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 fancy one hears the midnight
Fates busily stirring their embryos. The lamp glowed mildly on the bust