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Guy Darrell resumed the thread of solitary life at Fawley with a calmwhich was deeper in its gloom than it had been before. The experiment ofreturn to the social world had failed. The resolutions which had inducedthe experiment were finally renounced. Five years nearer to death, andthe last hope that had flitted across the narrowing passage to the grave,fallen like a faithless torch from his own hand, and trodden out by hisown foot.
It was peculiarly in the nature of Darrell to connect his objects withposterity—to regard eminence in the Present but as a beacon-height fromwhich to pass on to the Future the name he had taken from the Past. Allhis early ambition, sacrificing pleasure to toil, had placed its goal ata distance, remote from the huzzas of bystanders; and Ambition haltednow, baffled and despairing. Childless, his line would perish withhimself—himself, who had so vaunted its restoration in the land! Hisgenius was childless also—it would leave behind it no offspring of thebrain. By toil he had amassed ample wealth; by talent he had achieved asplendid reputation. But the reputation was as perishable as the wealth.Let a half-century pass over his tomb, and nothing would be left to speakof the successful lawyer the applauded orator, save traditionalanecdotes, a laudatory notice in contemporaneous memoirs—perhaps, atmost, quotations of eloquent sentences lavished on forgotten cases andobsolete debates—shreds and fragments of a great intellect, whichanother half-century would sink without a bubble into the depths of Time.He had enacted no laws—he had administered no state—he had composed nobooks. Like the figure on a clock, which adorns the case and has noconnection with the movement, he, so prominent an or nament to time, hadno part in its works. Removed, the eye would miss him for a while; but anation's literature or history was the same, whether with him or without.Some with a tithe of his abilities have the luck to fasten their names tothings that endure; they have been responsible for measures they did notnot invent, and which, for good or evil, influence long generations.They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period inprose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.But the orator, whose effects are immediate—who enthralls his audiencein proportion as he nicks the hour—who, were he speaking like Burkewhat, apart from the subject-matter, closet students would praise, must,like Burke, thin his audience, and exchange present oratorical successfor ultimate intellectual renown—a man, in short, whose oratory isemphatically that of the DEBATER is, like an actor, rewarded with a loudapplause and a complete oblivion. Waife on the village stage might winapplause no less loud, followed by oblivion not more complete.
Darrell was not blind to the brevity of his fame. In his previousseclusion he had been resigned to that conviction—now it saddened him.Then, unconfessed by himself, the idea that he might yet reappear inactive life, and do something which the world would not willingly letdie, had softened the face of that tranquil Nature from which he mustsoon now pass out of reach and sight. On the tree of Time he was a leafalready sear upon the bough—not an inscription graven into the rind.
Ever slow to yield to weak regrets—ever seeking to combat his ownenemies within—Darrell said to himself one night, while Fairthorn'sflute was breathing an air of romance through the melancholy walls: "Isit too late yet to employ this still busy