The flaming fire cast great, quivering shadows, like dancing, black spectres, on the walls and ceiling of the dark room. Now and then a momentary flash of brightness would hover about an antique silver ewer, or glint along a carved sideboard, which, like a vague dark mass, filled up an angle in the room, or play about a set of old china, or a pair of antique vases over the mantelpiece.
Vincent Vere lay stretched on his sofa, and looked around with half-closed eyes, each time there was a flickering of light over the room. That strange prevailing gloom, penetrated by fitful gleams of ruddy light, made him pleasantly forgetful of his prosaic rooms, where a stray object of vertu of his own was in screaming contrast with the shabby gentility of the furniture. And he lay musing awhile in the Dantesque twilight.
These last few days he had felt very worn and exhausted. A languor seemed to numb his limbs; it was as though it were warm water instead of blood that coursed through his veins; at times a mist seemed to hang before his eyes, so that he could neither act nor think. His eyelids drooped wan and limp over his lack-lustre, light blue eyes; his lower lip hung down heavily, and about his small mouth there was a very pained expression. He had often felt like that, but this time he ascribed it to the atmosphere of the Hague, which well-nigh suffocated him, and he longed for more space and more air, and could not understand why he should have [[88]]gone to a city, which had always had so little attraction for him. Yes, he remembered—through the mist of his exhaustion—he had wished for a span of rest, after all his restless wanderings; but already, notwithstanding his fatigue, he felt a nervous stimulation to action, and an inward spur once more to throw himself into a vortex of change. Rest and monotony had a dulling effect upon him, and in spite of his weakness he felt continually excited to movement and action, and an insatiable longing for an ever-changing horizon. And yet he lacked the energy to devote himself with determination to any kind of labour, whilst his changeable nature constantly drove him onward in a restless search after some surroundings, some sphere or occupation in which he might feel at home, and which he ever failed to find.
The two weeks which he had spent in the Hague seemed to him an age of ennui. The day after he had met Betsy and Eline at the opera, he had been to take coffee at the van Raats’, and had asked Henk to lend him 500 florins; he was daily expecting some money from Brussels, he said, and he would repay him at the very first opportunity. Henk, though he knew him to be exceedingly forgetful in such matters, did not like to refuse, and handed him the amount, and so Vincent lived on, one day allowing the money to run as water through his fingers, the next with parsimonious economy hesitating to spend a dubbeltje, while the drafts from Brussels continued to stay away.
About the future he troubled himself but little; he had ever led a hand-to-mouth existence; he had known days of luxury in Smyrna, and suffered privation in London and Paris; but in whatever circumstances he might have found himself, that feverish desire for change had spurred him on, in continual dissatisfaction with the present; and at that moment, while he was living on his 500 florins, he felt so unnerved that the very burden of his listlessness at times almost made him forget his weakness.
Then he mused on, gazing into the darkness, now and again lit up by the ruddy flames, as they shot forth from the hearth and fell in spectral relief about the gloom-hidden furniture. He mused on, in coldest pessimism. Why should he be other than he was? He would again want money, and he would get it somehow; why not? There was neither good nor evil in the world; everything was as it should be, and the inevitable result of an unbroken [[89]]chain of causes and reasons; everything that was had a right to be; no one could alter that which was, or was to be; no one had a free will; every one was only a different temperament, and no one could act in any way but in accordance with the demands and nature of that temperament, influenced by circumstances and surroundings; that and that alone was truth, yet mankind with its childish idealism, eternally prating about virtue, and provided with a handful of religious poesy, was ever seeking to hide it.
“Great heavens! what a life it is!” he thought, and his fingers wandered about his light brown curls. “The life at least that I am leading now, for a year of it, would kill me, or drive me mad. To-morrow is like to-day, nothing but one blank monotony.”
And he threw himself into an ocean of memories, as he thought of what he had lived through, and scenes in many climes and pictures of various cities rose before his mind.
“And yet, what a struggling, what a toiling for nothing at all,” he muttered, and his eyes closed, whilst swiftly a veil appeared to descend over his memory, and light drops of perspiration formed on his brow. There was a singing in his ears, and suddenly, a vague space, terrible in its extent, unrolled before his closed eyes.
But this state of weakness, bordering almost on a swoon, lasted only a few seconds; and a deep sigh escaped his bosom.