Complete works of hall c.., p.425
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 425
What then was before him? Old age? What was old age without friends, without children, without love, without respect and with memory — that last joy of a man’s declining days — like a poisoned river running through a wasted land?
Was there nothing before him then? Yes, there was one thing — one only — and as he lay in that room alone with his head over his hands on the table, he had the trembling, thrilling, palpitating sense of supernatural wings hovering above him, and of an awful voice that seemed to say, “THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH!”
At that moment he became aware of other voices — more human and homely voices — murmuring about him, and one of them said, “He has fallen asleep, poor gentleman,” and another, “He has drunk too much, perhaps.” Then a hand touched him on the shoulder and somebody cried in his ear —
“Hadn’t you better go to bed, sir?”
It was his mother, with Magnus behind her, and looking at both he could see that they supposed he was intoxicated. In the wild labouring of heart and brain, it suited him that they should continue to think so, and indeed the strain of nerve had been so hard that when he rose to his feet he staggered like a drunken man.
“Heigho! What’s this?” he laughed. “Your brennie-vin must be pretty heady, landlady. But no matter! It will be a good nightcap and make me sleep the sounder. I’m tired, very tired, but I’m going to have a long sleep at last — a long, long sleep at last.”
“But to-morrow will be New Year’s Day,” said Anna. “The bells ring at daybreak, and the Sheriff will be here soon after, so you’ll have to be stirring early if you want to be ready for the auction.”
“Why so I shall — I had forgotten all about it — and since we cannot agree about the girl I must buy the farm whatever happens. I told you I wanted it for a particular purpose, but I didn’t say what it was. It’s my secret, landlady, but I don’t mind telling you. I want it for my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“That’s so! She was born in these parts, and the poor old thing would like to end her days here.”
“So she tells you to buy up my farmstead?”
“Not she! She doesn’t know anything about it. That’s to be my surprise. I’ve not been a good son, but when I go away never to come back again I want to feel that the dear old soul is happy and comfortable and has a roof to cover her.”
He laughed, with the same sense as before of an hysterical oppression of the heart, and then turned to Magnus and said —
“Sorry to buy your house over your head, but business is business, you know, and anybody is at liberty to bid who has money to pay.”
Magnus moved aside with a contemptuous expression.
“Don’t look so glum, my man. You think you’ve been badly treated and perhaps you have, but you’re the luckiest man in Iceland if you ask me. You think because you’ve done well you ought to be rewarded, but what right have poor wretches like us to expect reward in this world? You think because a man is rich he is to be envied, but what’s the use of having your pocket full if your heart is empty? And you think because Death kills the innocent and the happy it is a cruel monster, but there are worse things than Death, and Life is one of them when you’ve nobody to care whether you live or die. Then cheer up, old fellow! You’ve got your health and your good name, and your mother and that sweet girl to love and to love you, so what the devil have you got to complain of? Nothing at all!”
Saying this with a mixture of real emotion and its mocking make-believe, a touch of the boy came back to him for a moment and he put his arm across his brother’s shoulder as he used to do in the old days, but Magnus shuddered and shrank away.
“Your candle is burning in the bedroom, sir,” said Anna coldly.
And then he saw that his mother also looked black at him, as one who had come to turn them out of house and home, and as one who had tried to tempt the girl away from them, and as one who could laugh at their condition and have no thought except for himself. And thinking that this was the last he would see of her; that it was so different from the parting he had expected; that all hope of pardon and reconciliation was lost; that his mother would never hear that her lingering faith in her prodigal had been justified and never know that he had been and gone, he had as much as he could do not to break down and betray himself even at the end.
But gathering up his clothes which had been drying by the stove, he turned towards the bedroom, saying with another laugh — a laugh that went to Anna’s heart like a sword —
“Don’t look so down-hearted, landlady. When things are at their worst they can’t move without they mend. You’ve had your troubles, but you shall drink my health under my mother’s roof-tree to-morrow morning. Good night!”
And then he reeled into the guest-room.
VI
THE stranger being gone, mother and son looked into each other’s faces. Then they spoke in whispers.
“Did you hear him?” said Anna.
“About his mother’s roof-tree?” asked Magnus.
“About the auction — about everything. The man can have no feeling — no pity.”
“None.”
“‘Business is business,’ he said, when he talked of buying the place over our heads. And when he spoke of his mother ending her days here he never once thought of me.”
“He never thought of Elin either. He would have taken the girl away from us without a moment’s hesitation.”
“He would,” said Anna. “‘There’s enough in this purse,’ he said, ‘to pay your interest twenty times over.’”
“Did he say that?”
“He did. He took his pocket-book out of his breast pocket and—”
“His breast pocket, you say?”
“Yes, ‘and I’ll give the money to your son,’ he said, ‘if he’ll give me the girl instead.’”
