He had lost, and the clammy silence was broken.
"Are you going?" asked Helga, in a listless tone, with wandering eyes.
"Certainly. And you?"
"Not yet--Neils is winning splendidly."
Then in a moment, as in the twinkling of an eye, his month-long intoxication of soul left him and he saw where he was and what he had done. He had taken money from Finsen to permit the grave of his wife to be opened, and he had gambled with that money and lost it!
When he saw things in this way he could scarcely stand upright, but with an effort he walked out of the gambling-room, down the corridor where the spies were watching, past the restaurant where the sluggards were smoking, through the hall where the band was playing and out into the garden.
There he looked for a dark place and sat on a bench under a tree. The night was clear and quiet, the stars were out, and the sea was singing in the distance, but he could hear nothing except an owl that was hooting somewhere in the eaves. Oh, for the snows of his own country to cool his hot forehead! Oh, for the storms of Iceland to silence the babel in his brain!
When he thought of his conduct he hated himself, and when he remembered his temptation he hated Helga also. The one hatred counteracted the other or he would have destroyed himself. He must live, if only to subdue Helga, to bring her to his feet and then to cast her off forever!
How was he to do this? There was one way, but it was closed to him--closed by the vow he had made when he stood by the open coffin of his wife and, in punishment of himself for having neglected her and sinned against her, he had sworn before God to bury his ambitions in her grave and never write another line of music as long as he lived.
If he could only wipe out that vow, if he could only begin again, if he could only say to himself some day, "Oscar Stephenson is dead!" But that could never be and Oscar Stephenson must go on to the end, trailing the slag of his burned-out life behind him.