Complete works of hall c.., p.408
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 408
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 upstairs and turned mechanically towards 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 a 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 towards 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 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 clenched 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 was 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.
END OF PART IV
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 Stephensson 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 bound for 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 odour of carpets and curtains and a prospect of the neighbouring roofs, with various causeways of red chimney-pots.
In this apartment Oscar Stephensson 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 neighbour 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 waggons (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 cosy 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-bye, dearest, and God bless you, and God bless everybody at home, for we shall all be good friends yet.
“OSCAR.
