Transcribed from the 1903 Archibald Constable & Co. edition byDavid Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
The name of Henry Ryecroft never became familiar to what is calledthe reading public. A year ago obituary paragraphs in the literarypapers gave such account of him as was thought needful: the date andplace of his birth, the names of certain books he had written, an allusionto his work in the periodicals, the manner of his death. At thetime it sufficed. Even those few who knew the man, and in a measureunderstood him, must have felt that his name called for no further celebration;like other mortals, he had lived and laboured; like other mortals, hehad entered into his rest. To me, however, fell the duty of examiningRyecroft’s papers; and having, in the exercise of my discretion,decided to print this little volume, I feel that it requires a wordor two of biographical complement, just so much personal detail as maypoint the significance of the self-revelation here made.
When first I knew him, Ryecroft had reached his fortieth year; fortwenty years he had lived by the pen. He was a struggling man,beset by poverty and other circumstances very unpropitious to mentalwork. Many forms of literature had he tried; in none had he beenconspicuously successful; yet now and then he had managed to earn alittle more money than his actual needs demanded, and thus was enabledto see something of foreign countries. Naturally a man of independentand 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, certainlynot 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 acalm, contented life. Only after several years of friendship wasI able to form a just idea of what the man had gone through, or of hisactual existence. Little by little Ryecroft had subdued himselfto a modestly industrious routine. He did a great deal of merehack-work; he reviewed, he translated, he wrote articles; at long intervalsa volume appeared under his name. There were times, I have nodoubt, when bitterness took hold upon him; not seldom he suffered inhealth, 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, takingthe day’s toil as a matter of course, and rarely grumbling overit.
Time went on; things happened; but Ryecroft was still laborious andpoor. In moments of depression he spoke of his declining energies,and evidently suffered under a haunting fear of the future. Thethought of dependence had always been intolerable to him; perhaps theonly boast I at any time heard from his lips was that he had never incurreddebt. It was a bitter thought that, after so long and hard a strugglewith unkindly circumstance, he might end his life as one of the defeated.
A happier lot was in store for him. At the age of fifty, justwhen his health had begun to fail and his energies to show abatement,Ryecroft had the rare good fortune to find himself suddenly releasedfrom toil, and to enter upon a period of such tranquillity of mind andcondition as he had never dared to hope. On the death of an acquaintance,more his friend than he imagined, the wayworn man of letters learntwith astonishment that there was bequeathed to him a life annuity ofthree hundred pounds. Having only himself to support (he had beena widower for several years, and his daughter, an only child, was married),Ryecroft saw in this income something more than a competency. In a few weeks he quitted the London suburb where of late he had beenliving, and, turning to the par