"You mean that day when I lay before you on my knees," she corrected
him. "That day I buried my last dream of personal happiness. I would have
gladly raised you from the floor, but love was utterly gone. If I am
tenderer to-day than I am wont to be, it is because you mean so much to
me as the symbol of my renunciation. When I realised that I could not
even save the thing I loved from myself, I became hardened and cruel to
others. Not that I know no kindly feeling, but no qualms of conscience
lay their prostrate forms across my path. There is nothing in life for
me but my mission." His face was bathed in ecstasy. The pupils were luminous, large and
threatening. He had the look of a madman or a prophet. After a while Ethel remarked: "But you have grown into one of the
master-figures of the age. Why not be content with that? Is there no
limit to your ambition?" Reginald smiled: "Ambition! Shakespeare stopped when he had reached his
full growth, when he had exhausted the capacity of his contemporaries. I
am not yet ready to lay down my pen and rest." "And will you always continue in this criminal course, a murderer of
other lives?" He looked her calmly in the face. "I do not know." "Are you the slave of your unknown god?" "We are all slaves, wire-pulled marionettes: You, Ernest, I. There is
no freedom on the face of the earth nor above. The tiger that tears a
lamb is not free, I am not free, you are not free. All that happens must
happen; no word that is said is said in vain, in vain is raised no
hand." "Then," Ethel retorted, eagerly, "if I attempted to wrest your victim
from you, I should also be the tool of your god?" "Assuredly. But I am his chosen." "Can you--can you not set him free?" "I need him--a little longer. Then he is yours." "But can you not, if I beg you again on my knees, at least loosen his
chains before he is utterly ruined?" "It is beyond my power. If I could not rescue you, whom I loved, what in
heaven or on earth can save him from his fate? Besides, he will not be
utterly ruined. It is only a part of him that I absorb. In his soul are
chords that I have not touched. They may vibrate one day, when he has
gathered new strength. You, too, would have spared yourself much pain
had you striven to attain success in different fields--not where I had
garnered the harvest of a lifetime. It is only a portion of his talent
that I take from him. The rest I cannot harm. Why should he bury that
remainder?" His eyes strayed through the window to the firmament, as if to say that
words could no more bend his indomitable will than alter the changeless
course of the stars. Ethel had half-forgotten the wrong she herself had suffered at his
hands. He could not be measured by ordinary standards, this dazzling
madman, whose diseased will-power had assumed such uncanny proportions. But here a young life was at stake. In her mind's eye she saw Reginald
crush between his relentless hands the delicate soul of Ernest Fielding,
as a magnificent carnivorous flower might close its glorious petals upon
a fly. Love, all conquering love, welled up in her. She would fight for Ernest
as a tiger cat fights for its young. She would place herself in the way
of the awful force that had shattered her own aspirations, and save, at
any cost, the brilliant boy who did not love her. XXII


The last rays of the late afternoon sun fell slanting through Ernest's
window. He was lying on his couch, in a leaden, death-like slumber that,
for the moment at least, was not even perturbed by the presence of
Reginald Clarke. The latter was standing at the boy's bedside, calm, unmoved as ever. The
excitement of his conversation with Ethel had left no trace on the
chiselled contour of his forehead. Smilingly fastening an orchid of an
indefinable purple tint in his evening coat, radiant, buoyant with life,
he looked down upon the sleeper. Then he passed his hand over Ernest's
forehead, as if to wipe off beads of sweat. At the touch of his hand the
boy stirred uneasily. When it was not withdrawn his countenance twitched
in pain. He moaned as men moan under the influence of some anæsthetic,
without possessing the power to break through the narrow partition that
separates them from death on the one side and from consciousness on the
other. At last a sigh struggled to his seemingly paralysed lips, then
another. Finally the babbling became articulate. "For God's sake," he cried, in his sleep, "take that hand away!" And all at once the benignant smile on Reginald's features was changed
to a look of savage fierceness. He no longer resembled the man of
culture, but a disappointed, snarling beast of prey. He took his hand
from Ernest's forehead and retired cautiously through the half-open
door. Hardly had he disappeared when Ernest awoke. For a moment he looked
around, like a hunted animal, then sighed with relief and buried his
head in his hand. At that moment a knock at the door was heard, and
Reginald re-entered, calm as before. "I declare," he exclaimed, "you have certainly been sleeping the sleep
of the just." "It isn't laziness," Ernest replied, looking up rather pleased at the
interruption. "But I've a splitting headache." "Perhaps those naps are not good for your health." "Probably. But of late I have frequently found it necessary to exact
from the day-hours the sleep which the night refuses me. I suppose it is
all due to indigestion, as you have suggested. The stomach is the source
of all evil." "It is also the source of all good. The Greeks made it the seat of the
soul. I have always claimed that the most important item in a great
poet's biography is an exact reproduction of his menu." "True, a man who eats a heavy beefsteak for breakfast in the morning is
incapable of writing a sonnet in the afternoon." "Yes," Reginald added, "we are what we eat and what our forefathers have
eaten before us. I ascribe the staleness of American poetry to the
griddle-cakes of our Puritan ancestors. I am sorry we cannot go deeper
into the subject at present. But I have an invitation to dinner where I
shall study, experimentally, the influence of French sauces on my
versification." "Good-bye." "Au revoir." And, with a wave of the hand, Reginald left the room. When the door had closed behind him, Ernest's thoughts took a more
serious turn. The tone of light bantering in which the preceding
conversation had taken place had been assumed on his part. For the last
few weeks evil dreams had tortured his sleep and cast their shadow upon
his waking hours. They had ever increased in reality, in intensity and
in hideousness. Even now he could see the long, tapering fingers that
every night were groping in the windings of his brain. It was a
well-formed, manicured hand that seemed to reach under his skull,
carefully feeling its way through the myriad convolutions where thought
resides. And, oh, the agony of it all! A human mind is not a thing of stone, but
alive, horribly alive to pain.