter, and the answer that came back was prompt and courteous but as cold as the breath of an iceberg.He appealed to the banker in London, asking for a junior clerkship, or a position as messenger or even porter, and the reply he received was as smooth as a dog's tongue and as useless for help and healing. And then he knew by bitter knowledge that the kindness which had been shown to him in the better time was kindness to his father's son, and that he had wasted that heritage and was his father's son no more.Meantime he spent his days, and a great part of his nights also, in the streets. There he was like a piece of helpless driftwood in the roaring current of life, always going on yet never going anywhere, always floating along yet never making headway. The ceaseless stream in the busy thoroughfares tormented him terribly, but the emptiness of the obscurer streets tortured him still more, and the blankness of Sunday morning in the Strand afflicted him most keenly of all, for it was full of memories of Sunday morning in Iceland with its atmosphere of peace and rest and the sound of church bells.When he was at his lowest depths of hopelessness he sent his first letter home."Dearest Mother," he wrote, sitting in his stuffy back room overlooking the roof-tops, "You would naturally have expected to hear from me before this, and I certainly should have written earlier, only that I have been waiting for a long, quiet hour in which I could tell you all the news, everything that has happened to me since we parted on the steamer and I saw your dear face disappearing in the boat. That hour seems never to come, so I must snatch a few moments without any more delay to say that all is well and everything goes swimmingly.""The dear old soul, why should I make her miserable?" he thought."You will easily understand that in a great city like London, especially when one is beginning again and one has so much to do and so many people to see, there is not an hour left for oneself and hardly a moment to write a letter. But this does not prevent my thinking of you at all events, and I do so every day and always.""That's true at least," he told himself, and he went on boldly with his affectionate fictions."I know that my dear little mamma will want to know first the condition of my creature comforts and I hasten to tell her that these are as right as can be. This is a large and handsome house just off the tide of greatest traffic where splendid horse wagons (called omnibuses) and upholstered sleighs on wheels (called hansoms) roll about in countless numbers day and night, making a roar like that of the Ellida river where it falls into the fiord. But my bedroom, in which I am writing this letter, is quiet and cozy and homelike, and my landlady is a good little creature who visits me daily and is always most kind and motherly."As he went on his pen flowed freely and his handwriting became big and reckless."I am making new and influential acquaintances every day, and seeing in the flesh the faces we are all familiar with in prints. Walking in the Park yesterday I passed the Queen, who is one of our own princesses, you know, so I felt myself entitled to bow to her and she bowed back with the sweetest courtesy. I see the Prime Minister frequently, for he lives in a house that is only down the street and round the corner, and the homes and offices of nearly all the Ministers of State are within a stone's throw of this place. In fact one way or another I am certainly coming in touch with the leading men in England, and when I open my window at night I can see the light that burns in the clock-tower above the Houses of Parliament."So you see that I am finding life wonderfully interesting in this mighty maelstrom of human activity, and if I do not write as often as I ought, my anxious little mamma is not to imagine there is anything amiss with me, but merely to tell herself that no news is good news and that I am immersed in many occupations."Perhaps if I have a lonely hour occasionally"--the pen trembled in his fingers and the handwriting became loose and shaky--"it is when I think about home and wonder what is happening there and what people are saying about me now. I suppose I have no right to complain whatever it may be, but sometimes when I am coming back to my lodging on a starry night after a tiring day and I look up to the Milky Way and think, 'That is the road to my country,' the thought goes to my heart like a stab that when I left it last my father's door was closed against me, and I saw nothing of Magnus at the end."How are they both, and how are you, and how are the Factor and Aunt Margret, and how--oh! how is our dear little Elin? My sweet, sweet child! What I would give to see her again! Has she grown? Is she still as much like her poor mother? Does she 'notice?' She will begin to babble and talk by and by. Will they bring her up to know nothing about her father? Or perhaps to think ill of him? If I return to Iceland some day (and I shall) to take up the broken threads of my life again, and find that the mind of my own child has been poisoned against me, I don't know what will happen; I believe I shall go back instantly and wipe myself out for ever."But I will not think of that even as a remote possibility, and, meantime, I am working day and night to build up a new career, and, as you see, I am getting on splendidly. So good-by, dearest, and God bless you, and God bless everybody at home, for we shall all be good friends yet.--OSCAR."P.S.--Is Helga still in Iceland, or has the Factor carried out his threat of sending her back to Denmark? I suppose I ought not to think of her, having given that promise to the Governor, yet I can not help doing so, and I can not help asking."
XII
The proud man was abased. For the first time in his life he was degraded in his own eyes. His own son had committed a vulgar crime and exposed himself to a vulgar punishment.
In the first pain of surprise and humiliation he saw himself covering up the whole wretched episode. But he was too proud to be proud, and at the next moment he began to count with his conscience. Thus far he had tried to do what was right in Iceland, and he would do what was right to the end, whatever it might cost him.
