Chapter XI: Part 11

"And now, though you are getting on so well, you must not be angry with your mother for sending you a little present. Maria has been all day in the kitchen packing your college box, and goodness knows what things she may have put in it. But I am knitting you a pair of stockings out of old Maggie's brown wool, and I hope you will not be ashamed to wear them, for they will keep your feet warm in the cold weather, when the English socks must be so thin and cottony. Then I remember how fond you used to be of our smoked mutton, so I am telling Maria to put in some of that too, and a few rolls of Rullapilsa.

"I dare not let the Governor know I am sending the mutton--he would think it foolish and unnecessary--and of course, with so many good things to eat and drink I do not expect you to offer it to your English friends, but perhaps you can hide it in a cupboard somewhere and take a slice when you are quite alone.

"And now I must conclude for Magnus is coming to the end of his paper. It makes me happy to think your bedroom is comfortable and I wish I could thank your landlady for being so kind and motherly. I may never see her in this world, but we shall meet in heaven some day and then I will thank her.

"And now, my dear son, in the midst of your great prosperity, do not forget that all good things come from God and remember to put your trust in Him. To His care I commit you, for He knows all our wants and all our troubles and all our secrets, and His eye ever watches and His heart never sleeps.

"Your affectionate mother,
"ANNA."

*IV*

When Oscar received his mother's letter he was living in a slum in Westminster. It was called Short Street, and it was a typical example of the mean streets which nearly always, and in all countries, lie near to a great minster, like sea-wrack at the foot of a rock.

Short Street was a cul-de-sac, whereof one end was a gin-palace and the other an archway to the railway depot of a suburban necropolis. Late at night the inhabitants were kept from sleep by the quarreling of tipsy men who had been turned out of the public-house, and early in the morning they were awakened by the rumbling of the hearses that rattled the corpses over the cobbles of the street.

Oscar's home in Short Street was at Number One, a grimy house with a soiled card in the fanlight above the door, saying, "Lodgings for single men." Besides himself, there were four lodgers, three of them being porters at the funeral depot and the fourth head barman at the public-house. The bar-man had the parlor floor, and he generally brought home a number of noisy companions at closing time to play cards and drink beer.

Oscar's bedroom in this house was not so much a room as a stifling closet of miserable aspect, in which the refuse furniture seemed to make an effort to range itself in order--a threadbare carpet, an iron bedstead without foot or head, a painted washstand, a broken-lipped water ewer, two or three rickety chairs, a table that was safest when it rested against the wall, a few pictures of race-horses on the remains of a dirty wall-paper, and a looking-glass blotched by damp, like a sheet of ice spotted and scabbed by thaw.

His landlady lived in the basement and was never seen except on Monday mornings, when she went round for her lodgers' rent some two or three hours before the collector called for her own. The only person whom Oscar saw constantly was the landlady's servant, Jenny, a typical cockney girl of the humblest class, untidy and unclean, but as bright as a London street sparrow, and with a big soft heart in her vulgar little breast.

Jenny had conceived a certain affection for Oscar, based on no grounds more personal than that he did not shout at her down the pairs of stairs, or take liberties, or use bad language, and that he always raised his hat when he passed her in the street.

The only effect of this sentimental attitude on Jenny's part was that she always dressed in her clean "print" on the days when Oscar happened to be at home to tea, and it was on one of these afternoons that she came knocking at the door of his bankrupt garret and said, "Letter for you, sir."

It was so long since Oscar had received a letter of any kind that he leaped up with a kind of fear, and on taking the envelope out of Jenny's hand and seeing it was addressed in Magnus's writing, and had been sent on from his former lodging, he turned pale and trembled.

"Is it bad news, sir?" said Jenny. "I wouldn't 'a' brought it up on no account if I'd knowed."

"No, no! Leave me, Jenny," said Oscar, and when the girl had gone and he had opened the letter with nervous fingers, he read it with eyes that were wet with tears while his cheeks were flushed with shame.

When he came to the end his heart was beating wildly and he was asking himself if it would not be the brave and manly thing to write at once and say that all this story of his prosperity was a miserable fiction, that he had never been otherwise than wretched, that he was living in a common way among common companions, doing common work which he dare not think of, and that no words could express the secret agony of his soul at having sunk so low. But deep as was the degradation of that bitter hour it was not so deep as that of the following morning when Jenny came lugging his college box up-stairs, and chattering gaily as if she had brought him a fortune.

"The railway man said as 'ow it was as 'eavy as lead, so I give 'im twopence for 'isself--I 'ope I did right, sir."

"Quite right, Jenny. Here's the money. You can go now."

"Can I 'elp ye to unpack it, sir? There ain't no sort o' box as I can't unpack. My! what a long way it must 'a' come!"

"It came from Iceland, Jenny."

"Fancy that now! Pat Looney, the lorry man, 'e come from there, and the neighbors says it's a pity 'e don't go back. They never says that about you, though. 'He's so perlite,' they says."

