Chapter X: Part 10

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--I _will_ do 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 before_
_I swore--but was I sober when I swore?_
_And then, and then came Spring, and rose-in-hand_
_My threadbare penitence apieces tore._"

*I*

Above all other cities of the world, London is the home of the outcast, the refuge of the disgraced and rejected, the asylum of the moral leper, the grave of the moral suicide. She offers him obscurity and a kind of cleansing if he will cast himself into the rolling billows of her six millions of people, and she keeps her word but exacts her penalties. Her penalties are homelessness, friendlessness, and loneliness, but above all loneliness. There is no loneliness like that of London. The loneliness of an open boat on an open sea in an impenetrable fog, or the loneliness of a trackless heath in a blinding snowstorm, is not so desolating to the human soul as the loneliness of London's crowded thoroughfares, with their lines of unknown faces filing on and on.

Within a year Oscar Stephenson knew the loneliness of London to its last pang, its utmost bitterness.

When he parted from his mother on the deck of the "Laura" she slipped a purse into his pocket, just as she used to do when he was a boy going to college or going away for his holiday. The purse contained gold and notes to the value of fifty pounds, and this, with the little he had of his own, was the whole sum of his fortune and all he had to face the future with. He was not so young as to think it inexhaustible, or so sanguine as to expect the world to fall at the feet of a fallen man, so he tried to be frugal and to spend his substance prudently.

He spent his first night in London at the hotel in Trafalgar Square at which he had stayed with Thora and Helga on their way to Italy, but besides being too expensive for his present means the place was too full of tragic memories, and next day he removed to a house in one of the first of the side streets going down to the river from the Strand. His lodging was a single room on an upper floor, having a stuffy odor of carpets and curtains and a prospect of the neighboring roofs with various causeways of red chimney-pots.

In this apartment Oscar Stephenson had his first experience of the loneliness of London. He lived there six months without seeing any face belonging to the house except the face of his landlady, and without knowing more about his fellow-lodgers than that his neighbor in the adjoining room never returned home at night until after the great clock at Westminster had struck twelve, and that he whistled "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in varying degrees of alcoholic uncertainty while he put himself to bed.

Before the end of those six months Oscar was in debt to his landlady, he had no regular employment and no prospect except the imminent one of being homeless and penniless.

By what stages of quick descent he came down to this condition it would be a needless task to tell. His story is that of the great army of the disgraced and the castaway who fly to London as to a sanctuary and are allowed to live only by lying at its doors. He had struggled and failed. He was young and active, but nobody needed him. In some places his want of references was a difficulty. In others his superior education was a cause of suspicion. He was too good for one post and not good enough for another. In a world full of work there was no work for him to do.

The slow agony of those first six months kept alive the shame and misery of his breakdown and nearly sapped his moral courage. As day followed day and the feeling of uselessness deepened, he felt like a boy, a friendless, abandoned boy. He had done wrong and he was ready to bear his punishment, but the great, irresistible, unanswerable world was using him cruelly. It would not make peace with him on any terms. It was leaving him without hope, or counsel or encouragement or consolation--it was leaving him alone. This sense of being of no account, of being nothing and nobody in the world, with the terror of sinking out of sight some day and nobody knowing or caring, was harder to bear than poverty or even shame itself.

When the clouds looked blackest he swallowed the last remnant of his pride and appealed to the few friends of his father in England who had been so good to him in the careless days of his college life and so boundlessly hospitable in the happy time of his honeymoon. He appealed to the professor at Oxford, making a clean breast of his misdoings and no concealment of his sufferings and asking for influence and assistance in obtaining a sub-librarianship or such other employment as might provide him with bread and butter, and the answer that came back was prompt and courteous but as cold as the breath of an iceberg.

He appealed to the banker in London, asking for a junior clerkship, or a position as messenger or even porter, and the reply he received was as smooth as a dog's tongue and as useless for help and healing. And then he knew by bitter knowledge that the kindness which had been shown to him in the better time was kindness to his father's son, and that he had wasted that heritage and was his father's son no more.

