Sir Austin did not battle with the tempter. He took him into his bosom at
once, as if he had been ripe for him, and received his suggestions and
bowed to his dictates. Because he suffered, and decreed that he would
suffer silently, and be the only sufferer, it seemed to him that he was
great-minded in his calamity. He had stood against the world. The world
had beaten him. What then? He must shut his heart and mask his face; that
was all. To be far in advance of the mass, is as fruitless to mankind, he
reflected, as straggling in the rear. For how do we know that they move
behind us at all, or move in our track? What we win for them is lost; and
where we are overthrown we lie!

It was thus that a fine mind and a fine heart at the bounds of a nature
not great, chose to colour his retrogression and countenance his
shortcoming; and it was thus that he set about ruining the work he had
done. He might well say, as he once did, that there are hours when the
clearest soul becomes a cunning fox. For a grief that was private and
peculiar, he unhesitatingly cast the blame upon humanity; just as he had
accused it in the period of what he termed his own ordeal. How had he
borne that? By masking his face. And he prepared the ordeal for his son
by doing the same. This was by no means his idea of a man's duty in
tribulation, about which he could be strenuously eloquent.

But it was his instinct so to act, and in times of trial great natures
alone are not at the mercy of their instincts. Moreover it would cost him
pain to mask his face; pain worse than that he endured when there still
remained an object for him to open his heart to in proportion; and he
always reposed upon the Spartan comfort of bearing pain and being
passive. "Do nothing," said the devil he nursed; which meant in his case,
"Take me into you and don't cast me out." Excellent and sane is the
outburst of wrath to men, when it stops short of slaughter. For who that
locks it up to eat in solitary, can say that it is consumed? Sir Austin
had as weak a digestion for wrath, as poor Hippias for a green duckling.
Instead of eating it, it ate him. The wild beast in him was not the less
deadly because it did not roar, and the devil in him not the less active
because he resolved to do nothing.

He sat at the springs of Richard's future, in the forlorn dead-hush of
his library there, hearing the cinders click in the extinguished fire,
and that humming stillness in which one may