Complete works of hall c.., p.401
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 401
“Magnus — Oscar,” continued Anna, “if you both love the poor girl who is lying helpless upstairs, isn’t that a reason why you should be friends and not enemies? And then-think of me, my sons. I am your mother. Surely the sons of one mother can live at peace. I nursed you both when you were little ones, and if there should be strife between you now, and blows and perhaps bloodshed, it would kill me — I could never survive it.”
Then she turned towards Magnus and said, as well as she could for the tears that choked her —
“Magnus, you mustn’t be angry with Oscar. He is your younger brother, remember. You and he slept in the same bed when you were children. And when he was a boy you used to carry him on your back and fight all his battles.” Magnus groaned and turned again until he stood sideways to his mother, and thinking he was not to be moved, she faced about to Oscar.
“Oscar,” she said, “you must make peace with Magnus. You must, if only for Thora’s sake. Remember, you have got her, Oscar, and if it is true that Magnus gave her up to you, although he loved her himself, think of the sacrifice he must have made for both of you! Perhaps he loves her still, and has condemned himself to lifelong loneliness because he has lost her. And perhaps he weeps his heart out for her, the long nights through. Love that suffers like that has a great excuse, Oscar. Doesn’t it give him a right to look to Thora’s happiness? And if he thinks she is suffering for want of her little Elin—”
Oscar’s throat was hurting him, and in a husky voice he said, “She shall have the child back, mother. If the doctor says it is safe she shall have the child back immediately.”
“There!” said Anna. “That’s fair — nothing could be fairer than that, Magnus. Come, now, you must shake hands with Oscar.”
She put her hand on Magnus’s arm, but he did not move. “Magnus,” she said, “your mother’s love may be all that is left to you now, but it will last long, my son. You need not give it up to any one, and no one can take it away. After all, a mother’s love is best. It will cling to you and comfort you whatever you do and whatever the world may do to you.
Magnus, you must make friends with your brother — for your mother’s sake, Magnus—”
Magnus turned about and saw Oscar before him with broken face and outstretched hand. Then his own hand swung out, drew back, swung out again, and at the next moment the big, burly fellow had flung his arms about Oscar’s neck and was sobbing over him like a child.
Two minutes later Magnus was on his way home, cracking his long whip over Golden-Mane’s flying head and whooping and galloping like a madman.
END OF PART III
PART IV
Lo! I some we loved the holiest and the best
That time and fate of all their vintage prest,
Have drunk their cup a round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.
I
THE day of the Proclamation of the Laws was to be kept as a general holiday. A hundred pack horses, carrying tents and provisions, had left the little capital for Thingvellir the day before. The Danish man-of-war anchored in the fiord had lent half its flags, and the Order of Good Templars had sent all their insignia. It was to be a great and gorgeous spectacle.
Before daybreak the town was astir, and elderly people on slow ponies were setting out on their journey. Everybody was on horseback, for the way was long, and Iceland had few roads and no coaches. Soon after dawn the Governor started off in his cocked hat, and with his Inverness cape belted over the bright gold of his official uniform. Factor Neilsen rode beside him, and the Bishop, the Chief-Justice, and most of the Thingmen followed in his train. The idea of reviving a great ceremony of ancient days, and clasping hands with the mighty dead over a gulf of a thousand years, had taken hold of everybody’s imagination.
Oscar Stephensson, who had been the first to think of it, was among the last to go. He had been round to the Factor’s house to see the child and to fetch Hclga. The sun was reddening the sky over the eastern hills when they mounted their fleet young ponies. It was a quiet morning, with the promise of a radiant day.
Helga wore her woollen helmet and a fur cape over a white jersey. Oscar was in riding dress, with his new Italian cloak hung loose from his shoulders. Their way out of the town lay past the end of Government House, under the windows of Thora’s bedroom, and Oscar stopped and called up to it.
“Helloa! Helloa!” cried Oscar.
