“But there must be help,” said Sigrid. “Some one else must be guilty. The other man in the shop must certainly have put it there.”
“For what purpose?” said Frithiof sadly. “Besides, how could he have done it without my knowledge?”
“I don’t know,” said Sigrid, beginning to perceive the difficulties of the case. “What sort of a man is he?”
“I used to dislike him at first, and he naturally disliked me because I was a foreigner. But latterly we have got on well enough. He is a very decent sort of fellow, and I don’t for a moment believe that he would steal.”
“One of you must have done it,” said Sigrid. “And as I certainly never could believe that you did it, I am forced to think the other man guilty.”
Frithiof was silent. If he did not agree with her, was he not bound to accept Mr. Boniface’s theory? The horrible mystery of the affair was almost more than he could endure; his past had been miserable enough, but he had never known anything equal to the misery of being innocent yet absolutely unable to prove this innocence. Sigrid, glancing at him anxiously, could see even in the dim twilight what a heavy look of trouble clouded his face, and resolutely turning from the puzzling question of how the mystery could be explained, she set herself to make as light of the whole affair as was possible.
“Look, Frithiof,” she said; “why should we waste time and strength in worrying over this? After all, what difference does it make to us in ourselves? Business hours must, of course, be disagreeable enough to you, but at home you must forget the disagreeables; at home you are my hero, unjustly accused and bearing the penalty of another’s crime.”
He smiled a little, touched by her eagerness of tone, and cheered, in spite of himself, by her perfect faith in him. Yet all through the night he tossed to and fro in sleepless misery, trying to find some possible explanation of the afternoon’s mystery, racking his brain to think of all that he had done or said since that unlucky hour when Sardoni had asked for change.
The next morning, as a natural consequence, he began the day with a dull, miserable headache; at breakfast he hardly spoke, and he set off for business looking so ill that Sigrid wondered whether he could possibly get through his work. It was certainly strange, she could not help thinking, that fate seemed so utterly against him, and that when at last his life was beginning to look brighter, he should again be the victim of another’s fault. And then, with a sort of comfort, there flashed into her mind an idea which almost reconciled her to his lot. What if these obstacles so hard to be surmounted, these difficulties that hemmed him in so persistently, were after all only the equivalent to the physical dangers and difficulties of the life of the old Vikings? Did it not, in truth, need greater courage and endurance for the nineteenth-century Frithiof to curb all his natural desires and instincts and toil at uncongenial work in order to pay off his father’s debts, than for the Frithiof of olden times to face all the dangers of the sea, and of foes spiritual and temporal who beset him when he went to win back the lost tribute money? It was, after all, a keen pleasure to the old Frithiof to fight with winds and waves; but it was a hard struggle to the modern Frithiof to stand behind a counter day after day. And then again, was it not less bitter for the Frithiof of the Saga to be suspected of sacrilege, than for Frithiof Falck to be suspected of the most petty and contemptible act of dishonesty?
She was right. Anything, however painful and difficult, would have been gladly encountered by poor Frithiof if it could have spared him that miserable return to his old place in Mr. Boniface’s shop. And that day’s prosaic work needed greater moral courage than any previous day of his life.