36
CRAKDOS.

youth in this madness, and, young yet, looked for noth-
ing save a death in a hospital and a pauper's unowned
f rave—men who had flung away high birth, high gifts,
igh chances, and came here to wear out the few last
hours of dishonored lives—men with eyes in which the
wasted genius of a mighty mind looked wistfully out
through the bloodshot mists of a drunkard's sight—men
who had the trackers of turf-law or of social law in
their trail, and, hiding for very life, knew no nest surer
than this foul one -all these were here in the tawdry
glitter of the flaring gas-jets. And there were women,
too—some young, some fearfully young—loveless and
rouged, and hacking bitter coughs, or laughing
ghastly laughs, playing, playing, playing insatiate,
with the thirsty, eager, devilish glare aching in their
painted eyes.
Among them stood Chandos.
The look which had set on his face the night that he
had left Clarencieux had never left it; its glorious
beauty survived the ravages of misery, the gaunt
sleeplessness of a gamester's days, the wreck of all
greater, better, higher things in him. Nothing could
stamp it out utterly; but it had something more fear-
ful than any one of the other faces crowded round
them, though they would have furnished a painter
with a thousand dreams for the Purgatorio, though
they would have given an artist a throng of hope-for-
gotten, devil-tortured wretches fettered in the bottom-
less circle of Dante's Antenora. It survived to show
all that he had been—to mark more utterly all he had
become.
For he had fallen very low.
To meet his ruin, he had risen with the haughty
pride, the reckless courage, of his race—risen to front
it with a calmness and a force that none had looked for
in him. He had met calamity greatly; he had been
tempted to sell his honor for passion's sake, and he
had repulsed the temptation; he had been allured
to evade justice, and secure comparative peace, by
acting a lie to the world; he had refused, and had
given up ail, to remain with a stainless honesty and a
conscience uncondemned. He had done these things
with a sudden power of will, a sudden steel-knit
strength of resolve, that had sprung in the instant of
their need, ghuits full-armed, from the voluptuous un-
heeding indolence and indulgence of his life. But
characters cannot change in a day; endurance may
be forged hard in the flame of adversity, but it will
give way many a time first, and melt and writhe and
bend and break at last. When all had been done, all
ended, all sacrificed, all lost, the force which had sus-
tained him had broken down, the utter reaction fol-
lowed.
The habits of his life had left him with no shield, the
teinper of his creeds had left him with no shelter
against the storm that had burst over him. His only
knowledge had been how to enjoy; none had ever
taught him how to suffer. A limitless indulgence had
been the master of his existence; he had no compre-
hension of calamity. With latent greatness he had
dominant weakness; as the limbs that lie ever on
couches of down are enervated and sinewless, so his
nature, that had basked ever in the warmth and the light
of enjoyment, had no stamina to bear the crushing
desolation that struck all from his hands at one blow.
In the moment of emergence, of temptation, he had
risen equal to it, risen above it, and been great; in the
darkness that followed, in the darkness in which he
was driven out into exile, stripped, mocked, aban-
doned, left in beggared solitude, to drift to his grave as
he would, he sank under the burden that he bore. A
strong man might have gone down powerless under the
accumulated anguish, the blasted devastation of such
ix fate. He who had known nothing but the cares s of
fortune from his birth, he who had all the loathing of
pain and of deformity of the Achœan nature, he who had
never felt a desire unfulfilled, a command unaccom-
plished, he who had been pliant to frailty, yielding to
effeminacy, could have no sustaining force to enable
him to face and to contend with the destruction that
smote him to thé earth. All who had kissed his feet
forsook him as though he were plague-stricken; there
was little marvel that he forsook himself.
He seemed to walk like a blind man through a starless
night; he had neither sight nor knowledge; all that was
left to him was the consciousness of misery, the power
to suffer; the power to endure was dead. He drifted
senselessly on, tar on evil roads, far towards the mur-
der in him of all that he had once been. He lived in
infinite wretchedness, and the very memory of all
better things died out in him. There is no arrest in a
downward road. In the way of honor and honesty,
and every holier thought and loftier effort, life piles
obstacles breast high; but in descent there is no
barrier, down the ice-slope there is no pause, till the
broken limbs are dashed to pieces in the black crevasse
below.
When his last step had passed the threshold of his
home, he had left all likeness of what he once had been.