Oscar allowed the girl to open the box and empty it of its contents, and as she did so she chirped away like the street sparrow that she was, while he sat with the mist of his boyish associations floating up to him from the happy past.

"Well, I never!" she cried, sitting back on her heels as she knelt before the box. "Polonies! And sausages! And pickled tongues! And hams! Why, you won't 'ave to buy nothin' to eat for months! Isn't that lucky now? Just when you're 'out' too! Is it a present?"

"Yes, it is a present, Jenny."

"They must think somethin' of ye as sends ye a present like this," said Jenny, and then, after a moment, in a fluttering voice, "Is it a laidy, sir?"

"It's my mother," said Oscar.

"Your mother!" said Jenny, in a tone of relief. "Well, that's what I do call a mother--being good to anybody like this."

"She has been good to me all my life, Jenny, and all my life I've treated her badly."

Jenny looked at him strangely as if something surprised and pained her.

"You have, sir?"

"Shamefully, Jenny, yet she has forgiven me again and again."

Jenny was silent for a moment and then she said, "Mothers is like that, isn't they? Now there's Jim Cobb, the shandry man, 'e knocks 'is mother about somethin' cruel, but she never 'aves 'im up for it, never! Mothers is proper good!"

"Is your mother good to you, Jenny?"

"Me? I'm an orfling," said Jenny, and then, lowering her voice to a tone of confidence, she added, "I don't mind tellin' you, but I am! I always tells the other lodgers as my mother was one o' them girls as ye see at the Aquarium at nights covered with silks and diamonds."

"And was she?"

A look of dejection crossed Jenny's face. "I don't see as she could 'ave been, because they say at the Orflinage as I was born in Holloway when my mother was doin' time."

By this time the contents of the box were ranged on the table and chairs, and Jenny was sitting back on her heels again to look at them.

"There! They're as pretty as a 'am and beef shop! And I do believe as that's what your mother meant 'em for too. Jim Cobb, 'e wanted me to set one up with 'im, but not me! Not as I 'ave any objections to the 'am and beef business, and if anybody else thought of starting it----"

Jenny's hint was interrupted by the sound of a vehicle stopping suddenly outside the house.

"Now, I bet ye I know who that is," she said with a wink. "It's that blessed Jim Cobb again. He's always a-wantin' me to go for a ride in 'is shandry."

But going to the window she cried, "Goodness! It's a handswim cab! And there's a laidy a-gettin' out of it!"

"A lady?"

"You can't see 'er now--she's on the steps. There she is," cried Jenny, as a rat-tat came to the street door, "and me not 'ad time to comb my 'air yet!"

With an indefinable feeling of mingled fear and hope which there was yet no cause for, Oscar stood on the landing and listened while Jenny ran down the stairs. When the street door was opened he heard his own name in a voice that sent the blood to his head and made him reel with dizziness. A moment later Jenny came back with a face that looked white even under the smudges that soiled it, and she said in the same fluttering voice as before:

"I thought as much. It's you she's askin' for. I've took 'er into the barman's parlor--'e won't be 'ome till tea."

Oscar went down-stairs slowly, but when he got to the bottom his breath was coming and going in gusts, and his heart was beating against his breast as with the blows of a hammer. The parlor door stood ajar and a perfume he knew was coming out to him. After a moment he pushed the door open and then she whom he expected to see was standing before him, she herself, more radiantly beautiful than ever, with something soft and white about her neck and a face shining with smiles.

How much he lived in that moment no one could say. A hundred emotions coursed through his soul like the flash of flame--joy, delight, pain, shame, the rapture of seeing her, the humiliation of being found in such a common place, the degradation of being ill-clad and obviously poor, but above all love--the uncontrollable love that leads men on to happiness and victory or to ruin and death. His face broke up, tears burst from his eyes and holding out both hands he cried--

"Helga! My God! Helga!"

*V*

Helga appeared to be not less excited than Oscar himself. She was genuinely moved to see how the joy he had in meeting her affected him, and when he had kissed both her hands she kissed one of his and tears which she could not keep back came to her eyes also. There was a shiny leather-covered sofa in the room and they sat on it side by side and hand in hand.

"I have never, never been so glad," he said.

"And I am glad too," she said. "Let me look at you again, Oscar. A little paler, and perhaps a little thinner, but otherwise not changed in the least."

"Yet you have changed a great deal, Helga."

"Grown older, have I?"

"Grown lovelier and more beautiful than ever."

At that she leaned her face toward him and he kissed her, and for some moments they could not restrain their fondness. Helga was the first to recover self-possession.

"And now let us talk seriously," she said, but Oscar was still quivering with excitement and, having brushed away his tears, he laughed hysterically.

"How long have you been in London?" he asked.

"A month--a month to-morrow," she replied.

"And to think that I have never known it until now! But how did you come to leave Copenhagen?"

