The Prodigal Son

by Sir Hall Caine

"Hush, dear, hush!"

"But I'm willing to believe it was the fault of other people."

"Don't let us speak of it, Helga," said Oscar, and his arms, which had been about her in a close embrace, slackened away and fell.

It was easier to part with her after that, but before he opened the door he kissed her again, and when he helped her into the hansom he put her fingers to his lips.

He stood bare-headed on the pavement oblivious to all surroundings until the cab had rounded the corner of the public house and Helga had waved to him through the glass. Then he became aware that the sight in that sordid slum of so lovely a girl, so beautifully dressed and with a hansom waiting for her, had brought the neighbors to their doors, and that the women were thumbing their apron-strings and grinning to each other across the rails.

When he reentered the house Jenny passed him in the lobby with a stealthy and guilty air which seemed to say that her poor tortured little soul had not resisted the temptation to listen and to watch.

He returned to the parlor for a moment and the perfume of Helga's presence was still to be felt there over the odor of dead ale and tobacco. Never had he envied the barman before, but at that moment he would have given all he possessed to keep this room for the rest of the day, that he might sit on the sofa where Helga had sat, and lay his hand on the table where her hand had rested and kiss the carpet where her feet had trod.

He was like a man moving in a dream, and when he went back to his own apartment he was not conscious of his squalid surroundings. The dirty wall-paper, the threadbare carpet and the blotched looking-glass humiliated and compromised him no longer. His body was still in his bankrupt garret, but his soul was far away. It was in another world--a world that was bright with Helga's eyes as its sun and stars, for he was going over again the time he had spent with her, every word of it, every tone, every look, every gesture.

This lasted the whole of the day and when darkness fell a curtain seemed to have fallen on the life he had been living during the past twelve months. The mire and slime of vulgar associations, the degradation of common companionship, the sense of loneliness, of friendlessness, of being nothing and nobody, the deep remembrance of being homeless and hopeless and helpless and useless--all this had gone. That passage of his life was over now, and never, never, never would its pain and shame come back to him again. He had passed through it because he had sinned; but if he had sinned he had suffered, and God Himself had seen that he had suffered enough.

His eyes were wet when he lay down on his soiled pillow, but he fell asleep in a blissful condition and in the first dream of the night he was back with Helga. Once in the dark hours he awoke and heard the deadened hum of the barman and his friends at their cards and ale; and again he awoke in the dawn and then he heard the hearse of the necropolis thundering up Short Street and rumbling under the archway at the top of it.