Complete works of hall c.., p.405
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 405
The window of Thora’s bedroom — the window at which Oscar had shouted his adieus the day before — stood open, and a ladder had been raised against it. By the gate to the green a horse lay dead on the gravel — it was Magnus’s horse, his magnificent Golden-Mane — covered with dust and sweat, as it fell under its rider at the last step of his fearful journey.
In the middle of the hall Anna and Aunt Margret stood with the Governor and the Factor, sobbing out their pitiful explanations. Afraid to return to the empty house which had been the scene of a painful memory, Anna had sat the night through with Margret at the Factor’s, waiting hour after hour for the reports of the Sheriff and his constables. Nothing had been heard of Thora, but in the early morning Magnus had returned and found the door of her room locked on the inside. Then he had run for them and they had called to Thora but received no answer, though sometimes they heard the baby crying. And now Magnus, having failed to force the door, had gone for a ladder, and he intended to climb into the room from the outside.
Oscar was conscious of no more until he found himself knocking at Thora’s door and calling in his agony —
“Thora! Thora! Thora!”
There was a heavy, staggering step inside the room, the lock was thrust back and the door thrown open.
“Thora!” cried Oscar again, but it was Magnus who stood before him — Magnus with a face white and set and full of anger and hatred.
“You were right,” he said, pointing to the bed. “There she is, and God — you!”
Thora lay high on the pillow with her eyes open and her parted lips smiling, as if she had just awakened from a beautiful dream. She was dead, but her baby was alive, and it was rolling its little round head and digging its red hand into her cold, white breast.
With a low, choking cry Oscar fell to his knees at the bedside and buried his face in the bedclothes. Magnus left the room, the others entered it, and Aunt Margret lifted the living child out of the mother’s breast over the father’s kneeling form,
IX
DURING the few days before the funeral Government House felt motionless and empty, like a room when the clock has stopped in it. Behind the drawn blinds everybody talked in whispers, as if the dead were asleep and must not be wakened. The stillness of the house centred in the room where Thora lay, and that was white and fresh with the odour of clean linen and wild flowers. In the deadened sunshine as it filtered through the yellow blinds there was a halo about the waxen face on the bed, and it seemed to diffuse solemnity on all around it.
Anna never allowed herself to be long away from this chamber. Her fear of the room had gone now that death had entered it. Early and late, in daylight and dark, she went to and fro in the silent place, walking softly and seeming to count the hours during which her dear girl would be above ground.
The Governor did nothing from the day of Thora’s death until the day of her burial. Dressed always in his official uniform, he sat in his bureau but received no one. He wrote no letters and read no books, and seldom spoke at his meals. For hours together he would sit with folded arms looking fixedly at the pattern on the carpet. A shadow had fallen on him — a shadow of shame — and in the sealed chamber of his proud soul he was struggling to reconcile his conduct to himself and finding it difficult to do so.
The Factor went on with his work as usual, for in the decalogue of his duty there was no maxim that forbade business, but sometimes as he turned the leaves of his ledger he looked long and saw nothing, and once, as he counted up the figures in his bank-book the thought smote him with the force of a blow on the brain that perhaps Nature was beginning to strike a balance with him against the sum of his successes, and that the cruel bereavement which had just befallen him was the first stroke of the Nemesis which was to follow in the wake of his wealth.
Aunt Margret and Helga were always at home, the one busy with the baby, which had been taken back to the Factor’s, and the other with the “black” which had to be ordered for everybody.
Little was known of Magnus, except that he was still in town, that he had been seen with the Sheriff and two strangers, that in spite of the trouble which had overtaken his family he was spending most of his time in the dark smoking-room of the hotel, and that he was said to be drinking heavily.