"That's just what I am trying to tell you. My father, for some unknown reason, elected to reduce my mother's income by half, so something had to be done. Then I remembered Neils Finsen and the wonderful things he used to say about my voice."

"Finsen!" repeated Oscar, in a graver tone.

"So I wrote to him, and he answered that if I would come to London he would have experts to hear me, and then they would see what could be done."

"Well? Well?"

"Well, I came, and the experts heard me, and they concluded that my voice was quite unusual--the most promising soprano they had found for years."

"And now?"

"Now I'm at the Royal Academy of Music, and by and by I am to go to Paris for two years, three years, perhaps four to study under Marchesi or Bonby and to attend an acting class, and finally I am to be taken to Monte Carlo or Nice in representations of "Faust" and "Someo," as a first step toward taking London by storm as Marguerite or Juliette--there!"

"And Finsen is doing all this for you?"

"Well, yes, so to speak, I suppose I must say that."

"Is he to pay your expenses?"

"I really don't know who is to pay them, but I've signed a contract to come out under his management and to refund everything when I am fairly launched. And now about yourself, Oscar?"

"About me?"

"It's nearly a year since I saw you last. What have you been doing?"

Oscar made a clumsy laugh. "Oh, I'm like the lilies of the field--I toil not, neither do I spin."

But his forced gaiety broke down badly, and he said more soberly, "Don't ask me what I've been doing, Helga."

Helga's eyes wandered around the room for a moment and then she said, "I know! Neils told me something about it, and he wished me to say----"

Before she could finish Oscar had risen to his feet. "If you come from Finsen I know what your errand is, and I would rather die----"

"_No, no, no,_" said Helga, clinging to his nervous hand. "Sit down. It's not that at all. Listen!"

He sat and the sweetness of her look banished all his fears.

"They're giving what they call promenade concerts at Covent Garden, and a few days ago there was some difference with the leader of the orchestra. It seemed desirable to make a change and the question was who the new leader ought to be. Naturally I thought of you."

"Of me?"

"Why not? Didn't I see what you could do with those hundred and fifty numskulls at Thingvellir?"

"But Covent Garden!"

"My dear Oscar, I've seen every leader they have here, and while they are all your superiors in knowledge and experience, there's not one of them with a tittle of your magnetism and genius. So I said, 'Neils, if you want the finest leader that London has ever seen let me go and fetch him!'"

"But you can't know, Helga--you can't imagine--if you had the least idea of what I've gone through to live--merely to live----"

Helga looked around the room again and she said, "Can't I see? Haven't I got eyes? But if you were to tell me that nobody has had any use for you in the meanest work that is ever done by the commonest men, I should still say what I said to Finsen."

Oscar's throat was hurting him. The thought of Helga's faith and championship broke down his self-control. He never allowed himself to think there could be any selfish ground for it.

"What do you wish me to do, Helga?" he asked.

"To meet me in Finsen's office at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning."

"But I vowed I could never set foot in the place again."

"You didn't know then that _I_ should ask you. And I do ask you, Oscar."

He remembered the promise he had given to his father; he reflected on the danger of reopening a page of his life which he had crossed out and turned down as for ever; he thought of Finsen and his interest in Helga and the hold he would have of her through her hopes and ambitions; and his will was like a broken withe, for the controlling destiny of his life was leading him on.

"You will be there, will you not?" she whispered, and Oscar answered:

"Yes."

She leaned her face forward again, and again he kissed her and then she rose to go.

"Where are you staying?" he asked, and she told him. It was in a fashionable apartment-house on the edge of the Green Park.

"Does Finsen live there also?"

"Well, yes, he lives in the same building. And you must live there, too. I shall want to see you constantly. There are a thousand things I want you to do for me. But now I must be off."

He could not let her go, and they renewed their caresses. "It will seem like a dream when you are gone," he said. "I shall hardly be able to believe you have been here, or that you will ever come back again."

"Don't say that. I told you in Iceland that I should come to you if you didn't come to me, and I've kept my word, haven't I?"

"My dear, dear Helga!"

"It wasn't quite good of you to go away without giving me an opportunity of seeing you again."

"I know, I know!"

"You had a certain duty to me, you know, after what had passed----"

"Hush, dear, hush!"

"But I'm willing to believe it was the fault of other people."

"Don't let us speak of it, Helga," said Oscar, and his arms, which had been about her in a close embrace, slackened away and fell.

It was easier to part with her after that, but before he opened the door he kissed her again, and when he helped her into the hansom he put her fingers to his lips.

He stood bare-headed on the pavement oblivious to all surroundings until the cab had rounded the corner of the public house and Helga had waved to him through the glass. Then he became aware that the sight in that sordid slum of so lovely a girl, so beautifully dressed and with a hansom waiting for her, had brought the neighbors to their doors, and that the women were thumbing their apron-strings and grinning to each other across the rails.

