“How I should like never to see this hateful room again!” he exclaimed. “You don’t know how I detest it. The old ghosts seem to haunt it still. There is nothing that I can bear to look at except your picture of Bergen, which has done me more than one good turn.”
Sigrid, partly to keep him from talking too much, partly because she always liked to tell people of that little act of kindness, gave Roy the history of the picture, and Frithiof lay musing over the curious relative power of kindness and cruelty, and was obliged, though somewhat reluctantly, to admit to himself that a very slight act of kindness certainly did exert an enormous and unthought-of influence.
Physical disorder had had much to do with the black view of life which he had held for the last few months, but now that the climax had been reached and rest had been forced upon him, his very exhaustion and helplessness enabled him to see a side of life which had never before been visible to him. He was very much softened by all that he had been through. It seemed that while the events of the past year had imbittered and hardened him, this complete breakdown of bodily strength had brought back something of his old nature. The bright enjoyment of mere existence could of course never return to him, but still, notwithstanding the scar of his old wound, there came to him during those days of his convalescence a sense of keen pleasure in Sigrid’s presence, in his gradually returning strength, and in the countless little acts of kindness which everybody showed him.
The change to Rowan Tree House seemed to work wonders to him. The house had always charmed him, and the recollection of the first time he had entered it, using it as a shelter from the storm of life, much as Roy and Cecil had used his father’s house as a shelter from the drenching rain of Bergen, returned to him again and again through the quiet weeks that followed. The past year looked now to him like a nightmare to a man who was awakened in broad daylight. It seemed to him that he was lying at the threshold of a new life, worn and tired with the old life, it was true, yet with a gradually increasing interest in what lay beyond, and a perception that there were many things of which he had as yet but the very faintest notion.
Sigrid told him all the details of her life in Norway since they had last seen each other, of her refusal of Torvald Lundgren, of her relations with her aunt, of the early morning on Hjerkinshö. And her story touched him. When, stirred by all that had happened into unwonted earnestness, she owned to him that after that morning on the mountain everything had seemed different, he did not, as he would once have done, laughingly change the subject, or say that religion was all very well for women.
“It was just as if I had worn a crape veil all my life,” she said, looking up from her work for a moment with those clear, blue, practical eyes of hers. “And up there on the mountain it seemed as if some one had lifted it quite away.”
Her words stirred within him an uneasy sense of loss, a vague desire, which he had once or twice felt before. He was quite silent for some time, lying back idly in his chair and watching her as she worked.
“Sigrid!” he said at last, with a suppressed eagerness in his voice, “Sigrid, you wont go back again to Norway and leave me?”
“No, dear, I will never leave you,” she said warmly. “I will try to find some sort of work. To-night I mean to talk to Mr. Boniface about it. Surely in this huge place there must be something I can do.”
“It is its very hugeness that makes one despair,” said Frithiof. “Good God! what I went through last autumn! And there are thousands in the same plight, thousands who would work if only they could meet with employment.”