There, throwing himself on the well-worn chair before the crowded desk,
he buried his face in his hands, and for some minutes he felt all that
profound despondency peculiar to those who have won fame, to add to the
dark volume of experience the conviction of fame's nothingness. For some
minutes he felt an illiberal and ungrateful envy of St. John, so fair,
so light-hearted, so favoured by fortune, so rich in friends,--in a
mother's love, and in Helen's half-plighted troth. And he, from his very
birth, cut off from the social ties of blood; no mother's kiss to reward
the toils or gladden the sports of childhood; no father's cheering word
up the steep hill of man! And Helen, for whose sake he had so often,
when his heart grew weary, nerved himself again to labour, saying, "Let
me be rich, let me be great, and then I will dare to tell Helen that I
love her!"--Helen smiling upon another, unconscious of his pangs! What
could fame bestow in compensation? What matter that strangers praised,
and the babble of the world's running stream lingered its brief moment
round the pebble in its way. In the bitterness of his mood, he was
unjust to his rival. All that exquisite but half-concealed treasure
of imagination and thought which lay beneath the surface of Helen's
childlike smile he believed that he alone--he, soul of power and son of
genius--was worthy to discover and to prize. In the pride not unfrequent
with that kingliest of all aristocracies, the Chiefs of Intellect, he
forgot the grandeur which invests the attributes of the heart; forgot
that, in the lists of love, the heart is at least the equal of the mind.
In the reaction that follows great excitement, Ardworth had morbidly
felt, that day, his utter solitude,--felt it in the streets through
which he had passed; in the home to which he had returned; the burning
tears, shed for the first time since childhood, forced themselves
through his clasped fingers. At length he rose, with a strong effort
at self-mastery, some contempt of his weakness, and much remorse at his
ungrateful envy. He gathered together the soiled manuscript and dingy
proofs of his book, and thrust them through the grimy bars of his grate;
then, opening his desk, he drew out a small packet, with tremulous
fingers unfolding paper after paper, and gazed, with eyes still
moistened, on the relics kept till then in the devotion of the only
sentiment inspired by Eros that had ever, perhaps, softened his iron
natu