The Power of a Lie. Johan Bojer
he could save her money. An event had taken place in the house which swept everything else into the background.
“How did you get on in town to-day?” she asked at length.
And he could answer frankly now: “Karen dear, the worst is about your money—” He could get no further, his voice grew husky. Instead of being afraid and in despair, he now felt so certain of forgiveness that he could safely be distressed.
He was quite right. She did not spring up. She did not call him to account for all his false representations. She bowed her head; she still had a vision of the bailiff before her eyes, and she answered with a sigh:
“Well, well—so long as you are innocent in this——”
“Don’t say that, Karen!” he said with tears in his eyes. “I feel that I have so much to answer for both to you and——”
“Oh, it may turn out all right in the end,” she said, her face turned towards the lamp. “So long as one doesn’t lose one’s honour.”
So that was over. He had not this confession to dread any longer; but he had never dreamt it would have been got through so easily.
“What is it, though?” he thought, as he rose from the table. He felt as if it were his duty to be unhappy, and now he could not. He kept his eyes all the time fixed upon his innocence in this one matter, and this feeling of innocence was like a lamp that suddenly shone upon his darkness; it illuminated everything, softened everything, so that the remorse and despair he had felt in the train, all that had chafed and wounded him earlier in the day, melted away into far-off, shapeless mist.
He had to go into the bedroom to look at the children, and he sat down on the edge of the bed in which the two little girls slept. In the train he had felt himself unworthy to bring children into the world, but now he was once more happy in being a father.
“How long do you think we shall be able to stay here?” she asked, when he came in again. “Do you think we shall have to move before I am laid up?”
It sounded so unusually resigned.
“No,” he said; “certainly not.”
They walked through the rooms, he carrying the lamp. They seemed to have a mutual feeling that it would soon all be taken from them, and they be left homeless and empty-handed. They paused in front of various things—a mirror, a rug, a picture—and looked at them, his disengaged arm round her waist, as if to support her.
“Do you know,” she said with a little sigh, “when my confinement is over I’m going to try to do without a servant.”
“Oh,” said he, “there will be no sense in that.”
“Yes, but, Henry, have you considered what we’re going to live upon?”
He recollected a vow he had made in the train, to put his hand to any sort of work, if only she, to whom he owed so much, could live free from care. But he said nothing about it now. This feeling of innocence gave him an involuntary pride, and he contented himself with saying:
“Let’s hope I shall yet be able to arrange a composition.”
He drew her closer to him, as if to have her with him in this faint hope; and she leaned against him, with her fair head resting upon his shoulder, now that she felt sure that he was innocent of this crime, before which everything else dwindled into easily surmountable trifles.
The maid was out. They were alone in the house, and the stillness made them talk in undertones. She grew tired of standing, and sank down upon a sofa; and he seated himself beside her, when he had placed the lamp upon a table close by.
They sat in silence, gazing vacantly at the piano. The little lamp threw a pale light about them, while the furniture in the rest of the room was lost in the darkness.
“Father came while the bailiff was here,” she said at last, looking straight before her.
“How did he take it?”
“Every one will believe you’re guilty,” she said. “And Norby is powerful. Father is coming again to-morrow. You’d promised to bring him from town the last ten thousand krones he got for you.”
Wangen’s head drooped. A vision of her father, with his white hair and red, watery eyes, came before him. What should he say to the old man to-morrow, now that everything was lost?
“And the widow from Thorstad has been here,” she went on. “You had promised her half as soon as you came from town.”
Wangen still stared into the shadow by the piano. He was afraid she would ask him if he had the money.
“It is worst for the working-men,” she continued, “who are now quite destitute, and cannot get credit anywhere. And in the middle of winter too!” She was on the verge of tears.
Perhaps they too would be coming in the morning to ask about what he had promised them. In the half-darkness Wangen could see before him the old man with the red, watery eyes, the widow whose fortune he had wasted, the work-people—all of them. They would all come in the morning, and call him to account.
He turned cold at the thought, and the same dark accusation he had brought against himself in the train appeared once more, while he felt his clear innocence of forgery to be valueless; it grew fainter, like a lantern on the point of going out, leaving him in a darkness where the crushing sense of responsibility brought him to despair, where remorse fastened upon him with innumerable hands, and where he must eternally and inexorably remain a prisoner and be tortured with the pains of hell.
He rose suddenly. “Let’s go into the other room,” he said, raising his shoulders; “it’s so cold here.”
In the dining-room he placed the lamp on the table, and stood a moment gazing at it.
“When I think about it,” he said at last, “I can after all understand why Norby wants to injure me.”
“Can you?” she said eagerly.
He continued to stand motionless in the same position.
“Yes,” he said; “that man is both jealous of his honour and revengeful. He wasn’t made chairman of the parish last time either, and I expect he thinks it’s my fault.”
“Good heavens!” she sighed.
As he stood there, he could see in his mind’s eye Norby with his cherished grudge, sitting in his house like a wicked ogre, ready to burst with a desire for revenge, and this distorted picture strengthened Wangen’s feeling of innocence, which now seemed like a kind of thread upon which he hung, and which must not break.
He heard his wife say good-night, but he still stood there. When at last he went into the bedroom, she was standing half-undressed in front of the looking-glass, doing up her thick hair for the night in a long plait.
“And what’s more,” he said softly, gazing as if at a dawning salvation, “I understand now why Norby managed to frustrate the intention of building the church of brick. The brickfields, do you see, shouldn’t make anything out of it. Norby wanted to provide the timber.”
He began to walk up and down, and then stopped again. “And now I understand too,” he went on, “how it is that so many customers have left me lately. The brickfields were to be removed out of the way of the large forest-owners here.”
“Do you really think so?” she exclaimed, turning from the glass and looking at him, half in horror that people could be so wicked, half in gladness that the decline in the brickfields business was not wholly his fault.
The wind began to howl in the great factory chimneys. A door up in the loft opened and shut with a bang so that the house shook.
“Oh, would you mind?” she said. “That door has been banging ever since the girl went out, but I didn’t venture on the stairs. Will you?”
He went, and on coming down again he said:
“And