It is of course a truism that we never fully appreciate what we have, until some trouble or some other loss shows us all that has grown familiar in a fresh light. Our life-long friends are only perhaps valued at their true worth when some friendship of recent growth has proved fleeting and full of disappointment. And though many may love their homes, yet a home can only be properly appreciated by one who has had to bear from the outside world contempt and misunderstanding and harsh judgment. Fond as he had been of his home before, Frithiof had never until now quite realized what it meant to him. But as each evening he returned from work, and from the severe trial of an atmosphere of suspicion and dislike, he felt much as the sailor feels when, after tossing about all day in stormy seas he anchors at night in some harbor of refuge. Sigrid knew that he felt this, and she was determined that he should not even guess at her trouble. Luckily she had plenty to do, so that it was impossible for her to sit and look her sorrow in the face, or brood over it in idleness. It was with her certainly as she went about her household work, with her as she and Swanhild walked through the hot and crowded streets, and with her as she played at Madame Lechertier’s Academy. But there was something in the work that prevented the trouble from really preying on her mind, she was sad indeed yet not in despair.

Nevertheless Madame Lechertier’s quick eyes noted at once the change in her favorite.

“You are not well, chÉrie,” she said, “your face looks worn. Why, my dear, I can actually see lines in your forehead. At your age that is inexcusable.”

Sigrid laughed.

“I have a bad habit of wrinkling it up when I am worried about anything,” she said. “To-day, perhaps, I am a little tired. It is so hot and sultry, and besides I am anxious about Frithiof, it is a trying time for him.”

“Yes, this heat is trying to the strongest,” said Madame Lechertier, fanning herself. “Swanhild, my angel, there are some new bonbons in that box, help yourself.”

This afternoon it happened to be a children’s class, and Madame Lechertier invariably regaled them in the intervals of rest with the most delicious French sweetmeats. It was a pretty sight to see the groups of little ones, and Swanhild in her dainty Norwegian costume, handing the bonbons to each in turn. Sigrid always liked to watch this part of the performance, and perhaps the most comforting thought to her just then was, that as far as Swanhild was concerned, the new life, in spite of its restrictions and economies, seemed to answer so well. The child was never happier than when hard at work at the academy; even on this hot summer day she never complained; and in truth the afternoons just brought the right amount of variety into what would otherwise have been a very monotonous life.

“Sigrid,” said the little girl, as they walked home together, “is it true what you said to Madame Lechertier about Frithiof feeling the heat? Is it really that which has made him so grave the last few days?”

“It is partly that,” replied Sigrid. “But he has a good deal to trouble him that you are too young to understand, things that will not bear talking about. You must try to make it bright and cheerful at home.”

Swanhild sighed. It was not so easy to be bright and cheerful all by one’s self, and of late Frithiof and Sigrid had been—as she expressed it in the quaint Norse idiom—silent as lighted candles. People talk a great deal about the happy freedom from care which children can enjoy, but as a matter of fact many a child feels the exact state of the home atmosphere, and puzzles its head over the unknown troubles which are grieving the elders, often magnifying trifles into most alarming and menacing sources of danger. But Frithiof never guessed either little Swanhild’s perplexities, or Sigrid’s trouble; when he returned all seemed to him natural and homelike; and perhaps it was as much with the desire to be still with them as from any recollection of Donati’s words, that on the following Sunday he set off with them to the service held during the summer evenings at Westminster Abbey.

What impression the beautiful service made on him Sigrid could not tell, but the sermon was unluckily the very last he ought to have heard. The learned Oxford professor who preached to the great throng of people that night could have understood very little how his words would affect many of his hearers; he preached as a pessimist, he drew a miserable picture of the iniquity and injustice of the world, all things were going wrong, the times were out of joint, but he suggested no remedy, he did not even indicate that there was another side to the picture. The congregation dispersed. In profound depression, Frithiof walked down the nave, and passed out into the cool evening air. Miserable as life had seemed to him before, it now seemed doubly miserable, it was all a great wretched problem to which there was no solution, a purposeless whirl of buying and selling, a selfish struggle for existence. They walked past the Aquarium, the dingy side streets looked unlovely enough on that summer night, and the dreary words he had heard haunted him persistently, harmonizing only too well with the cui bono that at all times was apt to suggest itself to his mind. A wretched, clouded life in a miserable world, misfortunes which he had never deserved eternally dogging his steps, his own case merely one of a million similar or worse cases. Where was the use of it all?

