"It is for him she has left me," thought Jason, in the whirl of his dazed brain; "for him and his place, his station, and the pride of his success."
Then, remembering how his love of this woman had fooled him through five treacherous years, turning him aside from thoughts of his vow, giving him his father's money for his mother's wrongs, and how she who had been so damned dear to him had drawn him on in the days of her trouble, and cast him off when another beckoned to her, he cried in his tortured heart, "Oh, God in heaven, give me this man into my hands."
CHAPTER VIII.
The Sword of Esau.
Jason went back to his lodging by the Cathedral, found the old caretaker sitting up for him, made some excuse for returning late, and turned in to bed. His room was the guest-chamber—a little, muggy, stifling box, with bed and bedding of eider down sewed into canvas sacks. He threw off his boots and lay down in his clothes. Hour followed hour and he did not sleep. He was nevertheless not wholly awake, but retained a sort of sluggish consciousness which his dazed brain could not govern. Twelve had chimed from the great clock of the turret overhead as he lay down, and he heard one, two, three, and four follow in their turn. By this time he was feeling a dull pain at the back of his head, and a heavy throbbing in his neck. Until then he had been ever a man of great bodily strength, with never an ache or ailment. "I am making myself ill before anything is done," he thought, "and if I fall sick nothing can come of my enterprise. That must not be." With an effort of will he composed himself to sleep. Still for a space he saw the weary night wear on; but the lapse, the broken thread, and the dazed sense stole over him at last, and he dropped into a deep slumber. When he awoke the white light of midday was coming in strong dancing bars through the rents of the dark blanket that covered the little window, the clock of the Cathedral was chiming twelve once again, and over the little cobble causeway of the street in front there was the light patter of many sealskin shoes. "How could I sleep away my time like this with so much to do?" he thought, and leapt up instantly.
His old landlady had more than once looked in upon him during the morning, and watched him with an air of pity. "Poor lad, he looks ill," she thought; and so left him to sleep on. While he ate his breakfast, of skyr and skate and coffee, the good soul busied herself about him, asking what work he had a mind to do now that he had come back, and where he meant to look for it, with other questions of a like kind. But he answered her many words with few of his own, merely saying that he intended to look about him before deciding on anything, and that he had something in his pocket to go on with in the meanwhile.
Some inquiries he made of her in his turn, and they were mainly about the new President, or Governor; what like he was to look upon, and what his movements were, and if he was much seen in the town. The good body could tell him very little, being old, very deaf, and feeble on her feet, and going about hardly at all farther than the floors of the Cathedral on cleaning days. But her deaf old husband, hobbling in from the street at that moment, said he had heard somebody say that a session of Althing was sitting then, and that under the Republic that had lately been proclaimed, Michael Sunlocks presided at the parliament-house daily about midday.
Hearing this, Jason rose from his unfinished breakfast, and went out on some pretended errand; but when he got to the wooden shed where Althing held its session he found the sitting over and the delegates dispersed. His only object had been to see Michael Sunlocks that he might know him, and having lost his first opportunity he returned the following day, coming earlier, before the sitting had begun or the delegates had yet gathered. But though he lounged within the door yard, while the members passed through, jesting and laughing together, he saw no one young enough to answer to Michael Sunlocks. He was too much in dread of attracting attention to inquire of the few idlers who looked on like himself, so he went away and came yet again the next day after and waited as before. Once more he felt that the man he looked for had not passed in with the rest, and, between fear of exciting suspicion and of throwing away further chances, he questioned the doorkeeper of the Chamber. This person stuttered before every word, but Jason learned at length that Michael Sunlocks had not been there for a week, that by the rule of the new Constitution the Governor presided only at the sittings of the higher house, the Council, and that the present sittings were those of the lower house, the Senate.
That was Thursday, and Jason reflected that though four days were gone nothing was done. Vexed with himself for the caution that had wasted so much time, he boldly started inquiries on many sides. Then he learned that it was the daily practice of the Governor to go at twelve o'clock noon to the embankment in front of the merchant stores, where his gangs of masons were throwing up the new fort. At that hour that day Jason was there, but found that the Governor had already been and gone. Going earlier the next day, Friday, he learned that the Governor had not yet come, and so he lay about to wait for him. But the men whom he had questioned began to cast curious glances in his direction, and to mutter together in groups. Then he remembered that it was a time of revolution, that he might be mistaken for a Danish spy, and as such be forthwith seized and imprisoned. "That would stop everything," he thought, and moved away.
In a tavern of a by-street, a long lean youth, threadbare and tipsy, formerly a student and latterly expelled from the college for drunkenness, told him that the new Governor turned in at the Latin school every evening at dusk, to inspect the drill of the regiment he had enrolled. So to the Latin school at dusk Jason made his way, but the place was dark and silent when he came upon it, and from a lad who was running out at the moment he heard that the drill-sergeant had fallen ill, and the drill been discontinued.