"Poor Anna!" said the Rector, and the two old friends went heavily down the path.
Meantime the man they were talking of, though they did not know it, was going through an agony of self-reproach. The duplicity of winning his way to the love and esteem of his people under the cover of a false name was suffocating him. It was necessary, it was inevitable, it was a part of the conduct that was forced upon him by the errand that had brought him home, but if they who welcomed him in the ignorance of their enthusiasm could know who he was, how their hearts would turn from him; how their sympathy would change to loathing and their admiration to contempt!
The evening was one of prolonged suffering to Christian Christiansson, for everything that happened in that house, every trivial object that met his eye, seemed charged with the power to torture him. As soon as he could, he excused himself, and asked to be shown to his room.
They showed him to the bedroom that had been occupied by Thora!
That was the last drop in his cup. He felt like a man who had stumbled into a hidden grave, and he wanted to say, "Give me any room in the house except this." But he dared not speak, lest his slightest word should betray him.
When the door was closed, he flung himself in the armchair before the stove, and then one after one, as by flashes of lightning, he saw over again the scenes of his life with which that room was associated. He thought of his wedding night, when with a fluttering heart he came on tiptoe into the cosy nest of his bridal chamber, and heard Thora's tremulous breathing behind the curtains of the bed. He thought of the joyous morning when her pale face shone like sunshine, and the air of the room was full of auroral radiance, because a child was born to them. He thought of the dark day when he found her lying dead, and of the heavy hour when he took his last look at her, and buried his compositions in her coffin.
Oh, miserable mummery! Oh, broken and senseless vow! Yet not senseless either, save to his own violated intention, for now he knew why he had taken the name of Christian Christiansson. In the blind spasm of his accusing conscience he had thought it was merely in order to deny himself the fame which his works were to win for him, but the inscrutable and ironical powers of Destiny had sterner purposes than that.
It was in order that, being dead as Oscar Stephenson, he should yet return to Iceland; in order that he should see the accumulated consequences of his conduct; in order that he should follow, as if with bare feet on the hot ground of a geyser, the footsteps and the funeral of his youth; in order that the living might torture him with gratitude, and the dead with memories; in order that God's right hand of Justice should fall on him as it had never fallen before, and everything he had done should be paid for.
This was why he had taken the name and won the fame of Christian Christiansson. And the martyrdom of his new life was beginning.
V