“Who is he with the long white hair,” asked his companion, “who even now glanced up at these old towers with an expression so stern and so sad?”
“He who was once their heir,” replied Pride. “You see Timon Bardon, whom you and I disinherited through the power which we possessed over his father.”
“Have you not thereby lost the son?” asked Intemperance. “Would not the pride of wealth—”
He was rudely interrupted by his associate—“Know you not that there is also a pride of poverty?” he cried. “Have you forgotten that there is the acid fermentation as well as the vinous? Ha! ha! my influence is recognised over the rich and the great; but who knows—who knows,” he repeated, clenching his shadowy hand, “in how heavy a grasp I can hold down the poor! But I can no longer linger here,” continued Pride; “I must mingle with yon crowd of worshippers, even as they enter the house of prayer. Unless I keep close at the side of each, they may derive some benefit from the sermon, from forgetting to criticise the preacher.”
“And I,” exclaimed Intemperance, “must now away to do my work of death amongst such as never enter a house of prayer.”
And so the two evil spirits parted, each on his own dark errand. My tale deals only with Pride, and rather as his influence is seen in the actions and characters of the human beings to whom the preceding conversation related, than as possessing any distinct existence of his own. Let these three first chapters be regarded as a preface in dialogue, explaining the design of my little volume; or as a glimpse of the hidden clockwork which, itself unseen, directs the movements of everyday life. Most thankful should I be if such a glimpse could induce my reader to look nearer at home; if, when ubiquitous Pride speaks to the various characters in this tale, the reader should ask himself whether there be not something familiar in the tone of that voice, and with a searching glance examine whether his own soul be clogged with no link of the tyrant’s chain,—whether he himself be not a prisoner of Pride.