Gerald's white face looked whiter than usual. His eyes, in their hard stare, were very ugly.
"Still I can't understand," he said. "The critiques were, of course rather severe: but how can critiques kill a man?"
"And if you, being a reviewer yourself, Gerald, could only get to find out who the false-hearted hound was,--for it's thought to have been one fellow who penned the lot--you'd oblige me," put in Roland. "I'd repay him, as I've seen it done at Port Natal. His howling would be something fine."
"You do not yet entirely understand, I see, Gerald," sadly answered Ellen, paying no attention to Roland's interruption, while Gerald turned his shoulder upon him. "In one sense the reviews did not kill. They did not, for instance, strike Hamish dead at once, or break his heart with a stroke. In fact, you may think the expression, a broken heart, but a figure of speech, and in a degree of course it is so. But there are some natures, and his is one, which are so sensitively organized that a cruel blow shatters them. Had Hamish been stronger he might have borne it, have got over it in time; but he had been working beyond his strength; and I think also his strangely eager hope in regard to the book must have helped to wear out his frame. It was his first work, you know. When the blow came he had not strength to rally from it; mind and body were alike stricken down, and so the weakness set in and laid hold of him."
"What are these natures good for?" fiercely demanded Gerald, in a tone as if he were resenting some personal injury.
"Only for Heaven, as it seems to me," she gently answered.
Gerald rubbed his face; he could not get any colour into it, and there ensued a pause. Presently Ellen spoke again.
"I remember, when I was quite a girl, reading of a somewhat similar case in one of Bulwer Lytton's novels. A young artist painted a great picture--great to him--and insisted on being concealed in the room while a master came to judge of it. The judgment was adverse; not, perhaps, particularly harsh and cruel in itself, only sounding so to the painter; and it killed him. Not at the moment, Gerald; I don't mean that; he lived to become ill, and he went to Italy for his health, his heart gradually breaking. He never spoke of what the blow had been to him, or that it had crushed out his hope and life, but died hiding it. Hamish has never spoken."
"What I want to know is, where's the use of people being like this?" pursued Gerald. "What are they made for?"
"Scarcely for earth," she answered. "The too-exquisitely-refined gold is not meant for the world's coinage."