Oscar had offended against the law and he must bear its righteous punishment. It might be eight years' imprisonment, with the ruin of all his prospects, the waste of all his talents, and the wreck of all his happiness, but he must go through with it to the last hour, the last penalty, the last pang.
So felt the Governor as Judge, and if as the father he felt differently it was only with a different intensity. His favorite son--the son whom he had indulged and pampered in the past--for whom he had planned and prepared so many things in the future--had committed a crime against his country and against himself, relying upon his father's love and pride to save him from the painful consequences, no matter what sacrifice it might cost him in hard-earned money or in money still to earn; no matter how much it might put him at the mercy of a scheming crew who were striving to pull him from his place! It was selfish, it was heartless, it was shameful, it was infamous, and it deserved a double punishment.
Feeling more bitterly against his son than he had ever felt before against any human creature, the Governor passed the day in torment, and he was sitting alone in his room late at night, with no light but the sleepy glow from the open stove, when the door opened noiselessly and Anna entered. She looked as if she had been crying, although her eyes were dry, and the Governor reproached himself that in all his sorry summary of the consequences of his son's crime he had never once thought of his son's mother.
But neither did she think of herself, and now sitting by the stove and stirring it, she began to talk of Oscar.
"He has fallen asleep at last," she said, "and his troubles are over for a little while anyway. He went up to his old bedroom to-night, Stephen, the one he slept in when he was a boy--when Magnus and he were boys together. I sat with him until he dropped off, and he held my hand all the time, just as he used to do after he had been naughty and you had sent him to bed without his supper. He looks quite like himself now, poor boy, and if you could see him lying there on the pillow, you would think the old days had come back, when you used to go up with the candle to look at him, and wipe the tears from his little face while he lay asleep, and stroke his curly hair. Ah, dear, how easily he could throw off his troubles in those old days, Stephen! Next morning you would hear him romping about overhead, and singing like a lark."
"A shallow nature, Anna," said the Governor, "a shallow nature, on which nothing makes a serious impression--always has been, always will be."
"Oh, but this will, Stephen, this will make a deep impression, and if the poor boy could only have another chance he would turn over a new leaf and set to work in good earnest, and realize all your expectations. And then think--only think, father, what a dreadful thing it would be if one brother were to drag the other into the dock--dreadful for us, I mean. We should lose both our children, for Oscar would be lost to us one way and we should never be able to look on Magnus again."
"Our children have always been at war, Anna, ever since their earliest infancy."
"Don't say that, Stephen. When they were little they loved each other dearly. It was not until they grew up that they were different. And then others came between them--one other anyway, and--who knows?--perhaps she has been the cause of all this trouble."
"Has Oscar said so?" asked the Governor.
"He will say nothing against anybody," replied Anna. "That was always the way with Oscar. But if somebody tempted him and he was weak, and if our poor boy must go to prison while she----"
"There is a weakness that is wickedness, Anna, and must bear its pains and penalties."
"Yes, I know," said Anna. "I remember you said the same words long ago when the sailor lad killed his sweetheart in a fit of drunken passion. The mother was a widow and she came to ask me to plead with you for her son. He was a good boy, she said, and if it had not been for the drink he would never have hurt any one. You spared his life, you know, and he was sent to prison. And dear me, how the poor woman kissed me and wept on my face for joy! But she came to think that for her part it might have been better if her boy had died instead of being locked up for ever. She could never forget it, and when her eldest daughter was married and her house was full of people, and everybody was happy, she suddenly remembered and ran up-stairs to cry. And then on wintry nights, when the wind was moaning over the sea and she was putting the little boys to bed, she always thought of their brother lying alone in the big brown house up the road and round the corner. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had been sent away, she thought. And she was only a poor widow who washed at the hot springs."
The night wind was moaning over the sea at that moment, and the Governor, who had been walking to and fro, struggling to be righteous and severe, was feeling a pain in his parched throat.
He stood for some moments by the window, with his hands interlaced behind him, looking out through the dark pane on the flying moon, and then with an obvious inward effort he said:
"Anna, if I acknowledge this signature we shall have nothing left--nothing but my salary. Even my salary is threatened, and if it goes we shall be without anything in the world."
"Why should we think of that, Stephen?" said Anna. "We had nothing when we married, and yet we were very happy. It is true we were young then, and now we are old, but if poverty comes again we shall know better how to bear it. And if we have nothing else we will have each other--and our boys, too--both our boys--wherever they may be by that time--and neither of them will love us the less because we have given up everything--everything we had in the world--that they might still be honored and respected."
The clock struck twelve in the tower of the cathedral, with a reverberant ring that passed over the sleepy town, and the Governor stopped in his restless perambulation.
"It is late, mother," he said, in a husky voice, "let us go to bed."
XIII
Next morning the Governor was in his bureau again. He was now firm and composed and waiting calmly for the officers from Copenhagen. They came early, headed by the Sheriff, and bore themselves largely, like men who were conscious that they were about to administer a painful shock.