When he reentered the house Jenny passed him in the lobby with a stealthy and guilty air which seemed to say that her poor tortured little soul had not resisted the temptation to listen and to watch.

He returned to the parlor for a moment and the perfume of Helga's presence was still to be felt there over the odor of dead ale and tobacco. Never had he envied the barman before, but at that moment he would have given all he possessed to keep this room for the rest of the day, that he might sit on the sofa where Helga had sat, and lay his hand on the table where her hand had rested and kiss the carpet where her feet had trod.

He was like a man moving in a dream, and when he went back to his own apartment he was not conscious of his squalid surroundings. The dirty wall-paper, the threadbare carpet and the blotched looking-glass humiliated and compromised him no longer. His body was still in his bankrupt garret, but his soul was far away. It was in another world--a world that was bright with Helga's eyes as its sun and stars, for he was going over again the time he had spent with her, every word of it, every tone, every look, every gesture.

This lasted the whole of the day and when darkness fell a curtain seemed to have fallen on the life he had been living during the past twelve months. The mire and slime of vulgar associations, the degradation of common companionship, the sense of loneliness, of friendlessness, of being nothing and nobody, the deep remembrance of being homeless and hopeless and helpless and useless--all this had gone. That passage of his life was over now, and never, never, never would its pain and shame come back to him again. He had passed through it because he had sinned; but if he had sinned he had suffered, and God Himself had seen that he had suffered enough.

His eyes were wet when he lay down on his soiled pillow, but he fell asleep in a blissful condition and in the first dream of the night he was back with Helga. Once in the dark hours he awoke and heard the deadened hum of the barman and his friends at their cards and ale; and again he awoke in the dawn and then he heard the hearse of the necropolis thundering up Short Street and rumbling under the archway at the top of it.

At eleven o'clock that morning he went to Covent Garden, and again and again at eleven the following mornings he went there. On the tenth morning he called to Jenny, who had grown shy of him and was leaving his breakfast on a tray outside his door, and said:

"Jenny, I wish you to tell your mistress that I shall be leaving this lodging in another week."

Then Jenny's white and wistful face broke down utterly, and with a crack in her voice, and the ghost of a smothered sob in it, she said:

"I knowed as it 'ud come to this. The minit I set eyes on 'er I said as she'd take ye away from me--_an' she 'as._"

*VI*

The Governor never knew that Oscar had broken faith with him.

When the time came for the next session of Althing, a Bill for the reform of the Constitution, reenacting the abolition of the Governorship and the appointment of a Minister, was passed by a large majority. But an Act involving a constitutional change had to be voted by two Parliaments and therefore a dissolution of Althing became necessary. The time of dissolution was at the discretion of the Governor, and he might have delayed it until the fever for reform had passed. Instead of doing so he decided to dissolve immediately, thus feeding the agitation and precipitating his own fate.

Many things befall the man whose day is done, and the measure of the Governor's errors was not yet full. When the time came to select the candidates it was found that the constituency for which Oscar had sat--the capital--was once more without its man, and to everybody's astonishment the Governor himself, in order to secure a voice in the popular assembly, determined to stand for it.

This unusual step on the Governor's part created great excitement, but the fever increased tenfold when it was announced that the Factor intended to oppose him.

Never had popular feeling run so high as on the night when the Governor and the Factor had to confront each other on the same hustings. The better people stayed away, being sorry and ashamed that these two friends of fifty years should claw each other face to face like eagles, but the baser sort were reveling in the prospect of that spectacle and the Artisan's Institute was crowded.

"You learn a lot when your servants quarrel," they told each other, and they were not to be disappointed.

The Sheriff was in the chair, and it was clear from the beginning that his life-long rivalry of the Governor did not prompt him to restrain either candidate from making a fool of himself. Bad luck is a quick voter and the Governor played into the Sheriff's hands without suspicion and without delay.

The once silent and dignified man had lost all reticence and self-control, and when his time came to speak he flung innuendoes on every side. If you hate a man all his deeds are hateful, and coming at length to the Factor's business life the Governor said:

"Never is selfishness satisfied, my friends. Will you commit the care of your public purse to one who in order to grasp all is losing all and hurling himself into bankruptcy and want?"

This thrust was received with ironical cheers and counter cheers, not unmixed with derisive laughter, and when the Factor's turn came he said with a humorous leer over a face that was white as death:

"A blunt knife should seek the joints and not hack at the solid bone. But if it comes to asking conundrums I'll ask one also: Will you commit the care of your public purse to one whose son was banished from the country because he was a forger and a thief?"

This charge against Oscar, often whispered, but never before publicly uttered, fell on the reeking crowd with the effect of a thunderbolt, and before the audience had recovered from its astonishment the Governor was on his feet again, against all rule and order, saying in a loud voice:

"And will you commit the charge of your public morality to a man who in his youth contracted an alliance with an abandoned woman and only married his mistress after his first daughter had been born a bastard?"

