Only one gift had been denied him--the gift of sleep. By whatever means he might weary himself in the day--in study, in sport, in recreation, or in the business of the realm--night found him sleepless, and all the dark hours the lights burned in his bedchamber and in his library, as he would pace from one to the other, with eyes tragically awake and brain torturingly alert and clear.
Every means known to science by which to bring sleep to the eyes of sleepless men had been tried in vain. Learned physicians from all parts of the world had come to my lord's castle, and had gone thence, confessing that their skill had availed nothing. All strange and terrible drugs that have power over the spirit of man had failed to conquer those stubborn eyelids. My lord still paced from his bedchamber to his library, from his library to his bedchamber--sleepless.
[Illustration: A SUDDEN STRANGE NEW LIGHT WOULD SHINE OUT OF ITS PAGES]
Sometimes in his anguish he had thrown himself on his knees in prayer before a God whom he had not always remembered--the God who giveth His beloved sleep--but his prayers had remained unanswered; and in his darkest moments he had dreamed of snatching by his own hands that sleep perpetual of which a great Latin poet he loved had sung. Often, as he paced his library, he would say over and over to himself, _Nox est perpetua una dormienda_--and in the still night the old words would often sound like soft dark voices calling him away into the endless night of the endless sleep. But he was not the man to take that way of escape. No; whatever the suffering might be, he would fight it out to the end, and so he continued sleepless, trying this resource and that, but, most of all, that first and last resource--courage. It is seldom that courage fails to wrest for us some recompense from the hardest situation, and the sleepless man, as night after night he fought with his fate, did not miss such hard-wrung rewards. Often, as in the deepest hush of the night he wearily took up some great old book of philosopher or poet familiar to him from his youth, a sudden strange new light would shine out of its pages, as of some inner radiance of truth which he had missed in his daylight reading. At such times an exaltation would come over him, and it would almost seem as though the curse upon him was really a blessing of initiation into the world of a deeper wisdom, the gate of which is hidden by the glare of the sun. In the daylight the eternal voices are lost in the transitory clamor of human business; it is only when the night falls, and the stars rise, and the noise of men dies down like the drone of some sleeping insect, that the solemn thoughts of God may be heard.