"She forgave him for that, though, and when he died--you know how he died, everybody knows it--she thought that all he had been trying to do when he fell into that foul dishonor was to get money enough to come back home and make amends."
"She thought that, did she?"
"She still thinks it."
Christian Christiansson had a sense of hysterical oppression at his heart. Again he wanted to tell all, and he dared not. "But if it had been true," he said--"I don't say it was, but if it had been--if your brother had really been trying for years to make money solely in order to wipe out the debts he had left behind him--if he had come home with the fortune in his hands----"
Magnus's dark face darkened ominously, and bringing his great fist down on to the table he said, "There would have been a curse on every coin of it, and I should have flung it in his face."
Christian Christiansson did not ask him why. He knew too well what Magnus meant. In an instant, by such a flash of the lightning of the mind as must come to the guilty soul on the Day of Judgment, the past of his life lay open before him, and the most awful fact of it stood out with naked vividness--the desecration of his wife's grave.
It was impossible to plead that this had been only the act of a moment; that he had repented it a thousand times with bitter tears; that he had derived no profit or advantage from it, and had endured for ten years its fearful penalty in the death of his identity. Again and again he had soothed himself with such excuses, but he could not cheat his conscience now. Why was he Christian Christiansson? How had it come to pass that he had two hundred thousand crowns in his pocket and that his works were known all over the world?
All the miserable sophistry and false reasoning which had made him what he was, the owner of fame and fortune, had been riddled through and through by Magnus's terrible words. All the mocking vanity which had lured him onward to that hour with promises of the great surprise, the great dénouement, when he should say, "See, I am here; I have justified all expectations," lay stark and dead and cold.
No, he could not reveal himself to his family to-morrow morning. He could not reveal himself at all. Having once become Christian Christiansson, he could never again be known as Oscar Stephenson. Thus did the dead punish him, and the desecration of his wife's grave had but rendered the vow he made to himself perpetual and registered the oath he made to her in heaven.
Christian Christiansson was feeling as if all the world had gone away from him when Anna came out of the guest-room, saying: