dily
fatigue. Hence it lay open to assault, at the mercy of a thousand and one
crowding thoughts and perceptions. And over these he desired to gain
ascendency--to drive, rather than be driven by them. The epic of his
three-score years, from its dim, illusive start to this dramatic and
inexorable finish--but instantly disclosed to him in the reluctant
admissions of the good-hearted Irish doctor--flung by at a double, in
coloured yet incoherent progression, so to speak, now marching to
triumphant blare of trumpet, now to roll of muffled drum. Which
incoherence came in great measure of the inalienable duality of his own
nature--passion and austerity, arrogance and self-doubt, love--surpassing
most men's capacity of loving--and a defacing strain of cruelty,
delivering stroke and counter-stroke. From all such tumult he earnestly
sought to be delivered; since not the thing accomplished--whether for
fame, for praise or for remorse--not, in short, what has been, but what
was, and still more what must soon be, did he need, at this juncture,
dispassionately to contemplate.

That sharp-toothed disappointment gnawed him, is undeniable, when he
thought of the culminating gift of happy fortune, royally satisfying to
ambition, as unexpectedly offered him as, through his own unlooked-for
and tragic disability, it was unexpectedly withdrawn. But disappointment
failed to vex him long. A more wonderful journey than any possible
earthly one, a more majestic adventure than that of any oriental
proconsulship, awaited him. For no less a person than Death issued the
order--an order there is no disobeying. He must saddle up therefore, bid
farewell, and ride away.

Nor did he flinch from that ride with Death, the black captain, as
escort, any more than, during the past night, he had flinched under the
grip of mortal pain. For some persons the call to endurance brings actual
pleasure--of a grim heroic kind. It did so to Charles Verity. And not
only this conscious exercise of fortitude, this pride of bearing bodily
anguish, but a strange curiosity worked to sustain him. The novelty of
the experience, in both cases, excited and held his interest, continued
to exercise it and to hold.

Now, as in solitude his mental atmosphere acquired serenity and
poise--the authority of the past declining--this matter of death
increasingly engrossed him. For it trenches on paradox, surely, that the
one absolutely certain event in every human career is also the