IIIt was the time when a young English composer was creating some sensation by writing an opera on the subject of "King Olaf." The theme was one which Oscar had often proposed to himself, and raised his fancy and emulation upon, in the delirious days when he had hoped to become a musician, and the dazzling dreams of glory were not yet so dead that he could restrain himself from rambling up to Covent Garden on the night of the first performance.He knew he was penniless and he was conscious that his clothes were shabby and his shoes in a woful condition as he lounged by the arches and watched the audience assemble. The carriages were rolling up and discharging their occupants--the Queen and her ladies, the Prime Minister and finally the King--and he was turning away feeling more miserable and destitute than ever, when a hand touched him on the shoulder and a familiar voice at his side said cheerily,"Helloa! Can it be possible?"It was Neils Pinsen, his former schoolfellow and companion, fresh and bright in evening dress under a handsome fur-lined overcoat."Heard you were in London, but didn't know where to find you. Want to see you immediately, old fellow. Where do you stay?"As soon as he had got rid of a stifling sensation in the throat Oscar answered him, and then Finsen said,"Should I call upon you there, or would you prefer to come here to me?""I will come to you," said Oscar."Good! When shall it be? Will to-morrow at twelve be convenient?""Any time will be convenient to me.""Happy man! Twelve to-morrow in my office, then. Glad to have found you at last. Thought you might have looked me up and wondered what on earth had become of you. Good-by! Busy to-night and enough work for a regiment. By the way, if you would like to see the performance--can't promise you a seat, but if you would care to stand at the back of the balcony--You would? Come this way--Johnson! Take this gentleman in front and give him anything you have left. By-by!"Before Oscar had quite recovered his breath, he was sitting in the half-light at the back of the upper circle, feeling miserably humiliated and ashamed, yet tingling with a strange excitement. He never quite knew what happened thereafter. He forgot that his money was all gone, that he had not eaten since morning, that his trousers were frayed at the bottom and his shoes down at the heels. He only felt that out of the sordid conditions of the past six months he had suddenly emerged into an atmosphere that was as the vivid breath of his soul.When the conductor entered--it was the young composer himself--Oscar craned forward to catch a glimpse of the man who was on the eve of snatching the triumph which but for the hard buffetings of fate might perhaps have been his own, and when the opera began he listened with every faculty. It was good, it was human, it was modern, its harmony was exquisite, its orchestration sure, its form showed mastery of the mystery of music, and yet it lacked something. What did it lack? It lacked the life-blood of the stern old Northland. The Englishman could not give it that, for the root of the matter was not in him. But he could have done so, for his blood was the blood of the Vikings, the blood of Flosi and Snorri and Eric and Olaf and all the mighty men of old.Oscar did not hear his fellow-lodger go to bed that night, with his lunging step on the stairs and his drunken whistling of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and next morning when his landlady came up to speak to him, according to her wont, he was hardly conscious of what she said except that it was some protest, some threat, and that he did not feel it worth while to soften and sweeten her with such promises as he had made before.The intoxication of last night was still upon him when he set out to keep his appointment. Music was calling to him again, calling him like a siren, out of his friendlessness and loneliness, his humiliation and obscurity, his poverty and shame, out of the pitiless cruelty of crowded thoroughfares and the grimy sordidness of obscure streets, into the glory of success and fame."Come in, old fellow," cried the familiar voice of yesterday, and Oscar found himself in Finsen's office."Let me see," said Finsen, removing a pair of pince-nez, "how long have you been in London?""Six months--nearly seven," said Oscar."And what have you been doing?""Nothing.""Lucky chap! Nothing at all?""Yes, there is one thing I've been doing--I've been doing it rather industriously.""What's that?""Starving."Finsen laughed loud, but Oscar laughed louder--he had not yet broken his fast."We all go through it at some time," said Finsen, "and it's best to get it over at the beginning. So I congratulate you, old fellow, and now to business. I'm managing here--managing for a syndicate. Under four eyes, as we say in Iceland, I intend to give a series of concerts and I'm looking out for fresh material. You compose?""Used to do," said Oscar."I understand," said Finsen. "Your life has been off the tracks lately and you'll not write much more that's worth anything until you get back into the groove. But I know what you used to do and that's good enough for me. I heard some of your songs from the Sagas, you remember, and I don't mind saying that as the work of a man who was nearly self-taught in the matter of harmony I thought them wonderful. But Helga tells me--Helga Neilsen, I mean, I hear from her occasionally----"Oscar flinched as if a lash had cut him."Helga tells me," continued Finsen, "that you did some things in Iceland last year that beat your Saga songs to little bits, and if you think we can try them here----""They're gone," said Oscar."I know," said Finsen. "I've heard what has become of them. But perhaps you have copies?""Not a copy," said Oscar."Or perhaps you can remember some of them?""Not one.""Even so, the case is not quite hopeless. You are a person of some influence in Iceland?""Used to be," said Oscar."Well, I presume to think I am--my father is Sheriff and likely to be something better--so if you care to give your consent we may recover the things still."A mist arose between Oscar's eyes and Finsen's face. "You surely do not mean----?""Certainly I do. If the things are half as good as Helga says, they're worth all the trouble. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on her judgment, to give you something to go on with, and when the stuff comes to devote a morning to trying it with the orchestra, and ask you to conduct the rehearsal."Finsen's figure was floating in the mist that was between it and Oscar's eyes."You wish me to authorize you to exhume----""Why not? It's not an unheard of proceeding. And if ever there was a moment that justified it it's now. If compositions that might give pleasure to the world and make pots of money are lying buried in a grave----""I'll starve first," said Oscar, rising from his seat."My dear chap," said Finsen, putting back his pince-nez, "you tell me you're doing that already. But here's your chance of doing it no more, and if----""I'll starve to death first," said Oscar, turning to the door."Nonsense, old fellow! If the things were doing any good where they are I could respect your feelings. But they're not. They are merely rotting away and they will soon disappear altogether. What your object was in burying them you know best--I confess I thought it very quixotic--but whatever it was it has served its purpose. And now there they lie--works of genius, as I'm willing to believe--that might possibly make your name and begin to make your fortune, while you----""I'll die in a ditch rather than touch them," said Oscar, and without a word of farewell he flung out of the room.No words could describe the agony he endured during the remaining hours of that day. The intoxication of the night before was gone by this time and he suffered the pains of the spirit that has buoyed itself up on a bankrupt hope. If he had ever had any uncertainty about the meaning of the blind impulse of remorse which had prompted him to bury his compositions in his wife's grave he had none now. It was God's own punishment to shut up the only channel to fame and success, nay to livelihood itself, as by the door of a tomb.Hour after hour he walked the streets, feeling that escape from the way of life he had been living was now utterly hopeless. He would go down and down, day by day, little by little, until he was submerged beneath the flood, or became, but for the mercy of God, a vagabond and a castaway.It was long before he could bring himself to go back to his lodging and when he did so he found that the street door would not open to the key he carried in his pocket. He rang the bell and a little maid-of-all-work came up as from her bedroom below stairs with curl papers in her hair and some loose clothes about her body."Why did you bolt the door, my child?" he said. "Didn't you know that I had not come home?""Yes, sir, but mistress told me to tell you as how your room has been let and you can have your trunks when you pay what you owes her.""Do you mean that I am to be turned out?""It ain't my fault, sir, and I'm very sorry."Oscar and the girl stood looking vacantly at each other for a moment, and then he turned away and walked up the street with a new sensation--the blank, desolating sensation of not having a roof over his head. No one knows what it means to be one night homeless in a great city except those who have gone through it. It is not so much the poverty of privation that is hard to bear as the sense of utter worthlessness, of being less to the world than its dogs, for they are cared for, or its horses for they are housed.His money was gone, and he had no luggage in his hands to make shift to find another lodging with, so he walked on and on, up Lower Regent Street and across Piccadilly, through noisy throngs of people--young women smoking cigarettes, young men laughing and singing and a bedraggled girl being lugged along by a policeman--on and on until he came to a wide and quiet thoroughfare where a line of broughams waited outside a house that was brilliantly lighted up, and there he paused in his aimless perambulation to listen to the music that was coming through the open windows.He had been asking himself for the hundredth time how it had come to pass that he, so lately the pampered son of his father--who was the Governor of his people and their upright judge--was tramping the streets of London without a penny in his pocket or a roof to cover him, when the door opened and an elderly gentleman came out bare-headed to escort some ladies to their carriage. Then his stunned faculties awoke and he saw where he was standing. He was outside the house of his father's friend, the banker. The deep remembrance came back to him of the time, so near yet so far away, when he himself, with Thora and Helga, had been honored guests in that house, and lest the banker should see him, the