The dead woman was nothing to him. He had not once thought of the youth that had perished in her; of the laughter that hunger had hushed forever on the colorless lips; of the passion blushes that had died out forever on the ashen cheeks; of the caressing hands of mother and of lover that must have wandered among that curling hair; of the children that should have slept on that white breast so smooth and cold beneath his hand. For these he cared nothing, and thought as little. The dead girl for him had neither sex nor story; and he had studied all phases and forms of death too long to be otherwise than familiar with them all. Yet a certain glacial despair froze his heart as he left her body lying there in the flicker of the struggling moonbeams, and, himself, pacing to and fro in his solitude, suffered a greater bitterness than death in his doom of poverty and of obscurity.
The years of his youth had gone in fruitless labor, and the years of his manhood were gliding after them, and yet he had failed so utterly to make his mark upon his generation that he could only maintain his life by the common toil of the common hand-laborer, and, if he died on the morrow, there would not be one hand stretched out to save any one work of his creation from the housewife's fires or the lime-burner's furnace.
Cold to himself as to all others, he said bitterly in his soul, "What is Failure except Feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim wildly and weakly?"
He told himself that harsh and inexorable truth a score of times, again and again, as he walked backward and forward in the solitude which only that one dead woman shared.
He told himself that he was a madman, a fool, who spent his lifetime in search and worship of a vain eidolon. He told himself that there must be in him some radical weakness, some inalienable fault, that he could not in all these years find strength enough to compel the world of men to honor him. Agony overcame him as he thought and thought and thought, until he scorned himself; the supreme agony of a strong nature that for once mistrusts itself as feebleness, of a great genius that for once despairs of itself as self-deception.
Had he been the fool of his vanities all his youth upward; and had his fellow-men been only wise and clear of sight when they had denied him and refused to see excellence in any work of his hand? Almost, he told himself, it must be so.
He paused by the open casement, and looked outward, scarcely knowing what he did. The mists were heavy; the air was loaded with damp exhalations; the country was profoundly still; above-head only a few stars glimmered here and there through the haze. The peace, the silence, the obscurity were abhorrent to him; they seemed to close upon him, and imprison him; far away were the lands and the cities of men that he had known, far away were all the color and the strength and the strain and the glory of living; it seemed to him as though he were dead also, like the woman on the trestle yonder; dead in some deep sea-grave where the weight of the waters kept him down and held his hands powerless, and shut his eyelids from all sight, while the living voices and the living footsteps of men came dimly on his ear from the world above: voices, not one of which uttered his name; footsteps, not one of which paused by his tomb.
It grew horrible to him—this death in life, to which in the freshness of manhood he found himself condemned.
"Oh, God!" he, who believed in no God, muttered half aloud, "let me be without love, wealth, peace, health, gladness, all my life long—let me be crippled, childless, beggared, hated to the latest end of my days. Give me only to be honored in my works; give me only a name that men cannot, if they wish, let die."
Whether any hearer greater than man heard the prayer, who shall say? Daily and nightly, through all the generations of the world, the human creature implores from his Creator the secrets of his existence, and asks in vain. There is one answer indeed; but it is the answer of all the million races of the universe, which only cry, "We are born but to perish; is Humanity a thing so high and pure that it should claim exemption from the universal and inexorable law?"