"You want me to write something, then?"
"No, no. I want yourself--your very self!"
Olof looked at her blankly--he could not guess what was in her mind.
He felt himself more and more in the power of something he had been striving to escape.
"Oh, don"t you understand? Your portrait."
"But--but I have only one. And--I have never given anyone my portrait."
"No," said the girl confidently. "You have kept it for me."
Olof felt himself shamed. What a poor creature he was grown! Why could he not rise up and take this strange rare child in his arms, and swear by all he revered that she had touched his inmost heart, that he was hers alone, for ever?
He sprang to his feet, and cried earnestly, "Yes! It was taken for you, and for no other!"
But the words ended in a sob--it was as if his blood were turned to sand. With trembling fingers he took out the portrait, and sank down as if paralysed into his seat.
The girl watched him with a starry gleam of ecstasy in her eyes.
But he could not meet her glance--he bent his head, thinking bitterly to himself, "What have I come to? Why do I cheat her and myself, why do I give these beggar"s crumbs to one that should have all?"
The girl sat still with the same light of wonder in her eyes, looking now at the portrait, now at Olof himself.
"Yes, it is really you," she said at last, and touching the picture with her lips, she laid it in the case, and slipped it into her bosom.
"Now I have nothing more to ask," she said. "I shall thank you all my life for this. When you are gone, you will be with me still. I can talk to you at night before I sleep, and in the morning you will be the first thing I see. I can whisper to you just as I used to do. And when I am dead, you shall be buried with me."
Olof was overwhelmed with emotion--it was as if something within him had been rent asunder. He looked at the girl"s face--how pure and holy it was! Why could not he himself be as she was? What was it that had happened to him?
He felt an impulse to throw himself on the floor at her feet and tell her all--and then rise up young and pure and whole again, able to feel as others did. But he could not; an icy voice within him told that the days of his spring-time were gone for ever. And as he felt her arms about him once more, he could only bend down humbly and touch her hair with his lips in silence, as if begging her to understand.
Warm drops were falling on his knees, warm drops fell on her hair.
Welling from deep sources--but unlike, and flowing different ways.
DARK FURROWS
Sunday morning--a calm and peaceful time. Olof was up, and sat combing his hair before the gla.s.s.
"Those wrinkles there on the temples are getting deeper," he thought.
"Well, after all, I suppose it looks more manly."
He laid down the comb, turned his head slightly, and looked in the gla.s.s again.
"Paler, too, perhaps," he thought again. "Well, I"m no longer a boy...."
He moved as if to rise.
"Look once more--a little closer," urged the gla.s.s.
Olof brushed his moustache and smiled.
"Can"t you see anything?" the gla.s.s went on, with something like a sneer. "Under the eyes, for instance?"
And suddenly he saw. The face that stared at him from the gla.s.s was pale, and marked by the lines and wrinkles of those past years. And under the eyes were two dark grey furrows, like heavy flourishes to underline a word.
"Is it possible?" he cried, with a shudder.
"Is it any wonder?" said the gla.s.s coldly.
The face in the gla.s.s was staring at him yet, with the dark furrows under the eyes.
"But what--how did they come there?" asked Olof in dismay.
"Need you ask?" said the gla.s.s. "Well, you have got your "mark,"
anyhow--though it was not one you asked for."
The face in the mirror stared at him; the dark furrows were there still. He would have turned his head away, or closed his eyes, but could not. He felt as if some great strong man were behind him with a whip, bidding him sternly "Look!"
And he looked.
"Look closer--closer yet!" commanded his tormentor. "A few deep lines--and what more?"
Olof looked again. The plainer furrows tailed off into a host of smaller lines and tiny folds, this way and that, there seemed no end to them. And again he shuddered.
"Count them!" cried the voice behind him.
"Impossible--they--they are so small!"
"Small they may be--but how many are there?"
Olof bent forward and tried to count.
"Well?"
No answer.
"How many are there?" thundered the voice--and Olof saw the whip raised above his head.
"Nine or ten, perhaps," he answered.
"More! And what do they mean? Can you tell me that?"