There the proud blood of his race had taken the simu-
lance of strength, and had upheld in him some likeness
©f their honor, of their power, of their grandeur, even
beneath the strokes of his adversity; but once passed
forever from Clarencieux, the only influence that had
sustained him was gone; he fell without an effort. His
foe might have been consoled for the one failure which
had saved the woods and the stones of his hatred from
destruction, had he seen how courage and reason and
genius and manhood were perishing with the body and
the soul of the man he had betrayed.
In the sheer instinct for covert in which the hunted
animal unconsciously finds his lair, he had made his
way to the safe solitude and secrecy of a great city.
He shunned every sign, every sight, that could recall
the world he had left to him, or him to it. The place of
his refuge was known to none ; it was hidden among the
innumerable roofs of a close quarter; it was quitted
only at night or in the earliest gray of the morning, and
quitted then only for the gambling-dens. There was
not a creature with him or near him thf he had known
or loved, save his dog. The animal never left him; he
would lie at his feet in the ganring-hells, or would wait
all day and all night outside tha doors ; he would crouch
down by him on the cold and cheerless bed of some
wretched lodging, as he had done under the silken
hangings of a palace; he would watch with ever-wake-
ful eyes by his side where he was stretched in the stupor
of an opiate or the heaviness of brandy-lulled sleep.
The love even of the dog was precious to Chandos in
his desolation; as far as lie noted or foit anything, he
was grateful for it. But he noted little. A burning
fever consumed him at times; at all others he was sunk
in a lethargy more dangerous for his reason than even
the oblivion of opium-dreams.   The loss of lands, of
wealth, of power, he would have met with the courage
of race and of manhood; it was the desertion of every
creature he had aided, of every life he had loved, it
was the Judas-betrayal of all he had trusted, that had
killed all strength and all life in him.
He lived in intense wretchedness; the little gold he
had on his person was not so much as he had spent on
a woman's bracelet, on an hour's entertainment. The
absolute fangs of want might be upon him in a single
day. He who had feasted emperors more brilliantly
than they reigned in their own courts, and who had
only spoken a wish to have it fulfilled as by enchant-
ment, might any day, want actually bread. Every
thing around him, everything touched or seen or heard,
was such as would have been loathsome and unendura-
ble to his voluptuous and fastidious habits a few short
weeks before: yet these he was barely conscious of;
he was lost in the stupefaction of a misery too great to
have any other sense awake in it. Now and then he
would glance with a shudder round the places to which
he wandered ; now and then he would turn sickening
from the food offered him ; more often all things passed
him unnoted, and in his eyes there came gradually the
lustreless dreamy vacancy w-hich presages the rupture
of the reason, the dulling of the brain. For hours he
would lie prostrated. When he rose it would only be to
drag his limbs wearily out into the night and go to the
gaming-hells, where intoxication as sure, and even yet
more deadly, was to be found, where alone he gained
such gold as sufficed to keep life in him, and to give
him a stake to cast again.
Strangely enough, the temptress favored him. Haz-
ard often allures her prey with that merciless mercy,
and fills his hands only to hold him closer in her coils.
He won enough to keep life in him—such as life was
now.
This was the issue to which his career had come; this
was the fate to which he, who in his bright visionary
childhood had vowed to rival in his nation's story
the chivalrous honor of an Arthur's fame, had come ;
his pride trampled out, his genius drowned in drugs,
his waking hours consumed in the gambler's delirium,
almost all manhood slain in him. The Hebrew's
thought was right : his enemy's work on him was worse
tkan murder. It was a terrible abasement, a terrible
surrender; itwas frailty, cowardice, suicide; but the
storm had beaten down on his once proud head till it
hung in a slave s shame. Existence had grown so
hideous to him that he sunk beneath its ceaseless tor-
ture, longing alone for death.
Those who have from early years been tried in the
fires of affliction may grow the sterner, firmer, more
highly tempered for it, like the wrought steel; but
those to whom it has been wholly unknown in the soft
sensuousness of a joyous life, stagger and fall swoon-
ing at the first intolerable breath of its blasting fur-
nace. When a mortal is bound to the agony of Pro-
metheus, the man may well succumb where the god
could scarce endure.