Meantime he spent his days, and a great part of his nights also, in the streets. There he was like a piece of helpless driftwood in the roaring current of life, always going on yet never going anywhere, always floating along yet never making headway. The ceaseless stream in the busy thoroughfares tormented him terribly, but the emptiness of the obscurer streets tortured him still more, and the blankness of Sunday morning in the Strand afflicted him most keenly of all, for it was full of memories of Sunday morning in Iceland with its atmosphere of peace and rest and the sound of church bells.

When he was at his lowest depths of hopelessness he sent his first letter home.

"Dearest Mother," he wrote, sitting in his stuffy back room overlooking the roof-tops, "You would naturally have expected to hear from me before this, and I certainly should have written earlier, only that I have been waiting for a long, quiet hour in which I could tell you all the news, everything that has happened to me since we parted on the steamer and I saw your dear face disappearing in the boat. That hour seems never to come, so I must snatch a few moments without any more delay to say that all is well and everything goes swimmingly."

"The dear old soul, why should I make her miserable?" he thought.

"You will easily understand that in a great city like London, especially when one is beginning again and one has so much to do and so many people to see, there is not an hour left for oneself and hardly a moment to write a letter. But this does not prevent my thinking of you at all events, and I do so every day and always."

"That's true at least," he told himself, and he went on boldly with his affectionate fictions.

"I know that my dear little mamma will want to know first the condition of my creature comforts and I hasten to tell her that these are as right as can be. This is a large and handsome house just off the tide of greatest traffic where splendid horse wagons (called omnibuses) and upholstered sleighs on wheels (called hansoms) roll about in countless numbers day and night, making a roar like that of the Ellida river where it falls into the fiord. But my bedroom, in which I am writing this letter, is quiet and cozy and homelike, and my landlady is a good little creature who visits me daily and is always most kind and motherly."

As he went on his pen flowed freely and his handwriting became big and reckless.

"I am making new and influential acquaintances every day, and seeing in the flesh the faces we are all familiar with in prints. Walking in the Park yesterday I passed the Queen, who is one of our own princesses, you know, so I felt myself entitled to bow to her and she bowed back with the sweetest courtesy. I see the Prime Minister frequently, for he lives in a house that is only down the street and round the corner, and the homes and offices of nearly all the Ministers of State are within a stone's throw of this place. In fact one way or another I am certainly coming in touch with the leading men in England, and when I open my window at night I can see the light that burns in the clock-tower above the Houses of Parliament.

"So you see that I am finding life wonderfully interesting in this mighty maelstrom of human activity, and if I do not write as often as I ought, my anxious little mamma is not to imagine there is anything amiss with me, but merely to tell herself that no news is good news and that I am immersed in many occupations.

"Perhaps if I have a lonely hour occasionally"--the pen trembled in his fingers and the handwriting became loose and shaky--"it is when I think about home and wonder what is happening there and what people are saying about me now. I suppose I have no right to complain whatever it may be, but sometimes when I am coming back to my lodging on a starry night after a tiring day and I look up to the Milky Way and think, 'That is the road to my country,' the thought goes to my heart like a stab that when I left it last my father's door was closed against me, and I saw nothing of Magnus at the end.

"How are they both, and how are you, and how are the Factor and Aunt Margret, and how--oh! how is our dear little Elin? My sweet, sweet child! What I would give to see her again! Has she grown? Is she still as much like her poor mother? Does she 'notice?' She will begin to babble and talk by and by. Will they bring her up to know nothing about her father? Or perhaps to think ill of him? If I return to Iceland some day (and I shall) to take up the broken threads of my life again, and find that the mind of my own child has been poisoned against me, I don't know what will happen; I believe I shall go back instantly and wipe myself out for ever.