After the formal introductions the Sheriff leaned above the Governor's desk and said suavely, almost condescendingly:
"These gentlemen have been anxious to show every consideration. They came on an urgent matter--I may say a most urgent matter--but they have waited five days, rather than break in upon you at a time of domestic tribulation."
"I am busy this morning, Mr. Sheriff," said the Governor. "Be so good as to waste no more time than is necessary."
The Sheriff gasped and fell back from the desk, whereupon the strangers stepped up to it, and one of them opening a large envelope, said in a tone of indulgent courtesy:
"We have a document here, your Excellency, which claims to be drawn by your authority. Will you be good enough to see if this is your Excellency's signature?"
The Governor fixed his eye-glasses leisurely, and glancing hastily, almost casually, at the paper put before him, replied promptly:
"It is."
The strangers looked at each other in silence before they spoke again.
"In that case we presume your Excellency will be prepared to honor it?"
"Certainly," said the Governor.
"Then your Excellency will be aware that the bill is already overdue and that two applications have been made for payment?"
The Governor flinched at that question, but recovering himself in a moment, he said, shortly:
"The bill shall be met immediately."
"How soon, your Excellency--a week, a fortnight?"
"Three days," said the Governor. "Good-morning, gentlemen," and without more ceremony he took up his pen and began to write a letter.
The Sheriff, who was perspiring visibly by this time, had edged round to the door, and after a short silence, in which nothing was heard but the scratching of the Governor's quill, the strangers bowed to his stooping forehead and backed themselves out of the room.
The Governor's letter was to the Factor, asking him to come immediately. He came, looking sullen and suspicious, with the air of one who knew something already of the business for which he had been summoned.
"Old friend," said the Governor, "we have known each other for fifty years, and I have never yet asked you to do me a favor, but I am going to ask you now."
"H'm!" said the Factor, with a cold smile.
"It is not for my own needs I ask it, but for one who is nearer to me than myself. We who are fathers know what that means; and we also know that a favor done once to our children is done twice to ourselves."
"H'm, h'm!" said the Factor, with the same cold smile.
"It is a private matter--strictly private--but to you, old friend, I can reveal the secret--your godson has got himself into trouble."
And then, excusing and extenuating nothing, the Governor told the story of Oscar's downfall, and the Factor listened with the impatience of one who had heard the sorry tale before.
"He signed my name also, you say?" said the Factor.
"That, too, unhappily," answered the Governor, "but you were merely made witness to the deed, and I am responsible for the money."
"What are you going to do about it?" asked the Factor in a hard tone.
"Pay it and give the lad another chance in life," replied the Governor. "And that's why I sent for you this morning. I can find fifty thousand crowns and I want you to lend me the other fifty thousand."
"Not fifty thousand cents," said the Factor. "Not fifty--to shield a criminal and to cheat the law."
The Governor's face whitened, but he answered quietly, "Don't speak so fast, old friend. Remember that the offense against the law is only an offense against myself, and if I choose to forgive it the law can have nothing to say."
"What about the offense against me?" said the Factor.
"Remember, too," continued the Governor, "that if Oscar has made free with your name he has certain claims upon your purse--there is the marriage contract."
"The marriage contract was made for Thora, and Thora is dead," said the Factor.
"There is the child," said the Governor.
"I hold the child now and I am prepared to provide for it in the future," said the Factor, "but I will have nothing more to do with a man who has forged my name, and if any further claim is made--on my business or estate or what not--I will protest against it and publish my reasons for doing so."
"Oscar Neilsen," said the Governor, "there is something I have not told you, something I did not intend to tell you, but I must tell it to you now. I have reason to believe--to be confident--that for the trouble in which Oscar finds himself Helga is partly responsible."
"Can you prove that, Stephen Magnusson?" said the Factor.
"If I can not prove it," replied the Governor, "it is because my son--whatever his faults and follies--is still a gentleman; and if you do not know it by this time it is because your daughter is not a lady."
"Speak for your own, Stephen Magnusson, and leave mine to me," said the Factor.
"Therefore," continued the Governor, "when I pay this money--and I shall pay it--you will have the satisfaction to know that though I am a poor man and you are a rich one, I am discharging your debt as well as mine."
With that, red and angry, the Governor walked to the door and opened it. The Factor looked at him in blank amazement, and for one swift instant his better nature conquered his greed and he saw what a pitiful thing it was that after fifty years of friendship they should quarrel thus about their children. But one sword draws another from its sheath, and he snapped his fingers contemptuously and strode out of the room.
Then the Governor sent for the manager of the Bank of Iceland.
"Manager," he said, "I wish you to arrange a loan of one hundred thousand crowns on the security of my farm at Thingvellir."
"The farm is hardly worth so much, sir--I say it is hardly worth so much," said the manager. "But in your case there can be little difficulty--none whatever if you are willing to pay the higher interest--I say none whatever if you are willing to pay the higher interest."
"I agree," said the Governor, "and let the deed be drawn without delay."
