"I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other
problems. 'They will think me mad,' I thought. 'And suppose I
vanish now!--Amazing disappearance of a prominent politician!' That
weighed with me. A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses
weighed with me in that crisis."
Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking
slowly; "Here I am!" he said.
"Here I am!" he repeated, "and my chance has gone from me.
Three times in one year the door has been offered me--the door that
goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a
kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it,
Redmond, and it has gone--"
"How do you know?"
"I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to
the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say,
I have success--this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have
it." He had a walnut in his big hand. "If that was my success,"
he said, and crushed it, and held it out for me to see.
"Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying
me. For two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work
at all, except the most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is
full of inappeasable regrets. At nights--when it is less likely I
shall be recognised--I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder what
people would think of that if they knew.
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