"But I will not think of that even as a remote possibility, and, meantime, I am working day and night to build up a new career, and, as you see, I am getting on splendidly. So good-by, dearest, and God bless you, and God bless everybody at home, for we shall all be good friends yet.--OSCAR.

"P.S.--Is Helga still in Iceland, or has the Factor carried out his threat of sending her back to Denmark? I suppose I ought not to think of her, having given that promise to the Governor, yet I can not help doing so, and I can not help asking."

*II*

It was the time when a young English composer was creating some sensation by writing an opera on the subject of "King Olaf." The theme was one which Oscar had often proposed to himself, and raised his fancy and emulation upon, in the delirious days when he had hoped to become a musician, and the dazzling dreams of glory were not yet so dead that he could restrain himself from rambling up to Covent Garden on the night of the first performance.

He knew he was penniless and he was conscious that his clothes were shabby and his shoes in a woful condition as he lounged by the arches and watched the audience assemble. The carriages were rolling up and discharging their occupants--the Queen and her ladies, the Prime Minister and finally the King--and he was turning away feeling more miserable and destitute than ever, when a hand touched him on the shoulder and a familiar voice at his side said cheerily,

"Helloa! Can it be possible?"

It was Neils Pinsen, his former schoolfellow and companion, fresh and bright in evening dress under a handsome fur-lined overcoat.

"Heard you were in London, but didn't know where to find you. Want to see you immediately, old fellow. Where do you stay?"

As soon as he had got rid of a stifling sensation in the throat Oscar answered him, and then Finsen said,

"Should I call upon you there, or would you prefer to come here to me?"

"I will come to you," said Oscar.

"Good! When shall it be? Will to-morrow at twelve be convenient?"

"Any time will be convenient to me."

"Happy man! Twelve to-morrow in my office, then. Glad to have found you at last. Thought you might have looked me up and wondered what on earth had become of you. Good-by! Busy to-night and enough work for a regiment. By the way, if you would like to see the performance--can't promise you a seat, but if you would care to stand at the back of the balcony--You would? Come this way--Johnson! Take this gentleman in front and give him anything you have left. By-by!"

Before Oscar had quite recovered his breath, he was sitting in the half-light at the back of the upper circle, feeling miserably humiliated and ashamed, yet tingling with a strange excitement. He never quite knew what happened thereafter. He forgot that his money was all gone, that he had not eaten since morning, that his trousers were frayed at the bottom and his shoes down at the heels. He only felt that out of the sordid conditions of the past six months he had suddenly emerged into an atmosphere that was as the vivid breath of his soul.

When the conductor entered--it was the young composer himself--Oscar craned forward to catch a glimpse of the man who was on the eve of snatching the triumph which but for the hard buffetings of fate might perhaps have been his own, and when the opera began he listened with every faculty. It was good, it was human, it was modern, its harmony was exquisite, its orchestration sure, its form showed mastery of the mystery of music, and yet it lacked something. What did it lack? It lacked the life-blood of the stern old Northland. The Englishman could not give it that, for the root of the matter was not in him. But he could have done so, for his blood was the blood of the Vikings, the blood of Flosi and Snorri and Eric and Olaf and all the mighty men of old.

Oscar did not hear his fellow-lodger go to bed that night, with his lunging step on the stairs and his drunken whistling of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and next morning when his landlady came up to speak to him, according to her wont, he was hardly conscious of what she said except that it was some protest, some threat, and that he did not feel it worth while to soften and sweeten her with such promises as he had made before.

The intoxication of last night was still upon him when he set out to keep his appointment. Music was calling to him again, calling him like a siren, out of his friendlessness and loneliness, his humiliation and obscurity, his poverty and shame, out of the pitiless cruelty of crowded thoroughfares and the grimy sordidness of obscure streets, into the glory of success and fame.

"Come in, old fellow," cried the familiar voice of yesterday, and Oscar found himself in Finsen's office.

