He started back, his nerves for the instant shaken. It was a skull, mottled like polished tortoise-shell, mounted in dull silver as a drinking-cup. He had unearthed the relic years before with a heap of stone coffins amid the rubbish of the Abbey’s ruined priory—grim reminder of some old friar—and its mounting had been his own fancy. He had forgotten its very existence.
Now, as it lay supine, yet intrusive, the symbol at one time of lastingness and decay, it filled him with a painful fascination.
Picking it up, he set it upright on the desk, seized the bottle, knocked off its top against the marble mantel and poured the fantastic goblet full.
“Death and life!” he mused. “One feeds the other, each in its turn. Life! yet it should not be too long; I have no conception of any existence which duration would not render tiresome. How else fell the angels? They were immortal, heavenly and happy. It is the lastingness of life that is terrible; I see no horror in a dreamless sleep.”
He put out his hand to the goblet, but withdrew it.
“No—wait!” he said, and seating himself at the desk, he seized a pen. The lines he wrote, rapidly and with scarcely an alteration, were to live for many a long year—index fingers pointing back to that dark mood that consumed him then:
“Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull,
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.