BOOK III.

AMBITION.

"I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on, educe the man,
Who keeps one end in view makes all things serve."

ROBERT BROWNING.

CHAPTER XII.

ALAN WALCOTT.

Alan Walcott knew perfectly well that he had done a mad, if not an
unaccountable thing in writing his letter to Miss Campion. He knew it,
that is to say, after the letter was gone, for when he was writing it,
and his heart was breaking through the bonds of common-sense which
generally restrained him, he did not feel the difficulty of accounting
either for his emotions or for his action. The wild words, as he wrote
them, had for him not only the impress of paramount truth, but also the
sanction of his convictions and impulse at the moment. No stronger
excuse has been forthcoming for heroic deeds which have shaken the world
and lived in history.

Who amongst us all, when young and ardent, with the fire of generosity
and imagination in the soul, has not written at least one such letter,
casting reserve and prudence to the winds, and placing the writer
absolutely at the mercy of the man or woman who received it?

This man was a poet by nature and by cultivation; but what is the
culture of a poet save the fostering of a distempered imagination? I do
not mean the culture of a prize poet, or a poet on a newspaper staff, or
a gentleman who writes verses for society, or a professor of poetry, or
an authority who knows the history and laws of prosody in every tongue,
and can play the bard or the critic with equal facility. Alan Walcott
had never ceased to work in distemper, because his nature was
distempered to begin with, and his taste had not been modified to suit
the conventional canons of his critics. Therefore it was not much to be
wondered at if his prose poem to the woman he loved was a distempered
composition.

The exaltation of the mood in which he had betrayed himself to Lettice
was followed by a mood of terrible depression, and almost before it
would have been possible for an answer to reach him, even if she had sat
down and written to him without an hour's delay, he began to assure
himself that she intended to treat him with silent contempt--that his
folly had cost him not only her sympathy but her consideration, and that
there was no hope left for him.

He had indeed told her that he did not expect a reply; but now he
tortured himself with the belief that silence on her