After Fauntleroy had thus spent a few empty years, coruscating continually an unnatural light, the source of it—­which was merely his gold—­began to grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted.  He saw himself in imminent peril of losing all that had heretofore distinguished him; and, conscious of no innate worth to fall back upon, he recoiled from this calamity with the instinct of a soul shrinking from annihilation.  To avoid it,—­wretched man!—­or rather to defer it, if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the life of a few breaths more amid the false glitter which was now less his own than ever,—­he made himself guilty of a crime.  It was just the sort of crime, growing out of its artificial state, which society (unless it should change its entire constitution for this man’s unworthy sake) neither could nor ought to pardon.  More safely might it pardon murder.  Fauntleroy’s guilt was discovered.  He fled; his wife perished, by the necessity of her innate nobleness, in its alliance with a being so ignoble; and betwixt her mother’s death and her father’s ignominy, his daughter was left worse than orphaned.

There was no pursuit after Fauntleroy.  His family connections, who had great wealth, made such arrangements with those whom he had attempted to wrong as secured him from the retribution that would have overtaken an unfriended criminal.  The wreck of his estate was divided among his creditors:  His name, in a very brief space, was forgotten by the multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth to mouth.  Seldom, indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest former intimates.  Nor could it have been otherwise.  The man had laid no real touch on any mortal’s heart.  Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created by the sunshine of prosperity, it was his law to vanish into the shadow of the first intervening cloud.  He seemed to leave no vacancy; a phenomenon which, like many others that attended his brief career, went far to prove the illusiveness of his existence.

Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally melted into vapor.  He had fled northward to the New England metropolis, and had taken up his abode, under another name, in a squalid street or court of the older portion of the city.  There he dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest.  Many families were clustered in each house together, above stairs and below, in the little peaked garrets, and even in the dusky cellars.  The house where Fauntleroy paid weekly rent for a chamber and a closet had been a stately habitation in its day.  An old colonial governor had built it, and lived there, long ago, and held his levees in a great room where now slept twenty Irish bedfellows; and died in Fauntleroy’s chamber, which his embroidered and white-wigged ghost still haunted.  Tattered hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with many cracks and fissures, a richly carved oaken mantelpiece, partly hacked away for kindling-stuff, a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with great, unsightly patches of the naked laths,—­such was the chamber’s aspect, as if, with its splinters and rags of dirty splendor, it were a kind of practical gibe at this poor, ruined man of show.