“Is it worth while to waken her?” said Helga.
But the window opened and Anna’s face appeared at it.
“It’s Oscar,” she said, facing back into the room.
“Good-bye, Thora! We’ll be back this evening.”
There was an indistinct murmur from within, and then Anna said, “Thora says ‘Good-bye,’ and you are not to hurry home on her account.”
Oscar laughed and answered, “We’ll see, we’ll see.” And then the riders put their heels to their ponies and bounded away. Helga was in high spirits, but the clouds hung on Oscar, and he tried in vain to banish them.
“All goes well, doesn’t it?” asked Helga.
“God knows,” said Oscar. “She’s quiet certainly, and apparently resigned. Yet her eyes are so dry, her lips so pale, and her cheeks so white and thin—”
“But what else can you expect four days after her confinement?” said Helga.
“True! But I’ve never seen her quite like this before. It is almost as if a wall of ice had frozen about her soul.”
“You took my advice, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“And what did the Governor say?”
“He said Magnus’s interference was an impertinence, and he wouldn’t hear of it for a moment.”
“So things are to remain as they are?”
“As they are,” said Oscar.
“And what about Magnus himself?” asked Helga.
“Magnus is at the farm.”
“But if he should come back while everybody is away?”
“He cannot come back to-day — his guests will keep him busy.”
“But if he should in spite of everything?”
“In that case,” said Oscar, dropping his voice and turning his head, “the Sheriff has orders to deal with him.”
By this time they had come to the tail of the train which had started before them, and the dust and the noise of the clattering caravan were too much for Helga.
“Let us go round by the hot springs and come out ahead of them,” she said, and they went cantering down a lane to the left where vapour floated over a flowing stream. Half-an-hour later they returned to the main road, forded a river, and tolted up a hill beyond it. The cavalcade was now far behind them, and the little wooden capital was a long way off, with its feet in the grey fiord and the white encircling arms of the snow-covered hills stretching out to the brightening line of the sea and sky.
“There!” said Helga, drawing rein and looking at Oscar with a sparkle in her eyes.
“Poor little Thora! I was sorry to leave her. But I daresay everything will be well,” said Oscar.
“Sure to be,” said Helga.
“Is that a steamer out there — out by the head?” asked Oscar.
“Undoubtedly it is a steamer,” replied Helga.
“The Laura is a day late — she was due to arrive yesterday.”
“Then it’s the Laura to a certainty.”
The sun had now risen, but Oscar shivered as with cold. “I must be a miserable coward, Helga, for the sight of a mail-ship frightens me,” he said.
But Helga only laughed and held up a warning hand. “We’ll not talk of that to-day, Oscar — not to-day, at all events. Look!” she cried, pointing to the line of moving forms on the brown streak of road that ran through the plain of black lava. “Look at your tribe down yonder. Don’t you feel like Mahomet going back to Mecca? Or like Jacob going up to the Mount of Gilead with his flocks and his herds and—”
“And his wives?” said Oscar.
“Yes, and his wives,” laughed Helga, and then both laughed together.
They put heels to their ponies again, and Helga sang to herself as they swung along.
“What a fool I am,” thought Oscar. “Why should I meet misfortune before it comes? And why should I trouble so much about Thora? Isn’t Helga as greatly to be pitied? In the wretched tangle of our fate hers is the knot that can never be untied Yet how happy she looks! Why shouldn’t I be happy?”
“Helga!” said Oscar, when they slowed down again, “you wouldn’t like to have lived in those old days, I suppose?”
“Certainly I should,” said Helga.
“What? And share your husband with another woman?”
“That’s nothing. Women do the same in these days, you know.”
And then they laughed again, though with a dubious gaiety, and broke into a canter once more.
“I’m a brute,” thought Oscar. “And badly as I have injured Thora, the wrong I have done to Helga is still more terrible. For her there is no outlook, no prospect, no future. She must go back to Denmark and I must go on with my duty. But why shouldn’t we have one day of happiness first? One day of delight before the dream is over?”