Anna talked on in an innocent, helpless way without knowing what bad work she was doing, but suddenly, mysteriously, at the mention of the purse a change passed over Magnus’s face and it grew ugly with evil passions.
“He must be rich,” said Anna.
“Richer than anybody has a right to be,” said Magnus.
“Surely God cannot mean that anybody should be as rich as that while other people are so poor.”
“God!” said Magnus, and his distorted face quivered.
“If he would only lend us enough to satisfy the Sheriff in the morning!” said Anna.
“What’s the good of expecting a man to help us to keep the farm when he has come to buy it for himself?”
“It’s hard, though, cruelly hard, to be turned out of house and home by the first person who comes along with more money.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” said Magnus.
Down to this moment Anna had only been trying to sympathise with Magnus’s mood, but now something in his tone made her suspect that she had awakened a devil, and she looked at him in terror.
He took up the bottle and drank, he drank out of the neck; and there was a new devil in every drop. His eyes began to gleam with a feverish lustre, and Anna trembled. She remembered that Magnus had not taken any strong drink until to-day since the day of Thora’s funeral, and then she thought of her father, and a sensation of extreme cold crept over her.
“Let us not talk of it any more,” she said, as she tried to put the bottle away, but Magnus held on to it.
Mother and son looked at each other again, and then Anna went over to the stranger’s door and listened.
“Has he locked it?” asked Magnus.
“No, I’m afraid — No, no, he has not.”
“What is he doing?”
“The candle is out — he must be in bed already.”
“Then,” said Magnus, “he has thrown himself down without undressing and the pocket-book is on him still.”
“Magnus, what are you thinking of?” said Anna — her teeth were chattering.
“Would it be so very wicked?”
“What?”
“To take as much as would satisfy the Sheriff in the morning?”
“Magnus! I didn’t mean that.”
“He would never miss it — never know it was gone — and it would enable us to keep the farm and so save us from starvation.”
“Oh dear! What have I done?”
“He’s a prodigal himself, it seems. Very well, let prodigal pay for prodigal.”
She could not breathe freely — she could only look at Magnus in speechless surprise. He took up the bottle again and gulped down the last of the liquor.
“He has drunk a good deal — he will sleep heavily — and he won’t awake until the auction is over.”
“Let us go to bed,” said Anna.
“Go yourself,” he growled, for the furies that march in the brain of the drunken man had mastered him.
“Magnus,” said Anna, “if you will not go to bed I shall stay up all night with you.”
Then the devil that had changed Magnus into a cunning, savage beast, showed him what he had to do.
“Very well, let us go to bed,” he replied.
He bolted the outer door again and raked out the stove, while his mother extinguished the lamp and re-lit the candles. She thought the evil impulse that had come to him had been conquered, and she talked of other matters.
“I’ve made up Eric’s bed for you, and you’ll find everything comfortable,” she said.
As she passed Elin’s door she opened it gently and held her head aside to listen. The sound of soft and measured breathing came out to them for a moment and then the door was closed again.
“Poor child! She would lay her head on her pillow full of faith in the miracle that is to happen before to-morrow morning. Of such is the kingdom of heaven!”
They parted at the door of the badstofa, and a few minutes afterwards the little house lay silent and dark in the arms of the hills and on the breast of the snow, but the wings of Death hung over it.
Magnus did not go to bed. He threw himself on the eiderdown and went through a fierce fight with God as represented by God’s vicar, his conscience. A vision of the pocket-book in the stranger’s breast pocket danced before his dark heart, and he told himself that come what would he must take enough of the stranger’s money to pay the interest in the morning. If he did not do so the man would buy the farmstead and Elin and his mother would be turned adrift.
On this thought came compunctions. To take the man’s money would be to steal, and Magnus had never stolen. But faith being already gone, morality followed, and he wrestled with his conscience and overcame it. What he was going to do was what men did every day, only they called it business, and they did it to wrong the right, whereas he would do it to right the wrong. Magnus marshalled his reasons and justified himself. Here was a man so rich that he would not know to-morrow morning that he had lost what was sufficient to make his dear ones happy. That man was going to expose them to poverty and destitution. Surely it was right, it was necessary, it was his duty to prevent him.
In the mad tangle of his disordered brain he saw everything that had happened that day in a sinister light, and it seemed as if fate had thrown the man into his hands. He might have gone to lodge at the Parsonage — he had come there! He might have concealed the purpose of his coming — he had revealed it! He might have said nothing of the pocket-book — he had shown it with childlike simplicity! Surely this was the way out of his difficulties which Destiny had marked out for him, and not to take it would be to cover himself with self-reproaches when his dear ones came down to want.
