“Jasper Helwyze, at your service,” he added aloud, stepping in, and accepting courteously the only hospitality his poor young host could offer.
The dim light and shrouding cloak showed nothing but a pale, keen face, with dark penetrating eyes, and a thin hand, holding a paper on which the youth recognized the familiar words, “Felix Canaris.”
“My name! You came to help me? What good angel sent you, sir?” he exclaimed, with a thrill of hope,—for in the voice, the eye, the hand that held the card with such tenacious touch, he saw and felt the influence of a stronger nature, and involuntarily believed in and clung to it.
“Your bad angel, you might say, since it was the man who damned your book and refused the aid you asked of him,” returned the stranger, in a suave tone, which contrasted curiously with the vigor of his language. “A mere chance led me there to-day, and my eye fell upon a letter lying open before him. The peculiar hand attracted me, and Forsythe, being in the midst of your farewell denunciation, read it out, and told your story.”
“And you were laughing at my misery while I was making ready to end it?” said the youth, with a scornful quiver of the sensitive lips that uttered the reproach.
“We all laugh at such passionate folly when we have outlived it. You will, a year hence; so bear no malice, but tell me briefly if you can forget poetry, and be content with prose for a time. In plain words, can you work instead of dream?”
“I can.”
“Good! then come to me for a month. I have been long from home, and my library is neglected; I have much for you to do, and believe you are the person I want, if Forsythe tells the truth. He says your father was a Greek, your mother English, both dead, and you an accomplished, ambitious young man who thinks himself a genius, and will not forgive the world for doubting what he has failed to prove. Am I right?”
“Quite right. Add also that I am friendless, penniless, and hopeless at nineteen.”
A brief, pathetic story, more eloquently told by the starvation written on the pinched face, the squalor of the scanty garments, and the despair in the desperate eye, than by the words uttered with almost defiant bluntness.