He folded the right-hand letter, and put it beneath his right heel; then folding his two arms, stood upon both the letters.
“These are most small circumstances; but happening just now to me, become indices to all immensities. For now am I hate-shod! On these I will skate to my acquittal! No longer do I hold terms with aught. World’s bread of life, and world’s breath of honor, both are snatched from me; but I defy all world’s bread and breath. Here I step out before the drawn-up worlds in widest space, and challenge one and all of them to battle! Oh, Glen! oh, Fred! most fraternally do I leap to your rib-crushing hugs! Oh, how I love ye two, that yet can make me lively hate, in a world which elsewise only merits stagnant scorn!—Now, then, where is this swindler’s, this coiner’s book? Here, on this vile counter, over which the coiner thought to pass it to the world, here will I nail it fast, for a detected cheat! And thus nailed fast now, do I spit upon it, and so get the start of the wise world’s worst abuse of it! Now I go out to meet my fate, walking toward me in the street.”
As with hat on, and Glen and Frederic’s letter invisibly crumpled in his hand, he—as it were somnambulously—passed into the room of Isabel, she gave loose to a thin, long shriek, at his wondrous white and haggard plight; and then, without the power to stir toward him, sat petrified in her chair, as one embalmed and glazed with icy varnish.
He heeded her not, but passed straight on through both intervening rooms, and without a knock unpremeditatedly entered Lucy’s chamber. He would have passed out of that, also, into the corridor, without one word; but something stayed him.
The marble girl sat before her easel; a small box of pointed charcoal, and some pencils by her side; her painter’s wand held out against the frame; the charcoal-pencil suspended in two fingers, while with the same hand, holding a crust of bread, she was lightly brushing the portrait-paper, to efface some ill-considered stroke. The floor was scattered with the bread-crumbs and charcoal-dust; he looked behind the easel, and saw his own portrait, in the skeleton.
At the first glimpse of him, Lucy started not, nor stirred; but as if her own wand had there enchanted her, sat tranced.
“Dead embers of departed fires lie by thee, thou pale girl; with dead embers thou seekest to relume the flame of all extinguished love! Waste not so that bread; eat it—in bitterness!”
He turned, and entered the corridor, and then, with outstretched arms, paused between the two outer doors of Isabel and Lucy.
“For ye two, my most undiluted prayer is now, that from your here unseen and frozen chairs ye may never stir alive;—the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate, now quits ye forever!”
As he now sped down the long winding passage, some one eagerly hailed him from a stair.