This was the climax of sensation. The chewing and spitting crowd were silent, save for the sound of their audible breathing which was like the hissing in-wash of an ebbing wave. The Factor was pallid and speechless, as if the Governor's cruel word had struck all sensibility as well as sneering out of his face, while the Governor faced him with bloodshot eyes and blazing cheeks and lips that quivered convulsively. Thus the two men stood for a long moment with scarcely a yard's space between them, and then a big man was seen to be parting the people at the back of the platform and coming forward with great strides. It was Magnus, and he was making for his father as if to take him forcibly away.

But before the Governor had seen him, or could be conscious of his presence, another hand, an unseen hand, had been laid upon his shoulder. With a blow on the brain that was like a stroke from heaven, the Governor had realized that in returning the insult of the Factor, in his mad wrath and blind passion, he had outraged the memory of Thora, and that Thora was in her grave, and he had loved her better than any human soul that was not of his own flesh and blood. Then the noisome place in its ghastly silence spun round him, and with a low whine like that of a poisoned dog he fell heavily to the floor. Magnus took him up and carried him home--he had a stroke of paralysis.

There was only one nomination for the capital, the Factor was returned unopposed, and when the writs came back from the country it was found that the reform party had a larger majority than before.

The Governor made a slow recovery, but he was moving about by the time that Althing was next in session and when the constitutional question came up again he hobbled down to Parliament House on two sticks, in spite of all remonstrance, and took a seat in his little room overlooking the legislative chamber.

The debate was short and not exciting, and no one looked toward the alcove in which the Governor sat in his faded uniform, a doddering shadow of his old authority, but many cruel sallies of clumsy wit were aimed in that direction. The Governor grew more and more indignant, and at length he rose, frothing at the lips, to protest against unmerited insult, and was put down by the Speaker, who had formerly been his own private secretary.

The Act was passed by acclamation; there was much cheering, with the usual nine hurrahs after "God save the King," and then the fallen man was carried home.

In the middle of the night he had a second seizure, and he never left his room again. But as soon as he had recovered his speech he occupied his time dictating petitions to the King praying him not to give his sanction to an Act that was designed to degrade his servant.

After a few weeks Magnus came to persuade his father and mother to leave Government House and make their home at the farm.

"It's of no use to resist Parliament, sir," he said. "The new Minister will be appointed presently, and why should you wait until he turns you out? Come to Thingvellir--I'm strong, I can work for all of us."

But his father flew at him in a fury. "How dare you make such a proposition?" he said. "And how dare you show your face in this house? Don't you know that you have been the cause of everything? If it had not been for what you did at the beginning none of this mischief would have happened. As for the new Minister, if he comes here to turn me out tell him to bring my coffin with him--do you hear me?--tell him to bring my coffin."

The idea that Magnus was really to blame for all that had occurred, being the first cause and origin of the trouble, grew upon the Governor day by day, so that Oscar seemed to be without fault and even came to be regarded as a martyr. He called upon Anna to read Oscar's letter to him again, and when he had heard it a second time he was so seized by the idea that the Prime Minister of England was a friend of his son's that he had himself propped up in bed in order that he might write to Oscar with his own hand calling on him to defeat his father's enemies.

"You have great influence now, Oscar, and you must save your father from the machinations of these malicious scoundrels, of whom the worst and most devilish is the Factor."

That was what he thought he was writing, but his poor brain was far gone by this time and the paper he scribbled on over the counterpane was merely covered with unintelligible curves and strokes which Anna could not send on to Oscar.

When it seemed certain that the intensity of the Governor's wrath would kill him, and that he would die with nothing in his heart but hatred of the Factor, Anna and Aunt Margret put their heads together and thought of a way to soften his feelings and sweeten his end. It centered in the child as before. "A little child shall lead them," they said.

They took little Elin to the Governor's bedroom, and left her to play on the floor. She had grown to be the sweetest thing, with an angel's face, a little beam of spring sunshine that ran about the room and talked. But the only effect of her presence was to make the sick man stretch his arms to a safe near the head of his bed and take out a roll of papers.

Nobody knew what the papers were, except that they were old and that they crinkled in his stiff fingers. He kept them under his pillow at all times save when his bed was being made and then he smuggled them into the breast of his night-shirt.

When the women talked of Elin and all her pretty ways and sweet mysteries of childish make-believe, the Governor talked of Oscar. Although his memory was confused about recent events it was wondrously clear about distant ones, and he had countless stories of Oscar as a child. Some of them were humorous and he would laugh at them as well as he could with his distorted face, but all were meant to show that Oscar was not like other children, and when he had come to an end he would say:

"My son is a great man now, as I always said he would be, and when he gets my letter you'll see what he will do."

Meantime the Act had been sent over to Denmark and the Sheriff had been called across to Copenhagen. There was only one thing that this could mean, and in the absence of telegraphic communication the little capital sat waiting for the return of the steamer that was to bring the Sheriff back. She was due on a Sunday night, and the bell-ringers of the cathedral stood ready to ring a peal in honor of the new Minister.