wayfarer he then was, skulking there at that untimely hour, he turned about and walked quickly away.Nothing that had happened on that evil night had wounded his feelings so acutely, or made him feel so surely that rescue from his accursed condition there could be none. Was it to be a part of his punishment that even when his senses slept he was to be constantly brought up against himself and reminded of the days that were dead? If so, life would be unendurable, and existence an everlasting hell. Did Nature never forget? Did God never forgive?Half an hour afterward he was walking along the Embankment, past the crouching and sleeping forms of the sordid things whom the city casts out on to the river's bank by night; and looking wildly at the waters of the Thames, glistening and glimmering under the electric light, he asked himself why he should not end it all and have done with further torture.What was the thought that restrained him? Was it the thought of his dead wife whose memory was to be a safeguard against sin and a perpetual inspiration? No!By the inscrutable will of fate it was the thought of the one being whose love had wrecked him--it was the thought of Helga. In spite of the pledge he had given to the Governor, he could not help thinking of her. No day had been so dark but he had thought of her on going to bed at night and on awakening in the morning. She was gone, they might never meet again, their love was a page of his life which he had crossed out and turned down for ever, yet her eyes were in his eyes and her smile was the only sunshine that shone upon his face.The thought of Thora was a sweet and sacred thing which he had wrapped up and laid by in the lavender of memory, but the thought of Helga was warm and alive and always with him. It was with him now, and it saved his soul from despair and his body from death.IIIBefore Oscar's letter reached Iceland many changes had taken place there. The estrangement of the Governor and the Factor had developed into open antagonism. Everybody knew of it and the enemies of each had been playing upon his hatred of the other.The Factor was the first to suffer. The downfall of the barter trade, which Magnus predicted, had already come to pass, and the Factor's business had tumbled to pieces like an unbound faggot. There is always a good reason to kill a fat ox, and while people said, "The Factor gives the farmers what he likes for his wool and charges them what he pleases for foreign produce," the true ground of the attack upon his business had been his intimidation of the town at the time of Oscar's election.Oddsson, the defeated candidate of that day, never rested until he had established a company on the cash principle. Even then the Factor would have borne down all opposition, for the Factor was rich while the farmers were poor, but Oddsson had secured an ally in the most powerful person. As the smith uses the tongs to spare his fingers, so Oddsson had used the Governor to save his company.The Governor knew full well that Oddsson was his enemy, and that if his party got the upper hand they would upset the old order, but he could not resist the temptation to join him when he was trying to destroy the Factor. By his help the preferential tariff with Denmark was broken down and the Iceland markets were opened to English produce, and that was the death-blow to the barter business.For three months the Factor kept his doors open by selling at less than cost price and buying at more than market value, but the end was sure. It was whispered at the bank that he was parting with his securities in stocks and shares and his estate in land and loose property, and that sooner or later he would come down with a crash. Nobody pitied him, and at the bottom of his tortured heart one man rejoiced.But the smiter has often short joy of his stroke, and when Oddsson and his party, having done with trade, turned their attention to constitutional subjects the Factor, though he hated them, joined their agitation. The winter had been severe, there had been many deaths among the older members of Parliament and as often as a by-election had occurred the Factor had thrown the weight of his remaining influence and the force of his diminishing fortunes into the scale of reform. By the end of the spring it had become certain that the next session of Althing would witness the passing of a bill for the reconstruction of the Constitution and the abolition of the Governorship.Thus each of the two men who had stood shoulder to shoulder for fifty years destroyed himself in destroying the other, and the prophecy of long ago was fulfilled that if the Governor and the Factor ever ceased to be friends they would become the bitterest of enemies.Meantime Anna had tried to make peace and failed. When the quarrel was young, and chiefly about the children, she had attempted a tone of sympathetic protest. "Come, come, Stephen, pardon is the best punishment--you must make peace with the Factor.""He might have saved my son by the lifting of his hand and he would not do so--I shall never make peace with him," said the Governor."Oscar Neilsen," said Anna, meeting the Factor in the street, "when are you coming to see Stephen? If you stay away much longer the house-dog will fly at you.""The house-dog flew at me when I was there last, Anna--I shall never trust him again," said the Factor.When the quarrel grew old and ugly and personal to the men themselves, Anna thought of another means of reconciliation. The child was the last remaining link between the Governor and the Factor--it should bring them together again. "God has always a use for these little angels," she said.Aunt Margret joined in the conspiracy and the two old things concocted many schemes--all simple and transparent but womanly and good--to get the men into the same room. They never succeeded, but a thousand beams of sunshine shone out of the baby's cradle, and little by little the ice that had frozen about the men's souls was seen to melt.When the child was "shortened" it was taken over to Government House and wheeled in its perambulator into the Governor's bureau."Isn't she a beauty, Stephen?" said Anna; and Aunt Margret said,"The precious pet couldn't possibly be more like her father if she were not so wonderfully like her mother, too."The Governor looked down at the little face without saying a word, and when the child blinked up at him with the eyes of Thora and the smile of Oscar he went up-stairs to his bedroom, and Anna heard him lock the door.When the child cut her first tooth, and everybody according to custom ought to have given her a "tooth-fee," the Factor, coming home at night, found no presents on the nursery table, but the little one was propped up under the blue lace of her hooded cradle and making the air hideous with the divine discord of a baby's silver-mounted rattle."That's Stephen's present and it must have cost him a fortune," said Aunt Margret, whereupon the Factor, weary as he was, walked out into the road where he could hear nothing but the cold lapping of the lake.Yet love of the little one was not bringing the two men together--it was thrusting them still farther apart. "That man is scheming to get hold of the child," thought the Factor. "He and his have robbed me of my daughters and now they're trying to rob me of my granddaughter also.""She's my son's child," thought the Governor, "and my son's child is my child--why did I allow that man to have her?""No use, woman!" said Aunt Margret. "It's late to withdraw the sword when it is thrust to the heart."But then came Oscar's letter and Anna's hopes went up with a bound. She was like a child herself in her joy over it. Her happiness was too great to permit her to see holes in its picture of prosperity. Oscar was well, he was getting on splendidly and he sent his love to everybody.She read the letter first to the Governor, and after he had heard it he walked out into the home-field where the eider-ducks were building their nests afresh on the edge of the fiord, and the fishing-smacks were coming back to harbor. Then she took it over to the Factor's, rolled it up in the baby's hand like another rattle, and left it with Aunt Margret to be shown to her brother.But that day had been a bad day with the Factor and when Oscar's letter came back to Anna it was torn across the middle and enclosed in an empty envelope. Anna was nearly broken-hearted at the treatment of her treasure, for no girl of sixteen had ever so loved her first love-letter, and she had intended to show it to everybody--to the Bishop, the Rector, the Sheriff, and above all to Magnus.Magnus had been coming and going at intervals throughout the winter. It had been a hard one for him as for others, and he had begun to realize what it would be when his father was gone and he had to bear the burden of the monstrous mortgage. But harder to bear than any winter had been the sight of his mother's sufferings during Oscar's silence."Any news yet!" he would ask, and Anna would say No and No, with countless explanations and excuses.So it was through the dark days, and his feeling against Oscar grew hard as the ground he trod upon. But when the snow had gone and he went up with the spring caravan there was Anna with a face like the rising sun, and by that he knew that a letter must have come at last. Sure enough in less than a minute out it came from the bosom of her embroidered treya, torn across as the Factor had left it and she was calling on him to write an answer to her dictation. This is what he wrote:"MY DEAR SON: Your letter arrived safely by the last steamer and made up by its welcome news for the long time we had to wait for it. It is so good to hear that you are well and prosperous and enjoying your life in the great English city. Many a time I feared it might be otherwise, but now I have your letter and I am happy and contented."I am proud that my son is rising into such high and good company, and though your father speaks little I am sure that he feels the same. He always said that you would do great things some day, and it is not the way of God's goodness to disappoint such expectations where they are built on a good foundation."And now I have to tell you that your father is well in bodily health, though a little oppressed by worldly anxieties, but I tell him our home in this life is always on a steep mountain and if we trust in God there is no reason to be afraid. As for myself, I am as well as can be expected at my age, though my left ear troubles sometimes and my eyes are not what they used to be for knitting and small print. But I must not allow myself to complain, for perhaps it is a part of God's mercy to us old people that our senses should die by degrees so that when they come to die altogether we may not be taken unawares."Magnus is writing this letter and he is strong and hearty. The snow was deep at the farm this year and