"Let me see," said Finsen, removing a pair of pince-nez, "how long have you been in London?"

"Six months--nearly seven," said Oscar.

"And what have you been doing?"

"Nothing."

"Lucky chap! Nothing at all?"

"Yes, there is one thing I've been doing--I've been doing it rather industriously."

"What's that?"

"Starving."

Finsen laughed loud, but Oscar laughed louder--he had not yet broken his fast.

"We all go through it at some time," said Finsen, "and it's best to get it over at the beginning. So I congratulate you, old fellow, and now to business. I'm managing here--managing for a syndicate. Under four eyes, as we say in Iceland, I intend to give a series of concerts and I'm looking out for fresh material. You compose?"

"Used to do," said Oscar.

"I understand," said Finsen. "Your life has been off the tracks lately and you'll not write much more that's worth anything until you get back into the groove. But I know what you used to do and that's good enough for me. I heard some of your songs from the Sagas, you remember, and I don't mind saying that as the work of a man who was nearly self-taught in the matter of harmony I thought them wonderful. But Helga tells me--Helga Neilsen, I mean, I hear from her occasionally----"

Oscar flinched as if a lash had cut him.

"Helga tells me," continued Finsen, "that you did some things in Iceland last year that beat your Saga songs to little bits, and if you think we can try them here----"

"They're gone," said Oscar.

"I know," said Finsen. "I've heard what has become of them. But perhaps you have copies?"

"Not a copy," said Oscar.

"Or perhaps you can remember some of them?"

"Not one."

"Even so, the case is not quite hopeless. You are a person of some influence in Iceland?"

"Used to be," said Oscar.

"Well, I presume to think I am--my father is Sheriff and likely to be something better--so if you care to give your consent we may recover the things still."

A mist arose between Oscar's eyes and Finsen's face. "You surely do not mean----?"

"Certainly I do. If the things are half as good as Helga says, they're worth all the trouble. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on her judgment, to give you something to go on with, and when the stuff comes to devote a morning to trying it with the orchestra, and ask you to conduct the rehearsal."

Finsen's figure was floating in the mist that was between it and Oscar's eyes.

"You wish me to authorize you to exhume----"

"Why not? It's not an unheard of proceeding. And if ever there was a moment that justified it it's now. If compositions that might give pleasure to the world and make pots of money are lying buried in a grave----"

"I'll starve first," said Oscar, rising from his seat.

"My dear chap," said Finsen, putting back his pince-nez, "you tell me you're doing that already. But here's your chance of doing it no more, and if----"

"I'll starve to death first," said Oscar, turning to the door.

"Nonsense, old fellow! If the things were doing any good where they are I could respect your feelings. But they're not. They are merely rotting away and they will soon disappear altogether. What your object was in burying them you know best--I confess I thought it very quixotic--but whatever it was it has served its purpose. And now there they lie--works of genius, as I'm willing to believe--that might possibly make your name and begin to make your fortune, while you----"

"I'll die in a ditch rather than touch them," said Oscar, and without a word of farewell he flung out of the room.

No words could describe the agony he endured during the remaining hours of that day. The intoxication of the night before was gone by this time and he suffered the pains of the spirit that has buoyed itself up on a bankrupt hope. If he had ever had any uncertainty about the meaning of the blind impulse of remorse which had prompted him to bury his compositions in his wife's grave he had none now. It was God's own punishment to shut up the only channel to fame and success, nay to livelihood itself, as by the door of a tomb.

Hour after hour he walked the streets, feeling that escape from the way of life he had been living was now utterly hopeless. He would go down and down, day by day, little by little, until he was submerged beneath the flood, or became, but for the mercy of God, a vagabond and a castaway.

It was long before he could bring himself to go back to his lodging and when he did so he found that the street door would not open to the key he carried in his pocket. He rang the bell and a little maid-of-all-work came up as from her bedroom below stairs with curl papers in her hair and some loose clothes about her body.