They drew up at a river that ran by the road to water their ponies and to take off their cloaks and pack them behind their saddles, for the sun was now bright and the air was warm.
“There’s one curious point about the patriarchs,” said Oscar.
“And what’s that?” asked Helga.
“Clearly they thought it possible for a man to love more than one woman.” —
“And can’t he?” said Helga.
“I asked you” said Oscar— “can’t a man love more than one woman?”
“Why not? Aren’t we all told to love one another?” laughed Helga, and then Oscar lifted her in his arms and swung her back to her saddle and they started on their journey afresh.
Their road lay through a bleak and barren country, past red hills of volcanic sand and jagged mouths of extinct volcanoes, over a deep dale of lava rocks, rutted with paths and scored with fissures, but brightened by a farmstead here and there with its little green-roofed elt-house smoking for breakfast and its hummocked home-field gleaming like a gem in a wilderness of waste. At the last of these farms they stopped to rest their ponies and to refresh themselves, being now half-way to Thingvellir, with the caravan far behind them.
An untidy man in his shirt-sleeves took possession of their ponies, and a slatternly housewife in a soiled apron brought them milk and skyr. She was still young, but already she had three children. One of them was whimpering at her breast, another was dragging at her skirts, and the third was bellowing for her from the floor above. She belonged to the capital and had once been considered a beauty, but she was seven years married, and it was six since she had seen the town.
“There!” said Oscar, when they returned to the road. “That’s the patriarchal life if you please.”
“Then I’m done with it,” said Helga. “Ugh! To think of being buried in a place like that year in year out with three children and only one man! It might do for Thora, but give me life, life, life!”
“And the man who gives you that may have you body and soul, perhaps?” said Oscar.
“Body and soul,” laughed Helga.
For the next hour their course lay across an almost trackless heath, bare as a desert and flat as an inland sea. The mountains that bounded it were stark and cold and far away — on the one side steep with running screes, and on the other side clouded with steaming vapour which rose out of the glistening snow. Not a house was to be seen on any side, not a tree or a bush or a flower or a plant, and hardly a blade of grass, but only a broad stretch of silver moss, leaden and dull, like the mould on a dead man’s face. No birds sang in that solitude, but sometimes the wimbrel sent its long lone cry across the waste; sometimes the wild swan sped far overhead and uttered its eerie ululation, and sometimes the raven perched on a stone and croaked out its melancholy note. A line of beacons, broken and old, each with a projecting stone like an amputated arm, showed the course of the road, going on and on like soldiers in single file tramping back after a lost battle. Midway on the Heath there was a House of Rest for travellers overtaken by the storms of winter — a little hut, half cubicle and half stable, with nothing but a plank bed and a truss of hay.
“Gracious heavens, what a place to be lost in in a snowstorm,” said Helga.
“But what a country for Saga and song,” said Oscar, “and if some one could set it to music, grim as its glaciers and fierce as its fires, it would take the world by storm.”
“Do it, Oscar, do it, and I’ll love you,” cried Helga.
“As we are commanded to love one another?” asked Oscar.
“Perhaps,” laughed Helga, and when he swung her to the saddle again her hand slipped from his shoulder and his lips touched her cheek.
After that they both sang as they cantered along, for the clouds that had hung over Oscar had gone by this time, and if the ground was grey the sky was blue, and their blood was red and warm.
But suddenly a new scene opened at their feet — a deep plain with a shining blue lake in the midst of it, splashed with islands like spots on an eagle’s egg, and fenced by soft green fells. It was a dream in a desolate land, a cistern of sunshine encircled by countless peaks which stood round it clothed in white, like a surpliced choir that were singing their hymns to God. The black lava was there as elsewhere, and the valley was blistered with mounds and wrinkled with ruts and scored with fissures; but the blood-root grew in the clefts of the jagged rocks, and the blueberry hung over the face of the gaping chasms, and it was almost as if an angel had passed over the surface torn by earthquakes and brushed it with the bloom of his wings.
