Ingolf stood and thought that such a lonely year might do Hjor-Leif good. He would be a different man the next time they saw him. Ingolf only lent a momentary hearing to the voice of a strange wounded and groundless sense of loss in his soul. Quietly he turned round, roused his tired men mildly, and bade them hoist sail and make the vessel clear.
As early as the next night Hjor-Leif saw a fire shine from Ingolf's point. So Ingolf was already on land, and everything was right there. Hjor-Leif had not fared so well. The westerly breeze he had so strongly desired had come when he had no more use for it. It had come too late, and very inopportunely. After forty-eight hours he lay here pitching in the choppy seas, tacking as well as he could without getting much nearer his object. There was not a drop of fresh water on board. The Irish serfs had discovered how to knead meal and butter into a mess they called mintak, and declared that it was a food one did not get thirsty by eating. None the less, all were suffering with thirst, and the animals were in a miserable condition, unable to swallow a straw of the hay they had brought with them. The mintak quickly fermented, and the whole mass had to be thrown overboard.
It was only Hjor-Leif's wretched and indomitable obstinacy which prevented him from taking advantage of the wind and quickly running his ship to Ingolf's point. By doing so all his sufferings would have been got rid of at once. It needed only a little resolution, a slight change of mind. The wind was there, the light was there. The fire gleamed and beckoned. All was well so far. The only difficulty was that the deciding little possibility was wanting—the possibility of Hjor-Leif's bending his mind the little bit that was necessary—the possibility of giving way. In Hjor-Leif's volatile soul there towered a steep rock. He would see his animals perish of hunger and thirst, his crew perish one by one, and himself die by any death whatever rather than turn his vessel and use the favourable wind.
At last, on the evening of the third day, a little rain fell, and Hjor-Leif succeeded in collecting some water in the outspread sail. That refreshed both men and animals. Not till four days after Ingolf had kindled his fire did he see a fire burning in answer on Hjor-Leif's point. When he told Helga that, she went up on the point, sat by herself, and stared fixedly at the faint red light, sometimes hardly visible, far to the south-west. There she remained sitting for two days and nights, as long as Hjor-Leif kept up his fire in order to be sure that it should be seen.
Ingolf and Hallveig had at last begun to be anxious for Helga, for she ate nothing, did not sleep, and hardly answered when they spoke to her.
But when after these two days spent up there on the point she returned to the tents, she was herself again, and had recovered her old self-command. There was nothing to show either Ingolf or Hallveig that she carried about a burning sense of bereavement. Neither did they know that she lay whole and half nights sleepless, breathing in fancy the rich, delicious scent of pine trees.
VII
For the second time in his life Hjor-Leif lost his spirits completely. After closer reflection he found his lonely situation so meaningless and unjust, so devoid of all reconciling elements such as, for example, a prospect of adventures or opportunity for exploits—in brief, so utterly irrational, that he involuntarily began to show his teeth at existence by drowning himself in perpetual melancholy, only now and then interrupted by isolated attacks of ill-temper.