He watched the spider as it went.

It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a kingdom--if only in dreams.

This man had no hope; he had a kingdom, indeed, but it was not of earth; and in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain earth alone has dominion and power and worth.

The spider crawled across the gray wall; across the glow from the vanished sun; across a coil of a dead pa.s.sion-vine that strayed over the floor, across the cla.s.sic shape of a great cartoon drawn in chalks upon the dull rugged surface of stone.

Nothing arrested it; nothing r.e.t.a.r.ded it, as nothing hastened it.

It moved slowly on; fat, l.u.s.terless, indolent, hueless; reached at length its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young swarming around, its netted prey held in its forceps, its nets cast about.

Through the open cas.e.m.e.nt there came in on the rising wind of the storm, in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth, begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled tropic flower.

It swam in on trembling pinions, and lit on the golden head of a gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer Night's Dream.

A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate, l.u.s.trous-eyed and gossamer-winged.

A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests; of the yellow chalices of kingcups and the white b.r.e.a.s.t.s of river lilies, of moonbeams that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that glistened in the deep-folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a lotus-leaf.

A creature that, amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters, tells to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.

The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus-leaves which spread out their pale gold on the level of the floor.

It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed, wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and the night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it.

It lived before its time,--and it was like the human soul, which, being born in the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and wandering in vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in wretchedness.

It was beautiful exceedingly; with the brilliant tropical beauty of a life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high, spreading out its transparent wings, and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, and died.

There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes.

The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into the night to mingle with the storm-scourged gra.s.ses, the pale, dead violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and forgotten.

The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies, teaching its sp.a.w.n to prey and feed; content in squalor and in plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its sp.a.w.n and of its h.o.a.rd.

He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth.

Trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life which perishes of divine desire.

Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the wall; shapes grand and dim, the children of his genius, a genius denied by men.

His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt away from his breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger that he scorned devoured indeed, but which throbbed with a pain more bitter than that of even this lingering and ign.o.ble death. He had genius in him, and he had to die like a wolf on the Armorican wolds yonder westward, when the snows of winter hid all offal from its fangs.

It was horrible.

He had to die for want of the crust that beggars gnawed in the kennels of the city; he had to die of the lowest and commonest need of all--the sheer animal need of food. "_J'avais quelque chose la!_" was, perhaps, the most terrible of all those death-cries of despair which the guillotine of Thermidor wrung from the lips of the condemned. For it was the despair of the bodily life for the life of the mind which died with it.

When the man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in his shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to leave life, although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights, because life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him as there is the agony of Prometheus.

With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him which moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force, which compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.

Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety, of pa.s.sion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laughs that ring hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly fatigues and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men upon earth.

Weary of these he may be; but still if the G.o.ds have breathed on him and made him mad, with the madness that men have called genius, there will be that in him greater than himself, which he knows--and cannot know without some fierce wrench and pang--will be numbed and made impotent, and drift away, lost for evermore, into that eternal Night which is all that men behold of death.

It was so with this man now.

Life was barren for him of all delight, full of privation, of famine, of obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain desire; and yet because he believed that he had it in him to be great, or rather because, with a purer and more impersonal knowledge, he believed that it was within his power to do that which when done the world would not willingly let die; it was loathsome to him to perish thus of the sheer lack of food, as any toothless snake would perish in its swamp.

He stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which his soul had spent itself; creations which looked vague and ghostly in the shadows of the chamber, but in which he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the t.i.tle-deeds of his own heirship to the world's kingdom of fame.

For himself he cared nothing; but for them, he smiled a little bitterly as he looked:

"They will light some bake-house fire to pay those that may throw my body in a ditch," he thought.

And yet the old pa.s.sion had so much dominance still that he instinctively went nearer to his latest and best-loved creations, and took the white chalks up and worked once more by the dull sullen rays of the lamp behind him.

They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust for fuel into some housewife's kitchen-stove.

What matter?

He loved them; they were his sole garniture and treasure; in them his soul had gathered all its dreams and all its pure delights: so long as his sight lasted he sought to feed it on them; so long as his hand had power he strove to touch, to caress, to enrich them.

Even in such an hour as this, the old sweet trance of Art was upon him.

He was devoured by the deadly fangs of long fast; streaks of living fire seemed to scorch his entrails; his throat and lungs were parched and choked; and ever and again his left hand clinched on the bones of his naked chest as though he could wrench away the throes that gnawed it.

He knew that worse than this would follow; he knew that tenfold more torment would await him; that limbs as strong, and muscles as hard, and manhood as vigorous as his, would only yield to such death as this slowly, doggedly, inch by inch, day by day.

He knew; and he knew that he could not trust himself to go through that uttermost torture without once lifting his voice to summon the shame of release from it. Shame, since release would need be charity.

He knew full well; he had seen all forms of death; he had studied its throes, and portrayed its horrors. He knew that before dawn--it might be before midnight--this agony would grow so great that it would conquer him; and that to save himself from the cowardice of appeal, the shame of besought alms, he would have to use his last powers to drive home a knife hard and sure through his breast-bone.

Yet he stood there, almost forgetting this, scarcely conscious of any other thing than of the pa.s.sion that ruled him.

Some soft curve in a girl's bare bosom, some round smooth arm of a sleeping woman, some fringe of leaves against a moonlit sky, some broad-winged bird sailing through shadows of the air, some full-orbed lion rising to leap on the nude soft indolently-folded limbs of a dreaming virgin, palm-shadowed in the East;--all these he gazed on and touched, and looked again, and changed by some mere inward curve or deepened line of his chalk stylus.

All these usurped him; appealed to him; were well beloved and infinitely sad; seemed ever in their whiteness and their loneliness to cry to him,--"Whither dost thou go? Wilt thou leave _us_ alone?"

And as he stood, and thus caressed them with his eyes and touch, and wrestled with the inward torment which grew greater and greater as the night approached, the sudden sickly feebleness of long hunger came upon him; the gravelike coldness of his fireless chamber slackened and numbed the flowing of his veins; his brain grew dull and all its memory ceased, confused and blotted. He staggered once, wondering dimly and idly as men wonder in delirium, if this indeed were death: then he fell backwards senseless on his hearth.

The last glow of day died off the wall. The wind rose louder, driving in through the open cas.e.m.e.nt a herd of withered leaves. An owl flew by, uttering weary cries against the storm.

On high the spider sat, sucking the vitals of its prey, safe in its filth and darkness; looking down ever on the lifeless body on the hearth, and saying in its heart,--"Thou Fool!"

CHAPTER II.