Richard’s laugh, taken up by horrid reverberations, as it were through the lengths of the Lower Halls, replied.

This colloquy of two voices in a brain was concluded by Sir Austin asking again if there were no actual difference between the flower of his hopes and yonder drunken weed, and receiving for answer that there was a decided dissimilarity in the smell of the couple; becoming cognizant of which he retreated.

Sir Austin did not battle with the tempter.  He took him into his bosom at once, as if he had been ripe for him, and received his suggestions and bowed to his dictates.  Because he suffered, and decreed that he would suffer silently, and be the only sufferer, it seemed to him that he was great-minded in his calamity.  He had stood against the world.  The world had beaten him.  What then?  He must shut his heart and mask his face; that was all.  To be far in advance of the mass, is as fruitless to mankind, he reflected, as straggling in the rear.  For how do we know that they move behind us at all, or move in our track?  What we win for them is lost; and where we are overthrown we lie!

It was thus that a fine mind and a fine heart at the bounds of a nature not great, chose to colour his retrogression and countenance his shortcoming; and it was thus that he set about ruining the work he had done.  He might well say, as he once did, that there are hours when the clearest soul becomes a cunning fox.  For a grief that was private and peculiar, he unhesitatingly cast the blame upon humanity; just as he had accused it in the period of what he termed his own ordeal.  How had he borne that?  By masking his face.  And he prepared the ordeal for his son by doing the same.  This was by no means his idea of a man’s duty in tribulation, about which he could be strenuously eloquent.

But it was his instinct so to act, and in times of trial great natures alone are not at the mercy of their instincts.  Moreover it would cost him pain to mask his face; pain worse than that he endured when there still remained an object for him to open his heart to in proportion; and he always reposed upon the Spartan comfort of bearing pain and being passive.  “Do nothing,” said the devil he nursed; which meant in his case, “Take me into you and don’t cast me out.”  Excellent and sane is the outburst of wrath to men, when it stops short of slaughter.  For who that locks it up to eat in solitary, can say that it is consumed?  Sir Austin had as weak a digestion for wrath, as poor Hippias for a green duckling.  Instead of eating it, it ate him.  The wild beast in him was not the less deadly because it did not roar, and the devil in him not the less active because he resolved to do nothing.

He sat at the springs of Richard’s future, in the forlorn dead-hush of his library there, hearing the cinders click in the extinguished fire, and that humming stillness in which one may fancy one hears the midnight Fates busily stirring their embryos.  The lamp glowed mildly on the bust of Chatham.