Front matter (continued 6)

The Governor's voice was now husky and indistinct, but still he struggled on.

"You will look to yourself for your livelihood in the future, but that--with your talents, little as you have made of them hitherto--should not be difficult. Whatever happens here I shall never expect you to do anything for me, or for your mother, but if fortune should favor you, and you are able to repay your brother, your conscience may be the easier and--though I do not pity him, for his heart was hard--the earth on my grave the lighter."

The Governor paused for the last time, cleared his throat, and then said in a firmer tone:

"Only one word more. I thought perhaps your father-in-law might have done something for you, but apart from a promise to provide for the child, he will do nothing. Therefore, as I have reason to fear that his daughter Helga was at the root of the trouble which has so nearly wrecked us all, and perhaps a first cause of the death of our dear Thora, I will ask you to promise me--for your own sake more than mine--to hold no further intercourse with him or his--do you promise?"

There was silence for some moments and then a muffled sob came as from the stove itself:

"I promise."

After that there was silence again for a perceptible period, and then a voice--a strange voice that was like a cry said:

"That is all. And now--good-by and--and God help you!"

Choking with emotion and blind with tears, Oscar turned about to acknowledge the justice of his punishment--to say that he deserved everything--everything and more--a hundred-fold more--but he found himself alone. His father had fled from the room.

XV

When Magnus heard of what his father had done, his wrath knew no measure. On the day when he found Thora dead in her bed he had said to himself, "Oscar has done this and he must be made to suffer." But there was no legal way to punish a man who had tortured his wife to death by every refinement of hypocrisy and pretense, and it was at the height of his anger that the offense against his father's property had come to him with its diabolical temptation. "Use me," it whispered, "the damnable spirit of the world understands me better," and after a struggle in which the devils seemed to fight for his soul, he yielded.

He thought he knew the price he would have to pay and that was the reason he did not join his family at the funeral. Everybody would loathe him for giving up his brother to the punishment he deserved. His own mother would turn from him, and after his father, being confronted by poverty, had allowed the law to take its course, he would hate and despise the son who had saved him from beggary.

But no matter! When he stood up in court and said, "This is Oscar Stephenson's handwriting, for he is a forger and a thief," and a thrill of horror ran through the crowded room, and every eye turned on him with contempt, he would say to his secret heart, "He killed her, and he had to suffer, and there was no other way than this!"

Yet that was not what had happened. His father had saved Oscar from the just punishment of his infamous offense. And how had he saved him? By making him--Magnus--pay the price of Oscar's riotous living abroad. Thus the vengeance which he had vowed upon his brother had recoiled upon himself, and while his rightful inheritance was wiped out, while the farm on which he had built his last hopes was embarrassed beyond the possibility of redemption, and he was ruined for the rest of his life, the man for whom and by whom he was ruined--ruined in his affections as well as his fortunes--was to be allowed to steal away amid a croaking chorus of sympathy and pity under the cloak of broken health and a broken heart!

What a devil's world it was in which infamy could masquerade as honor and hypocrisy as grief! When Magnus thought in this way his eyesight grew dull and his hearing dense and he felt a cold pain at the back of his neck. Then he began to use again the only remedy he had recourse to when his head was bad--he began to drink.

But sitting in the darkest corner of the smoking-room of the hotel, every word he heard--every conversation that filtered through the smoke and noise and his deadened senses--seemed to stimulate the idea which had taken possession of him--it was the devil's own world and God had nothing whatever to do with it!

At one moment a student ran into the room and shouted, above the laughter and singing of his fellow-students, "Boys, what do you think? Oscar Stephenson is sailing by the 'Laura' to-night!" And thereupon a babel of voices cried, "Really!" "Never!" "You don't say so!" "True enough--smashed up for good and going abroad for an indefinite period!" "Not a bit of it! Oscar isn't the sort to be broken up like that. Six months abroad and he'll be home again as bright and fresh as ever."

"So he will," thought Magnus, but his heart was fierce and bitter.