XIV
Having gone through the material part of his preparations the Governor had now a spiritual and more trying ordeal before him, and he went out into the home-field to think over it. Leaving the town behind he walked, with hands, as usual, interlaced behind him, as far as to the margin of the fiord.
It was a beautiful morning. The light was wonderful, a silvery light that made the light of other days seem dull and leaden, full of innumerable sparkles like the stars that are sown in snow. The waters of the fiord were heaving slowly under a quivering haze, and on the sea outside--wide, vast, stretching far away--a number of fishing-boats, with their white sails bellied to a breeze that could not be felt on shore, were going on and on as if sailing into the sky. The mail-steamer was lying at anchor in the bay, getting up steam for her voyage back to England, and a flock of lighters, painted white, were floating about her black hull, like sea-fowl at the foot of a lava rock. The gulls were calling high up in the air, and from the sheltered side of a little island the last of the year's eider-duck were coaxing or driving their young ones into the sea to prepare them for their flight to far-off lands.
It was a cruelly beautiful morning, one of those radiant days when Nature in her indifference to man and his sufferings, seems to conjure up every joyous sound and sight that can trouble the bitterest waters of memory--when the very sunshine seems to break one's heart.
At length the proud man who was walking through the hummocked home-field, with head bent low by the sorrow of a wrecked and shattered hope, saw plainly what he had to do. In love no less than anger, in justice no less than duty, he had to cast off forever his favorite son, the pride of his heart and the hope of his life.
As soon as he returned to the house he sent up-stairs for Oscar. After some moments Oscar came down slowly, looking more ill and weak than ever, and stood by the stove with drooping head like a prisoner about to receive his sentence. The Governor glanced up at his son from over the rims of his eye-glasses, and at first his heart failed him, but after a moment he steeled himself to his task and began to speak in a steady voice.
"I have sent for you to tell you," he said, "that for your mother's sake--I prefer to put it so--I have acknowledged that signature and am preparing to pay the money you have wasted. To do so I am compelled to mortgage every pennyworth of property we possess, so that apart from my official salary I shall soon have nothing. Worse than that I have had to eat up your brother's inheritance in order to purchase your liberty, and whether I had a right to do so God alone can say."
Oscar shivered as from cold; the Governor saw this, waited a moment, and then went on.
"The condition on which I make this sacrifice is that you leave Iceland immediately. You will sail by the 'Laura,' which goes back this evening, and, as your honor is my honor, I will give it out that your health is broken after the death of your wife, and that you have gone away to recruit."
The Governor paused a second time, and when he spoke again his voice was thick and hoarse.
"I shall not expect you to come back soon--I shall not expect you to come back at all. Inasmuch as you have done your best--or worst--to wreck my happiness I will ask you to consider that henceforth our lives are to run in different courses, and that for my own part I wish to see you no more."
The Governor's voice was now husky and indistinct, but still he struggled on.
"You will look to yourself for your livelihood in the future, but that--with your talents, little as you have made of them hitherto--should not be difficult. Whatever happens here I shall never expect you to do anything for me, or for your mother, but if fortune should favor you, and you are able to repay your brother, your conscience may be the easier and--though I do not pity him, for his heart was hard--the earth on my grave the lighter."
The Governor paused for the last time, cleared his throat, and then said in a firmer tone:
"Only one word more. I thought perhaps your father-in-law might have done something for you, but apart from a promise to provide for the child, he will do nothing. Therefore, as I have reason to fear that his daughter Helga was at the root of the trouble which has so nearly wrecked us all, and perhaps a first cause of the death of our dear Thora, I will ask you to promise me--for your own sake more than mine--to hold no further intercourse with him or his--do you promise?"
There was silence for some moments and then a muffled sob came as from the stove itself:
"I promise."
After that there was silence again for a perceptible period, and then a voice--a strange voice that was like a cry said:
"That is all. And now--good-by and--and God help you!"
Choking with emotion and blind with tears, Oscar turned about to acknowledge the justice of his punishment--to say that he deserved everything--everything and more--a hundred-fold more--but he found himself alone. His father had fled from the room.
XV
When Magnus heard of what his father had done, his wrath knew no measure. On the day when he found Thora dead in her bed he had said to himself, "Oscar has done this and he must be made to suffer." But there was no legal way to punish a man who had tortured his wife to death by every refinement of hypocrisy and pretense, and it was at the height of his anger that the offense against his father's property had come to him with its diabolical temptation. "Use me," it whispered, "the damnable spirit of the world understands me better," and after a struggle in which the devils seemed to fight for his soul, he yielded.
He thought he knew the price he would have to pay and that was the reason he did not join his family at the funeral. Everybody would loathe him for giving up his brother to the punishment he deserved. His own mother would turn from him, and after his father, being confronted by poverty, had allowed the law to take its course, he would hate and despise the son who had saved him from beggary.
But no matter! When he stood up in court and said, "This is Oscar Stephenson's handwriting, for he is a forger and a thief," and a thrill of horror ran through the crowded room, and every eye turned on him with contempt, he would say to his secret heart, "He killed her, and he had to suffer, and there was no other way than this!"
