Oscar and the girl stood looking vacantly at each other for a moment, and then he turned away and walked up the street with a new sensation--the blank, desolating sensation of not having a roof over his head. No one knows what it means to be one night homeless in a great city except those who have gone through it. It is not so much the poverty of privation that is hard to bear as the sense of utter worthlessness, of being less to the world than its dogs, for they are cared for, or its horses for they are housed.
His money was gone, and he had no luggage in his hands to make shift to find another lodging with, so he walked on and on, up Lower Regent Street and across Piccadilly, through noisy throngs of people--young women smoking cigarettes, young men laughing and singing and a bedraggled girl being lugged along by a policeman--on and on until he came to a wide and quiet thoroughfare where a line of broughams waited outside a house that was brilliantly lighted up, and there he paused in his aimless perambulation to listen to the music that was coming through the open windows.
He had been asking himself for the hundredth time how it had come to pass that he, so lately the pampered son of his father--who was the Governor of his people and their upright judge--was tramping the streets of London without a penny in his pocket or a roof to cover him, when the door opened and an elderly gentleman came out bare-headed to escort some ladies to their carriage. Then his stunned faculties awoke and he saw where he was standing. He was outside the house of his father's friend, the banker. The deep remembrance came back to him of the time, so near yet so far away, when he himself, with Thora and Helga, had been honored guests in that house, and lest the banker should see him, the wayfarer he then was, skulking there at that untimely hour, he turned about and walked quickly away.
Nothing that had happened on that evil night had wounded his feelings so acutely, or made him feel so surely that rescue from his accursed condition there could be none. Was it to be a part of his punishment that even when his senses slept he was to be constantly brought up against himself and reminded of the days that were dead? If so, life would be unendurable, and existence an everlasting hell. Did Nature never forget? Did God never forgive?
Half an hour afterward he was walking along the Embankment, past the crouching and sleeping forms of the sordid things whom the city casts out on to the river's bank by night; and looking wildly at the waters of the Thames, glistening and glimmering under the electric light, he asked himself why he should not end it all and have done with further torture.
What was the thought that restrained him? Was it the thought of his dead wife whose memory was to be a safeguard against sin and a perpetual inspiration? No!
By the inscrutable will of fate it was the thought of the one being whose love had wrecked him--it was the thought of Helga. In spite of the pledge he had given to the Governor, he could not help thinking of her. No day had been so dark but he had thought of her on going to bed at night and on awakening in the morning. She was gone, they might never meet again, their love was a page of his life which he had crossed out and turned down for ever, yet her eyes were in his eyes and her smile was the only sunshine that shone upon his face.
The thought of Thora was a sweet and sacred thing which he had wrapped up and laid by in the lavender of memory, but the thought of Helga was warm and alive and always with him. It was with him now, and it saved his soul from despair and his body from death.
III
Before Oscar's letter reached Iceland many changes had taken place there. The estrangement of the Governor and the Factor had developed into open antagonism. Everybody knew of it and the enemies of each had been playing upon his hatred of the other.