he lost six of his best beasts, but his lambs came beautifully and now they are on the mountains and his ewes are milking well and the home-field is closed for the hay."I have to tell you that the one you ask about has gone back to her mother at Copenhagen and that there are those who can not be very sorry. Sometimes to silence the evil tongues that speak ill of you here I am tempted to blame her for all that has happened, but who am I to judge any one? And the worst I wish for her is that she may soon become a God-fearing girl."Margret Neilsen is just as she always was, a twisted bough with plenty of sap in it, and the Factor would be well enough but for a bad hip. He too, like your father, is much oppressed by worldly cares and taking it ill that they should fall so fast upon him in the evening of his days."And now I have to tell you of your little Elin that she is as well as can be, and she has cut two front teeth and her hair is curling over her forehead. She is the best child that ever was born, and when she smiles she is so like somebody that it nearly breaks my heart to look at her. Margret is as good to the darling as if she were her own mother, and your father and the Factor can hardly see the sun for her. As for me it fills my heart brimful to think how God in His goodness has sent us old folks this little angel after our late troubles, for she is like the spring after a hard winter when the snow and ice have stayed so long that we think surely we shall never see the grass or hear the rivers again, and then all at once there are the green fields and the shining streams and all the gladness of the flowers."And now, though you are getting on so well, you must not be angry with your mother for sending you a little present. Maria has been all day in the kitchen packing your college box, and goodness knows what things she may have put in it. But I am knitting you a pair of stockings out of old Maggie's brown wool, and I hope you will not be ashamed to wear them, for they will keep your feet warm in the cold weather, when the English socks must be so thin and cottony. Then I remember how fond you used to be of our smoked mutton, so I am telling Maria to put in some of that too, and a few rolls of Rullapilsa."I dare not let the Governor know I am sending the mutton--he would think it foolish and unnecessary--and of course, with so many good things to eat and drink I do not expect you to offer it to your English friends, but perhaps you can hide it in a cupboard somewhere and take a slice when you are quite alone."And now I must conclude for Magnus is coming to the end of his paper. It makes me happy to think your bedroom is comfortable and I wish I could thank your landlady for being so kind and motherly. I may never see her in this world, but we shall meet in heaven some day and then I will thank her."And now, my dear son, in the midst of your great prosperity, do not forget that all good things come from God and remember to put your trust in Him. To His care I commit you, for He knows all our wants and all our troubles and all our secrets, and His eye ever watches and His heart never sleeps."Your affectionate mother,"ANNA."IVWhen Oscar received his mother's letter he was living in a slum in Westminster. It was called Short Street, and it was a typical example of the mean streets which nearly always, and in all countries, lie near to a great minster, like sea-wrack at the foot of a rock.Short Street was a cul-de-sac, whereof one end was a gin-palace and the other an archway to the railway depot of a suburban necropolis. Late at night the inhabitants were kept from sleep by the quarreling of tipsy men who had been turned out of the public-house, and early in the morning they were awakened by the rumbling of the hearses that rattled the corpses over the cobbles of the street.Oscar's home in Short Street was at Number One, a grimy house with a soiled card in the fanlight above the door, saying, "Lodgings for single men." Besides himself, there were four lodgers, three of them being porters at the funeral depot and the fourth head barman at the public-house. The bar-man had the parlor floor, and he generally brought home a number of noisy companions at closing time to play cards and drink beer.Oscar's bedroom in this house was not so much a room as a stifling closet of miserable aspect, in which the refuse furniture seemed to make an effort to range itself in order--a threadbare carpet, an iron bedstead without foot or head, a painted washstand, a broken-lipped water ewer, two or three rickety chairs, a table that was safest when it rested against the wall, a few pictures of race-horses on the remains of a dirty wall-paper, and a looking-glass blotched by damp, like a sheet of ice spotted and scabbed by thaw.His landlady lived in the basement and was never seen except on Monday mornings, when she went round for her lodgers' rent some two or three hours before the collector called for her own. The only person whom Oscar saw constantly was the landlady's servant, Jenny, a typical cockney girl of the humblest class, untidy and unclean, but as bright as a London street sparrow, and with a big soft heart in her vulgar little breast.Jenny had conceived a certain affection for Oscar, based on no grounds more personal than that he did not shout at her down the pairs of stairs, or take liberties, or use bad language, and that he always raised his hat when he passed her in the street.The only effect of this sentimental attitude on Jenny's part was that she always dressed in her clean "print" on the days when Oscar happened to be at home to tea, and it was on one of these afternoons that she came knocking at the door of his bankrupt garret and said, "Letter for you, sir."It was so long since Oscar had received a letter of any kind that he leaped up with a kind of fear, and on taking the envelope out of Jenny's hand and seeing it was addressed in Magnus's writing, and had been sent on from his former lodging, he turned pale and trembled."Is it bad news, sir?" said Jenny. "I wouldn't 'a' brought it up on no account if I'd knowed.""No, no! Leave me, Jenny," said Oscar, and when the girl had gone and he had opened the letter with nervous fingers, he read it with eyes that were wet with tears while his cheeks were flushed with shame.When he came to the end his heart was beating wildly and he was asking himself if it would not be the brave and manly thing to write at once and say that all this story of his prosperity was a miserable fiction, that he had never been otherwise than wretched, that he was living in a common way among common companions, doing common work which he dare not think of, and that no words could express the secret agony of his soul at having sunk so low. But deep as was the degradation of that bitter hour it was not so deep as that of the following morning when Jenny came lugging his college box up-stairs, and chattering gaily as if she had brought him a fortune."The railway man said as 'ow it was as 'eavy as lead, so I give 'im twopence for 'isself--I 'ope I did right, sir.""Quite right, Jenny. Here's the money. You can go now.""Can I 'elp ye to unpack it, sir? There ain't no sort o' box as I can't unpack. My! what a long way it must 'a' come!""It came from Iceland, Jenny.""Fancy that now! Pat Looney, the lorry man, 'e come from there, and the neighbors says it's a pity 'e don't go back. They never says that about you, though. 'He's so perlite,' they says."Oscar allowed the girl to open the box and empty it of its contents, and as she did so she chirped away like the street sparrow that she was, while he sat with the mist of his boyish associations floating up to him from the happy past."Well, I never!" she cried, sitting back on her heels as she knelt before the box. "Polonies! And sausages! And pickled tongues! And hams! Why, you won't 'ave to buy nothin' to eat for months! Isn't that lucky now? Just when you're 'out' too! Is it a present?""Yes, it is a present, Jenny.""They must think somethin' of ye as sends ye a present like this," said Jenny, and then, after a moment, in a fluttering voice, "Is it a laidy, sir?""It's my mother," said Oscar."Your mother!" said Jenny, in a tone of relief. "Well, that's what I do call a mother--being good to anybody like this.""She has been good to me all my life, Jenny, and all my life I've treated her badly."Jenny looked at him strangely as if something surprised and pained her."You have, sir?""Shamefully, Jenny, yet she has forgiven me again and again."Jenny was silent for a moment and then she said, "Mothers is like that, isn't they? Now there's Jim Cobb, the shandry man, 'e knocks 'is mother about somethin' cruel, but she never 'aves 'im up for it, never! Mothers is proper good!""Is your mother good to you, Jenny?""Me? I'm an orfling," said Jenny, and then, lowering her voice to a tone of confidence, she added, "I don't mind tellin' you, but I am! I always tells the other lodgers as my mother was one o' them girls as ye see at the Aquarium at nights covered with silks and diamonds.""And was she?"A look of dejection crossed Jenny's face. "I don't see as she could 'ave been, because they say at the Orflinage as I was born in Holloway when my mother was doin' time."By this time the contents of the box were ranged on the table and chairs, and Jenny was sitting back on her heels again to look at them."There! They're as pretty as a 'am and beef shop! And I do believe as that's what your mother meant 'em for too. Jim Cobb, 'e wanted me to set one up with 'im, but not me! Not as I 'ave any objections to the 'am and beef business, and if anybody else thought of starting it----"Jenny's hint was interrupted by the sound of a vehicle stopping suddenly outside the house."Now, I bet ye I know who that is," she said with a wink. "It's that blessed Jim Cobb again. He's always a-wantin' me to go for a ride in 'is shandry."But going to the window she cried, "Goodness! It's a handswim cab! And there's a laidy a-gettin' out of it!""A lady?""You can't see 'er now--she's on the steps. There she is," cried Jenny, as a rat-tat came to the street door, "and me not 'ad time to comb my 'air yet!"With an indefinable feeling of mingled fear and hope which there was yet no cause for, Oscar stood on the landing and listened while Jenny ran down the stairs. When the street door was opened he heard his own name in a voice that sent the blood to his head and made him reel with dizziness. A moment later Jenny came back with a face that looked white even under the smudges that soiled it, and she said in the same fluttering voice as before:"I thought as much. It's you she's askin' for. I've took 'er into the barman's parlor--'e won't be 'ome till tea."Oscar went down-stairs slowly, but when he got to the bottom his breath was coming and going in gusts, and his heart was beating against his breast as with the blows of a