Yet that was not what had happened. His father had saved Oscar from the just punishment of his infamous offense. And how had he saved him? By making him--Magnus--pay the price of Oscar's riotous living abroad. Thus the vengeance which he had vowed upon his brother had recoiled upon himself, and while his rightful inheritance was wiped out, while the farm on which he had built his last hopes was embarrassed beyond the possibility of redemption, and he was ruined for the rest of his life, the man for whom and by whom he was ruined--ruined in his affections as well as his fortunes--was to be allowed to steal away amid a croaking chorus of sympathy and pity under the cloak of broken health and a broken heart!
What a devil's world it was in which infamy could masquerade as honor and hypocrisy as grief! When Magnus thought in this way his eyesight grew dull and his hearing dense and he felt a cold pain at the back of his neck. Then he began to use again the only remedy he had recourse to when his head was bad--he began to drink.
But sitting in the darkest corner of the smoking-room of the hotel, every word he heard--every conversation that filtered through the smoke and noise and his deadened senses--seemed to stimulate the idea which had taken possession of him--it was the devil's own world and God had nothing whatever to do with it!
At one moment a student ran into the room and shouted, above the laughter and singing of his fellow-students, "Boys, what do you think? Oscar Stephenson is sailing by the 'Laura' to-night!" And thereupon a babel of voices cried, "Really!" "Never!" "You don't say so!" "True enough--smashed up for good and going abroad for an indefinite period!" "Not a bit of it! Oscar isn't the sort to be broken up like that. Six months abroad and he'll be home again as bright and fresh as ever."
"So he will," thought Magnus, but his heart was fierce and bitter.
At another moment the chairman of the Town Board came in panting and cried, "News, gentlemen, news! Oscar Stephenson has resigned his seat in Parliament!" "Impossible!" "Listen!" and the little fat man read, out of his rasping, asthmatical throat, from a sheet smelling of damp paper and printer's ink a letter from Oscar to his constituents. Broken in health and happiness--compelled to go abroad--impossible to fix date of return--consequently forced to tender resignation--deeply grieved and disappointed--but set the duties too high to ask his constituents to wait, etc.--"That means he's not coming back!" "But, good heavens, does he know what he's giving up? Why, there's nothing that's not within the man's reach--absolutely nothing!" "I wonder the Governor has allowed him to do it!"
And then Magnus laughed out loud in the fierce bitterness of his heart.
After that the voices were lower for a little while, and when Magnus heard them again somebody was saying, "But a man can love a woman too much altogether. Breaking your life to pieces because you've lost your wife isn't brave, it isn't manly." "Perhaps not, but it's human," said somebody else, "and if Oscar Stephenson is smashed up by the death of Thora Neilsen, he's in the right of it, I say."
"So do I," cried Magnus, and laughing wildly, he dropped his head over his arms on the table. What a devil's own world it was to be sure!
There was some whispering and then two louder voices: "Poor fellow! So unlike his brother! Going it fast, they say!" "His father was pretty hard on him, though!" "Not harder than he deserved, poor devil!"
The poison in the soul of Magnus was fermenting every moment. Hearing the contemptuous pity with which he was contrasted with his brother--his brother who had wrought all the evil--his temples beat furiously and one wild thought expelled all other thoughts from his brain. If there was no law to punish Oscar, if his father had conspired to help Oscar to escape and if the hypocritical community agreed to cover up his fault, one thing at least remained--before Oscar left Iceland he must meet with him! Then if this was the devil's own world let the devil look after his elect!
Magnus's mind was weltering in this thought as in a boiling sulphur pit when the captain of the "Laura" came into the smoking-room with the agent of the steamship company, and seating themselves near to him, began to converse apart. "Then he will have to put up with a bed in the hold, for all the berths are gone," said the captain. "But why can't he wait for the next steamer?" "I'll tell you why," whispered the agent, "because the Factor's daughter is to sail by the Vesta and there seem to be reasons why they should not meet." "So that's it, is it? But their fathers are fools not to know that they'll meet on the other side if they want to."
Overhearing this conversation, Magnus lifted his head from his arms, drank a large tumbler of brandy and water to the last drop, and walked heavily out of the house. He had not been conscious of the passing of time, but the darkness was now closing in, porters were hurrying with luggage toward the pier and the first of the "Laura's" three bells was ringing.
Magnus was like a man who could not see or hear properly. More than once he collided with people on the parapet, and being big and strong he brushed them out of the way. Some of them cursed him, but he did not stop. His clouded faculties were conscious of one idea only--that he must go to Government House and meet Oscar face to face before he sailed.
Reaching his former home he found the door open, as usual on an autumn evening, and nobody in porch or hall. Avoiding his father's door, he walked up-stairs and turned mechanically toward the apartments which had lately been occupied by Oscar. But that was a part of the house sacred to his memory of Thora, and even in this hour of passion and pain something whispered to his tortured conscience, and he turned away. A moment later he was in Oscar's bedroom on the upper floor.
