CHAPTER II
Someone was scraping cautiously at the door.
He sprang from his seat, and fear gripped his heart once more. He rubbed his eyes, realizing that he had been asleep, and stared round him to see what had wakened him.
The noise was renewed, this time with a subdued whine. He grew calmer now, and opened the door.
A pair of brown eyes and the sharp nose of a dog appeared in the gloom of the passage. The animal looked up at him pleadingly, waiting for leave to enter. And once inside, it stopped still.
Ørlygur seated himself once more by the coffins, taking no heed of the dog. He had forgotten it. For the moment he was occupied wholly with a sense of dissatisfaction with himself; time after time that night he had allowed himself to be taken by surprise. First, he had let fancy run riot in his brain; then, on coming to himself, he had given way to a sense of fear; sleep had overcome him, and on waking he had allowed himself to give way to fear again. He knew there was nothing to fear; he was no coward—it was only when taken by surprise....
Involuntarily he glanced towards the door, where the dog had lain down. A pair of bright, watchful eyes met his, and the thought flashed through his mind that no human being could be more faithful than this dog. He beckoned it to him, and the animal promptly obeyed. It crept up close to him and laid its head upon his knees, licking his hand affectionately.
For a moment he enjoyed the kindly touch. Then his thoughts went wandering again.
“I can never be happy again,” he thought to himself. “I cannot understand how any one can be happy now. What pleasure is there in anything? Everything dies at last. Eternity—the everlasting—it is terrible to think of. And all one’s life but a drop in the ocean—what does it matter if we live or die? And our joys and sorrows—what are they, after all? All becomes insignificant. Some are glad when the sun shines; others are glad without knowing why. It is simple foolishness. Have they never seen a man die? Do they forget that one day they, too, must die?—die and rot ...”
The tears flowed down his cheeks, but he did not move; his features were set as though already stiffening in death.
“Die and rot in the grave....”
And he breathed softly, as if breathing in the air of death in the room, while the tears still flowed.
Suddenly he closed his eyes, and pictured himself dead and rotting—his flesh pale and bloodless—turning green and ghastly—falling from the bones, hanging in strips from the fingers and stripping like a mask from the face to bare the clenched, grinning teeth.
He opened his eyes with a start; an icy shiver passed through him, and he clenched his hands. But he did not move from his seat.
“God in heaven,” he thought, “I am going mad!”
His tears ceased to flow. And in a moment he was cool and collected once more. It was as if the trouble had passed from him, leaving only a deep earnestness.
And in unconscious effort to protect himself his thoughts turned towards the woman he loved.
He saw her now, in his mind; her lovely figure, her masses of golden hair, her bright, smiling face, and her eyes, that spoke so eloquently when they met his. Involuntarily he smiled.
But no sooner was he conscious of having smiled than the joy was gone, and his face relapsed into the same cold, sad look.
“If she had never seen me,” he thought. “If she had lived far away, or in some other time—then her eyes would have smiled at the sight of another as they do now for me. What is it all worth after all? An accident—a casual chance. Or could it be that, even if both she and I had been different, we should have loved each other still?”
Tears came to his eyes.
“I can never be happy,” he thought again. “Once I was always happy; always sure that the future would bring joy, more joy ... and I never dreamed but that it was good and happy to live. Now I am changed. I cannot understand it all. Everything seems different—even my thoughts are new to me. All changed ... I am like a stranger to myself. And why—what is the cause of it all? Because my father that I believed to be dead comes home alive—and dies.”
He sat staring before him.
Once more he surveyed the varied phases through which he had passed from the time when ten days before he had first come upon Guest the One-eyed in the mountains—not knowing then that the wise and kindly wanderer, beloved of all, was no other than his father, the hated Sera Ketill, who had disappeared twenty years back, and was looked on as dead—from that first meeting until now, when he sat keeping watch over two corpses; that of the beggar who had been twenty years on pilgrimage to expiate his sins, and that of his wife, the Danish Lady at Hof, who during those twenty years had paid the penalty of her husband’s crimes, only to forgive him at the last and follow him on his last long journey across the river of Death.
It was a week now since the two had died. And they were to be buried next day.
Ørlygur had begged and received permission to watch over them on this their last night on earth. It had been his great desire to keep that vigil alone, for he hoped that the night would bring him some revelation of himself; his feelings, his strength, his will.
