The Crown of Life eBook

Not for one instant did he visit these troubles upon the dead man.  His loyalty to his father was absolute; no thought, or half-thought, looked towards accusation.

He arrived at his hotel in London late at night, drank a glass of spirits and went to bed.  The sleep he hoped for came immediately, but lasted only a couple of hours.  Suddenly he was wide awake, and a horror of great darkness enveloped him.  What he now suffered he had known before, but with less intensity.  He stared forward into the coming years, and saw nothing that his soul desired.  A life of solitude, of bitter frustration.  Were it Irene, were it another, the woman for whom he longed would never become his.  He had not the power of inspiring love.  The mere flesh would constrain him to marriage, a sordid union, a desecration of his ideal, his worship; and in the latter days he would look back upon a futile life.  What is life without love?  And to him love meant communion with the noblest.  Nature had kindled in him this fiery ambition only for his woe.

All the passion of the great hungry world seemed concentrated in his sole being.  Images of maddening beauty glowed upon him out of the darkness, glowed and gleamed by he knew not what creative mandate; faces, forms, such as may visit the delirium of a supreme artist.  Of him they knew not; they were worlds away, though his own brain bodied them forth.  He smothered cries of agony; he flung himself upon his face, and lay as one dead.

For the men capable of passionate love (and they are few) to miss love is to miss everything.  Life has but the mockery of consolation for that one gift denied.  The heart may be dulled by time; it is not comforted.  Illusion if it be, it is that which crowns all other illusions whereof life is made.  The man must prove it, or he is born in vain.

At sunrise, Piers dressed himself, and made ready for his journey.  He was worn with fever, had no more strength to hope or to desire.  His body was a mechanism which must move and move.

CHAPTER XV

In the saloon of a homeward-bound steamer, twenty-four hours from port, and that port Southampton, a lady sat writing letters.  Her age was about thirty; her face was rather piquant than pretty; she had the air of a person far too intelligent and spirited to be involved in any life of mere routine, on whatever plane.  Two letters she had written in French, one in German, and that upon which she was now engaged was in English, her native tongue; it began “Dearest Mother.”

“All’s well.  A pleasant and a quick voyage.  The one incident of it which you will care to hear about is that I have made friends—­a real friendship, I think—­with a delightful girl, of respectability which will satisfy even you.  Judge for yourself; she is the daughter of Dr. Derwent, a distinguished scientific man, who has been having a glimpse of Colonial life.  When we were a day