hammer. The parlor door stood ajar and a perfume he knew was coming out to him. After a moment he pushed the door open and then she whom he expected to see was standing before him, she herself, more radiantly beautiful than ever, with something soft and white about her neck and a face shining with smiles.How much he lived in that moment no one could say. A hundred emotions coursed through his soul like the flash of flame--joy, delight, pain, shame, the rapture of seeing her, the humiliation of being found in such a common place, the degradation of being ill-clad and obviously poor, but above all love--the uncontrollable love that leads men on to happiness and victory or to ruin and death. His face broke up, tears burst from his eyes and holding out both hands he cried--"Helga! My God! Helga!"VHelga appeared to be not less excited than Oscar himself. She was genuinely moved to see how the joy he had in meeting her affected him, and when he had kissed both her hands she kissed one of his and tears which she could not keep back came to her eyes also. There was a shiny leather-covered sofa in the room and they sat on it side by side and hand in hand."I have never, never been so glad," he said."And I am glad too," she said. "Let me look at you again, Oscar. A little paler, and perhaps a little thinner, but otherwise not changed in the least.""Yet you have changed a great deal, Helga.""Grown older, have I?""Grown lovelier and more beautiful than ever."At that she leaned her face toward him and he kissed her, and for some moments they could not restrain their fondness. Helga was the first to recover self-possession."And now let us talk seriously," she said, but Oscar was still quivering with excitement and, having brushed away his tears, he laughed hysterically."How long have you been in London?" he asked."A month--a month to-morrow," she replied."And to think that I have never known it until now! But how did you come to leave Copenhagen?""That's just what I am trying to tell you. My father, for some unknown reason, elected to reduce my mother's income by half, so something had to be done. Then I remembered Neils Finsen and the wonderful things he used to say about my voice.""Finsen!" repeated Oscar, in a graver tone."So I wrote to him, and he answered that if I would come to London he would have experts to hear me, and then they would see what could be done.""Well? Well?""Well, I came, and the experts heard me, and they concluded that my voice was quite unusual--the most promising soprano they had found for years.""And now?""Now I'm at the Royal Academy of Music, and by and by I am to go to Paris for two years, three years, perhaps four to study under Marchesi or Bonby and to attend an acting class, and finally I am to be taken to Monte Carlo or Nice in representations of "Faust" and "Someo," as a first step toward taking London by storm as Marguerite or Juliette--there!""And Finsen is doing all this for you?""Well, yes, so to speak, I suppose I must say that.""Is he to pay your expenses?""I really don't know who is to pay them, but I've signed a contract to come out under his management and to refund everything when I am fairly launched. And now about yourself, Oscar?""About me?""It's nearly a year since I saw you last. What have you been doing?"Oscar made a clumsy laugh. "Oh, I'm like the lilies of the field--I toil not, neither do I spin."But his forced gaiety broke down badly, and he said more soberly, "Don't ask me what I've been doing, Helga."Helga's eyes wandered around the room for a moment and then she said, "I know! Neils told me something about it, and he wished me to say----"Before she could finish Oscar had risen to his feet. "If you come from Finsen I know what your errand is, and I would rather die----""No, no, no," said Helga, clinging to his nervous hand. "Sit down. It's not that at all. Listen!"He sat and the sweetness of her look banished all his fears."They're giving what they call promenade concerts at Covent Garden, and a few days ago there was some difference with the leader of the orchestra. It seemed desirable to make a change and the question was who the new leader ought to be. Naturally I thought of you.""Of me?""Why not? Didn't I see what you could do with those hundred and fifty numskulls at Thingvellir?""But Covent Garden!""My dear Oscar, I've seen every leader they have here, and while they are all your superiors in knowledge and experience, there's not one of them with a tittle of your magnetism and genius. So I said, 'Neils, if you want the finest leader that London has ever seen let me go and fetch him!'""But you can't know, Helga--you can't imagine--if you had the least idea of what I've gone through to live--merely to live----"Helga looked around the room again and she said, "Can't I see? Haven't I got eyes? But if you were to tell me that nobody has had any use for you in the meanest work that is ever done by the commonest men, I should still say what I said to Finsen."Oscar's throat was hurting him. The thought of Helga's faith and championship broke down his self-control. He never allowed himself to think there could be any selfish ground for it."What do you wish me to do, Helga?" he asked."To meet me in Finsen's office at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning.""But I vowed I could never set foot in the place again.""You didn't know then thatIshould ask you. And I do ask you, Oscar."He remembered the promise he had given to his father; he reflected on the danger of reopening a page of his life which he had crossed out and turned down as for ever; he thought of Finsen and his interest in Helga and the hold he would have of her through her hopes and ambitions; and his will was like a broken withe, for the controlling destiny of his life was leading him on."You will be there, will you not?" she whispered, and Oscar answered:"Yes."She leaned her face forward again, and again he kissed her and then she rose to go."Where are you staying?" he asked, and she told him. It was in a fashionable apartment-house on the edge of the Green Park."Does Finsen live there also?""Well, yes, he lives in the same building. And you must live there, too. I shall want to see you constantly. There are a thousand things I want you to do for me. But now I must be off."He could not let her go, and they renewed their caresses. "It will seem like a dream when you are gone," he said. "I shall hardly be able to believe you have been here, or that you will ever come back again.""Don't say that. I told you in Iceland that I should come to you if you didn't come to me, and I've kept my word, haven't I?""My dear, dear Helga!""It wasn't quite good of you to go away without giving me an opportunity of seeing you again.""I know, I know!""You had a certain duty to me, you know, after what had passed----""Hush, dear, hush!""But I'm willing to believe it was the fault of other people.""Don't let us speak of it, Helga," said Oscar, and his arms, which had been about her in a close embrace, slackened away and fell.It was easier to part with her after that, but before he opened the door he kissed her again, and when he helped her into the hansom he put her fingers to his lips.He stood bare-headed on the pavement oblivious to all surroundings until the cab had rounded the corner of the public house and Helga had waved to him through the glass. Then he became aware that the sight in that sordid slum of so lovely a girl, so beautifully dressed and with a hansom waiting for her, had brought the neighbors to their doors, and that the women were thumbing their apron-strings and grinning to each other across the rails.When he reentered the house Jenny passed him in the lobby with a stealthy and guilty air which seemed to say that her poor tortured little soul had not resisted the temptation to listen and to watch.He returned to the parlor for a moment and the perfume of Helga's presence was still to be felt there over the odor of dead ale and tobacco. Never had he envied the barman before, but at that moment he would have given all he possessed to keep this room for the rest of the day, that he might sit on the sofa where Helga had sat, and lay his hand on the table where her hand had rested and kiss the carpet where her feet had trod.He was like a man moving in a dream, and when he went back to his own apartment he was not conscious of his squalid surroundings. The dirty wall-paper, the threadbare carpet and the blotched looking-glass humiliated and compromised him no longer. His body was still in his bankrupt garret, but his soul was far away. It was in another world--a world that was bright with Helga's eyes as its sun and stars, for he was going over again the time he had spent with her, every word of it, every tone, every look, every gesture.This lasted the whole of the day and when darkness fell a curtain seemed to have fallen on the life he had been living during the past twelve months. The mire and slime of vulgar associations, the degradation of common companionship, the sense of loneliness, of friendlessness, of being nothing and nobody, the deep remembrance of being homeless and hopeless and helpless and useless--all this had gone. That passage of his life was over now, and never, never, never would its pain and shame come back to him again. He had passed through it because he had sinned; but if he had sinned he had suffered, and God Himself had seen that he had suffered enough.His eyes were wet when he lay down on his soiled pillow, but he fell asleep in a blissful condition and in the first dream of the night he was back with Helga. Once in the dark hours he awoke and heard the deadened hum of the barman and his friends at their cards and ale; and again he awoke in the dawn and then he heard the hearse of the necropolis thundering up Short Street and rumbling under the archway at the top of it.At eleven o'clock that morning he went to Covent Garden, and again and again at eleven the following mornings he went there. On the tenth morning he called to Jenny, who had grown shy of him and was leaving his breakfast on a tray outside his door, and said:"Jenny, I wish you to tell your mistress that I shall be leaving this lodging in another week."Then Jenny's white and wistful face broke down utterly, and with a crack in her voice, and the ghost of a smothered sob in it, she said:"I knowed as it 'ud come to this. The minit I set eyes on 'er I said as she'd take ye away from me--an' she 'as."
II
It was the time when a young English composer was creating some sensation by writing an opera on the subject of "King Olaf." The theme was one which Oscar had often proposed to himself, and raised his fancy and emulation upon, in the delirious days when he had hoped to become a musician, and the dazzling dreams of glory were not yet so dead that he could restrain himself from rambling up to Covent Garden on the night of the first performance.
