Complete works of hall c.., p.411
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 411
“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—”
“Not 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 their 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 would 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 re-opening 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; but 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 bareheaded 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 neighbours to their doors, and that the women were thumbing their apron-strings and grinning to each other across the rails.
When he re-entered 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 parlour for a moment and the perfume of Helga’s presence was still to be felt there over the odour 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, re-enacting 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 revelling in the prospect of that spectacle, and the Artisans’ 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 lifelong 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 Sheriffs 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 reeling 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 inwash 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 realised 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 t 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 towards 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 centred 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 honour 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 Dr. Olsen 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 towards 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 —
