Little by little a disjointed remembrance came to him. He remembered that he had been famished in the coldness of the night, endured much torment of the body, had fallen headlong and lost his consciousness. This was all he could recall.
He looked stupidly for awhile at the burning logs; at the pile of brambles; at the flask of wine, and the simple stores of food. He looked at the gray closed window, through which a silvery daylight came. There was not a sound in the house; there was only the cracking of the wood and the sharp sealike smell of the smoking pine boughs to render the place different from what it had been when he last had seen it.
He could recall nothing, except that he had starved for many days; had suffered, and must have slept.
Suddenly his face burned with a flush of shame. As sense returned to him, he knew that he must have swooned from weakness produced by cold and hunger; that some one must have seen and succored his necessity; and that the food which he had half unconsciously devoured must have been the food of alms.
His limbs writhed and his teeth clinched as the thought stole on him.
To have gone through all the aching pangs of winter in silence, asking aid of none, only to come to this at last! To have been ready to die in all the vigor of virility, in all the strength of genius, only to be saved by charity at the end! To have endured, mute and patient, the travail of all the barren years, only at their close to be called back to life by aid that was degradation!
He bit his lips till the blood started, as he thought of it. Some eyes must have looked on him, in his wretchedness. Some face must have bent over him in his misery. Some other human form must have been near his in this hour of his feebleness and need, or this thing could never have been; he would have died alone and unremembered of man, like a snake in its swamp or a fox in its earth. And such a death would have been to him tenfold preferable to a life restored to him by such a means as this.
Death before accomplishment is a failure, yet withal may be great; but life paved by alms is a failure, and a failure forever inglorious.
So the shame of this ransom from death far outweighed with him the benefit.
"Why could they not let me be?" he cried in his soul against those unknown lives which had weighed his own with the fetters of obligation. "Rather death than a debt! I was content to die; the bitterness was passed. I should have known no more. Why could they not let me be!"