He knew he was penniless and he was conscious that his clothes were shabby and his shoes in a woful condition as he lounged by the arches and watched the audience assemble. The carriages were rolling up and discharging their occupants--the Queen and her ladies, the Prime Minister and finally the King--and he was turning away feeling more miserable and destitute than ever, when a hand touched him on the shoulder and a familiar voice at his side said cheerily,
"Helloa! Can it be possible?"
It was Neils Pinsen, his former schoolfellow and companion, fresh and bright in evening dress under a handsome fur-lined overcoat.
"Heard you were in London, but didn't know where to find you. Want to see you immediately, old fellow. Where do you stay?"
As soon as he had got rid of a stifling sensation in the throat Oscar answered him, and then Finsen said,
"Should I call upon you there, or would you prefer to come here to me?"
"I will come to you," said Oscar.
"Good! When shall it be? Will to-morrow at twelve be convenient?"
"Any time will be convenient to me."
"Happy man! Twelve to-morrow in my office, then. Glad to have found you at last. Thought you might have looked me up and wondered what on earth had become of you. Good-by! Busy to-night and enough work for a regiment. By the way, if you would like to see the performance--can't promise you a seat, but if you would care to stand at the back of the balcony--You would? Come this way--Johnson! Take this gentleman in front and give him anything you have left. By-by!"
Before Oscar had quite recovered his breath, he was sitting in the half-light at the back of the upper circle, feeling miserably humiliated and ashamed, yet tingling with a strange excitement. He never quite knew what happened thereafter. He forgot that his money was all gone, that he had not eaten since morning, that his trousers were frayed at the bottom and his shoes down at the heels. He only felt that out of the sordid conditions of the past six months he had suddenly emerged into an atmosphere that was as the vivid breath of his soul.
When the conductor entered--it was the young composer himself--Oscar craned forward to catch a glimpse of the man who was on the eve of snatching the triumph which but for the hard buffetings of fate might perhaps have been his own, and when the opera began he listened with every faculty. It was good, it was human, it was modern, its harmony was exquisite, its orchestration sure, its form showed mastery of the mystery of music, and yet it lacked something. What did it lack? It lacked the life-blood of the stern old Northland. The Englishman could not give it that, for the root of the matter was not in him. But he could have done so, for his blood was the blood of the Vikings, the blood of Flosi and Snorri and Eric and Olaf and all the mighty men of old.
Oscar did not hear his fellow-lodger go to bed that night, with his lunging step on the stairs and his drunken whistling of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and next morning when his landlady came up to speak to him, according to her wont, he was hardly conscious of what she said except that it was some protest, some threat, and that he did not feel it worth while to soften and sweeten her with such promises as he had made before.
The intoxication of last night was still upon him when he set out to keep his appointment. Music was calling to him again, calling him like a siren, out of his friendlessness and loneliness, his humiliation and obscurity, his poverty and shame, out of the pitiless cruelty of crowded thoroughfares and the grimy sordidness of obscure streets, into the glory of success and fame.
"Come in, old fellow," cried the familiar voice of yesterday, and Oscar found himself in Finsen's office.
"Let me see," said Finsen, removing a pair of pince-nez, "how long have you been in London?"
"Six months--nearly seven," said Oscar.
"And what have you been doing?"
"Nothing."
"Lucky chap! Nothing at all?"
"Yes, there is one thing I've been doing--I've been doing it rather industriously."
"What's that?"
"Starving."
Finsen laughed loud, but Oscar laughed louder--he had not yet broken his fast.
"We all go through it at some time," said Finsen, "and it's best to get it over at the beginning. So I congratulate you, old fellow, and now to business. I'm managing here--managing for a syndicate. Under four eyes, as we say in Iceland, I intend to give a series of concerts and I'm looking out for fresh material. You compose?"
"Used to do," said Oscar.
"I understand," said Finsen. "Your life has been off the tracks lately and you'll not write much more that's worth anything until you get back into the groove. But I know what you used to do and that's good enough for me. I heard some of your songs from the Sagas, you remember, and I don't mind saying that as the work of a man who was nearly self-taught in the matter of harmony I thought them wonderful. But Helga tells me--Helga Neilsen, I mean, I hear from her occasionally----"
Oscar flinched as if a lash had cut him.
"Helga tells me," continued Finsen, "that you did some things in Iceland last year that beat your Saga songs to little bits, and if you think we can try them here----"
"They're gone," said Oscar.
"I know," said Finsen. "I've heard what has become of them. But perhaps you have copies?"
"Not a copy," said Oscar.
"Or perhaps you can remember some of them?"
"Not one."
"Even so, the case is not quite hopeless. You are a person of some influence in Iceland?"
"Used to be," said Oscar.
"Well, I presume to think I am--my father is Sheriff and likely to be something better--so if you care to give your consent we may recover the things still."
A mist arose between Oscar's eyes and Finsen's face. "You surely do not mean----?"
"Certainly I do. If the things are half as good as Helga says, they're worth all the trouble. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on her judgment, to give you something to go on with, and when the stuff comes to devote a morning to trying it with the orchestra, and ask you to conduct the rehearsal."
Finsen's figure was floating in the mist that was between it and Oscar's eyes.
"You wish me to authorize you to exhume----"
"Why not? It's not an unheard of proceeding. And if ever there was a moment that justified it it's now. If compositions that might give pleasure to the world and make pots of money are lying buried in a grave----"
"I'll starve first," said Oscar, rising from his seat.
"My dear chap," said Finsen, putting back his pince-nez, "you tell me you're doing that already. But here's your chance of doing it no more, and if----"
"I'll starve to death first," said Oscar, turning to the door.
"Nonsense, old fellow! If the things were doing any good where they are I could respect your feelings. But they're not. They are merely rotting away and they will soon disappear altogether. What your object was in burying them you know best--I confess I thought it very quixotic--but whatever it was it has served its purpose. And now there they lie--works of genius, as I'm willing to believe--that might possibly make your name and begin to make your fortune, while you----"
"I'll die in a ditch rather than touch them," said Oscar, and without a word of farewell he flung out of the room.
No words could describe the agony he endured during the remaining hours of that day. The intoxication of the night before was gone by this time and he suffered the pains of the spirit that has buoyed itself up on a bankrupt hope. If he had ever had any uncertainty about the meaning of the blind impulse of remorse which had prompted him to bury his compositions in his wife's grave he had none now. It was God's own punishment to shut up the only channel to fame and success, nay to livelihood itself, as by the door of a tomb.
Hour after hour he walked the streets, feeling that escape from the way of life he had been living was now utterly hopeless. He would go down and down, day by day, little by little, until he was submerged beneath the flood, or became, but for the mercy of God, a vagabond and a castaway.
It was long before he could bring himself to go back to his lodging and when he did so he found that the street door would not open to the key he carried in his pocket. He rang the bell and a little maid-of-all-work came up as from her bedroom below stairs with curl papers in her hair and some loose clothes about her body.
"Why did you bolt the door, my child?" he said. "Didn't you know that I had not come home?"
"Yes, sir, but mistress told me to tell you as how your room has been let and you can have your trunks when you pay what you owes her."
"Do you mean that I am to be turned out?"
"It ain't my fault, sir, and I'm very sorry."
Oscar and the girl stood looking vacantly at each other for a moment, and then he turned away and walked up the street with a new sensation--the blank, desolating sensation of not having a roof over his head. No one knows what it means to be one night homeless in a great city except those who have gone through it. It is not so much the poverty of privation that is hard to bear as the sense of utter worthlessness, of being less to the world than its dogs, for they are cared for, or its horses for they are housed.
His money was gone, and he had no luggage in his hands to make shift to find another lodging with, so he walked on and on, up Lower Regent Street and across Piccadilly, through noisy throngs of people--young women smoking cigarettes, young men laughing and singing and a bedraggled girl being lugged along by a policeman--on and on until he came to a wide and quiet thoroughfare where a line of broughams waited outside a house that was brilliantly lighted up, and there he paused in his aimless perambulation to listen to the music that was coming through the open windows.
He had been asking himself for the hundredth time how it had come to pass that he, so lately the pampered son of his father--who was the Governor of his people and their upright judge--was tramping the streets of London without a penny in his pocket or a roof to cover him, when the door opened and an elderly gentleman came out bare-headed to escort some ladies to their carriage. Then his stunned faculties awoke and he saw where he was standing. He was outside the house of his father's friend, the banker. The deep remembrance came back to him of the time, so near yet so far away, when he himself, with Thora and Helga, had been honored guests in that house, and lest the banker should see him, the wayfarer he then was, skulking there at that untimely hour, he turned about and walked quickly away.
