第1章

The name of Henry Ryecroft never became familiar to what is called the reading public.A year ago obituary paragraphs in the literary papers gave such account of him as was thought needful: the date and place of his birth, the names of certain books he had written, an allusion to his work in the periodicals, the manner of his death.

At the time it sufficed.Even those few who knew the man, and in a measure understood him, must have felt that his name called for no further celebration; like other mortals, he had lived and laboured;like other mortals, he had entered into his rest.To me, however, fell the duty of examining Ryecroft's papers; and having, in the exercise of my discretion, decided to print this little volume, Ifeel that it requires a word or two of biographical complement, just so much personal detail as may point the significance of the self-revelation here made.

When first I knew him, Ryecroft had reached his fortieth year; for twenty years he had lived by the pen.He was a struggling man, beset by poverty and other circumstances very unpropitious to mental work.Many forms of literature had he tried; in none had he been conspicuously successful; yet now and then he had managed to earn a little more money than his actual needs demanded, and thus was enabled to see something of foreign countries.Naturally a man of independent and rather scornful outlook, he had suffered much from defeated ambition, from disillusions of many kinds, from subjection to grim necessity; the result of it, at the time of which I am speaking, was, certainly not a broken spirit, but a mind and temper so sternly disciplined, that, in ordinary intercourse with him, one did not know but that he led a calm, contented life.Only after several years of friendship was I able to form a just idea of what the man had gone through, or of his actual existence.Little by little Ryecroft had subdued himself to a modestly industrious routine.He did a great deal of mere hack-work; he reviewed, he translated, he wrote articles; at long intervals a volume appeared under his name.There were times, I have no doubt, when bitterness took hold upon him; not seldom he suffered in health, and probably as much from moral as from physical over-strain; but, on the whole, he earned his living very much as other men do, taking the day's toil as a matter of course, and rarely grumbling over it.

Time went on; things happened; but Ryecroft was still laborious and poor.In moments of depression he spoke of his declining energies, and evidently suffered under a haunting fear of the future.The thought of dependence had always been intolerable to him; perhaps the only boast I at any time heard from his lips was that he had never incurred debt.It was a bitter thought that, after so long and hard a struggle with unkindly circumstance, he might end his life as one of the defeated.