Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/217

Rh stumbled upon it in the luckiest manner. I was at the hotel when"

The word "suicide" pierced Master's unconsciousness like a bright sword. He was oblivious to the rest. Burress's copy was the first to which he gave his whole mind. It was an account of the suicide of a man who seemed to have everything needful to make him happy—reputation, namely, and wealth, a handsome, accomplished wife and promising children. "No cause," ran the reporter's conventional phrase, "can be assigned for the rash act." If this man had found life a vain thing, what, he asked, could it hold of good for him? And the idea of suicide, once suggested to him, grew and waxed strong and became a resolve. Then, suddenly, self-disgust seized him. What good resolution, he asked himself savagely, had ever been kept by him? He was weak, he was a coward, he would never have the nerve

As he pondered this other man's obituary, he wondered in bitterness of spirit what the account of his own death would be—brief, he knew, and good-natured, but in every line, he foresaw, breathing contempt. And he rebelled against this imaginary notice with the rebellion of a man who, though he has failed, knows himself better than many who succeed. There is no hatred like that of the unjustly blamed for the unjustly praised. He cursed the editor and proprietor of the Dawn, who, though he was cruel and unscrupulous, yet prospered through the canny virtue of sobriety. That the man had any virtue whatever was perhaps, after all, where lay the sting. A passion of hate against this cool calculator of the value of respectability blazed in him. With the intensity of a strong fire swept by wind, he wished that he might show this man to the world as he was, avenge his own wrongs, drive a poisoned javelin at his enemy's heart even from the door-sill of death, and leave behind him as he stepped across it at least a revenge