And Sigrid felt the little clinging arm round her waist, and as they looked at the picture together she smoothed back the child’s golden hair tenderly.
“Yes,” she said, smiling, “after all, people are very kind.”
CHAPTER XV.
As Preston Askevold had feared, Frithiof bore the troubles much less easily. He was without Sigrid’s sweetness of nature, without her patience, and the little touch of philosophic matter-of-factness which helped her to endure. He was far more sensitive too, and was terribly handicapped by the bitterness which was the almost inevitable result of his treatment by Blanche Morgan, a bitterness which stirred him up into a sort of contemptuous hatred of both God and man. Sigrid, with her quiet common sense, her rarely expressed but very real faith, struggled on through the winter and the spring, and in the process managed to grow and develop; but Frithiof, in his desolate London lodgings, with his sore heart and rebellious intellect, grew daily more hard and morose. Had it not been for the Bonifaces he must have gone altogether to the bad, but the days which he spent every now and then in that quiet, simple household, where kindness reigned supreme, saved him from utter ruin. For always through the darkest part of every life there runs, though we may sometimes fail to see it, this “golden thread of love,” so that even the worst man on earth is not wholly cut off from God, since He will, by some means or other, eternally try to draw him out of death into life. We are astounded now and then to read that some cold-blooded murderer, some man guilty of a hideous crime, will ask in his last moments to see a child who loved him devotedly, and whom he also loved. We are astonished just because we do not understand the untiring heart of the All-Father who in His goodness often gives to the vilest sinner the love of a pure-hearted woman or child. So true is the beautiful old Latin saying, long in the world but little believed, “Mergere nos patitur, sed non submergere, Christus” (Christ lets us sink may be, but not drown).
Just at this time there was only one thing on which Frithiof found any satisfaction, and that was in the little store of money which by slow degrees he was able to place in the savings bank. In what way it could ever grow into a sum large enough to pay his father’s creditors he did not trouble himself to think, but week by week it did increase, and with this one aim in life he struggled on, working early and late, and living on an amount of food which could have horrified an Englishman. Luckily he had discovered a place in Oxford Street where he could get a good dinner every day for sixpence, but this was practically his only meal, and after some months the scanty fare began to tell upon him, so that even the Miss Turnours noticed that something was wrong.
“That young man looks to me underfed,” said Miss Caroline one day. “I met him on the stairs just now, and he seems to me to have grown paler and thinner. What does he have for breakfast, Charlotte? Does he eat as well as the other lodgers?”
“Dear me, no,” said Miss Charlotte. “It’s my belief that he eats nothing at all but ship’s biscuits. There’s a tin of them up in his room, and a tin of cocoa, which he makes for himself. All I ever take him is a jug of boiling water night and morning!”
“Poor fellow!” said Miss Caroline, sighing a little as she plaited some lace which must have been washed a hundred times into her dress.
A delicate carefulness in these little details of dress distinguished the three ladies—they had inherited it with the spelling of their name and other tokens of good breeding.
“I feel sorry for him,” she added. “He always bows very politely when I meet him, and he is remarkably good-looking, though with a disagreeable expression.”