The furniture was in disorder, the carpet was awry, and articles of apparel were scattered about as if somebody had been packing trunks, but the trunks were gone and there was nobody in the room. Magnus was about to go when his eyes were arrested by papers on a desk. Among sheets of music and scraps from newspapers there were the remains of a letter doubled up and torn across.
Magnus knew the handwriting--it was Helga's--and without any compunction he put the pieces together and read the letter:
"Oscar:--As soon as I heard that the Governor had spoken to you on the fatal subject, I confessed everything to my father and took my own share of the transaction. Of course, he was furious, and now he vows that I must go back immediately to my mother in Copenhagen. That does not trouble me, seeing that you are leaving Iceland, but I must see you before you go. In spite of all you say, and notwithstanding any promise you may have given to anybody, it is impossible that we can part like this. It would be too selfish and too cowardly not to give me the chance of seeing you for the last time. Your steamer sails at nine o'clock--come to me at half-past eight. If you do not come I may even follow you to London--Iwilldo so if----"
Magnus read no more, but ramming the pieces into his pocket he plunged down the stairs and out into the street. If anybody could have seen him at that moment his appearance must have seemed terrible, for his eyes were bloodshot, and the veins on his forehead were swollen and dark. It was now night and the second bell was ringing in the bay.
He was lunging along in the direction of the Factor's, when somebody crossed in front of him in the thoroughfare. It was Oscar himself and he was going in another direction. Magnus was like a man whose reason is clogged, but he saw everything in the light of his own making. His brother was returning from the pier after taking his baggage aboard, and he had come ashore on a last errand. Magnus knew what errand that was--it was to see Helga, and they were going to meet where they could be unobserved.
The moon had risen by this time and Magnus could keep his brother in view while he followed like a hound behind him. He saw nothing else and was not even conscious of what streets they passed through, save that they were going toward the upper part of the town, near to the lake, and down the road that runs beside it.
He tried to walk softly and to make no noise, but sometimes a hard laugh broke from his dry throat and once or twice a great sob came behind it. He was thinking of Thora, and telling himself what he would say when Oscar met Helga and he came face to face with them. He would say, "I loved your wife--I'm not ashamed to say so--I loved her and gave her up to you and you promised to cherish her, but you neglected her and allowed her child to be stolen away. I would have given my heart's blood to make her happy, but you made her miserable and now she is dead, and you are here with this woman who helped to torture her. You are a perjurer and a forger and a scoundrel and you may take that--and that--and that--and carry the mark of my hand on your face when you go where this wanton means to follow you!"
He was now outside the town, but he could not see or hear or think like a Christian man, and was merely ranging along the road like a beast. Then all at once, in the still air and the silence of all around him, he heard the voice of some one who was saying in low, quivering, pleading tones:
"My darling! My darling!"
Magnus knew whose voice it was! He thought he also knew what sight he should see a moment later. It would be Oscar and Helga locked in each other's arms as they had been when he saw them last in the dance at the farm--flushed, hot and excited.
With his fists clinched and his teeth set hard, he plunged through a gate that was like the gate to a garden, and then ran forward a few paces. But he drew up suddenly, as if an unseen hand had seized his arm. He saw where he was, and his breath seemed to leave him--he was in the cemetery, and some twenty yards farther down the path his brother Oscar was kneeling by the side of a grave and sobbing as if his heart would break.
Magnus stumbled back to the road, sobered, ashamed and broken into utter helplessness.
It might be the devil's own world, but God was in it also.
XVI
When the last of the "Laura's" three bells were ringing, Magnus stood alone on the little wooden jetty going down to the bay. The whistle screamed in the steam-pipe, the anchor-chain rattled in the hawse-holes, and the steamer turned her head to the sea.
Then a row-boat came back from the vessel's side, bringing an elderly lady who was trying to hide her tear-stained face from the gaze of the boatmen and even the eyes of the night, behind the folds of a little lace shawl which she wore over her hufa. It was Anna, and as Magnus helped her ashore, she said:
"Give me your arm and take me home--I'm not feeling well to-night, Magnus."
But before they had gone many paces she stopped and looked back lovingly at the ship that was now steaming down the fiord, and said in a pitiful voice:
"He is gone and I have lost him! My poor boy! My poor Oscar! I had him for six and twenty years and to think it should come to this!"
She walked a few more paces and then looked back again, and said:
"I have never seen anybody so deeply affected. 'Oh, mother, mother!' he cried at last--just like a child. I could have fancied the years had rolled back and he was still a boy--feeling ill and helpless and wanting to lie in his mother's lap."
Again she walked a few steps and looked back as before.
"There was nobody to see him off--nobody at all. The story must have leaked out somewhere, and of all the people he used to call his friends there was not one to say farewell. My poor boy! My poor Oscar! He did wrong--very wrong--but God knows how he is suffering. We think we punish people when we put them in prison, but what punishment is like the pain of an awakened conscience? And Oscar is leaving everything behind him--everything and everybody--and going away in disgrace."
Once more she walked a few steps and then she said in the voice of a crying child:
"I shall never see him again. I pretended I should, but I know quite well I shall not. 'Some day you will come back,' I said, 'and make amends and wipe out everything.' And he said 'Yes' and 'Yes,' but we both knew well it wasn't true. When the bell rang and I had to come away he said, 'Mother, you've been the best mother a man ever had,' and I knew it was the last word I shall ever hear from him."
After that she could not speak for some minutes and then she said, as if trying to comfort herself:
"Perhaps God will give my boy another chance where he is going to. If so I think he will do better, but if not----"
She could not finish what she intended to say--that God's mercy was more terrible than the vengeance of man, and he who renounced it would surely be destroyed.
They walked on in silence until they came to the gate of Government House, and then Anna took her last look at the dark ship that was dying away to an indistinguishable mass in the shades of night and the mists of her blinding tears, and said in a brave voice:
"We must be very good to each other in future, Magnus. You are the only son left to me now, and if you have to suffer for the sin of somebody else you must let me help you to bear it. I will always do so as long as I live, Magnus, and when I am gone from you God will not forget. Good-night, Magnus! And God bless you!"
Magnus stood for some time where his mother had left him, for the breakers of passion were still surging in his throat. Then he returned to the jetty and dropped the remains of Helga's letter into the sea, and they went out with the ebbing tide.
PART V
"Indeed, indeed, repentance oft beforeI swore--but was I sober when I swore?And then, and then came Spring, and rose-in-handMy threadbare penitence apieces tore."
"Indeed, indeed, repentance oft beforeI swore--but was I sober when I swore?And then, and then came Spring, and rose-in-handMy threadbare penitence apieces tore."
"Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before
I swore--but was I sober when I swore?
And then, and then came Spring, and rose-in-hand
My threadbare penitence apieces tore."
I
Above all other cities of the world, London is the home of the outcast, the refuge of the disgraced and rejected, the asylum of the moral leper, the grave of the moral suicide. She offers him obscurity and a kind of cleansing if he will cast himself into the rolling billows of her six millions of people, and she keeps her word but exacts her penalties. Her penalties are homelessness, friendlessness, and loneliness, but above all loneliness. There is no loneliness like that of London. The loneliness of an open boat on an open sea in an impenetrable fog, or the loneliness of a trackless heath in a blinding snowstorm, is not so desolating to the human soul as the loneliness of London's crowded thoroughfares, with their lines of unknown faces filing on and on.
Within a year Oscar Stephenson knew the loneliness of London to its last pang, its utmost bitterness.
When he parted from his mother on the deck of the "Laura" she slipped a purse into his pocket, just as she used to do when he was a boy going to college or going away for his holiday. The purse contained gold and notes to the value of fifty pounds, and this, with the little he had of his own, was the whole sum of his fortune and all he had to face the future with. He was not so young as to think it inexhaustible, or so sanguine as to expect the world to fall at the feet of a fallen man, so he tried to be frugal and to spend his substance prudently.
He spent his first night in London at the hotel in Trafalgar Square at which he had stayed with Thora and Helga on their way to Italy, but besides being too expensive for his present means the place was too full of tragic memories, and next day he removed to a house in one of the first of the side streets going down to the river from the Strand. His lodging was a single room on an upper floor, having a stuffy odor of carpets and curtains and a prospect of the neighboring roofs with various causeways of red chimney-pots.
In this apartment Oscar Stephenson had his first experience of the loneliness of London. He lived there six months without seeing any face belonging to the house except the face of his landlady, and without knowing more about his fellow-lodgers than that his neighbor in the adjoining room never returned home at night until after the great clock at Westminster had struck twelve, and that he whistled "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in varying degrees of alcoholic uncertainty while he put himself to bed.
Before the end of those six months Oscar was in debt to his landlady, he had no regular employment and no prospect except the imminent one of being homeless and penniless.
By what stages of quick descent he came down to this condition it would be a needless task to tell. His story is that of the great army of the disgraced and the castaway who fly to London as to a sanctuary and are allowed to live only by lying at its doors. He had struggled and failed. He was young and active, but nobody needed him. In some places his want of references was a difficulty. In others his superior education was a cause of suspicion. He was too good for one post and not good enough for another. In a world full of work there was no work for him to do.
The slow agony of those first six months kept alive the shame and misery of his breakdown and nearly sapped his moral courage. As day followed day and the feeling of uselessness deepened, he felt like a boy, a friendless, abandoned boy. He had done wrong and he was ready to bear his punishment, but the great, irresistible, unanswerable world was using him cruelly. It would not make peace with him on any terms. It was leaving him without hope, or counsel or encouragement or consolation--it was leaving him alone. This sense of being of no account, of being nothing and nobody in the world, with the terror of sinking out of sight some day and nobody knowing or caring, was harder to bear than poverty or even shame itself.