The succession of unexpected happenings, the complete revolution in his inner and outer life, had left him in a state of vague unrest, a prey to dreams and longings hitherto unknown to him. A strange and mysterious power seemed hovering over him, possessing him completely. All life seemed changed.
The desire for common worldly pleasures and success, the thought of being looked up to by his fellow-men—all seemed empty and meaningless now—or even sinful.
The dying words of Guest the One-eyed had burnt themselves into his heart, filling him with remorse and spiritual unrest. What was it he had said about a successor—one to carry on his work—to show his fellows that the greatest joy in life was a pilgrimage in poverty and humility, setting aside all worldly things?...
Ørlygur could not forget—the dying man’s voice; his intonation remained firmly impressed on his mind; he saw again the look of sadness on the wrinkled face as the wanderer lay back on his pillow.
And to him, the son of the aged pilgrim, it was as the opening of a new world of thought. He had promised himself to take up the task, to continue the work his father had begun, without a thought of the difficulties that might lie in his way.
As long as the undertaking remained as but an inward emotion, a consciousness of his intention, burning within him like a sacred flame that consumed all gloomy doubts, so long did he feel himself uplifted in soul, raised far above to a height where his bereavement itself seemed but a little thing. He almost felt that in thus bowing to his father’s will and vowing to accomplish his desire, he had saved the weary pilgrim from the horror of death.
And for a while the difficulties of realization never crossed his mind.
At times he did remember that he was a lover. But the self-reproach with which he realized that he had for a time forgotten his love passed off again: a momentary remembrance, no more.
During the first days of this his new passion he was as one entranced, lifted above himself in a fervour of resolve. His soul was possessed by one thought, by a mighty dazzling dream. A glorious ray of golden light streamed into his mind, to the exclusion of all else. His soul answered to but one note—the mighty theme of self-sacrifice that rang through it.
Intoxicated with joy, he passed the long nights without sleep. At first the new, strange exultation more than outweighed the physical strain, and the grey days that came and went seemed bright and beautiful. He had never known what it was to suffer from sleeplessness; nights without sleep seemed now but an added treasure, an extended scope for happy consciousness. But soon the climax came, and his feast of dreams was at an end.
The days lost their beauty. He was weary and irritable from the moment he rose; he longed for night to come, for peace and solitude in which to dream again. But when night came and he sought to gather up once more the threads of his imaginings, his brain was dull, and his mind refused to frame new thoughts. At first he tried to content himself with merely recalling what he had dreamed before. It satisfied him for a while, but a repetition showed the things once glorious as dull and faded; he could hardly understand how he had ever been so moved by what now seemed vague and distant. And with sorrow in his heart, as for something lost, he fell asleep. Next day he resolved to watch the last night by the dead, and had obtained his wish to keep the vigil alone.
It had not dawned upon him that he had already been defeated—that the life he had resolved upon was a thing foreign to him, with no root in his soul, an abrupt departure from his natural bent and his former ways. He did not know that suffering was a gift of Fate, granted to many, yet to few in such extent that they are able to forget their own good and ill, and live for others wholly. He did not know that it is only the chosen of Sorrow who are freed from all thought of self.
Even had he grasped the truth, it would not have helped him to relinquish his ideas and admit they were but weavings of an over-sensitive mind. His nature was too stubborn to give in without a bitter struggle.
And his doubts did not come openly to begin with, but in disguise; only later, after long uncertainty and pondering, did they reveal themselves as what they were.
Irresolution, following on the tense pitch of excitement, rendered him distrustful of himself to an unwonted degree.
He sat now with bowed head, as if listening intently in a world of silence. And it seemed as if the silence spoke to him. No natural utterance, this sound that reached his ears, but an unknown tongue, a passing murmur of something mysterious—a wave that rose and fell, now loud, now low.
He strove with all his sense to find some meaning—at times it seemed as if words and sentences were there, but disconnected, without any purport he could understand.
Breathlessly he listened. His brain throbbed; all his faculties were concentrated in one present effort; this thing that was being told him now—he must hear it, understand it. That was all his task. Perhaps it might solve all the riddles of his questioning—give him a key to life.
And suddenly his sub-conscious mind came to his aid, whispering some lines from a poem by Hjalmar à Bolu. And in relief he murmured the words to himself, lifting his head and breathing freely once more:
“If Thou wilt not hear my words,
Divine, eternal grace,
Then shall the burning cry of my blood
Sunder the heavens about Thee.”