I 'm
prepared for failure. It won't be a disappointment, simply because I
shan't survive it. The end of my work shall be the end of my life. When
I have played my last card, I shall cease to care for the game. I 'm not
making vulgar threats of suicide; for destiny, I trust, won't add
insult to injury by putting me to that abominable trouble. But I have a
conviction that if the hour strikes here," and he tapped his forehead,
"I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a cloud! For the past
ten days I have had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming
before my eyes. My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my
imagination as motionless as the phantom ship in the Ancient Mariner!"
Rowland listened to this outbreak, as he often had occasion to listen to
Roderick's heated monologues, with a number of mental restrictions. Both
in gravity and in gayety he said more than he meant, and you did him
simple justice if you privately concluded that neither the glow of
purpose nor the chill of despair was of so intense a character as his
florid diction implied. The moods of an artist, his exaltations
and depressions, Rowland had often said to himself, were like the
pen-flourishes a writing-master makes in the air when he begins to set
his copy.
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