Alwyn looked up--his lips quivered.
"Poet--poet!" he murmured--"why taunt me with the name?" He started upright in his chair--"Let me tell you all," he said suddenly; "you may as well know what has made me the useless wreck I am; though perhaps I shall only weary you."
"Far from it," answered Heliobas gently. "Speak freely--but remember I do not compel your confidence."
"On the contrary, I think you do!" and again that faint, half- mournful smile shone for an instant in his deep, dark eyes, "though you may not be conscious of it. Anyhow I feel impelled to unburden my heart to you: I have kept silence so long! You know what it is in the world, ... one must always keep silence, always shut in one's grief and force a smile, in company with the rest of the tormented, forced-smiling crowd. We can never be ourselves-- our veritable selves--for, if we were, the air would resound with our ceaseless lamentations! It is HORRIBLE to think of all the pent-up sufferings of humanity--all the inconceivably hideous agonies that remain forever dumb and unrevealed! When I was young,--how long ago that seems! yes, though my actual years are taut thirty, I feel an alder-elde of accumulated centuries upon me--when I was young, the dream of my life was Poesy. Perhaps I inherited the fatal love of it from my mother--she was a Greek-and she had a subtle music in her that nothing could quell, not even my father's English coldness. She named me Theos, little guessing what a dreary sarcasm that name would prove! It was well, I think, that she died early."
"Well for her, but perhaps not so well for you," said Heliobas with a keen, kindly glance at him.
Alwyn sighed. "Nay, well, for us both,--for I should have chafed at her loving restraint, and she would unquestionably have been disappointed in me. My father was a conscientious, methodical business man, who spent all his days up to almost the last moment of his life in amassing money, though it never gave him any joy so far as I could see, and when at his death I became sole possessor of his hardly-earned fortune, I felt far more sorrow than satisfaction. I wished he had spent his gold on himself and left me poor, for it seemed to me I had need of nothing save the little I earned by my pen--I was content to live an anchorite and dine off a crust for the sake of the divine Muse I worshipped. Fate, however, willed it otherwise,--and though I scarcely cared for the wealth I inherited, it gave me at least one blessing--that of perfect independence. I was free to follow my own chosen vocation, and for a brief wondering while I deemed myself happy, ... happy as Keats must have been when the fragment of 'Hyperion' broke from his frail life as thunder breaks from a summer-cloud. I was as a monarch swaying a sceptre that commanded both earth and heaven; a kingdom was mine-a kingdom of golden ether, peopled with shining shapes Protean,--alas! its gates are shut upon me now, and I shall enter it no more!"