Having persuaded himself that he could not help but take as much of the stranger’s money as was necessary to pay the interest, he began to ask why he should take so little. If the pocket-book in the man’s breast pocket contained enough to pay the interest twenty times over, why not take enough to buy the farm out and out? That would enable him to leave to Elin the inheritance which he had lost through his brother’s extravagance and crime. This man was about to take it away from her — he must not and he should not do so!
Stage by stage he pushed back the bulwarks of conscience until he came to ask himself why he should not take all. His mind was clogged and numb by this time, but he knew well what that meant. It meant taking the stranger’s life. There was at first an indescribable horror in the thought of killing a human being, but after a moment it passed away. This man alone stood between his dear ones and shelter — why shouldn’t he? This man threatened to take their lives by exposing them to starvation — why shouldn’t he take his life instead?
A momentary qualm came with the thought that he would be attacking one who had trusted himself to the hospitality of his house, a defenceless man in his sleep. But he thought of the stranger’s heartless laughter, his callousness to their condition, and recalled what he had said of his mother, and pictured her sitting there surrounded by every comfort while his own mother, born in that place, was turned out to perish, and then his gorge rose again and his heart knew no pity.
He began to ask himself how it could be done. It could be done quite easily. Nobody except themselves had seen the man; nobody else would ever know that he had been to their house. He could tell his mother and Elin that the stranger had gone away in the early morning. They would believe him, and even if they did not they would hold their tongues, for his interest would be their interest, and all he would do would be done for them.
A new and awful light illumined his gloomy mind, and he saw himself doing everything. No other eye would see, no other ear would hear. It was freezing hard to-night, and if it was found in the drowning pool when the ice melted the story would be that the stranger had lost his way in the snowstorm and stumbled over the rocks.
Having satisfied himself that he could defeat this world’s judgment, the tortured man in the toils of his temptation began to think of the judgment of the next. But fear of that vanished in a moment. Nothing was known in the other world of what took place in this one, and God interfered but little in the affairs of men!
At the thought of God a singing noise came into his ears like water in the ears of a drowning man. It was his conscience going down after its last gasp, for he was telling himself that murder though it might be, and contrary to God’s law, God had done nothing for him, and therefore he was not called upon to do anything for God. He had been a good man all his life, yet God had left him in the lurch. God and the world were letting his mother and Elin perish, therefore he must fight the world — and God!
In the last convulsion of his human nature he remembered that once before the impulse to kill had come to him, and that he had suffered the tortures of the damned whenever afterwards he had thought of it. But that was different, that was in the whirlwind of outraged passion, and if he had carried out his threat it would have been the worst of crimes, the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost — a brother’s murder! A thousand times he had thanked God that Oscar had not lived to come home, but how strange were the ways of fate — another man, another heartless prodigal, had come there, and if his dear ones were to be saved from starvation and the consequences of Oscar’s crimes, he knew what he had to do!
“Let prodigal pay for prodigal,” he thought again, and then he leapt up from the bed.
His brute nature, goaded on by the flattering devil of drink, had conquered his conscience, yet his knees knocked together as he went on tiptoe by his mother’s room, and when he came to Elin’s door he could hardly breathe. Their pure souls were sleeping in the protecting atmosphere of prayer; and when he asked himself what he was to say in the morning if they wanted to know where he had got the money, his mind was so clogged and numb that he could find no answer.
But this thought, with the vision that came after it of how his mother and Elin would look at him with searching and suspicious glances — of how when all would be over and he hoped to be at rest he would find them sitting together in silence, staring at nothing — nearly broke down the brute in him and his whole body was shaken by a kind of tearless sob. Nevertheless the flash of human light on his dark heart only made the blackness more profound, and after a moment he went on with his preparations.
When he stepped on tiptoe into the hall, the two sheep-dogs who had been sleeping on the mat by the door got up and stretched themselves and yawned, and lest they should make a noise he took them out and locked them up in a shed. After that he went over to the stable, which was at some distance from the dwelling, and saddled and bridled the stranger’s mare, and then with a sharp cut of his whip he sent her galloping and whinnying into the darkness. A breath of icy wind was coming down the valley as if day were stirring in its morning sleep, and a faint pink and white light in the eastern sky, with a glint on the western glaciers, seemed to say that the dawn was near, but the drink was in Magnus’s eyes and he could not see clearly.
No snow had fallen since the traveller arrived, and returning to the front of the farmstead Magnus made backward tracks from the porch to the river, partly in order to obliterate the stranger’s footsteps and partly to conceal his own when he should come out again, carrying a heavy burden. The man was gone by this time, and Magnus was like a night-bird hovering about his own house and thinking of his prey.
When he returned to the hall there was no sound there except that of the ashes slipping in the stove, and of the clock ticking in the darkness the deliberate seconds. He took off his boots, leaving on his snow-stockings only, and then he picked up a large cushion from the arm-chair and stepped to the stranger’s door and listened.