A voice close beside him made him start. They were passing a corner where two streets crossed each other, and the words that fell upon his ear, spoken with a strange fervor yet with deep reverence, were just these:

“Jesus, blessed Jesus!”

He glanced sharply round and saw a little crowd of people gathered together; the words had been read from a hymn-book by a man whose whole heart had been thrown into what he read. They broke into Frithiof’s revery very strangely. Then immediately the people began to sing the well-known hymn, “The Great Physician now is near,” and the familiar tune, which had long ago penetrated to Norway, brought to Frithiof’s mind a host of old memories. Was it after all true that the problem had been solved? Was it true that in spite of suffering and sin and misery the pledge of ultimate victory had already been given? Was it true that he whose uncongenial work seemed chiefly to consist of passive endurance had yet a share in helping to bring about the final triumph of good?

From the words read by the street preacher, his mind involuntarily turned to the words spoken to him a few days before by a stage singer. Donati had spoken of living the life of the crucified. He had said very little, but what he said had the marvelous power of all essentially true things. He had spoken not as a conventional utterer of platitudes, but as one man who has fought and agonized and overcome, many speak to another man who, bewildered by the confusion of the battle-field, begins to doubt his own cause. And far more than anything actually said there came to him the thought of Donati’s own life, what he had himself observed of it, and what he had heard of his story from Cecil. A wonderfully great admission was made lately by a celebrated agnostic writer when he said that, “The true Christian saint, though a rare phenomenon, is one of the most wonderful to be witnessed in the moral world.” Nor was the admission much qualified by the closing remark,—“So lofty, so pure, so attractive that he ravishes men’s souls into oblivion of the patent and general fact that he is an exception among thousands of millions of professing Christians.”

Frithiof’s soul was not in the least ravished into oblivion of this fact; he was as ready as before, perhaps more ready, to admit the general selfishness of mankind, certainly he was more than ever conscious of his own shortcomings, and daily found pride and selfishness and ungraciousness in his own life and character. But his love for Donati, his great admiration for him, had changed his whole view of the possibilities of human life. The Italian had doubtless been specially fortunate in his parentage, but his life had been one of unusual temptation, his extremely rapid change from great misery to the height of popularity and success had alone been a very severe trial, though perhaps it was what Frithiof had heard of his three years in the traveling opera company that appealed to him most. Donati was certainly saint and hero in one; but it was not only men of natural nobility who were called to live this life of the crucified. All men were called to it. Deep down in his heart he knew that even for him it was no impossibility. And something of Donati’s incredulous scorn as he flung back the word “impossible” in his face, returned to him now and nerved him to a fresh attack on the uncongenial life and the faulty character with which he had to work. The week passed by pretty well, and the following Sunday found him tired indeed, but less down-hearted, and better able to keep at arm’s length his old foe depression. For that foe, though chiefly due to physical causes, can, as all doctors will bear witness, to be a great extent held in check by spiritual energy.

The morning was so bright that Sigrid persuaded him to take a walk, and fully intending to return in an hour’s time to his translating, he paced along the embankment. But either the fine day, or the mere pleasure of exercise, or some sort of curiosity to see a part of London of which he had heard a great deal, lured him on. He crossed BlackFriars Bridge and walked farther and farther, following the course of the river eastward into a region, dreary indeed, yet at times picturesque, with the river gleaming in the sunshine, and on the farther bank the Tower—solid and grim, as befitted the guardian of so many secrets of the past. Even here there was a quiet Sunday feeling, while something familiar in the sight of the water and the shipping carried him back in imagination to Norway, and there came over him an intense longing for his own country. It was a feeling that often took possession of him, nor could he any more account for its sudden seizures than the Swiss can account for that sick longing for his native mountains to which he is often liable.

“It’s no use,” he thought to himself. “It will take me the best part of my life to pay off the debts, and till they are paid I can’t go.”

He turned his eyes from the river, as though by doing so he could drag his thoughts from Norway, when to his astonishment he all at once caught sight of his own national flag—the well known blue and white cross on the red ground. His breath came fast, he walked on quickly to get a nearer view of the building from which the flag floated. Hurriedly pushing open the door, he entered the place, and found himself in a church, which presented the most curious contrast to churches in general, for it was almost full of men, and the seven or eight women who were there made little impression, their voices being drowned in the hearty singing of the great bulk of the congregation.

