“Isabel.”
He sat for a while musing, then went up to his own room. He walked up and down with the letter in his hands; at length, as if unwillingly, he destroyed it. When he had done so, he unlocked a drawer, and took out a collection of letters, all from Isabel. One of them he held to the paper still burning in the fireplace, then threw the others, one by one, upon the flame. As he watched the last sparks flicker, he was overcome with a rush of tears. He covered his face with his hands, and stood weeping.
There was a change in him after that day. He walked for several hours each morning, and the rest of his time gave to new books, which he got from a library. His own volumes did not attract him; he read simply with the pleasure in novelty, which is as far as most people ever get to in the matter of reading. His mind appeared to be quite calm, and in the evenings he spoke freely with his sister. By degrees the question of what he should do for a living actively occupied him. He answered advertisements persistently, and received no replies; that, circumstances considered, was in the order of things. The world has no place for a man who is possessed merely of general intelligence and a fair amount of reading. No one will take him on trust or on trial.
There must be specific capacity, estimable in terms of the ledger. Lacking this, and lacking the aid of influential friends, a man may starve—or there is the workhouse. What would you have? We are civilised, and enjoy the blessings of a social order.
Kingcote believed that Mr. Meres might have helped him, but in that quarter he could not apply. Gabriel was his only friend; Mr. Vissian, though correspondence with him continued, could scarcely be counted. But neither had Gabriel any practical suggestions to offer. He always talked of literary work, and literary work Kingcote could not undertake; it was perhaps his one note of actual wisdom, that he recognised his unfitness for earning money by the pen, and did not waste time in efforts that way. He was prepared, he said, to do anything that promised an income whereon he and his sister could live. Were it manual labour, well and good; were it the basest of clerkships, equally well.
“I have a need of work,” he said to Gabriel, one day about Christmas time. “It is getting to be a physical need. I must do something which calls for exertion. Do you know that I am at present exactly in the state which leads men to any kind of dissipation, which tests their character. If I had not my home and my sister, I should fall into the gulf by the edge of which walk such men as I am. And, if I fell, there would be no ascent to the light.”
“In other words, you are nursing your weakness,” said Gabriel unsympathetically. He was seldom sympathetic. It may have been as a tonic that Kingcote relished his society. “I perfectly believe what you say; you are capable of going to the devil. But remember that other people cannot devote themselves to hanging on at your coat-tails; you must put the drag on yourself.”
Gabriel always worked during their sittings together; idleness was abhorrent to him.
“I,” he went on, throwing himself back in his chair, “should have had as natural an alacrity in going to the devil as any man. I was made for it. I am by nature the most indolent fellow alive. I fight it, and I shall go on fighting.”
It was stimulating, but without practical direction; nor was the artist to blame for this. Kingcote was not adapted for any one of the plain categories of money-earning labour. Only the benevolence of fate could come to his aid.