Waited—for what? She did not know. She did not dare even to steal to him and touch his hand with such a timid caress as a beaten dog ventures to give the hand of the master who has driven it from him.
For even a beaten dog is a creature less humble and timid than a woman that loves and whose love is rejected.
He took up a palette ready set, and went to a blank space of canvas and began to cover it with shapes and shadows on the unconscious creative instinct of the surcharged brain. Faces and foliage, beasts and scrolls, the heads of gods, the folds of snakes, forms of women rising from flames and clouds, the flowers of Paradise blossoming amidst the corruption and tortures of Antenora. All were cast in confusion, wave on wave, shape on shape, horror with loveliness, air with flame, heaven with hell, in all the mad tumult of an artist's dreams.
With a curse he flung his brushes from him, and cast himself face downward on his bed of straw.
The riot of fever was in his blood. Famine, sleepless nights, unnatural defiance of all passions and all joys, the pestilence rife in the crowded quarter of the poor,—all these had done their work upon him. He had breathed in the foul air of plague-stricken places, unconscious of its peril; he had starved his body, reckless of the flight of time; he had consumed his manhood in one ceaseless, ruthless, and absorbing sacrifice; and Nature, whom he had thus outraged, and thought to outrage with impunity as mere bestial feebleness, took her vengeance on him and cast him here, and mocked him, crying,—
"A deathless name?—Oh, madman! A little breath on the mouths of men in all the ages to come?—Oh, fool! Hereafter you cry?—Oh, fool!—heaven and earth may pass away like a scroll that is burnt into ashes, and the future you live for may never come—neither for you nor the world. What you may gain—who shall say? But all you have missed, I know. And no man shall scorn me—and pass unscathed."
There came an old lame woman by laboriously bearing a load of firewood. She paused beside the threshold.
"You look yonder," she said, resting her eyes on the stranger crouching on the threshold. "Are you anything to that man?"
Silence only answered her.
"He has no friends," muttered the cripple. "No human being has ever come to him; and he has been here many months. He will be mad—very soon. I have seen it before. Those men do not die. Their bodies are too strong. But their brains go,—look you. And their brains go, and yet they live—to fourscore and ten many a time—shut up and manacled like wild beasts."