Diana Tempest, Volume III

Diana Tempest.
By Mary Cholmondeley, Author of The Danvers Jewels, Sir Charles Danvers, etc.
In Three Volumes. Vol. III.
London: Richard Bentley & Son, Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen. 1893. (All rights reserved.)
Time and chance are but a tide. Burns.
BETWEEN aspiration and achievement there is no great gulf fixed. God does not mock His children by putting a lying spirit in the mouth of their prophetic instincts. Only the faith of concentrated endeavour, only the stern years which must hold fast the burden of a great hope, only the patience strong and meek which is content to bow beneath the fatigue of a long and distant purpose; only these stepping-stones, and no gulf impassable by human feet, divide aspiration from achievement.
To aspire is to listen to the word of command. To achieve is to obey, and to continue to obey, that voice. It is given to all to aspire. Few allow themselves to achieve. John had begun to see that.
If he meant to achieve anything, it was time he put his hand to the plough. He had listened and learned long enough.
My time has come, he said to himself, as he sat alone in the library at Overleigh on the first day of the new year. I am twenty-eight. I have been 'promising' long enough. The time of promise is past. I must perform, or the time of performance will pass me by.
He knit his heavy brows.
I must act, he said to himself, and I cannot act. I must work, and I cannot work.
John was conscious of having had—he still had—high ambitions, deep enthusiasms. Yet lo! all his life seemed to hinge on the question whether Di would become his wife. Who has not experienced, almost with a sense of traitorship to his own nature, how the noblest influences at work upon it may be caught up into the loom of an all-absorbing personal passion, adding a new beauty and dignity to the fabric, but nevertheless changing for the time the pattern of the life?