The Governor heard that the "Laura" was expected and he conceived the idea that Oscar was coming with her to bring the King's veto and to scatter his father's enemies. He was very ill that day, and Doctor Olesen had said he might not last until morning. But he would have nobody to nurse him, and Magnus, who had come at his mother's call, but dared not show his face to his father, sat on the stairs outside the door.

Aunt Margret was coming and going during the whole of the day, and toward evening the Factor himself was seen tramping to and fro outside the house, looking up at intervals at the Governor's windows with a face in which the madness of love and fear was fighting with the greater madness of pride and wrath. At length Anna went out to him and said:

"Oscar Neilsen, come into the house to see your old friend."

"Not till he asks me--not till he asks me," said the Factor; whereupon Anna went indoors again and whispered over the bed of the dying man:

"Stephen, the Factor is outside, and he only wants to be asked to come in."

"He must come in on his knees then," said the Governor, and that was the end of everything.

The steamer did not arrive that night, and the bell-ringers went to bed. But at daybreak, when the fishing-boats in the bay were breaking through a veil of mist and the sunlight was glistening on the mountain-tops, the bells began to ring merrily, for the "Laura" was sailing up the fiord with flags floating from stem to stern.

Magnus heard the bells, and then a shuffling movement in his father's bedroom. A little later he heard the hurrahs of people cheering in the streets, and then a smothered echo of the same sound at the other side of his father's door.

"Hurrah!" "Hurrah!" cried the people outside.

"Hur-a! Hur-a! Hur-a-a--" echoed the voice within.

At the next moment the house shook as with a heavy fall and Magnus burst into his father's bedroom. His father lay in his night-shirt on the floor. He was dead, but his face was smiling and in his withered hands were the crinkled papers on which Oscar in his boyhood had scribbled his childish compositions.

Later the same day Magnus wrote to Oscar: "This is to tell you that our father died this morning. I think he died happy."

But the mail did not leave until the end of the week, and under Magnus's message Anna wrote for herself: "He loved you to the last, and we hav berrid him next to our dere Thora."

*VII*

When Oscar received the news of his father's death he was near the close of what he had believed to be the happiest period of his life. His success as a leader of orchestra had been substantial and immediate, and when the concerts at Covent Garden came to an end he had been offered engagements in other quarters.

"There! Didn't I know what I was talking about?" Helga said. "But this is nothing to the reputation you will make when you consent to appear as a composer."

"Ah, that is past praying for!" Oscar answered with a shake of the head, but all the same he was pleased and happy.

On leaving his dismal lodgings in Short Street, he took rooms in the same house with Helga and Finsen at the corner of Piccadilly and the Green Park. There the three friends lived the innocent lives of children, observing few of the restrictions which society imposes on the manners and conduct of men and women.

Helga's sitting-room was the general rendezvous, and the men used it with the utmost freedom. Oscar, in particular, was nearly always to be found there, except in the mornings when Helga was at the Academy and in the evenings when he was himself at the theater.

No hour was too early and hardly any hour too late for Oscar to call on Helga. He ate with her, played with her, sang with her, read with her and helped her with her lessons. Mozart, Cherubini, Ouseley, Macfarren, Parry, and again Mozart--their work was all play and their play was all music.

Helga was more than satisfied that Oscar should be always with her, always assisting her, always praising and encouraging and inspiring her, and he on his part was entirely happy to devote himself to her service. To think for a moment that this was all she wished for, all she wanted with him, was more than his heart was capable of.

On their off days, and nights they went to other concerts and opera-houses; attended the English cathedral services and the masses at Catholic Oratories; heard the old masterpieces over and over again; became familiar with nearly every new opera, oratorio, symphony, and voluntary, and studied the methods of most of the great singers and players who appeared in London. It was one long feast of music eaten at the table of love.

They had their social pleasures too, and kept open house on Sundays. Sometimes they supped or dined at restaurants with their new friends, who were chiefly Finsen's friends, and then brought their hosts back to Helga's rooms for cards and conversation until one, two, or three o'clock in the morning. It was a reckless, irresponsible, unconventional life, a little like the life Oscar had lived at college, a little like the life Helga had lived with her mother at Copenhagen, and more than a little dangerous, though they never thought of that.

Oscar found only one cause for uneasiness and that concerned Finsen. A certain pride which he felt at first in Finsen's interest in the girl he loved, the girl who loved him, soon gave place to jealousy. He was jealous of Finsen's hold over Helga, his control of her career, his power over her destiny. Little by little this became a gnawing anxiety until at length every pleasant word Helga exchanged with Finsen, and every smile she gave him, seemed to go to Oscar's heart like a stab.