But the grief of Oscar touched and satisfied everybody. He had eaten little and had never been known to sleep. Sometimes he was seen to be sitting apart and weeping silently; sometimes he was moving from room to room as if every spot on which his eye could rest were charged with the memory of happy days that were dead; sometimes he was heard in the white room in which Thora lay — the room in which she had been so merry and so sad, so wild with delirium and so happy with her baby — and there he was sobbing out his wild regrets in muffled cries of “Forgive me! Forgive me?” Once in the middle of the night he was heard at the harmonium in the room below the death-chamber, playing softly a pitiful lament which awakened his father and mother and brought the salt tears to their eyes.
The desolate soul in these ghastly hours was prostrating itself in the dust. Death strikes sternly, and Oscar in his penitence was accusing himself of every crime. He had killed Thora — not her body only but her heart, that faithful heart which had loved him so deeply, so tenderly, so passionately.
In this conscience-stricken condition he looked back on the path of his life with Thora, and every step as he now saw it seemed to be thick set with the stubble of sin and rank with the weeds of self-deception. When he returned from England he had taken Thora from Magnus although he did not love her. It was true he had thought he loved her, but the brotherly thing would have been to stand back in silence, and if he had only done so Time itself would have undeceived him.
That was the first of his offences, and the next was no less hideous. When, being betrothed to Thora, he awoke to the certainty that his heart was with Helga, he had gone on with his bargain and led the girl who loved him into a loveless marriage. It was true he thought he was doing his duty, but behind duty was fear, fear of the world and fear of Magnus, while the courageous thing, the manly thing, even the merciful thing, would have been to stop at the church door if need be, and face the facts and take the consequences.
But having cheated Thora of her love and lied to her at the altar, he had crowned the sum of his sins by exposing himself to the temptation of infidelity. It was true that Thora herself, in her innocent affection, had paved the way to this temptation; true, too, that his marriage had been an imperfect partnership, but all the same his course had been clear, and he should have cut himself off from Helga at once and for ever. That he had not done so, that he had paltered with temptation, was the last cause of this terrible calamity. Thora had died because her heart was dead, and he himself had killed it.
Thus the desolate soul of the unhappy man laid down its faults at the feet of God, hiding nothing, palliating nothing, and seeing everything in naked light. If to be sorry for having sinned is to be innocent, Oscar had ceased to be guilty in his pitiful but useless sorrow. In the dizzy hours of pain and shame when the wheel of life goes rapidly, Oscar asked himself how it had come to pass that Thora was dead, and something whispered “Helga,” and again and yet again something whispered “Helga,” but his heart would not listen to that excuse. Helga had not been to blame. He alone had been at fault. He had sacrificed Thora to his ambitious dreams — his dreams of greatness, of glory. Helga had been merely the symbol of those dreams, and Thora was dead because he had tried to become a great musician.
But the past was past, and when Oscar asked himself what punishment he could impose upon himself for the future he heard but one answer. If his ambitions had been the cause of his sin, to bury them would be the true expression of his repentance. He would bury them. He would bury his genius and the expectation of becoming a composer in the grave of the sweet girl he had destroyed, and go through the rest of his life in the drudgery of the nearest duty, eating the bread of affliction in obscurity and remorse.
When Oscar first attempted to carry out this resolution, it was in a scene of such tragic beauty that no one who witnessed it could ever afterwards wipe it out of mind. The family had gathered for that last office of love which makes perhaps the saddest moment of human experience — sadder than the moment of turning away from the newly-covered grave, sadder even than the moment of returning to the void and empty home — the moment when the coffin-lid is closed down and the beloved face disappears for ever.
The death-chamber was the same that in a better time had been the bridal chamber, but the air which had tingled with all exquisite thoughts of life was now heavy with the hush of death. It was night time and the same lamp burned under the same shade, while a gilt-edged prayer-book stood in a circle of lighted candles on the little table that stood by the bed. Besides the members of the family only two persons were present — one of the sewing-maids who had made the wedding-dress for the cathedral and had just put the last stitch to the garment intended for a darker house, and a joiner in his shirt-sleeves.