They began to sing just as he entered; the tune was one which he had known all his life, and a host of memories came back to him as he heard once more the slow and not too melodious singing, rendered striking, however, because of the fervor of the honest Norsemen. Tears, which all his troubles had not called forth, started now to his eyes as he listened to the words which carried him right out of the foreign land back to his childhood at Bergen.

Translation.

An onlooker, even a foreigner not understanding the language, could not fail to have been touched by the mere sight of this strange gathering in the heart of London,—the unpretentious building, the antique look of the clergyman in his gown and Elizabethan ruff, the ranks of men—numbering nearly four hundred—with their grave, weather-beaten faces, the greater number of them sailors, but with a sprinkling of business men living in the neighborhood, and the young Norseman who had just entered, with his pride broken down by memories of an old home, his love of Norway leading him to the realization that he was also a citizen of another country, and his stern face softened to that expression which is always so full of pathos—the expression of intent listening.

In the Norwegian church the subject of the sermon is arranged throughout the year. On this second Sunday after Trinity it was on the Gospel for the day, the parable of the Master of the House who made a great supper, and of the guests who “all with one consent began to make excuse.” There was nothing new in what Frithiof heard; he had heard it all in the old times, and, entirely satisfied with the happiness of self-pleasing, had been among the rich who had been sent empty away. Now he came poor and in need, and found that after all it is the hungry who are “filled with good things.”

Very gradually, and helped by many flashes of light which had from time to time come to him in his darkest hours, he had during the last two years groped his way from the vague and somewhat flippant belief in a good providence, which he had once announced to Blanche as his creed, and had learnt to believe in the All-Father. His meeting with Donati had exercised, and still continued to exercise, an extraordinary influence over him; but it was not until this Sunday morning, in his own national church, not until in his own language he once more heard the entreaty, “Come, for all things are now ready!” that he fully realized how he had neglected the life of Sonship.

With an Infinite Love belonging to him by right, he had allowed himself to be miserable, isolated, and bitter. To many distinct commands he had turned a deaf ear. To One who needed him and asked his love he had replied in the jargon of the nineteenth century, but in the spirit of the old Bible story, that practical matters needed him and that he could not come.

When the preacher went on to speak of the Lord’s Supper, and the distinct command that all should come to it, Frithiof began to perceive for the first time that he had regarded this service merely as the incomprehensible communication of a great gift—whereas this was in truth only one side of it, and he, also, had to give himself up to One who actually needed him. It was characteristic of his honest nature that when he at last perceived this truth he no longer made excuse but promptly obeyed, not waiting for full understanding, not troubling at all about controversial points, but simply doing what he recognized as his duty.

And when in a rapid survey of the past there came recollections of Blanche and the wrong she had done him, he was almost startled to find how quietly he could think of her, how possible it had become to blot out all the resentful memories, all the reproachful thoughts that for so long had haunted him. For the first time he entirely forgave her, and in the very act of forgiving he seemed to regain something of the brightness which she had driven from his life, and to gain something better and truer than had as yet been his.

All the selfish element had died out of his love for her; there remained only the sadness of thinking of her disgrace, and a longing that, even yet, the good might prevail in her life. Was there no recovery from such a fall? Was no allowance to be made for her youth and her great temptations? If she really repented ought not her husband once more to receive her; and give her the protection which he alone could give?

Kneeling there in the quiet he faced that great problem, and with eyes cleared by love, with his pride altogether laid low, and knowing what it was both to forgive and to be forgiven, he saw beyond the conventional view taken by the world. There was no escaping the great law of forgiveness laid down by Christ, “If he repent, forgive him.” “Forgive even as also ye are forgiven.” And if marriage was taken as a symbol of the union between Christ and the Church, how was it possible to exclude the idea of forgiveness for faithlessness truly repented of? Had he been in Lord Romiaux’s place he knew that he must have forgiven her, that if necessary he must have set the whole world at defiance, in order once more to shelter her from the deadly peril to which, alone, she must always be exposed.

And so it happened that love turned to good even the early passion that had apparently made such havoc of his life, and used it now to raise him out of the thought of his own trouble and undeserved disgrace, used it to lift him out of the selfishness and hardness that for so long had been cramping an otherwise fine nature.