Chandos stood now amidst the crowd about the play-
tables, in companionship with much of all that was
worst and most desperate in Paris. He did not know
them ; he scarcely knew how vile the character of
many round him was. In the brilliance and the aristo-
cratic exclusion of the life he had until now lived, he
had been as ignorant of the world without his charmed
circle, he had been as ignorant of all depravity that
was unrefined, of all vices that were hidden away with
poverty and criminality, as any one of the fair patri-
cian women of the courts. His license had been the
license of a graceful Catullus ; his sins had been the
soft sins of an elegant Sardanapalus; he knew nothing
of the ignominy of great cities; he knew nothing of the
coarse criminality of such as those who harbored and
gambled there. He had strayed to its haunt by
chance; he returned again and again for the sake of
its secrecy, its opium-drugged wines, its reckless play.
He had no knowledge of the companions with whom
he was thrown; he was too utterly lost in his own
misery to note or to loathe them, whilst they looked
on, half awed, half curious, at one whom all Paris
knew by name and sight, whose history all knew also,
as he came among them day after day, night after
night, with that deathless beauty, that inextinguish-
able grace left in him, as they were left in the slaugh-
tered body of Alcibiades, to show how royal a blood
had run in his veins—how mighty, how majestic, how
hopeless a wreck was there.
Once one of them touched his arm—a young girl, not
twenty, but with long years of age and crime and
shameless shame under the scarlet rouge that glowed
her cheek, on the sallow, aching, burning brow from
which her gold-hued, flower-decked hair was pushed.
" Why are you here? You are as beautiful as a god!
Yon are not like us—yet."
He looked at her with a dull vacancy, an answered
nothing, as he filled a glass with brandy. She thrust
the opiate he had mixed with it back to his hand.
" Drink enough to kill yourself at once. Don't live to
be what you will be.   Such as you go to a madhouse."
Her words dreamily pierced through the semi-insen-
sibility of his brain: he set the opiate down undrunk—
for that once. He thought of the dead man who had
bade him meet his fate, whatever his fate became; but
the next moment he was again at the gaming-table,
the next moment only its mad tempting was remem-
bered.
He never heeded what he won, what he lost, though
he knew that the very food of the next day hung in
the hazard; he would have blessed the famine that
should have killed him. But he had the gamester's
instinct in him; the gamester's peril alone gave him an
oblivious intoxication; he never left it, except when he
wandered out to some sleeping-place and flung himself
down to sleep, wellnigh as lifelessly as the dead sleep,
hours, perhaps days through.
So months had gone with him. The splendid strength
and stamina of his frame resisted the ravages that
were consuming them; but what was worse than the
body perished: the mind decayed, swiftly, surely.
Months went by; he thought time would never end
The golden summer, the ruddy autumn, the bitterness
of early winter, had passed; he noted no change of
seasons; night and day were alike to him; he only
dully wondered how long life would curse him by leav-
ing its throb in his heart, the breath in his lips.
Re had played thirty-six hours now at a stretch,
among the painted women and the haggard men who
filled this pandemonium. He had played on till he had
lost all—the only time that he had ever done so: the
last, franc was staked and swept away. He stood
blankly gazing down at the tables: he felt that the
means of gaining the one intoxication that was precious
to him was gone, he had no remembrance that it
turned him on the streets a beggar. The eager throngs,
seeing the card pass without his stake being laid on it,
pushed fiercely, ravenously, to get his nearer place.
He let them take it, moving as a somnambulist, and
made his way out down the staircase and through the
lefw, masked side door that alone lent admittance to
the gambling-rooms: the face of the house was merely
a fruiterer's and a tobacconist's shops. He went out
mechanically ; he knew he must get more gold or go
without this, which had become the single craving
necessity of life. Where? He who had owned the aris-
tocracies of whole nations as his friends, and had given
to all who asked, as though the world were his, had
not a shilling now to get him bread.
He walked on aimlessly, unheeding the snow which
poured down on his bare head, the cutting north wind
that blew like an ice-blast. It was between three and
four in the morning; there was scarce a soul abroad.
In the quarter where he was few carriages ever rolled,
and the thieves and revellers who filled it were mostly
housed in some den or another in the inclement wea-
ther. The dog followed him closely; otherwise he was
almost alone in the tortuous, endless streets, whose
windings he took without knowing whither they led
him. The bitter rush of the wind lifted the masses of
his hair, the sleet drove in his eyes, the cold chilled
him to the bone ; he was adrift in the streets of Paris,
without a sou to get him food or bed—he who a few
months before bad reigned there in a splendor passing
the splendor of princes !
