Ah! it was all one! And yet amidst her grief the thought of being able to feel all this to the core as he had felt, was like the sun shining behind a misty atmosphere and gradually bursting through the layers of fog with thousands of undreamed-of light effects, above and below. How freely she could breathe again after the void, privation, brooding of many years.
Not until later did individual thoughts force themselves forward, then not fully until Rönnaug came to her. There was something labored in this letter; it read occasionally like a translation from a foreign language. But now for the letter itself:—
I have just returned from the south. I thought myself strong enough. Alas! The papers have doubtless informed you that I am ill; but the papers do not know what I now know!
The first thing I do in this new certainty is to write to you, dear Magnhild.
You will, of course, be painfully surprised at the sight of my signature. I awakened great hopes—and failed when they should have been fulfilled.
A thousand times since I have thought how impossible it would be for you to go to the piano and try over some song we three had studied together, or some exercise we two had gone through. A miracle would have been needed to compel you to do so.
A thousand times I have considered whether I should write to you, and tell you what I must now tell you, that this has been the deepest sorrow of my life.
You set me free from a once rich, but afterward unworthy relation, and this was my salvation. The germ of innocence in my soul was once more released. The entire extent of my emancipation, however, I did not realize so long as we were together.
And I repaid you for what you had done for me by desolating your life, so far as lay within my power. But I have also yearned to tell you what I now believe: our destiny upon earth is not alone what we ourselves have recognized it to be, not alone what we believe to be the main purpose of our existences. When you, without being yourself conscious of it, gave me a purer, higher tendency, you were fulfilling a part of your destiny, dear Magnhild. It was perhaps a small part; but perhaps it was also only an hundredth part of still more which you had done for many others without so much as suspecting it yourself.
Magnhild, I can say it now without danger of being misinterpreted, and also without doing harm; for you have become four years and a half older and I am going hence; indeed, I believe it will help you to hear it. Well, then, the innocence in your soul had become, amidst your peculiar circumstances, a moral atmosphere which in you, more than in any one I ever met, proclaimed itself to be a power. It was all the more beautiful because so unconscious in its manifestations. It was breathed from every manifestation of your bashfulness. It revealed itself to me not alone in your blushes, Magnhild; no, in the tone of your voice also, in the immediate relations you held with every one you had intercourse with, or looked upon, or merely greeted. If there were those in your presence who were not pure, you made them appear abhorrent; you taught even the fallen ones what beauty there is in moral purity.
You have the fullest right to rejoice over what I say. Aye, may it bring you more than rejoicing! It is not well to brood over a lost vocation, Magnhild, and the letters I receive from Grong lead me to suppose that this is what you are now doing. One who does not attain the first or greatest object of his ambition ought not to sink into listless inactivity; for do we not thus check the development of the thousand-leaved destiny of the tree of life? May not even disappointment be part of this?
(Five days later.)
Magnhild, I do not say this in self-justification. Every time I think of your singing I realize what I have repressed. It possessed a purity, untouched by passion, and that was why it moved with such exalting influence through my soul. The perfume of tender memories was in it, memories of my childhood, my mother, my good teacher, my first conceptions of music, my first yearning for love, or thirst for beauty. It also revived the first, pure tintings of life, those which had not yet become glaring, still less tainted.
I think of your singing artistically schooled, radiant with spirituality—what a revelation! And this I checked in its growth.
I bought while we were together some of the brooches made by your father. I showed them to no one. Under the circumstances it would have caused suspicion and consequent annoyance. But in those brooches I felt the family calling, Magnhild, the family work, which your talent should have further continued. In your father's work there is innocent fancy, patience, in its imperfections, as it were, a sigh of far more significant, undeveloped power.
Is all this now checked because your progress is checked, you who are the last of your family and without children? No, I cannot justify myself.
(I have been again compelled to lay aside my pen for many days. Now I must try if I can finish.)
Let not the wrong I did to you, and thereby, alas, to many both in the present and in the future, be used by you as an excuse for never making further progress! You can, if you will, give free scope to whatever power there is within you, if not in one way, in another. And do this now; do it, also, because I implore you! You can make the burden of my fault less heavy for my thoughts, now in the last hours of my life.
Aye, while I write this it grows lighter. The kindness you, in spite of all, surely cherish toward me (I feel it!) sends me a greeting.
You will, so far as you can, rescue my life's work, where it failed to complete its efforts; you will build upon and improve, Magnhild!
You will, moreover, accept this request as a consolation?
(I could proceed no farther. But to-day I am better.)
If what I have written helps to open the world once more to you, so that you can enter in and take hold of life's duties; aye, if all that you have either neglected or only half performed can come to attain the rank of links in life's problem, and thus become dear to you,—then it will do me good; remember this! Farewell!
Ah, yes, farewell! I have other letters to write, and cannot do much. Farewell!
Hans Tande.
(Eight days later.)
I copy in this letter to you the following lines from a letter to another:—
"It is not true that love is for every one the portal to life. Perchance it is not so for even half of those who attain real life.
"There are many whose lives are ruined by the loss of love, or by sacrificing everything to love. With some of them, perhaps, it could not have been otherwise (people are so different, circumstances excuse so much); but those whose existences I have seen thus blighted could unconditionally have gained the mastery over self and in the effort acquired a new power. Encouraged, however, by a class of literature and art whose short-sightedness proceeds from a maimed will, they neglected all attempts at gaining strength."
CHAPTER XI.
Magnhild and Rönnaug came arm in arm out of the wood where Rönnaug had finally been obliged to seek her friend, where so many confidences had been made, so much discussed and considered. They emerged into the open plain. How blue the haze about the mountains! And this was the frame for the pine forest, the surrounding heather, and the plain with Miss Roland and the child. The latter were sitting on blue and red rugs near the carriage. From this foreground the mother's eye wandered away more musingly than ever, and gained even stronger impressions of outline, light, color.
"The summer travels in Norway! The summer travels in Norway!" she kept saying to herself.
From the way in which she uttered these words it might be surmised that in the entire English vocabulary there was nothing which admitted of being repeated with such varied shades of meaning.
The two friends took a long ramble. Magnhild had become a new being to Rönnaug, her individuality enriched, her countenance illumined and thus transformed. For nearly five years Magnhild had been secretly brooding over her lost vocation, and her lost love, those two sisters that had lived and died together. At length she had opened her heart to another; thus something had been accomplished.
The horses were now hitched to the carriage, and the party drove on. The noonday repose of nature was not disturbed by so much as the rumbling of the wheels, for the carriage wound its way slowly over the mountain slopes.