The outcast

ON THE island of Grimön, among the rocks and reefs of the western coast of Sweden, there lived, some years back, a man and his wife. The two were much unlike each other.

Joel Elversson, the husband, was the elder of the pair by fifteen years or so. Ill-favoured to look at, heavy and slow, he had always been, and age had not improved him. His wife, on the other hand, was still as neat and pleasant a little body as ever; far from having lost her looks, she seemed almost as pretty now, at fifty, as she had been at twenty.

One fine Sunday evening the couple were sitting on a big flat rock just outside their house, chatting together at their ease. Joel was a man who enjoyed hearing his own voice, and delivered his words with care. Just now he was giving his wife at some length the contents of an article he had read in the paper. The little woman listened, but her thoughts were not following very closely.

"Eh," she thought to herself, "he's a wonderful head has Joel, to be sure. How he can get all that out of a bit of print in a newspaper.... Pity he can't put his learning to some use for us both, instead of others."

Involuntarily she glanced across at the house. It was a good-sized place in itself, but in such a state of dilapidation as to be largely uninhabitable; the pair lived now in one small outbuilding, which the previous tenants, sea-captains all, had used for kitchen and larder.

"If only he'd had a liking for the sea," went on Mor Elversson to herself, "like his father and grandfather before him. He'd have laid by something now, and we'd be able to look forward to old age in ease and comfort. But he's always been set on farming and field work and such, and little enough it's brought us."

She did not move from her place while her husband was speaking, but her little head, that moved quickly and easily as a bird's, turned slightly as she glanced over the patches of cornfield and potato, little islands of growth among the barren rock that formed the greater part of the island.

Every little strip of cultivation was her husband's work; the very soil was, in a manner of speaking, his creation. He had brought endless boatloads of earth and manure to Grimön, in the firm conviction that he must one day reap a rich reward for his pains.

"All that trouble for so many bits of earth, and poor at that," thought his wife to herself. "Needs but one good northerly gale at Whitsuntide, and all the sowing and planting'd be nowhere Nay, 'tis to the sea we should look for our daily bread, living here as we do. There's neither right nor reason in it else."

Another movement of the quick little head, and she was looking out through the space between the tumbledown old house and the cottage, over the broad, gleaming surface of the water beyond.

"Ay, the sea," she sighed. "'Tis different with that. Freights and cargoes and good money paid. If I'd been a man, I'd have gone to sea from the first, and never taken up with the farm work at all. And here we're getting old and older, and what's to become of us when we're past work? There's none of the children'd stay at home to toil and moil that away--and small blame to them for that."

The last words must have been spoken aloud, for her husband turned sharply toward her. He had been describing the perils and hardships of an English expedition recently returned from the Arctic, and broke off now in the middle of a sentence.

"You're not listening," he said. But it was doubtless not the first time he had found himself talking to deaf ears, for he seemed neither surprised nor annoyed.

"Indeed I was," his wife assured him. "I was thinking this very moment how fine you talk, and how you'd do for a preacher."

"I don't know about that," said the husband, with a laugh. "If I can't keep one listener from thinking of all and sundry when I'm preaching, how'd I manage with a congregation?"

"But I was listening," his wife protested, somewhat discomfited. "I've got it all in my head now. How they lost their ship the very first winter and managed to build a snow house, and had to stay and live there for over a year, till all their food was gone, and they were chewing bits of hide."

There was a note of vexation in her voice, and her mouth twitched in a way it often did when anything troubled her.

"Wonder how it would feel," suggested her husband, casually, "if 'twas one of our own blood had been there starving in a snow hut."

The woman glanced at him sharply. What did he mean by that now? Something, surely. But Joel sat staring before him, with no trace of expression in his rheumy eyes.

"Well, if we were to spend all our time sitting thinking of other folks' troubles, there'd be little pleasure in life," she said, apologetically. "And, anyhow, they were saved in the end."

"That's true," Joel admitted. "There was a ship went out to find them, and they're safe back in England now."

"And all the honour and glory, and live happy ever after," concluded his wife.

To her mind, there was nothing to be so serious about when all had come well at last. But her husband went on without changing his tone.

"I dreamt last night about our boy Sven," he said. "Dreamt he came and stood by my bed and said I'd done him a sore wrong. I won't say if I've any gift of dreaming true as a rule, and I don't know if there's anything in this or not. But it's a queer thing, all the same, to see his name in the paper here to-day."

The last words were spoken carelessly, as if the speaker were thinking only of himself. But from that moment he had no reason to complain of want of attention in his listener. His wife came close to him and deluged him with questions: Where was the name? What was it he had dreamt? Was there really anything about their boy Sven? Her voice grew shrill, her nose flushed, and tears stood in her eyes.

Had it been any other of their children, she would have been less easily moved. But it was different with Sven. They had given the boy away, when nine years old, to an English gentleman and his lady, who had come sailing along the coast in a yacht. The strangers had simply fallen in love with the child, and had promised, if he were entrusted to them, to bring him up as their own, as a rich gentleman, and make him their heir.

It was a wonderful prospect for the lad; his parents had felt that for his own sake they dared not refuse. If he stayed with them, he would have none to help him but themselves. And he was a bright child, with a clever head; they had often agreed that he would surely get on in the world if he had but the chance in his upbringing.

Seventeen years now since they had let him go, and during all that time they had heard nothing from him. Never a letter, never a word of greeting. They knew no more of him than if he had lain at the bottom of the sea.

"See there," said the man, handing across the paper to his wife. "List of those saved. Here it is. 'Sven E. Springfield.'"

"Yes, yes. 'Sven E. Springfield'--it's there, right enough."

"And that can't mean anything but Sven Elversson Springfield," Joel went on. "His own name, mine, and his foster-father's. There's no mistake about that."

Mor Elversson crushed the paper close. At that moment she felt that the son she had given up to others of her own free will was dearest of all her children.

"Why didn't you say straight out at once that Sven was there?" she said, reproachfully. "I wasn't listening. Now you'll have to tell it all over again."

Joel seemed somewhat at a loss. He had thought to tell her the whole story before saying a word about Sven; it would have been easier so. Then he could have seen how she took it, and acted accordingly.

However, he must tell her now. And he went on to explain all she wished to know. What was meant by the eightieth degree of latitude, for instance. And she listened, growing eager on her son's behalf for the honours to be won, and thinking surely he and his comrades must have reached farther than any before them. And what had they lived on after the ship had gone down with all their stores? The story of how the relief expedition had found them that summer, on the shores of Melville Island, had to be repeated over and over again.

"Oh, what he must have had to go through in all that time!" she exclaimed. "No, 'tis a wicked thing to give away one's own child to strangers."

"But he's made his fortune now, I suppose," she went on, relieved. "And they'll give him a host of medals and orders and all."

Soon she began to wonder how the boy had been received in England on his return.

"Millions of people came out to see them," said Joel. "'Arctic explorers' homecoming.'"

He felt ill at ease, anxious, and in fear. All their future depended on how he framed his words now; if he could say the thing as it must be said.