One by one the family approached the bed to take their last look at the burden that lay on it — the Governor with a solemn tread as if he had been approaching the presence of a king, the Factor with rigid strides and a bewildered stare, and Helga with a nervous step and a furtive glance as if duty had called her and she wished herself away. But Anna and Aunt Margret moved about the body without dread or ceremony, laying flowers on the bosom and smoothing the soft hair that was dressed down the cheek, as if the dear dead belonged to them by right of nature, and they would give it up to no one until Earth herself, the mother of us all, should claim it for her own.
The man in the shirt-sleeves had stepped forward to finish his task when the Governor held up his hand.
“Wait! Where is Oscar?” he asked, and then Maria, the old housemaid, who had been weeping noiselessly outside the door, was sent to fetch him.
While Maria was away Aunt Margret went up to Thora and whispered over her —
“My precious, precious pet! You never changed to your stupid old Auntie, did you — not even when she kept your dear baby away from you and your sweet heart was broken! Don’t think she didn’t love you for all that, my precious. She loved you every minute, my own, and now that she has got your baby she intends to keep it. She will keep it as long as she lives, so don’t you ever be troubled about that, Thora. Aunt Margret is going to be a mother to your little girl, and nobody in the world shall ever touch a hair of your darling’s head.”
It was at this moment that Oscar entered the room with old Maria creeping up behind him. His pale cheeks and sunken eyes testified to the strength of his remorse, but his step was firm and his whole figure showed intense vitality of will. He carried a bundle of papers in one hand, and they were loose and irregular, as if they had been snatched up hurriedly at the moment he was called. In the utter absorption of his mood he seemed to be unconscious of anybody or anything in the room except one thing — the thing that lay upon the bed — and walking up to it he looked down at the white face and spoke to it as if the dead, and the dead alone, could hear.
“Thora,” he said in a calm voice, “these are the only copies of my compositions, and I wish you to take them with you. They were written in hours when your faithful heart was suffering through my fault — when I neglected you and deserted you for the sake of my foolish visions of art and greatness. That was the real cause of your death, Thora, and in punishment of myself for sacrificing your sweet life to my selfish dreams I wish to bury the fruits of them in your grave. Take them, then, and let them lie with you and fade with you and be forgotten. I will never write another note of music as long as I live, and from this hour onwards my ambitions are at an end.”
Saying this he put the papers beside the body of Thora and wrapped them in the long plaits of her beautiful hair.
“Oscar! Oscar!” cried Helga in breathless horror.
The others listened and looked on, hardly realising what Oscar had resigned, but Helga realised it, and she was trying to warn him against the lifelong sacrifice. But he did not seem to hear her, and at such a moment further remonstrance was impossible.
“My sweet girl,” said Oscar, stretching both arms over the bed, “forgive me for all my failures of duty. Oh, what I would give to forget them now; but I can’t, I can’t! You are gone, and I can never make amends.”
Thinking to put an end to a scene which was touching everybody too deeply, the Governor signed to the man in the shirt-sleeves, but when the man stepped forward Oscar’s grief broke out afresh, and in the vehemence of his sorrow his tongue lost all control of itself.
“Not yet!” he cried. “O God! Thora! My wife! My sweet young wife! Let me look at her face again! How bright and happy it used to be, and now it is leaving me like this! Forgive me, my angel! Say you forgive me before you go! I cannot live without your forgiveness! I wronged you and sinned against you, but you were good and your childlike heart was from God!”
The desolate cry rang through the room, and each of those who heard the revelation of the naked soul read it by the light of his own. Helga trembled and turned to the window, the Governor and the Factor dropped their heads, but Aunt Margret cried openly in innocent sympathy and Anna touched Oscar’s arm and tried to comfort him.
After a moment Oscar became more calm and even signed to the man himself, and when all was over he walked firmly and courageously out of the room.
