Volume One—Chapter Seventeen.
Baulked.
“Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall,” is a good and safe maxim in other senses than the theological, for it goes to the very root of human nature.
Here was a man in the zenith of his strength, at an age when the fire of youth would be tempered and steeled by rare physical powers of endurance; a man to whose lot had befallen stirring and eventful experiences beyond the lot of most men, and in befalling had hardened; a man of cool judgment and keen, clear, reasoning powers far beyond his years; a man to whom the other sex would accord a full share of attention, and who hitherto has been utterly unsusceptible to any such excusable weakness, has hitherto never known a quickened pulse in response to soft glance or welcoming smile. And this man has now surrendered at sight—absolutely, and without the smallest reservation.
And it had all come about in a single day.
Just so. It is your apparent icicle that annihilates itself with the most startling rapidity when suddenly touched by the scorching beam of the unlooked-for sun. It is the unsusceptible one who goes down forehead to the earth, not pausing to spread rug or carpet in the way, when the self-constituted idol appears. And oh, how frequently too, not the feet only, but the head, the hands, and the heart of the image prove to be of the veriest clay!
To-morrow!
Who among us ever gives a thought to this commonplace word? Not, I mean, when we are passing through some momentous crisis of our lives, some care, some expectation for good or for ill, which may either make us, or crush us well-nigh out of existence. Not then, but when our lives are flowing on, smooth and undisturbed, then it is that we practically ignore the possibility of to-morrow bringing with it anything eventful, or being, in short, other than a mere twenty-four hours’ repetition of to-day.
To-morrow!