And
the spirit on which he would have spent his hatred was not here or
there, as an embodied faction, but everywhere as an intangible
influence. The acqua tofana of his enemies had pervaded every fibre of
the state.
The mist of anguish lifted, he saw himself alone among ruins. For a
moment Fulvia's glowing faith had hung between him and a final vision of
the truth; and as his convictions weakened he had replaced them with an
immense pity, an all-sufficing hope. Sentimental verbiage: he saw it
clearly now. He had been the dupe of the old word-jugglery which was
forever confounding fact and fancy in men's minds. For it was
essentially an age of words: the world was drunk with them, as it had
once been drunk with action; and the former was the deadlier drug of the
two. He looked about him languidly, letting the facts of life filter
slowly through his faculties. The sources of energy were so benumbed in
him that he felt like a man whom long disease had reduced to
helplessness and who must laboriously begin his bodily education again.
Hate was the only passion which survived, and that was but a deaf
intransitive emotion coiled in his nature's depths.
Sickness at last brought its obliteration. He sank into gulfs of
weakness and oblivion, and when the rise of the tide floated him back to
life, it was to a life as faint and colourless as infancy. Colourless
too were the boundaries on which he looked out: the narrow enclosure of
white walls, opening on a slit of pale spring landscape.
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