He longed for death—longed as never man yet
longed for life. The unspeakable physical misery
alone passed his strength; to the nerves that had
shrunk from pain, to the senses that had been steeped
in every pleasure, to the tastes that had loathed un-
sightliness as a torture, to the habits that had been
enervated in all the richness of enjoyment the wretch-
edness that was now his portion was horrible beyond
the utterance. He who had never known what an
hour's suffering, what a moment's denial, were, now
endured cold, and exposure, and need of food, and all
the racking pangs of want and fever, like any house-
less beggar starving in the night.
He wandered on and on—still always in the same
quarter, still always keeping, by sheer instinct, far
Irom all that he had once known, far from all that
had so lately seen him in the magnificence of his
reign. He wandered on, under the lowering walls
of pent-up dwellings, through the driving of the
slowly-falling snow, against the cutting breath of the
ice-chill air. A strange faiutness stole on him, a
strange numbness seized his limbs; he began to lose all
sense of the keen blasts that blew against him ; the inten-
sity of cold began to yield place to a dreamy exhaustion
and prostration, half weary, half soothing; he felt sleep
stealing on him—deep as death. He had no wish to
resist no power to overcome it; the languor stole over
all his frame, his limbs failed him ; he sank down and
stretched himself out as on some welcome bed, with a
heavy sigh, lying there on the snow-covered ground,
with the snow falling on his closed eyes and the wind
winding among his hair. The dog couched down and
pressed its silky warmth against his breast; profound
rest stole on him ; he knew no more.
CHAPTER II.
There was intense solitude in the. dark, cheerless
night; the snow drifted noiseless down; now and then
the wild winds broke and howled with a hollow moan;
all else was very still—still as the starless, ink-black
skies that bent above. One shadow alone moved
through the gloom that a yellow lamp-light here and
there only served 10 make more impenetrable—a
shadow frail, bent, delicate as a woman's, feeble as
that of age—the shadow of a cripple.
He dragged himself along with slow and painful
effort: when he passed under one of the lamps, its
glare shone on a face fair and spiritual, with great dark
dreaming eyes, that looked out at the. snow-flakes
wearily—the face of Guido Lulli. The fragile, helpless,
pain-worn Provençal, who shuddered from cold as a
young fawn will shudder in it, and who had barely till
now quitted the chamber where he wove his melodious
fancies and forgot a world with which he could have
no share, was out in the bitterness of the winter's night,
on a quest that his fidelity had never slackened in
through many months of vain toil and fruitless search.
The search was ended now.
His foot touched the outflung arm of the form that
lay prostrate, half on the stone of the steps on which it
had sunk, half on the road to which the limbs had been
stretched in the strange peace and languor which had
come with the slumber of cold and fasting.
The snow had fallen faster and heavily in the last few
moments; it covered the hands, and was shed white
and thick upon the uncovered hair and upturned brow.
A lamp burned just above; its flicker, glowing dully
through the raw gray mist, shone on the death-like
calm of the features in the breathless rest of sleep
from which few ever waken. Lulli stooped and looked,
then, with a great cry, sank down on his knees beside
the senseless form, fie knew it in a glance, all changed
though it was; his search was over.
The dog lifted his head and gave a moaning of recog-
nition, half of joy, half of entreaty; but he would not
stir from where he crouched on his master's breast,
lending with his warm breath and his curly hair and
his massive strength such aid and protection as he
could against the blasts of the storm and the chills of
the night.   If any life lingered, he had saved it.
" My master ! Found at last, and found—O God ! too
late!" cried Lulli, as he strove, all weak and feeble as
he was, to raise the prostrate form in his arms, to draw
the limbs from the road, to rest the head against his
bosom, to dash the snow from the wet hair, and to
chafe the stagnant dullness of the frozen hands.
" Monseigneur, monseigneur ! is it thus with thee?"
murmured the Provencal in the loving sweetness of his
Southern tongue, while the great tears coursed down
his cheeks and fell fast as the snow-flakes on the brow
and eyes of Chandos—the brow that was contracted
even in senselessness as with an unbearable pain, tlie
eyes that were closed so heavily, so wearily, the long
thick lashes lying on the cheek white as the snow-cov-
ered stone on which it had been resting.
The musician loved him with a tenderness intense and
enduring; and there was something that might have
moved a heart far less warm than the lonely cripple's
in the sight of the magnificent limbs stretched lifeless
as a corpse, of the drooped head that hung like the
head of the dead, of the hair that women had loved to
toy with, dank and dogged with moisture, and of the
features, only of late so brilliant with genius and with
life, haggard, colorless, and drawn as by death, in th»
tawny flickering glare of the swinging lamp above-