He spoke to her on the subject, and she only laughed at him for his folly. Her endearing words and caresses dissipated his uneasiness for a time, but it always came back. Sometimes it seemed to him that Finsen presumed on his position as the one who was finding the ways and means, and that Finsen's friends interpreted this attitude according to the morality of the atmosphere they lived in. At length to ease the secret gnawing at his heart Oscar proposed that they should marry. Why not? There was no longer any impediment, and there would be an end of damaging misconceptions.

Remembering the past he thought Helga would have received his proposal with delight, but times had changed since they were together in Iceland and a cheerless smile hung about her lips as she shook her head. She showed him how fatal marriage at this stage would be to a girl in her position,--fatal to her aims, her ambitions, her standing with the public, and above all with the men to whom she had to look for favors--until he felt almost as much ashamed as if he had proposed a guilty thing.

"But why should you be jealous?" she said, approaching him to embrace him. "If _he_ is so there may certainly be some cause."

She put her arms about his neck and added, "Business is business, you know, and I may have to do things in the future which neither of us could wish--unless," she whispered, laying her head on his breast, "my bad boy will at length consent to be true to himself and to his genius and promise to write the great works I know he can write, and let me sing them all over the world. Then," she cried with passion, while her eyes shone and her arms clutched his neck, "then he will see what I can do."

To this, and such as this, Oscar answered, "No, no," or, "It's impossible," or "Don't let us talk of it;" but Helga's endearing words and caresses, again and again repeated, were like the water from sunny streams which trickles between the snow and the frozen rock and brings down the avalanche at last.

The days passed--they kept no count of them--six months, a year, a year and a half, and at length the time approached when Helga, according to the program which had been mapped out for her, was to leave the Academy of Music and begin her lessons in Paris. The prospect of an early separation was a constant nightmare to Oscar, who was striving in vain to devise schemes to prevent it, when that secret play of fate which men call chance, helped out by the blind strivings of human passion, brought him unexpectedly to the end he aimed at.

One day Finsen came dashing into Helga's sitting-room with his mouth full of news. The syndicate which held the theater and Casino in one of the principal towns of the Riviera had applied to him to recommend a leader of orchestra who should be capable of controlling a season of opera; he had recommended Oscar; his recommendation had been accepted, and it had been left to him to conclude terms with the company's servant and to despatch him without delay.

If a desire to separate Oscar from Helga had been a part of Finsen's plan his hopes were instantly frustrated, for Helga herself cried:

"Splendid! But if Oscar is to control the opera season why can't I go also? He can put me into small parts under an assumed name in that distant place where I can never be recognized, and that will be better practise for the stage than all the acting-classes in Christendom."

"Admirable idea!" shouted Oscar, and Finsen--not half-convinced--was compelled to agree.

It was while Oscar's heart rode high on this last freak of fortune, while he was preparing for his flight to the Riviera and while Helga was writing to Paris to postpone her lessons, that the letter came from Iceland and fell on him like a thunderbolt. The sight of a black-edged envelope addressed in Magnus's handwriting sent the blood rushing to his head. It was long before he could gather courage to open it. Feeling numb and faint he put the letter in his pocket and went out into the park to breathe and to think.

He had not written to his mother since the early days in his first lodging, being afraid to write from Short Street from dread of disclosing his poverty or from Piccadilly from fear of saying anything about Helga. As a consequence he had heard nothing from home since Anna's letter; the only news that had reached him had come through Finsen by way of his father and concerned public matters chiefly--the fall of the barter trade, the passing of the new Act and the progress of the elections.

Some one belonging to him was dead--who could it be? For no other reason than that little Elin was the youngest and frailest he concluded that it must be the child. His poor motherless darling! He reproached himself with having thought so little of her amid the appeals of an absorbing passion. Yet he had thought of her: he had thought he would go back for her some day, as it was his right and duty to do, and so make amends to Thora in the care and love he would bestow on her child. But perhaps that atonement was impossible now and his sweet child was with her mother in heaven.

Oscar thought that of all disasters that could befall him at home the death of his child would be the worst, but when at length he opened his letter and found that it was his father who was gone from him his grief was greater still. His dear father who had loved him better, perhaps, than any one else in the world, and whom he had rewarded the worst! He remembered the forgery and felt choked with shame; he thought of the promise to break with Helga and felt crushed by remorse. His father, who had pampered him and cherished such high hopes for him that should never be realized, never justified now, was dead far away in Iceland, and had loved him to the last!

Sitting on a bench under a tree he was trying to read again, as well as he could for the fading light and the blinding mist in his eyes, the written sob of his mother's misspelled postscript, when a park-keeper touched him on the shoulder to say the gates were closing, and then the dull hum of London's burrowing mazes fell on his ear again.

Helga had expected him in her room that afternoon to make the last arrangements for their journey, but the sun set, the evening closed, the night fell and he did not come. Next morning he walked in with drooping head and a dejected step and she saw that something had occurred.

"You have had bad news, Oscar--what is it?"

"My father is dead," he answered, and after that they sat for some moments without speaking.