At another moment the chairman of the Town Board came in panting and cried, "News, gentlemen, news! Oscar Stephenson has resigned his seat in Parliament!" "Impossible!" "Listen!" and the little fat man read, out of his rasping, asthmatical throat, from a sheet smelling of damp paper and printer's ink a letter from Oscar to his constituents. Broken in health and happiness--compelled to go abroad--impossible to fix date of return--consequently forced to tender resignation--deeply grieved and disappointed--but set the duties too high to ask his constituents to wait, etc.--"That means he's not coming back!" "But, good heavens, does he know what he's giving up? Why, there's nothing that's not within the man's reach--absolutely nothing!" "I wonder the Governor has allowed him to do it!"

And then Magnus laughed out loud in the fierce bitterness of his heart.

After that the voices were lower for a little while, and when Magnus heard them again somebody was saying, "But a man can love a woman too much altogether. Breaking your life to pieces because you've lost your wife isn't brave, it isn't manly." "Perhaps not, but it's human," said somebody else, "and if Oscar Stephenson is smashed up by the death of Thora Neilsen, he's in the right of it, I say."

"So do I," cried Magnus, and laughing wildly, he dropped his head over his arms on the table. What a devil's own world it was to be sure!

There was some whispering and then two louder voices: "Poor fellow! So unlike his brother! Going it fast, they say!" "His father was pretty hard on him, though!" "Not harder than he deserved, poor devil!"

The poison in the soul of Magnus was fermenting every moment. Hearing the contemptuous pity with which he was contrasted with his brother--his brother who had wrought all the evil--his temples beat furiously and one wild thought expelled all other thoughts from his brain. If there was no law to punish Oscar, if his father had conspired to help Oscar to escape and if the hypocritical community agreed to cover up his fault, one thing at least remained--before Oscar left Iceland he must meet with him! Then if this was the devil's own world let the devil look after his elect!

Magnus's mind was weltering in this thought as in a boiling sulphur pit when the captain of the "Laura" came into the smoking-room with the agent of the steamship company, and seating themselves near to him, began to converse apart. "Then he will have to put up with a bed in the hold, for all the berths are gone," said the captain. "But why can't he wait for the next steamer?" "I'll tell you why," whispered the agent, "because the Factor's daughter is to sail by the Vesta and there seem to be reasons why they should not meet." "So that's it, is it? But their fathers are fools not to know that they'll meet on the other side if they want to."

Overhearing this conversation, Magnus lifted his head from his arms, drank a large tumbler of brandy and water to the last drop, and walked heavily out of the house. He had not been conscious of the passing of time, but the darkness was now closing in, porters were hurrying with luggage toward the pier and the first of the "Laura's" three bells was ringing.

Magnus was like a man who could not see or hear properly. More than once he collided with people on the parapet, and being big and strong he brushed them out of the way. Some of them cursed him, but he did not stop. His clouded faculties were conscious of one idea only--that he must go to Government House and meet Oscar face to face before he sailed.

Reaching his former home he found the door open, as usual on an autumn evening, and nobody in porch or hall. Avoiding his father's door, he walked up-stairs and turned mechanically toward the apartments which had lately been occupied by Oscar. But that was a part of the house sacred to his memory of Thora, and even in this hour of passion and pain something whispered to his tortured conscience, and he turned away. A moment later he was in Oscar's bedroom on the upper floor.

The furniture was in disorder, the carpet was awry, and articles of apparel were scattered about as if somebody had been packing trunks, but the trunks were gone and there was nobody in the room. Magnus was about to go when his eyes were arrested by papers on a desk. Among sheets of music and scraps from newspapers there were the remains of a letter doubled up and torn across.

Magnus knew the handwriting--it was Helga's--and without any compunction he put the pieces together and read the letter:

"Oscar:--As soon as I heard that the Governor had spoken to you on the fatal subject, I confessed everything to my father and took my own share of the transaction. Of course, he was furious, and now he vows that I must go back immediately to my mother in Copenhagen. That does not trouble me, seeing that you are leaving Iceland, but I must see you before you go. In spite of all you say, and notwithstanding any promise you may have given to anybody, it is impossible that we can part like this. It would be too selfish and too cowardly not to give me the chance of seeing you for the last time. Your steamer sails at nine o'clock--come to me at half-past eight. If you do not come I may even follow you to London--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.

"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.