"Why did you bolt the door, my child?" he said. "Didn't you know that I had not come home?"

"Yes, sir, but mistress told me to tell you as how your room has been let and you can have your trunks when you pay what you owes her."

"Do you mean that I am to be turned out?"

"It ain't my fault, sir, and I'm very sorry."

Oscar and the girl stood looking vacantly at each other for a moment, and then he turned away and walked up the street with a new sensation--the blank, desolating sensation of not having a roof over his head. No one knows what it means to be one night homeless in a great city except those who have gone through it. It is not so much the poverty of privation that is hard to bear as the sense of utter worthlessness, of being less to the world than its dogs, for they are cared for, or its horses for they are housed.

His money was gone, and he had no luggage in his hands to make shift to find another lodging with, so he walked on and on, up Lower Regent Street and across Piccadilly, through noisy throngs of people--young women smoking cigarettes, young men laughing and singing and a bedraggled girl being lugged along by a policeman--on and on until he came to a wide and quiet thoroughfare where a line of broughams waited outside a house that was brilliantly lighted up, and there he paused in his aimless perambulation to listen to the music that was coming through the open windows.

He had been asking himself for the hundredth time how it had come to pass that he, so lately the pampered son of his father--who was the Governor of his people and their upright judge--was tramping the streets of London without a penny in his pocket or a roof to cover him, when the door opened and an elderly gentleman came out bare-headed to escort some ladies to their carriage. Then his stunned faculties awoke and he saw where he was standing. He was outside the house of his father's friend, the banker. The deep remembrance came back to him of the time, so near yet so far away, when he himself, with Thora and Helga, had been honored guests in that house, and lest the banker should see him, the wayfarer he then was, skulking there at that untimely hour, he turned about and walked quickly away.

Nothing that had happened on that evil night had wounded his feelings so acutely, or made him feel so surely that rescue from his accursed condition there could be none. Was it to be a part of his punishment that even when his senses slept he was to be constantly brought up against himself and reminded of the days that were dead? If so, life would be unendurable, and existence an everlasting hell. Did Nature never forget? Did God never forgive?

Half an hour afterward he was walking along the Embankment, past the crouching and sleeping forms of the sordid things whom the city casts out on to the river's bank by night; and looking wildly at the waters of the Thames, glistening and glimmering under the electric light, he asked himself why he should not end it all and have done with further torture.

What was the thought that restrained him? Was it the thought of his dead wife whose memory was to be a safeguard against sin and a perpetual inspiration? No!

By the inscrutable will of fate it was the thought of the one being whose love had wrecked him--it was the thought of Helga. In spite of the pledge he had given to the Governor, he could not help thinking of her. No day had been so dark but he had thought of her on going to bed at night and on awakening in the morning. She was gone, they might never meet again, their love was a page of his life which he had crossed out and turned down for ever, yet her eyes were in his eyes and her smile was the only sunshine that shone upon his face.

The thought of Thora was a sweet and sacred thing which he had wrapped up and laid by in the lavender of memory, but the thought of Helga was warm and alive and always with him. It was with him now, and it saved his soul from despair and his body from death.

*III*

Before Oscar's letter reached Iceland many changes had taken place there. The estrangement of the Governor and the Factor had developed into open antagonism. Everybody knew of it and the enemies of each had been playing upon his hatred of the other.

The Factor was the first to suffer. The downfall of the barter trade, which Magnus predicted, had already come to pass, and the Factor's business had tumbled to pieces like an unbound faggot. There is always a good reason to kill a fat ox, and while people said, "The Factor gives the farmers what he likes for his wool and charges them what he pleases for foreign produce," the true ground of the attack upon his business had been his intimidation of the town at the time of Oscar's election.