Then Helga recovered herself--her brain had been going like a fly-wheel--and she said, scarcely above her breath:

"Well, what do you intend to do?"

"I intend to go hack," said Oscar.

"Back to Iceland?"

"Yes--to my mother and my child."

He lifted his eyes and looked at her, and at the sight of her face, so full of pain and disappointment the blood rushed from his heart, and he said:

"Helga, why shouldn't you go with me? Why shouldn't we marry and go back together? I know it is a good deal to ask, dear, but we should be everything to each other, and I should make up to you for any sacrifice by my devotion and love. What matter if we have to forget our cherished dreams and aspirations? Life is the fulfilment of duty, and our duty is at home--mine is at all events--and if you will share it, if you will go back with me----"

He stopped suddenly and dropped his head on his hands and his elbows on his knees. With every word he uttered the impossibility and folly of what he proposed forced itself upon him, and the blood that had flamed up to his head fell back to the depths of his heart.

Helga sat a moment without speaking; then she said in a steady voice:

"I'm sorry, very sorry, but it's impossible! If I had nothing and nobody else to think about I should have to think of Neils. He has spent money upon me and I have given him a contract, therefore I can't run away from him like that."

Oscar drew deep, gasping breaths and answered, "Then I must go alone. It will be hard, terribly hard, but I must go. There is the mortgage--I must take up that burden now that my father is gone--I can not let anybody else be borne down by it. And then there is the child--I've not done too much for her hitherto, and it is my duty, my sacred duty----"

"The child is all right, Oscar. Aunt Margret is taking care of her. Nothing you could do for the little mite would be half as good as is being done for her already. As for the mortgage, you can bear that burden just as well in England as in Iceland! Better--far better! You'll earn more money here--ten times, a hundred times more. And then think of the difficulty of beginning over again under the old conditions. Everybody must know everything by this time. They do--I know they do!"

She rose, and standing over him she stroked his hair--the uncombed curls of his fair hair--and said, softly:

"No, no, dear! You can never go back to Iceland until you go back rich and famous. And you may! I say you may! And then I, too, perhaps----"

But he covered his ears with his hands, for what Helga was saying sounded like mockery.

"Meantime you can not think of leaving me--especially now when I want your help so badly--and when everything depends upon it--my work and my future."

She dropped to her knees by his side and put her arms around his neck.

"Say you will not leave me, dearest! Say you will not!"

She loaded him with caresses, she addressed him by every endearing name, she conquered him. He felt that the impulse to go back to Iceland--the impulse of duty--was overcome by the rapture of love, and that he must stay where Helga was, whatever happened.

"I belong to you, body and soul, Helga--do as you like with me," he said.

"And you will go to the Riviera?"

"Yes."

If he had known what he was saying he would rather have called upon the river to carry him to its lowest depths and count him in the death-roll of its damned. But none of us can foresee the future. We must all bow before the Unknown.

*VIII*

The engagement on the Riviera was completely successful and Oscar covered himself with honor, but when the opera season came to an end he declined all offers to come back.

Finsen was there. Under cover of professional and fraternal interest he had made frequent visits to Oscar and Helga during the course of the season, and at the close of it he was staying at the same hotel. Oscar was nervous, fretful, and unhappy. The secret gnawing anxiety which had oppressed him in London had returned with redoubled force.

Helga's love of the gaiety and grandeur of the life of the Riviera was only too evident, and Finsen set himself to feed it. He fed it by every art and resource of a full purse and an open hand. Races, regattas, fetes, flowers--he gave her everything that was being enjoyed by other women living in abundance. Oscar protested, but she laughed at his protests or tried to coax him out of his jealousy. Her caresses and endearments were beginning to fail of their old effect. In spite of himself he was beginning to feel a certain contempt for her, and at some moments even a sort of hatred which tore his heart to pieces.

For his own part Oscar hated the life of the Riviera. What nature had done for the place was good, but what man had done was bad. The soft air, the blue sky, the deep blue sea, the smiling gardens, the flowers, the oleanders, the orange groves, the scent of the resin and then the still nights and the nightingale--could anything be more enchanting? Yet this paradise of nature, this God-blest corner of the earth was degraded by every gross desire that was at war with beauty and art and genius and the everlasting laws of life.

But Oscar's hatred of the Riviera was due to a cause more personal than his moral revolt--a poignant memory of the past. In the Casino which stood in the middle of the gardens, beyond the brilliant hall and the noisy orchestra, there was an inner room, guarded by keen-eyed door-keepers and watched by spies, where men and women sat about a green-topped table in a dusky and clammy silence; and at the end of that room, in the darkest part of it there was an alcove, almost covered by palms, where two persons could sit unseen. Helga and he had once sat there, and she had pleaded with him to do something that his soul shrank from, and he had done it. "Why not?" she had said. "He will never hear of it, and it will only be a matter of form. My luck must change, it must, and then we will pay back this money and everything will be wiped out. Do, Oscar, for me, please!"