His weakness, now that the collapse after passion had come on, clung to any human friend.  The very sound of Tom’s clear sturdy voice seemed pleasant to him, after long solitude and silence.  At least it kept off the fiends of memory.

Tom, anxious to keep Elsley’s mind employed on some subject which should not be painful, began chatting about the war and its prospects.  Elsley soon caught the cue, and talked with wild energy and pathos, opium-fed, of the coming struggle between despotism and liberty, the arising of Poland and Hungary, and all the grand dreams which then haunted minds like his.

“By Jove!” said Tom, “you are yourself again now.  Why don’t you put all that into a book!”

“I may perhaps,” said Elsley proudly.

“And if it comes to that, why not come to the war, and see it for yourself?  A new country—­one of the finest in the world.  New scenery, new actors,—­Why, Constantinople itself is a poem!  Yes, there is another ‘Revolt of Islam’ to be written yet.  Why don’t you become our war poet?  Come and see the fighting; for there’ll be plenty of it, let them say what they will.  The old bear is not going to drop his dead donkey without a snap and a hug.  Come along, and tell people what it’s all really like.  There will be a dozen Cockneys writing battle songs, I’ll warrant, who never saw a man shot in their lives, not even a hare.  Come and give us the real genuine grit of it,—­for if you can’t, who can?”

“It is a grand thought!  The true war poets, after all, have been warriors themselves.  Koerner and Alcaeus fought as well as sang, and sang because they fought.  Old Homer, too,—­who can believe that he had not hewn his way through the very battles which he describes, and seen every wound, every shape of agony?  A noble thought, to go out with that army against the northern Anarch, singing in the van of battle, as Taillefer sang the song of Roland before William’s knights, and to die like him, the proto-martyr of the Crusade, with the melody yet upon one’s lips!”

And his face blazed up with excitement.

“What a handsome fellow he is, after all, if there were but more of him?” said Tom to himself.  “I wonder if he’d fight, though, when the singing-fever was off him.”

He took Elsley upstairs into his bed-room, got him washed and shaved:  and sent out the woman of the house for mutton chops and stout, and began himself setting out the luncheon table, while Elsley in the room within chanted to himself snatches of poetry.

“The notion has taken:  he’s composing a war song already, I believe.”  It actually was so:  but Elsley’s brain was weak and wandering; and he was soon silent; and motionless so long, that Tom opened the door and looked in anxiously.

He was sitting on a chair, his hands fallen on his lap, the tears running down his face.

“Well?” asked Tom smilingly, not noticing the tears; “how goes on the opera?  I heard through the door the orchestra tuning for the prelude.”