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to ambition, as unexpectedly offered him as, through his own unlooked-for and tragic disability, it was unexpectedly withdrawn.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 most unexplored and practically incredible.—­An everyday occurrence, a commonplace, concerning which there remains nothing new, nothing original, to be written, sung or said; yet a mystery still inviolate, aching with the alarm of the undiscovered, the unpenetrated, to each individual, summoned to accept its empire!  He had sent others to their death.  Now his own turn came and he found it, however calmly considered, a rather astounding business.  An ending or a beginning?—­Useless, after all, to speculate.  The worst feature of it, not improbably, this same preliminary loneliness, this stripping naked, no smallest comfort left you of human companionship, or even of humble material keepsake from out the multitude of your familiar possessions here in the dear accustomed human scene.