Complete works of hall c.., p.412
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 412
“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 to 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-dress 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 lovd 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 theatre.
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, Gounod, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, 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.
He spoke to her on the subject, and she only laughed at him for his folly. Her endearing words and caresses dissipated his uneasiness for a time, but it always came back. Sometimes it seemed to him that Finsen presumed on his position as the one who was finding the ways and means, and that Finsen’s friends interpreted this attitude according to the morality of the atmosphere they lived in. At length, to ease the secret gnawing at his heart, Oscar proposed that they should marry. Why not? There was no longer any impediment, and there would be an end of damaging misconceptions.
Remembering the past, he thought Helga would have received his proposal with delight, but times had changed since they were together in Iceland, and a cheerless smile hung about her lips as she shook her head. She showed him how fatal marriage at this stage would be to a girl in her position — fatal to her aims, her ambitions, her standing with the public and above all with the men to whom she had to look for favours — until he felt almost as much ashamed as if he had proposed a guilty thing.
“But why should you be jealous?” she said, approaching him to embrace him. “If he is so there may certainly be some cause.”
She put her arms about his neck and added, “Business is business, you know, and I may have to do things in the future which neither of us could wish — unless,” she whispered, laying her head on his breast, “my good boy will at length consent to be true to himself and to his genius and promise to write the great works I know he can write, and let me sing them all over the world. Then,” she cried with passion, while her eyes shone and her arms clutched his neck, “then he will see what I can do.”
To this, and such as this, Oscar answered “No, no,” or “It’s impossible,” or “Don’t let us talk of it,” but Helga’s endearing words and caresses, again and again repeated, were like the water from sunny streams which trickles between the snow and the frozen rock and brings down the avalanche at last.
The days passed — they kept no count of them — six months, a year, a year and a half, and at length the time approached when Helga, according to the programme which had been mapped out for her, was to leave the Academy of Music and begin her lessons in Paris. The prospect of an early separation was a constant nightmare to Oscar, who was striving in vain to devise schemes to prevent it, when that secret play of fate which men call chance, helped out by the blind strivings of human passion, brought him unexpectedly to the end he aimed at.
One day Finsen came dashing into Helga’s sitting-room with his mouth full of news. The syndicate which held the theatre and Casino in one of the principal towns of the Riviera had applied to him to recommend a leader of orchestra who should be capable of controlling a season of opera; he had recommended Oscar; his recommendation had been accepted, and it had been left to him to conclude terms with the company’s servant and to despatch him without delay.
If a desire to separate Oscar from Helga had been a part of Finsen’s plan his hopes were instantly frustrated, for Helga herself cried —
“Splendid! But if Oscar is to control the opera season why can’t I go also? He can put me into small parts under an assumed name in that distant place where I can never be recognised, and that will be better practice for the stage than all the acting-classes in Christendom.”
“Admirable idea!” shouted Oscar, and Finsen — not half convinced — was compelled to agree.
It was while Oscar’s heart rode high on this last freak of fortune, while he was preparing for his flight to the Riviera and while Helga was writing to Paris to postpone her lessons, that the letter came from Iceland and fell on him like a thunderbolt. The sight of a black-edged envelope addressed in Magnus’s handwriting sent the blood rushing to his head. It was long before he could gather courage to open it. Feeling numb and faint, he put the letter in his pocket and went out into the park to breathe and to think.
He had not written to his mother since the early days in his first lodging, being afraid to write from Short Street from dread of disclosing his poverty or from Piccadilly from fear of saying anything about Helga. As a consequence he had heard nothing from home since Anna’s letter; the only news that had reached him had come through Finsen by way of his father and concerned public matters chiefly — the fall of the barter trade, the passing of the new act, and the progress of the elections.
Some one belonging to him was dead — who could it be? For no other reason than that little Elin was the youngest and frailest he concluded that it must be the child. His poor motherless darling! He reproached himself with having thought so little of her amid the appeals of an absorbing passion. Yet he had thought of her: he had thought he would go back for her some day, as it was his right and duty to do, and so make amends to Thora in the care and love he would bestow on her child. But perhaps that atonement was impossible now, and his sweet child was with her mother in heaven.
Oscar thought that of all disasters that could befall him at home the death of his child would be the worst, but when at length he opened his letter and found that it was his father who was gone from him his grief was greater still. His dear father who had loved him better, perhaps, than any one else in the world, and whom he had rewarded the worst! He remembered the forgery and felt choked with shame; he thought of the promise to break with Helga and felt crushed by remorse. His father, who had pampered him and cherished such high hopes for him that could never be realised, never justified now, was dead far away in Iceland, and had loved him to the last!
Sitting on a bench under a tree he was trying to read again, as well as he could for the fading light and the blinding mist in his eyes, the written sob of his mother’s misspelt postscript, when a park-keeper touched him on the shoulder to say the gates were closing, and then the dull hum of London’s burrowing mazes fell on his ear again.
Helga had expected him in her room that afternoon to make the last arrangements for their journey, but the sun set, the evening closed, the night fell and he did not come. Next morning he walked in with drooping head and a dejected step, and she saw that something had occurred.
“You have had bad news, Oscar — what is it?”
“My father is dead,” he answered, and after that they sat for some moments without speaking.
Then Helga recovered herself — her brain had been going like a fly-wheel — and she said, scarcely above her breath —
“Well, what do you intend to do?”
“I intend to go back,” said Oscar.
“Back to Iceland?”
“Yes — to my mother and my child.”