Nothing that had happened on that evil night had wounded his feelings so acutely, or made him feel so surely that rescue from his accursed condition there could be none. Was it to be a part of his punishment that even when his senses slept he was to be constantly brought up against himself and reminded of the days that were dead? If so, life would be unendurable, and existence an everlasting hell. Did Nature never forget? Did God never forgive?
Half an hour afterward he was walking along the Embankment, past the crouching and sleeping forms of the sordid things whom the city casts out on to the river's bank by night; and looking wildly at the waters of the Thames, glistening and glimmering under the electric light, he asked himself why he should not end it all and have done with further torture.
What was the thought that restrained him? Was it the thought of his dead wife whose memory was to be a safeguard against sin and a perpetual inspiration? No!
By the inscrutable will of fate it was the thought of the one being whose love had wrecked him--it was the thought of Helga. In spite of the pledge he had given to the Governor, he could not help thinking of her. No day had been so dark but he had thought of her on going to bed at night and on awakening in the morning. She was gone, they might never meet again, their love was a page of his life which he had crossed out and turned down for ever, yet her eyes were in his eyes and her smile was the only sunshine that shone upon his face.
The thought of Thora was a sweet and sacred thing which he had wrapped up and laid by in the lavender of memory, but the thought of Helga was warm and alive and always with him. It was with him now, and it saved his soul from despair and his body from death.
III
Before Oscar's letter reached Iceland many changes had taken place there. The estrangement of the Governor and the Factor had developed into open antagonism. Everybody knew of it and the enemies of each had been playing upon his hatred of the other.
The Factor was the first to suffer. The downfall of the barter trade, which Magnus predicted, had already come to pass, and the Factor's business had tumbled to pieces like an unbound faggot. There is always a good reason to kill a fat ox, and while people said, "The Factor gives the farmers what he likes for his wool and charges them what he pleases for foreign produce," the true ground of the attack upon his business had been his intimidation of the town at the time of Oscar's election.
Oddsson, the defeated candidate of that day, never rested until he had established a company on the cash principle. Even then the Factor would have borne down all opposition, for the Factor was rich while the farmers were poor, but Oddsson had secured an ally in the most powerful person. As the smith uses the tongs to spare his fingers, so Oddsson had used the Governor to save his company.
The Governor knew full well that Oddsson was his enemy, and that if his party got the upper hand they would upset the old order, but he could not resist the temptation to join him when he was trying to destroy the Factor. By his help the preferential tariff with Denmark was broken down and the Iceland markets were opened to English produce, and that was the death-blow to the barter business.
For three months the Factor kept his doors open by selling at less than cost price and buying at more than market value, but the end was sure. It was whispered at the bank that he was parting with his securities in stocks and shares and his estate in land and loose property, and that sooner or later he would come down with a crash. Nobody pitied him, and at the bottom of his tortured heart one man rejoiced.
But the smiter has often short joy of his stroke, and when Oddsson and his party, having done with trade, turned their attention to constitutional subjects the Factor, though he hated them, joined their agitation. The winter had been severe, there had been many deaths among the older members of Parliament and as often as a by-election had occurred the Factor had thrown the weight of his remaining influence and the force of his diminishing fortunes into the scale of reform. By the end of the spring it had become certain that the next session of Althing would witness the passing of a bill for the reconstruction of the Constitution and the abolition of the Governorship.
Thus each of the two men who had stood shoulder to shoulder for fifty years destroyed himself in destroying the other, and the prophecy of long ago was fulfilled that if the Governor and the Factor ever ceased to be friends they would become the bitterest of enemies.
Meantime Anna had tried to make peace and failed. When the quarrel was young, and chiefly about the children, she had attempted a tone of sympathetic protest. "Come, come, Stephen, pardon is the best punishment--you must make peace with the Factor."
"He might have saved my son by the lifting of his hand and he would not do so--I shall never make peace with him," said the Governor.
"Oscar Neilsen," said Anna, meeting the Factor in the street, "when are you coming to see Stephen? If you stay away much longer the house-dog will fly at you."
"The house-dog flew at me when I was there last, Anna--I shall never trust him again," said the Factor.
When the quarrel grew old and ugly and personal to the men themselves, Anna thought of another means of reconciliation. The child was the last remaining link between the Governor and the Factor--it should bring them together again. "God has always a use for these little angels," she said.
Aunt Margret joined in the conspiracy and the two old things concocted many schemes--all simple and transparent but womanly and good--to get the men into the same room. They never succeeded, but a thousand beams of sunshine shone out of the baby's cradle, and little by little the ice that had frozen about the men's souls was seen to melt.
When the child was "shortened" it was taken over to Government House and wheeled in its perambulator into the Governor's bureau.
"Isn't she a beauty, Stephen?" said Anna; and Aunt Margret said,
"The precious pet couldn't possibly be more like her father if she were not so wonderfully like her mother, too."
The Governor looked down at the little face without saying a word, and when the child blinked up at him with the eyes of Thora and the smile of Oscar he went up-stairs to his bedroom, and Anna heard him lock the door.
When the child cut her first tooth, and everybody according to custom ought to have given her a "tooth-fee," the Factor, coming home at night, found no presents on the nursery table, but the little one was propped up under the blue lace of her hooded cradle and making the air hideous with the divine discord of a baby's silver-mounted rattle.
"That's Stephen's present and it must have cost him a fortune," said Aunt Margret, whereupon the Factor, weary as he was, walked out into the road where he could hear nothing but the cold lapping of the lake.
Yet love of the little one was not bringing the two men together--it was thrusting them still farther apart. "That man is scheming to get hold of the child," thought the Factor. "He and his have robbed me of my daughters and now they're trying to rob me of my granddaughter also."
"She's my son's child," thought the Governor, "and my son's child is my child--why did I allow that man to have her?"
"No use, woman!" said Aunt Margret. "It's late to withdraw the sword when it is thrust to the heart."
But then came Oscar's letter and Anna's hopes went up with a bound. She was like a child herself in her joy over it. Her happiness was too great to permit her to see holes in its picture of prosperity. Oscar was well, he was getting on splendidly and he sent his love to everybody.
She read the letter first to the Governor, and after he had heard it he walked out into the home-field where the eider-ducks were building their nests afresh on the edge of the fiord, and the fishing-smacks were coming back to harbor. Then she took it over to the Factor's, rolled it up in the baby's hand like another rattle, and left it with Aunt Margret to be shown to her brother.
But that day had been a bad day with the Factor and when Oscar's letter came back to Anna it was torn across the middle and enclosed in an empty envelope. Anna was nearly broken-hearted at the treatment of her treasure, for no girl of sixteen had ever so loved her first love-letter, and she had intended to show it to everybody--to the Bishop, the Rector, the Sheriff, and above all to Magnus.
Magnus had been coming and going at intervals throughout the winter. It had been a hard one for him as for others, and he had begun to realize what it would be when his father was gone and he had to bear the burden of the monstrous mortgage. But harder to bear than any winter had been the sight of his mother's sufferings during Oscar's silence.
"Any news yet!" he would ask, and Anna would say No and No, with countless explanations and excuses.
So it was through the dark days, and his feeling against Oscar grew hard as the ground he trod upon. But when the snow had gone and he went up with the spring caravan there was Anna with a face like the rising sun, and by that he knew that a letter must have come at last. Sure enough in less than a minute out it came from the bosom of her embroidered treya, torn across as the Factor had left it and she was calling on him to write an answer to her dictation. This is what he wrote:
"MY DEAR SON: Your letter arrived safely by the last steamer and made up by its welcome news for the long time we had to wait for it. It is so good to hear that you are well and prosperous and enjoying your life in the great English city. Many a time I feared it might be otherwise, but now I have your letter and I am happy and contented.
"I am proud that my son is rising into such high and good company, and though your father speaks little I am sure that he feels the same. He always said that you would do great things some day, and it is not the way of God's goodness to disappoint such expectations where they are built on a good foundation.
"And now I have to tell you that your father is well in bodily health, though a little oppressed by worldly anxieties, but I tell him our home in this life is always on a steep mountain and if we trust in God there is no reason to be afraid. As for myself, I am as well as can be expected at my age, though my left ear troubles sometimes and my eyes are not what they used to be for knitting and small print. But I must not allow myself to complain, for perhaps it is a part of God's mercy to us old people that our senses should die by degrees so that when they come to die altogether we may not be taken unawares.
"Magnus is writing this letter and he is strong and hearty. The snow was deep at the farm this year and he lost six of his best beasts, but his lambs came beautifully and now they are on the mountains and his ewes are milking well and the home-field is closed for the hay.
"I have to tell you that the one you ask about has gone back to her mother at Copenhagen and that there are those who can not be very sorry. Sometimes to silence the evil tongues that speak ill of you here I am tempted to blame her for all that has happened, but who am I to judge any one? And the worst I wish for her is that she may soon become a God-fearing girl.