Oddsson, the defeated candidate of that day, never rested until he had established a company on the cash principle. Even then the Factor would have borne down all opposition, for the Factor was rich while the farmers were poor, but Oddsson had secured an ally in the most powerful person. As the smith uses the tongs to spare his fingers, so Oddsson had used the Governor to save his company.

The Governor knew full well that Oddsson was his enemy, and that if his party got the upper hand they would upset the old order, but he could not resist the temptation to join him when he was trying to destroy the Factor. By his help the preferential tariff with Denmark was broken down and the Iceland markets were opened to English produce, and that was the death-blow to the barter business.

For three months the Factor kept his doors open by selling at less than cost price and buying at more than market value, but the end was sure. It was whispered at the bank that he was parting with his securities in stocks and shares and his estate in land and loose property, and that sooner or later he would come down with a crash. Nobody pitied him, and at the bottom of his tortured heart one man rejoiced.

But the smiter has often short joy of his stroke, and when Oddsson and his party, having done with trade, turned their attention to constitutional subjects the Factor, though he hated them, joined their agitation. The winter had been severe, there had been many deaths among the older members of Parliament and as often as a by-election had occurred the Factor had thrown the weight of his remaining influence and the force of his diminishing fortunes into the scale of reform. By the end of the spring it had become certain that the next session of Althing would witness the passing of a bill for the reconstruction of the Constitution and the abolition of the Governorship.

Thus each of the two men who had stood shoulder to shoulder for fifty years destroyed himself in destroying the other, and the prophecy of long ago was fulfilled that if the Governor and the Factor ever ceased to be friends they would become the bitterest of enemies.

Meantime Anna had tried to make peace and failed. When the quarrel was young, and chiefly about the children, she had attempted a tone of sympathetic protest. "Come, come, Stephen, pardon is the best punishment--you must make peace with the Factor."

"He might have saved my son by the lifting of his hand and he would not do so--I shall never make peace with him," said the Governor.

"Oscar Neilsen," said Anna, meeting the Factor in the street, "when are you coming to see Stephen? If you stay away much longer the house-dog will fly at you."

"The house-dog flew at me when I was there last, Anna--I shall never trust him again," said the Factor.

When the quarrel grew old and ugly and personal to the men themselves, Anna thought of another means of reconciliation. The child was the last remaining link between the Governor and the Factor--it should bring them together again. "God has always a use for these little angels," she said.

Aunt Margret joined in the conspiracy and the two old things concocted many schemes--all simple and transparent but womanly and good--to get the men into the same room. They never succeeded, but a thousand beams of sunshine shone out of the baby's cradle, and little by little the ice that had frozen about the men's souls was seen to melt.

When the child was "shortened" it was taken over to Government House and wheeled in its perambulator into the Governor's bureau.

"Isn't she a beauty, Stephen?" said Anna; and Aunt Margret said,

"The precious pet couldn't possibly be more like her father if she were not so wonderfully like her mother, too."

The Governor looked down at the little face without saying a word, and when the child blinked up at him with the eyes of Thora and the smile of Oscar he went up-stairs to his bedroom, and Anna heard him lock the door.

When the child cut her first tooth, and everybody according to custom ought to have given her a "tooth-fee," the Factor, coming home at night, found no presents on the nursery table, but the little one was propped up under the blue lace of her hooded cradle and making the air hideous with the divine discord of a baby's silver-mounted rattle.

"That's Stephen's present and it must have cost him a fortune," said Aunt Margret, whereupon the Factor, weary as he was, walked out into the road where he could hear nothing but the cold lapping of the lake.

Yet love of the little one was not bringing the two men together--it was thrusting them still farther apart. "That man is scheming to get hold of the child," thought the Factor. "He and his have robbed me of my daughters and now they're trying to rob me of my granddaughter also."

"She's my son's child," thought the Governor, "and my son's child is my child--why did I allow that man to have her?"

"No use, woman!" said Aunt Margret. "It's late to withdraw the sword when it is thrust to the heart."

