er
consciousness of twenty years seemed compressed into those brilliant,
bitter hours. My lamp flickered. I rose with effort and supplied oil; it
would now burn till morning. The carriage came nearer. I knew that
Vannelle was in it. At last the heavy rumble ceased at the door.

A figure stood before me. The old fascination in the eyes; a soul
burning with lofty enthusiasm looked through and kindled them. But the
face,--it was ghastly, livid as the face of a leper: it was
spectral,--blanched and dried with the white flames of his exalted
vigils. Ah, black eyes, well may you shine in terrible triumph! The old
idolatry this man demanded of me would not be repelled. I gazed upon my
visitor as upon a phantom from another sphere, and knew no reckoning of
time. His magnetism was upon me; I could only crouch into myself--and
wait. At length the silence was broken.

"Charles Clifton, teacher of the people, listen that you may be taught!
For the last time I have come down into your world of passion and sense.
The impulses with which you vainly strive and wrestle are behind me.
Alone, alone, I have risen from the abysmal depths of personality. I
have struggled fiercely. I have also conquered."

The livid face showed no change. It suddenly came to me, that, by some
voluntary disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had
cut away the lusts for pleasure, fame, and influence. What woman would
kiss that ghastly cheek? What sycophant could fawn and smirk in that
chilly presence? The injunctions concerning the offending eye and hand
Vannelle had interpreted literally.

"I hold," he continued, "the noble prize of intellectual satisfaction
seized by effort. Multiply the self-satisfactions of earth by infinity,
and you may guess a little of the sublime contentment which wraps me
round! Does the best stage-trick of your liberal clergy help them to
anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into artistic forms of
skepticism? How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive
affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men?
How can you come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it
alone dogmatic and compulsive? Clifton, I pity you. I would rescue you
from this haze of thought and feeling,--I, who have even now discarded
Intelligence and enthroned Wisdom."

"I hope to be pardoned," I said,--"the current of this life sets so in
favor of Utility and the Practical; men long to be