The Prodigal Son

by Sir Hall Caine

When he returned to the hall there was no sound there except that of the ashes slipping in the stove, and of the clock ticking in the darkness the deliberate seconds. He took off his boots, leaving on his snow-stockings only, and then he picked up a large cushion from the arm-chair and stepped to the stranger's door and listened.

But heaven as well as hell is in the heart of every man, as long as life is with him, and the tearless sob came back to Magnus and shook his whole body, as he thought at the last moment of the awful pity of the thing he had to do. Yet telling himself again that God did nothing in this world, and saying once more, "Let prodigal pay for prodigal," he turned the handle and opened the door.

Then he stepped softly into the guest-room and bolted the door behind him.

VII

Anna, at that moment, had awakened from a frightening dream. On first going to her room she had been troubled by the memory of what she had done to awaken evil thoughts in Magnus, and visions had come to her of how, if anything happened, Magnus might say, "You put it into my head, mother." To banish her self-reproaches she had said a prayer for forgiveness, telling God she had never once thought of theft or violence, but only of Magnus and Elin and the inheritance they had lost through her importunity, and how cruel it seemed that while other people had so much more than they wanted, such hard times should come to her dear children.

Then she had gone to bed, and the voice of the stranger, which had teased her all the evening through with memories she could not fix, haunted her again, and the light being out, and her eyes no longer disturbed by sight of the stranger's different face, she knew whose voice it reminded her of. It was a voice very dear to her, a voice always near to her, Oscar's voice, which she was never to hear again.

When, with a thrill of the heart, this thought came to Anna, it altered the stranger altogether. His laughter ceased to be cruel, and what he had said of himself not being a good son became touching. And when she thought of his poor mother waiting for her prodigal and so soon to see him home again, and pictured her joy when he should say, "Mother, mother! I'm here at last, and we shall never, never be parted again!" her heart overflowed with sympathy, and she was sorry she had not been kinder to him when he was going to bed.

Then she went to sleep and the dream spirit took her back to the good time when she had two boys in her house, a dark one and a fair one, and the father had punished the dark one unjustly, and his stern and gloomy soul, with its sense of wrong, would not suffer him to explain, but the fair one was sobbing out a confession--"It was not Magnus, it was me, papa"--and a moment afterward two happy little heads were on the same pillow side by side, and both were laughing merrily.

In the shifting kaleidoscope of her dream this picture had hardly gone when Anna awoke with the clearest consciousness of Oscar's voice crying, "Mother! Mother! Mother!" She thought it must have been the stranger calling in his sleep, for the china ornaments on her dressing-table seemed to ring, but when she listened there was no other sound.

Then the memory of Magnus's temptation came rolling back on her like a thundercloud over a clear sky, and she got up to go to her son's room to make sure that he was in bed.