When the clouds looked blackest he swallowed the last remnant of his pride and appealed to the few friends of his father in England who had been so good to him in the careless days of his college life and so boundlessly hospitable in the happy time of his honeymoon. He appealed to the professor at Oxford, making a clean breast of his misdoings and no concealment of his sufferings and asking for influence and assistance in obtaining a sub-librarianship or such other employment as might provide him with bread and butter, and the answer that came back was prompt and courteous but as cold as the breath of an iceberg.
He appealed to the banker in London, asking for a junior clerkship, or a position as messenger or even porter, and the reply he received was as smooth as a dog's tongue and as useless for help and healing. And then he knew by bitter knowledge that the kindness which had been shown to him in the better time was kindness to his father's son, and that he had wasted that heritage and was his father's son no more.
Meantime he spent his days, and a great part of his nights also, in the streets. There he was like a piece of helpless driftwood in the roaring current of life, always going on yet never going anywhere, always floating along yet never making headway. The ceaseless stream in the busy thoroughfares tormented him terribly, but the emptiness of the obscurer streets tortured him still more, and the blankness of Sunday morning in the Strand afflicted him most keenly of all, for it was full of memories of Sunday morning in Iceland with its atmosphere of peace and rest and the sound of church bells.
When he was at his lowest depths of hopelessness he sent his first letter home.
"Dearest Mother," he wrote, sitting in his stuffy back room overlooking the roof-tops, "You would naturally have expected to hear from me before this, and I certainly should have written earlier, only that I have been waiting for a long, quiet hour in which I could tell you all the news, everything that has happened to me since we parted on the steamer and I saw your dear face disappearing in the boat. That hour seems never to come, so I must snatch a few moments without any more delay to say that all is well and everything goes swimmingly."
"The dear old soul, why should I make her miserable?" he thought.
"You will easily understand that in a great city like London, especially when one is beginning again and one has so much to do and so many people to see, there is not an hour left for oneself and hardly a moment to write a letter. But this does not prevent my thinking of you at all events, and I do so every day and always."
"That's true at least," he told himself, and he went on boldly with his affectionate fictions.
"I know that my dear little mamma will want to know first the condition of my creature comforts and I hasten to tell her that these are as right as can be. This is a large and handsome house just off the tide of greatest traffic where splendid horse wagons (called omnibuses) and upholstered sleighs on wheels (called hansoms) roll about in countless numbers day and night, making a roar like that of the Ellida river where it falls into the fiord. But my bedroom, in which I am writing this letter, is quiet and cozy and homelike, and my landlady is a good little creature who visits me daily and is always most kind and motherly."
As he went on his pen flowed freely and his handwriting became big and reckless.
"I am making new and influential acquaintances every day, and seeing in the flesh the faces we are all familiar with in prints. Walking in the Park yesterday I passed the Queen, who is one of our own princesses, you know, so I felt myself entitled to bow to her and she bowed back with the sweetest courtesy. I see the Prime Minister frequently, for he lives in a house that is only down the street and round the corner, and the homes and offices of nearly all the Ministers of State are within a stone's throw of this place. In fact one way or another I am certainly coming in touch with the leading men in England, and when I open my window at night I can see the light that burns in the clock-tower above the Houses of Parliament.
"So you see that I am finding life wonderfully interesting in this mighty maelstrom of human activity, and if I do not write as often as I ought, my anxious little mamma is not to imagine there is anything amiss with me, but merely to tell herself that no news is good news and that I am immersed in many occupations.
"Perhaps if I have a lonely hour occasionally"--the pen trembled in his fingers and the handwriting became loose and shaky--"it is when I think about home and wonder what is happening there and what people are saying about me now. I suppose I have no right to complain whatever it may be, but sometimes when I am coming back to my lodging on a starry night after a tiring day and I look up to the Milky Way and think, 'That is the road to my country,' the thought goes to my heart like a stab that when I left it last my father's door was closed against me, and I saw nothing of Magnus at the end.
"How are they both, and how are you, and how are the Factor and Aunt Margret, and how--oh! how is our dear little Elin? My sweet, sweet child! What I would give to see her again! Has she grown? Is she still as much like her poor mother? Does she 'notice?' She will begin to babble and talk by and by. Will they bring her up to know nothing about her father? Or perhaps to think ill of him? If I return to Iceland some day (and I shall) to take up the broken threads of my life again, and find that the mind of my own child has been poisoned against me, I don't know what will happen; I believe I shall go back instantly and wipe myself out for ever.
"But I will not think of that even as a remote possibility, and, meantime, I am working day and night to build up a new career, and, as you see, I am getting on splendidly. So good-by, dearest, and God bless you, and God bless everybody at home, for we shall all be good friends yet.--OSCAR.
"P.S.--Is Helga still in Iceland, or has the Factor carried out his threat of sending her back to Denmark? I suppose I ought not to think of her, having given that promise to the Governor, yet I can not help doing so, and I can not help asking."