This was Thingvellir, the place of the Proclamation, the Thing-place of the Northlands, the scene of a hundred Sagas, the subject of a thousand songs.
Oscar and Helga were now near the end of their journey, and they waited for the townspeople to overtake them. Half-an-hour later the caravan came up in a cloud of dust, all noisy but good-natured, and ravenous for breakfast. There were some shouts at the pioneers, and certain dubious compliments, but Oscar did not hear and Helga did not heed. They took their places behind the Governor, and went down to the law-plain in his train.
The way to it was through a wide chasm whose parallel walls stood up on either side of the steep causeway like the ruined street of some prehistoric city, but thrice grander and more awesome than any work of the hand of man because straight from the loins of nature and rent from the womb of the earth. There were great openings as of arches, empty spaces as of windows, broken peaks as of pediments, and curious stones as of carvings, all shaken from their foundations and toppling as if to fall; while over them, from beetling side to side, hung the gay flags of the Danish man-of-war, and through them came the bright shafts of the morning sun.
Half-way down the gorge there was a mound like a platform (the “Law-mount,” explained Oscar to Helga), and at the foot of it there was a pool whose clear green depths looked cold and chill in the palm of the cliffs that darkened it.
“That’s the drowning pool,” said Oscar. “When a woman was unfaithful to her husband they hurled her from the rocks into the water.”
“And what did they do with the unfaithful men?” laughed Helga.
From the edge of the pool a frothy river fell with a thunderous clamour over a precipice to the valley below, where it forked into many fingers and ran off to the margin of the lake. Beyond these rivulets there was the rutted plain, now dotted over with tents, but having only two houses within sight — the little wooden parsonage with its tiny church built of stone and shingles and the Inn-farm of Magnus Stephensson.
Magnus himself stood waiting there, washed and dressed, after working the whole night through, with his man Jon Vidalin, to prepare for his expected guests. And when Oscar rode up, a little excited and confused, he received him with the cheerful face of one who had made his peace with his brother and meant to keep it.
“How’s Thora to-day?” asked Magnus, as he loosened the girths of Oscar’s saddle; and Oscar answered nervously —
“Better — that is to say — well, perhaps not so very well today, Magnus.”
“Her child has been given back to her?” said Magnus.
‘Not yet,” said Oscar. “To tell the truth the Governor—” and then he faltered out the sequel to his broken promise. Magnus’s face darkened, and he said —
“So the doctor has not been consulted at all?”
“No. In the teeth of the Governor’s orders it was plainly impossible—”
“And Thora is still at Government House, and her child is still at the Factor’s?”
“That is so.”
Magnus looked from Oscar to Helga, who now stood beside him, and his face darkened more and more.
“Jon Vidalin,” he cried in a thick voice over his shoulder to a man behind him, “saddle my horse — I am going to Reykjavik.”
“But Magnus,” said the servant-man, “with all this work to do to-day, and all this money coming—”
“Saddle it quick,” cried Magnus, like a man who was choking.
“Magnus,” said Oscar, “for your own sake I think it only right to tell you—”
But Magnus cut him short by turning on his heel.
“Let him go,” said Helga, and before the people in the tents and the Inn-farm had settled down to breakfast Magnus was riding back to town.
II
MEANTIME Thora at home was in the throes of a great temptation. She had heard the peace-making between Magnus and her husband and had said to herself: Oscar will go to see Dr. Olsen at once, and the dear doctor will say, “Certainly, the little mother is quite well enough now to take care of her baby — give the child back to her immediately.” Then Oscar would come rushing upstairs, and her room would be the same as if a window had blown open, and he would cry, “Hip, hip, hurrah! Doctor says baby may come back! “ and then Anna would take him by the shoulders and turn him out and everybody would laugh.
