This imbroglio lasted for a month, and during that time he looked back with longing to the hours he had spent in Hamburg; they seemed to him like memories of an indescribably happy time when compared with this.
At last he was cut down from the gallows. A letter came from his sister-in-law inviting him to his father-in-law's villa at Odense. His wife had also been invited; and it was arranged that they should meet again there.
V
Prepared for everything, even the worst, he entered on this new stage of running the gauntlet. The most curious of all his changes awaited him. After having been a husband and father he was to become a child again, be incorporated into a family, and find another father and mother many years after losing his own. The situation was rendered more confused by the fact that his father and mother-in-law had lived separate for seven years, and now wished to come together again on the occasion of their daughter's marriage.
He had thus become a bond of union between them, and since the daughter had also been at variance with her father, the family meeting promised to take the shape of a manifold reconciliation.
But his own past was not exactly associated with family reconciliations, and since he himself had not a clean record the prospective idyll by the Areskov Lake began to loom before him like a cave of snakes. How was he to explain this strange parting from his bride after only eight weeks of marriage? To allege pecuniary embarrassment would be the worst of all excuses, because a son-in-law with money difficulties would be regarded as an impostor or a legacy-hunter.
As he approached the meeting-place, he became nervous, but at the last hour he saved his courage, as usual, by reverting to the stand-point of the author: "If I get no honour thereby, I will at any rate get material for a chapter in my novel."
He also regarded what happened to him from another point of view—that of the innocent martyr. "I will see how far Destiny can go in its meanness, and how much I can bear." When the train stopped at the pretty little branch-line station, he looked out, naturally enough, for faces which sought his own. A young lady leading a delicate-looking child by the hand approached, asked his name, and introduced herself as his father-in-law's French governess. She had been sent, she said, to meet him.
A pretty white village whose houses had high, tent-like roofs and green shutters lay in a valley surrounded by small hills, and enclosing a beautiful lake, on the bank of which, outside the village, stood his father-in-law's house. On the road under the lime-trees a bare-headed, white-haired lady met him, embraced him and bade him welcome. It was his wife's mother. He was immediately conscious what a strange transmission of feelings such a simple transaction as marriage had seemed to him, might bring about. She was his mother and he was her son.