"Margret Neilsen is just as she always was, a twisted bough with plenty of sap in it, and the Factor would be well enough but for a bad hip. He too, like your father, is much oppressed by worldly cares and taking it ill that they should fall so fast upon him in the evening of his days.
"And now I have to tell you of your little Elin that she is as well as can be, and she has cut two front teeth and her hair is curling over her forehead. She is the best child that ever was born, and when she smiles she is so like somebody that it nearly breaks my heart to look at her. Margret is as good to the darling as if she were her own mother, and your father and the Factor can hardly see the sun for her. As for me it fills my heart brimful to think how God in His goodness has sent us old folks this little angel after our late troubles, for she is like the spring after a hard winter when the snow and ice have stayed so long that we think surely we shall never see the grass or hear the rivers again, and then all at once there are the green fields and the shining streams and all the gladness of the flowers.
"And now, though you are getting on so well, you must not be angry with your mother for sending you a little present. Maria has been all day in the kitchen packing your college box, and goodness knows what things she may have put in it. But I am knitting you a pair of stockings out of old Maggie's brown wool, and I hope you will not be ashamed to wear them, for they will keep your feet warm in the cold weather, when the English socks must be so thin and cottony. Then I remember how fond you used to be of our smoked mutton, so I am telling Maria to put in some of that too, and a few rolls of Rullapilsa.
"I dare not let the Governor know I am sending the mutton--he would think it foolish and unnecessary--and of course, with so many good things to eat and drink I do not expect you to offer it to your English friends, but perhaps you can hide it in a cupboard somewhere and take a slice when you are quite alone.
"And now I must conclude for Magnus is coming to the end of his paper. It makes me happy to think your bedroom is comfortable and I wish I could thank your landlady for being so kind and motherly. I may never see her in this world, but we shall meet in heaven some day and then I will thank her.
"And now, my dear son, in the midst of your great prosperity, do not forget that all good things come from God and remember to put your trust in Him. To His care I commit you, for He knows all our wants and all our troubles and all our secrets, and His eye ever watches and His heart never sleeps.
"ANNA."
IV
When Oscar received his mother's letter he was living in a slum in Westminster. It was called Short Street, and it was a typical example of the mean streets which nearly always, and in all countries, lie near to a great minster, like sea-wrack at the foot of a rock.
Short Street was a cul-de-sac, whereof one end was a gin-palace and the other an archway to the railway depot of a suburban necropolis. Late at night the inhabitants were kept from sleep by the quarreling of tipsy men who had been turned out of the public-house, and early in the morning they were awakened by the rumbling of the hearses that rattled the corpses over the cobbles of the street.
Oscar's home in Short Street was at Number One, a grimy house with a soiled card in the fanlight above the door, saying, "Lodgings for single men." Besides himself, there were four lodgers, three of them being porters at the funeral depot and the fourth head barman at the public-house. The bar-man had the parlor floor, and he generally brought home a number of noisy companions at closing time to play cards and drink beer.
Oscar's bedroom in this house was not so much a room as a stifling closet of miserable aspect, in which the refuse furniture seemed to make an effort to range itself in order--a threadbare carpet, an iron bedstead without foot or head, a painted washstand, a broken-lipped water ewer, two or three rickety chairs, a table that was safest when it rested against the wall, a few pictures of race-horses on the remains of a dirty wall-paper, and a looking-glass blotched by damp, like a sheet of ice spotted and scabbed by thaw.
His landlady lived in the basement and was never seen except on Monday mornings, when she went round for her lodgers' rent some two or three hours before the collector called for her own. The only person whom Oscar saw constantly was the landlady's servant, Jenny, a typical cockney girl of the humblest class, untidy and unclean, but as bright as a London street sparrow, and with a big soft heart in her vulgar little breast.
Jenny had conceived a certain affection for Oscar, based on no grounds more personal than that he did not shout at her down the pairs of stairs, or take liberties, or use bad language, and that he always raised his hat when he passed her in the street.
The only effect of this sentimental attitude on Jenny's part was that she always dressed in her clean "print" on the days when Oscar happened to be at home to tea, and it was on one of these afternoons that she came knocking at the door of his bankrupt garret and said, "Letter for you, sir."
It was so long since Oscar had received a letter of any kind that he leaped up with a kind of fear, and on taking the envelope out of Jenny's hand and seeing it was addressed in Magnus's writing, and had been sent on from his former lodging, he turned pale and trembled.
"Is it bad news, sir?" said Jenny. "I wouldn't 'a' brought it up on no account if I'd knowed."
"No, no! Leave me, Jenny," said Oscar, and when the girl had gone and he had opened the letter with nervous fingers, he read it with eyes that were wet with tears while his cheeks were flushed with shame.
When he came to the end his heart was beating wildly and he was asking himself if it would not be the brave and manly thing to write at once and say that all this story of his prosperity was a miserable fiction, that he had never been otherwise than wretched, that he was living in a common way among common companions, doing common work which he dare not think of, and that no words could express the secret agony of his soul at having sunk so low. But deep as was the degradation of that bitter hour it was not so deep as that of the following morning when Jenny came lugging his college box up-stairs, and chattering gaily as if she had brought him a fortune.
"The railway man said as 'ow it was as 'eavy as lead, so I give 'im twopence for 'isself--I 'ope I did right, sir."
"Quite right, Jenny. Here's the money. You can go now."
"Can I 'elp ye to unpack it, sir? There ain't no sort o' box as I can't unpack. My! what a long way it must 'a' come!"
"It came from Iceland, Jenny."
"Fancy that now! Pat Looney, the lorry man, 'e come from there, and the neighbors says it's a pity 'e don't go back. They never says that about you, though. 'He's so perlite,' they says."
Oscar allowed the girl to open the box and empty it of its contents, and as she did so she chirped away like the street sparrow that she was, while he sat with the mist of his boyish associations floating up to him from the happy past.
"Well, I never!" she cried, sitting back on her heels as she knelt before the box. "Polonies! And sausages! And pickled tongues! And hams! Why, you won't 'ave to buy nothin' to eat for months! Isn't that lucky now? Just when you're 'out' too! Is it a present?"
"Yes, it is a present, Jenny."
"They must think somethin' of ye as sends ye a present like this," said Jenny, and then, after a moment, in a fluttering voice, "Is it a laidy, sir?"
"It's my mother," said Oscar.
"Your mother!" said Jenny, in a tone of relief. "Well, that's what I do call a mother--being good to anybody like this."
"She has been good to me all my life, Jenny, and all my life I've treated her badly."
Jenny looked at him strangely as if something surprised and pained her.
"You have, sir?"
"Shamefully, Jenny, yet she has forgiven me again and again."
Jenny was silent for a moment and then she said, "Mothers is like that, isn't they? Now there's Jim Cobb, the shandry man, 'e knocks 'is mother about somethin' cruel, but she never 'aves 'im up for it, never! Mothers is proper good!"
"Is your mother good to you, Jenny?"
"Me? I'm an orfling," said Jenny, and then, lowering her voice to a tone of confidence, she added, "I don't mind tellin' you, but I am! I always tells the other lodgers as my mother was one o' them girls as ye see at the Aquarium at nights covered with silks and diamonds."
"And was she?"
A look of dejection crossed Jenny's face. "I don't see as she could 'ave been, because they say at the Orflinage as I was born in Holloway when my mother was doin' time."
By this time the contents of the box were ranged on the table and chairs, and Jenny was sitting back on her heels again to look at them.
"There! They're as pretty as a 'am and beef shop! And I do believe as that's what your mother meant 'em for too. Jim Cobb, 'e wanted me to set one up with 'im, but not me! Not as I 'ave any objections to the 'am and beef business, and if anybody else thought of starting it----"
Jenny's hint was interrupted by the sound of a vehicle stopping suddenly outside the house.
"Now, I bet ye I know who that is," she said with a wink. "It's that blessed Jim Cobb again. He's always a-wantin' me to go for a ride in 'is shandry."
But going to the window she cried, "Goodness! It's a handswim cab! And there's a laidy a-gettin' out of it!"
"A lady?"
"You can't see 'er now--she's on the steps. There she is," cried Jenny, as a rat-tat came to the street door, "and me not 'ad time to comb my 'air yet!"
With an indefinable feeling of mingled fear and hope which there was yet no cause for, Oscar stood on the landing and listened while Jenny ran down the stairs. When the street door was opened he heard his own name in a voice that sent the blood to his head and made him reel with dizziness. A moment later Jenny came back with a face that looked white even under the smudges that soiled it, and she said in the same fluttering voice as before:
"I thought as much. It's you she's askin' for. I've took 'er into the barman's parlor--'e won't be 'ome till tea."
Oscar went down-stairs slowly, but when he got to the bottom his breath was coming and going in gusts, and his heart was beating against his breast as with the blows of a hammer. The parlor door stood ajar and a perfume he knew was coming out to him. After a moment he pushed the door open and then she whom he expected to see was standing before him, she herself, more radiantly beautiful than ever, with something soft and white about her neck and a face shining with smiles.
How much he lived in that moment no one could say. A hundred emotions coursed through his soul like the flash of flame--joy, delight, pain, shame, the rapture of seeing her, the humiliation of being found in such a common place, the degradation of being ill-clad and obviously poor, but above all love--the uncontrollable love that leads men on to happiness and victory or to ruin and death. His face broke up, tears burst from his eyes and holding out both hands he cried--
"Helga! My God! Helga!"
V
Helga appeared to be not less excited than Oscar himself. She was genuinely moved to see how the joy he had in meeting her affected him, and when he had kissed both her hands she kissed one of his and tears which she could not keep back came to her eyes also. There was a shiny leather-covered sofa in the room and they sat on it side by side and hand in hand.
"I have never, never been so glad," he said.
"And I am glad too," she said. "Let me look at you again, Oscar. A little paler, and perhaps a little thinner, but otherwise not changed in the least."
"Yet you have changed a great deal, Helga."
"Grown older, have I?"
"Grown lovelier and more beautiful than ever."
At that she leaned her face toward him and he kissed her, and for some moments they could not restrain their fondness. Helga was the first to recover self-possession.
"And now let us talk seriously," she said, but Oscar was still quivering with excitement and, having brushed away his tears, he laughed hysterically.
"How long have you been in London?" he asked.
"A month--a month to-morrow," she replied.
"And to think that I have never known it until now! But how did you come to leave Copenhagen?"
"That's just what I am trying to tell you. My father, for some unknown reason, elected to reduce my mother's income by half, so something had to be done. Then I remembered Neils Finsen and the wonderful things he used to say about my voice."
"Finsen!" repeated Oscar, in a graver tone.
"So I wrote to him, and he answered that if I would come to London he would have experts to hear me, and then they would see what could be done."
"Well? Well?"
"Well, I came, and the experts heard me, and they concluded that my voice was quite unusual--the most promising soprano they had found for years."
"And now?"
"Now I'm at the Royal Academy of Music, and by and by I am to go to Paris for two years, three years, perhaps four to study under Marchesi or Bonby and to attend an acting class, and finally I am to be taken to Monte Carlo or Nice in representations of "Faust" and "Someo," as a first step toward taking London by storm as Marguerite or Juliette--there!"
"And Finsen is doing all this for you?"
"Well, yes, so to speak, I suppose I must say that."
"Is he to pay your expenses?"
"I really don't know who is to pay them, but I've signed a contract to come out under his management and to refund everything when I am fairly launched. And now about yourself, Oscar?"
"About me?"
"It's nearly a year since I saw you last. What have you been doing?"
Oscar made a clumsy laugh. "Oh, I'm like the lilies of the field--I toil not, neither do I spin."
But his forced gaiety broke down badly, and he said more soberly, "Don't ask me what I've been doing, Helga."
Helga's eyes wandered around the room for a moment and then she said, "I know! Neils told me something about it, and he wished me to say----"
Before she could finish Oscar had risen to his feet. "If you come from Finsen I know what your errand is, and I would rather die----"
"No, no, no," said Helga, clinging to his nervous hand. "Sit down. It's not that at all. Listen!"
He sat and the sweetness of her look banished all his fears.
"They're giving what they call promenade concerts at Covent Garden, and a few days ago there was some difference with the leader of the orchestra. It seemed desirable to make a change and the question was who the new leader ought to be. Naturally I thought of you."
"Of me?"
"Why not? Didn't I see what you could do with those hundred and fifty numskulls at Thingvellir?"
"But Covent Garden!"
"My dear Oscar, I've seen every leader they have here, and while they are all your superiors in knowledge and experience, there's not one of them with a tittle of your magnetism and genius. So I said, 'Neils, if you want the finest leader that London has ever seen let me go and fetch him!'"
"But you can't know, Helga--you can't imagine--if you had the least idea of what I've gone through to live--merely to live----"
Helga looked around the room again and she said, "Can't I see? Haven't I got eyes? But if you were to tell me that nobody has had any use for you in the meanest work that is ever done by the commonest men, I should still say what I said to Finsen."
Oscar's throat was hurting him. The thought of Helga's faith and championship broke down his self-control. He never allowed himself to think there could be any selfish ground for it.
"What do you wish me to do, Helga?" he asked.
"To meet me in Finsen's office at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning."
"But I vowed I could never set foot in the place again."
"You didn't know then thatIshould ask you. And I do ask you, Oscar."
He remembered the promise he had given to his father; he reflected on the danger of reopening a page of his life which he had crossed out and turned down as for ever; he thought of Finsen and his interest in Helga and the hold he would have of her through her hopes and ambitions; and his will was like a broken withe, for the controlling destiny of his life was leading him on.
"You will be there, will you not?" she whispered, and Oscar answered:
"Yes."
She leaned her face forward again, and again he kissed her and then she rose to go.
"Where are you staying?" he asked, and she told him. It was in a fashionable apartment-house on the edge of the Green Park.
"Does Finsen live there also?"
"Well, yes, he lives in the same building. And you must live there, too. I shall want to see you constantly. There are a thousand things I want you to do for me. But now I must be off."
He could not let her go, and they renewed their caresses. "It will seem like a dream when you are gone," he said. "I shall hardly be able to believe you have been here, or that you will ever come back again."
"Don't say that. I told you in Iceland that I should come to you if you didn't come to me, and I've kept my word, haven't I?"
"My dear, dear Helga!"
"It wasn't quite good of you to go away without giving me an opportunity of seeing you again."
"I know, I know!"
"You had a certain duty to me, you know, after what had passed----"
"Hush, dear, hush!"
"But I'm willing to believe it was the fault of other people."
"Don't let us speak of it, Helga," said Oscar, and his arms, which had been about her in a close embrace, slackened away and fell.
It was easier to part with her after that, but before he opened the door he kissed her again, and when he helped her into the hansom he put her fingers to his lips.
He stood bare-headed on the pavement oblivious to all surroundings until the cab had rounded the corner of the public house and Helga had waved to him through the glass. Then he became aware that the sight in that sordid slum of so lovely a girl, so beautifully dressed and with a hansom waiting for her, had brought the neighbors to their doors, and that the women were thumbing their apron-strings and grinning to each other across the rails.
When he reentered the house Jenny passed him in the lobby with a stealthy and guilty air which seemed to say that her poor tortured little soul had not resisted the temptation to listen and to watch.
He returned to the parlor for a moment and the perfume of Helga's presence was still to be felt there over the odor of dead ale and tobacco. Never had he envied the barman before, but at that moment he would have given all he possessed to keep this room for the rest of the day, that he might sit on the sofa where Helga had sat, and lay his hand on the table where her hand had rested and kiss the carpet where her feet had trod.
He was like a man moving in a dream, and when he went back to his own apartment he was not conscious of his squalid surroundings. The dirty wall-paper, the threadbare carpet and the blotched looking-glass humiliated and compromised him no longer. His body was still in his bankrupt garret, but his soul was far away. It was in another world--a world that was bright with Helga's eyes as its sun and stars, for he was going over again the time he had spent with her, every word of it, every tone, every look, every gesture.
This lasted the whole of the day and when darkness fell a curtain seemed to have fallen on the life he had been living during the past twelve months. The mire and slime of vulgar associations, the degradation of common companionship, the sense of loneliness, of friendlessness, of being nothing and nobody, the deep remembrance of being homeless and hopeless and helpless and useless--all this had gone. That passage of his life was over now, and never, never, never would its pain and shame come back to him again. He had passed through it because he had sinned; but if he had sinned he had suffered, and God Himself had seen that he had suffered enough.
His eyes were wet when he lay down on his soiled pillow, but he fell asleep in a blissful condition and in the first dream of the night he was back with Helga. Once in the dark hours he awoke and heard the deadened hum of the barman and his friends at their cards and ale; and again he awoke in the dawn and then he heard the hearse of the necropolis thundering up Short Street and rumbling under the archway at the top of it.
At eleven o'clock that morning he went to Covent Garden, and again and again at eleven the following mornings he went there. On the tenth morning he called to Jenny, who had grown shy of him and was leaving his breakfast on a tray outside his door, and said:
"Jenny, I wish you to tell your mistress that I shall be leaving this lodging in another week."
Then Jenny's white and wistful face broke down utterly, and with a crack in her voice, and the ghost of a smothered sob in it, she said:
"I knowed as it 'ud come to this. The minit I set eyes on 'er I said as she'd take ye away from me--an' she 'as."