and from whom he would not willingly have
accepted the lightest favour. It has been truly said that the
concupiscence of the eye outlives desire. Tiberius succumbed to
premature senility (and was strangled by Macro) in a bedchamber
decorated with figures from the works of Elephantis; and Sir Jacques'
secret library, which he had omitted to destroy or disperse, bore
evidence to the whited sepulchre of his intellectual life.

This atmosphere was disturbing. Paul could have worked at Hatton Towers,
but not upon the mighty human theme with which at that hour his mind was
pregnant. For his intellect was like a sensitive plate upon which the
thoughts of those who had lived and longed and died in whatever spot he
might find himself, were reproduced eerily, almost clairvoyantly. It was
necessary that he should work amid sympathetic colour--that he should
appropriately set the stage for the play; and Fame having coming to him,
not empty-handed but laden with gold, he made those settings opulent.

He did spontaneously the things that lesser men do at behest of their
press-agents. The passionate mediaeval tragedy _Francesca of the
Lilies_, destined to enshrine his name in the temple of the masters, he
wrote at the haunted Palazzo Concini in Tuscany, where, behind tomb-like
doors, iron-studded and ominous, he worked in a low-beamed windowless
room at a table which had belonged to Gilles de Rais, and by light of
three bronze lamps found in the ruins of the Mamertine dungeons.

For company he had undying memories of sins so black that only the
silent Vatican archives held record of them; memories of unholy loves,
of deaths whose manner may not be written, of births whereat the angels
shuddered. Torch-scarred walls and worm-tunnelled furniture whispered
their secrets to him, rusty daggers confessed their bloody histories,
and a vial still bearing ghastly frost of Borgian _contarella_ spoke of
a virgin martyr and of a princely cardinal whose deeds were forgotten by
all save Mother Church. Paul's genius was absorbent, fructiferous,
prolific of golden dreams.

But the atmosphere of Hatton Towers stifled inspiration, was definitely
antagonistic. The portrait of the late Sir Jacques, in the dining-room,
seemed to dominate the house, as St. Peter's dominates Rome, or even as
the Pyramids dominate Lower Egypt. The scanty beard and small eyes; the
flat, fleshy nose; the indeterminable, mask-like expression; all were
faithfully reproduced