The Prodigal Son

by Sir Hall Caine

He began to ask himself how it could be done. It could be done, quite easily. Nobody except themselves had seen the man; nobody else would ever know that he had been to their house. He could tell his mother and Elin that the stranger had gone away in the early morning. They would believe him, and even if they did not they would hold their tongues, for his interest would be their interest, and all he would do would be done for them.

A new and awful light illumined his gloomy mind, and he saw himself doing everything. No other eye would see, no other ear would hear. It was freezing hard to-night, and if it was found in the drowning pool when the ice melted the story would be that the stranger had lost his way in the snowstorm and stumbled over the rocks.

Having satisfied himself that he could defeat this world's judgment, the tortured man in the toils of his temptation began to think of the judgment of the next. But fear of that vanished in a moment. Nothing was known in the other world of what took place in this one, and God interfered but little in the affairs of men!

At the thought of God a singing noise came into his ears like water in the ears of a drowning man. It was his conscience going down after its last gasp, for he was telling himself that murder though it might be, and contrary to God's law, God had done nothing for him, and therefore he was not called upon to do anything for God. He had been a good man all his life, yet God had left him in the lurch. God and the world were letting his mother and Elin perish, therefore he must fight the world--and God!

In the last convulsion of his human nature he remembered that once before the impulse to kill had come to him, and that he had suffered the tortures of the damned whenever afterward he had thought of it. But that was different, that was in the whirlwind of outraged passion, and if he had carried out his threat it would have been the worst of crimes, the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost--a brother's murder! A thousand times he had thanked God that Oscar had not lived to come home, but how strange were the ways of fate--another man, another heartless prodigal, had come there, and if his dear ones were to be saved from starvation and the consequences of Oscar's crimes, he knew what he had to do!

"Let prodigal pay for prodigal," he thought again, and then he leaped up from the bed.

His brute nature, goaded on by the flattering devil of drink, had conquered his conscience, yet his knees knocked together as he went on tiptoe by his mother's room, and when he came to Elin's door he could hardly breathe. Their pure souls were sleeping in the protecting atmosphere of prayer; and when he asked himself what he was to say in the morning if they wanted to know where he had got the money, his mind was so clogged and numb that he could find no answer.

But this thought, with the vision that came after it of how his mother and Elin would look at him with searching and suspicious glances--of how when all would be over and he hoped to be at rest he would find them sitting together in silence, staring at nothing--nearly broke down the brute in him and his whole body was shaken by a kind of tearless sob. Nevertheless the flash of human light on his dark heart only made the blackness more profound, and after a moment he went on with his preparations.

When he stepped on tiptoe into the hall, the two sheep-dogs who had been sleeping on the mat by the door got up and stretched themselves and yawned, and lest they should make a noise he took them out and locked them up in a shed. After that he went over to the stable, which was at some distance from the dwelling, and saddled and bridled the stranger's mare, and then with a sharp cut of his whip he sent her galloping and whinnying into the darkness. A breath of icy wind was coming down the valley as if day were stirring in its morning sleep, and a faint pink and white light in the eastern sky, with a glint on the western glaciers, seemed to say that the dawn was near, but the drink was in Magnus's eyes and he could not see clearly.

No snow had fallen since the traveler arrived, and returning to the front of the farmstead Magnus made backward tracks from the porch to the river, partly in order to obliterate the stranger's footsteps and partly to conceal his own when he should come out again, carrying a heavy burden. The man was gone by this time, and Magnus was like a night-bird hovering about his own house and thinking of his prey.