But then came Oscar's letter and Anna's hopes went up with a bound. She was like a child herself in her joy over it. Her happiness was too great to permit her to see holes in its picture of prosperity. Oscar was well, he was getting on splendidly and he sent his love to everybody.

She read the letter first to the Governor, and after he had heard it he walked out into the home-field where the eider-ducks were building their nests afresh on the edge of the fiord, and the fishing-smacks were coming back to harbor. Then she took it over to the Factor's, rolled it up in the baby's hand like another rattle, and left it with Aunt Margret to be shown to her brother.

But that day had been a bad day with the Factor and when Oscar's letter came back to Anna it was torn across the middle and enclosed in an empty envelope. Anna was nearly broken-hearted at the treatment of her treasure, for no girl of sixteen had ever so loved her first love-letter, and she had intended to show it to everybody--to the Bishop, the Rector, the Sheriff, and above all to Magnus.

Magnus had been coming and going at intervals throughout the winter. It had been a hard one for him as for others, and he had begun to realize what it would be when his father was gone and he had to bear the burden of the monstrous mortgage. But harder to bear than any winter had been the sight of his mother's sufferings during Oscar's silence.

"Any news yet!" he would ask, and Anna would say No and No, with countless explanations and excuses.

So it was through the dark days, and his feeling against Oscar grew hard as the ground he trod upon. But when the snow had gone and he went up with the spring caravan there was Anna with a face like the rising sun, and by that he knew that a letter must have come at last. Sure enough in less than a minute out it came from the bosom of her embroidered treya, torn across as the Factor had left it and she was calling on him to write an answer to her dictation. This is what he wrote:

"MY DEAR SON: Your letter arrived safely by the last steamer and made up by its welcome news for the long time we had to wait for it. It is so good to hear that you are well and prosperous and enjoying your life in the great English city. Many a time I feared it might be otherwise, but now I have your letter and I am happy and contented.

"I am proud that my son is rising into such high and good company, and though your father speaks little I am sure that he feels the same. He always said that you would do great things some day, and it is not the way of God's goodness to disappoint such expectations where they are built on a good foundation.

"And now I have to tell you that your father is well in bodily health, though a little oppressed by worldly anxieties, but I tell him our home in this life is always on a steep mountain and if we trust in God there is no reason to be afraid. As for myself, I am as well as can be expected at my age, though my left ear troubles sometimes and my eyes are not what they used to be for knitting and small print. But I must not allow myself to complain, for perhaps it is a part of God's mercy to us old people that our senses should die by degrees so that when they come to die altogether we may not be taken unawares.

"Magnus is writing this letter and he is strong and hearty. The snow was deep at the farm this year and he lost six of his best beasts, but his lambs came beautifully and now they are on the mountains and his ewes are milking well and the home-field is closed for the hay.

"I have to tell you that the one you ask about has gone back to her mother at Copenhagen and that there are those who can not be very sorry. Sometimes to silence the evil tongues that speak ill of you here I am tempted to blame her for all that has happened, but who am I to judge any one? And the worst I wish for her is that she may soon become a God-fearing girl.

"Margret Neilsen is just as she always was, a twisted bough with plenty of sap in it, and the Factor would be well enough but for a bad hip. He too, like your father, is much oppressed by worldly cares and taking it ill that they should fall so fast upon him in the evening of his days.

"And now I have to tell you of your little Elin that she is as well as can be, and she has cut two front teeth and her hair is curling over her forehead. She is the best child that ever was born, and when she smiles she is so like somebody that it nearly breaks my heart to look at her. Margret is as good to the darling as if she were her own mother, and your father and the Factor can hardly see the sun for her. As for me it fills my heart brimful to think how God in His goodness has sent us old folks this little angel after our late troubles, for she is like the spring after a hard winter when the snow and ice have stayed so long that we think surely we shall never see the grass or hear the rivers again, and then all at once there are the green fields and the shining streams and all the gladness of the flowers.