X
ON the day of the funeral Oscar was weak and ill, and more fit for his bed than for a journey to the cemetery, but no one could prevail on him not to go. The morning was dull and drear with black clouds from the mountains and some sprinklings of rain, and when the dread hour struck, and Oscar came down among the mourners, his face looked ghastly in the void and heavy air.
The bell in the cathedral tower began to toll, the solemn burden was borne slowly down the stairs, and then Oscar’s white face became yet more white, and he would have fallen but for his father’s arm which held him up.
The body was first rested on the green outside the door, and while the mourners grouped themselves round in a wide half-circle to sing a parting hymn, Oscar stood bareheaded in the drizzling rain which had begun to fall.
Jon, the servant, stood at the gate, holding Silvertop, Thora’s pony, which he had brought from the farm to carry her on her last journey, and the sight of this horse seemed to be more than Oscar could bear. The coffin was laid crosswise on the panniers and the procession began to form. It passed through deep lines of the townspeople, Oscar walking first after the body, alone, bareheaded, and conscious of nothing but his grief. The bell was still tolling, and a Sabbath quiet had fallen over the town.
The cathedral was crowded with the same faces that had looked on at Thora’s wedding, when she came down from the altar in her bloom and beauty, happy and smiling on her husband’s arm; and now that she was being carried up to it, while the organ played the funeral march, and Oscar walked with drooping head behind, the people nearest the aisle said he was weeping audibly.
The coffin in its pall was set down on the steps to the communion-rail — the spot where Thora had knelt as a young girl to be confirmed, and as a bride to be married — and then the Bishop, who had been waiting to receive it, delivered a consolatory address.
They should not ask themselves why this sweet and lovely life had been so ruthlessly cut off. The ways of Providence were inscrutable, but God was in heaven and the Judge of all the earth did right. Neither should the family who were there to mourn take blame to themselves for what had occurred, for if it had pleased the Almighty to lay His hand on the afflicted brain of their dear departed sister He knew best why He did so, and to what end it was done. Rather let them kneel in gratitude to God that in His mercy He had not suffered her to lift her hand against herself, and so rob them of the blessed hope of eternal life.
“To the young husband who is here plunged in sorrow,” said the Bishop, “what can we say but that all our hearts go out to him? It seems only yesterday that he stood on this spot to make his vows before heaven and before men to love and cherish the dear girl who has been so suddenly taken away. If she had lived he would have kept his promises, and though she is gone he will preserve the spirit of them still. The pure and innocent soul who linked her life with his life will be an abiding memory, a perpetual inspiration against sin, and when the first pangs of grief are over, a constant solace and a lasting joy.”
If it was possible for Oscar to look more wan and weak than when he went into the cathedral he did so when he came out of it. The rain was now falling heavily, but when the procession was formed again for the last stage of the journey he walked bareheaded as before.
The Factor, who was behind Oscar (with Helga quivering on his arm), begged him to put on his hat, but he refused, and when the Governor, who came next with Anna, passed up an umbrella he shook his head and sent it back. The bell tolled again, the little town sat quiet, and the townspeople, who wept floods of tears for Thora, wept for Oscar even more.
When the procession reached the cemetery the rain was coming down in torrents, and even the priest put an over-coat over his cassock, but Oscar stood uncovered by the open grave. During the short prayer— “dust to dust” — he suffered visibly, and during the long hymn that is always sung at an Icelandic funeral while the grave is being filled in, the hollow thuds of the falling earth seemed to beat upon his twitching face.
When all was at an end he could not be drawn away until his father took him by the arm and said in a firm voice, “Come.” Then with a stronger step he walked with a remnant of the broken procession across the little cemetery — the hummocked home-field of the dead — through the gate to the road — where Hans the water-carrier in the sleeveless waistcoat Thora had made for him was giving water to her horse; past the Factor’s house — where Aunt Margret watched at a window with the baby in her arms — and thus back to his empty home.