He lifted his eyes and looked at her, and at the sight of her face, so full of pain and disappointment, the blood rushed from his heart and he said —
“Helga, why shouldn’t you go with me? Why shouldn’t we marry and go back together? I know it is a good deal to ask, dear, but we should be everything to each other, and I should make up to you for any sacrifice by my devotion and love. What matter if we have to forget our cherished dreams and aspirations? Life is the fulfilment of duty, and our duty is at home — mine is at all events — and if you will share it, if you will go back with me—”
He stopped suddenly and dropped his head on his hands and his elbows on his knees. With every word he uttered the impossibility and folly of what he proposed forced itself upon him, and the blood that had flamed up to his head fell back to the depths of his heart.
Helga sat a moment without speaking; then she said in a steady voice —
“I’m sorry, very sorry, but it’s impossible! If I had nothing and nobody else to think about I should have to think of Neils. He has spent money upon me and I have given him a contract, therefore I can’t run away from him like that.”
Oscar drew deep, gasping breaths and answered, “Then I must go alone. It will be hard, terribly hard, but I must go. There is the mortgage — I must take up that burden now that my father is gone — I cannot let anybody else be borne down by it. And then there is the child — I’ve not done too much for her hitherto, and it is my duty, my sacred duty—”
“The child is all right, Oscar. Aunt Margret is taking care of her. Nothing you could do for the little mite would be half as good as is being done for her already. As for the mortgage, you can bear that burden just as well in England as in Iceland! Better — far better! You’ll earn more money here — ten times, a hundred times more. And then think of the difficulty of beginning over again under the old conditions. Everybody must know everything by this time. They do — I know they do!”
She rose, and standing over him she stroked his hair — the uncombed curls of his fair hair — and said softly —
“No, no, dear! You can never go back to Iceland until you go back rich and famous. And you may! I say you may! And then I too, perhaps—”
But he covered his ears with his hands, for what Helga was saying sounded like mockery.
“Meantime you cannot think of leaving me — especially now when I want your help so badly — and when everything depends upon it — my work and my future.”
She dropped to her knees by his side and put her arms around his neck.
“Say you will not leave me, dearest! Say you will not!” She loaded him with caresses, she addressed him by every endearing name, she conquered him. He felt that the impulse to go back to Iceland — the impulse of duty — was overcome by the rapture of love, and that he must stay where Helga was, whatever happened.
“I belong to you, body and soul, Helga — do as you like with me,” he said.
“And you will go to the Riviera?”
“Yes.”
If he had known what he was saying he would rather have called upon the river to carry him to its lowest depths and count him in the death-roll of its damned. But none of us can foresee the future. We must all bow before the Unknown.
VIII
THE engagement on the Riviera was completely successful and Oscar covered himself with honour, but when the opera season came to an end he declined all offers to come back.
Finsen was there. Under cover of professional and fraternal interest he had made frequent visits to Oscar and Helga during the course of the season, and at the close of it he was staying at the same hotel. Oscar was nervous, fretful, and unhappy. The secret gnawing anxiety which had oppressed him in London had returned with redoubled force.
Helga’s love of the gaiety and grandeur of the life of the Riviera was only too evident, and Finsen set himself to feed it. He fed it by every art and resource of a full purse and an open hand. Races, regattas, fêtes, flowers — he gave her everything that was being enjoyed by other women living in abundance. Oscar protested, but she laughed at his protests or tried to coax him out of his jealousy. Her caresses and endearments were beginning to fail of their old effect. In spite of himself he was beginning to feel a certain contempt for her, and at some moments even a sort of hatred which tore his heart to pieces.
For his own part Oscar hated the life of the Riviera. What nature had done for the place was good, but what man had done was bad. The soft air, the blue sky, the deep blue sea, the smiling gardens, the flowers, the oleanders, the orange groves, the scent of the resin, and then the still nights and the nightingale — could anything be more enchanting? Yet this paradise of nature, this God-blest corner of the earth, was degraded by every gross desire that was at war with beauty and art and genius and the everlasting laws of life.
But Oscar’s hatred of the Riviera was due to a cause more personal than his moral revolt — a poignant memory of the past. In the Casino which stood in the middle of the gardens, beyond the brilliant hall and the noisy orchestra, there was an inner room, guarded by keen-eyed doorkeepers and watched by spies, where men and women sat about a green-topped table in a dusky and clammy silence; and at the end of that room, in the darkest part of it, there was an alcove almost covered by palms, where two persons could sit unseen. Helga and he had once sat there, and she had pleaded with him to do something that his soul shrank from, and he had done it. “Why not?” she had said. “He will never hear of it, and it will only be a matter of form. My luck must change, it must, and then we will pay back this money and everything will be wiped out. Do, Oscar, for me, please!”
From fear of reviving this memory Oscar had avoided the Casino during his present visit. That was easy enough to do while the opera season lasted, but when it was over, and his work no longer wanted him, it was hard to see Helga go off with Finsen night after night, and to wander around the Casino like an uneasy spirit that could find no rest, while they were inside of it. The jealousy that was rankling in his breast could not bear that ordeal long, and when Helga said, “What nonsense! You needn’t play — why should you?” he followed her into the gaming-house.
He saw the usual sights there, and found the usual company gathered about the tables — all middle-class, whatever their rank and station — the middle-class financier, the middle-class millionaire, the middle-class baron, the middle-class peer, the middle-class duchess smoking her cigarettes, and then the prostitute in her feathers and the black-leg in his diamonds, as well as reputable men and virtuous women, for the gaminghouse knows no distinctions of means or morality or intellect, and is the high court of the devil’s democracy.
On the night of Oscar’s first visit Helga played and lost; and seeing the strained look in her face, his very soul felt sick and he walked out into the gardens. On the second night she lost again, and he saw her borrow from Finsen, who stood behind her. On the third night it was Finsen who played and he won largely, and then Helga, who sat by his side, seemed to be intoxicated by excitement and delight.
