‘Which of us can say that? who has ever divined where the strength lay till the day of struggle called it forth? Chance, chance—she is the great goddess!’
‘I’d be sorry to think so,’ said Gerald resolutely.
‘Indeed, boy!’ cried the other, turning his large, full eyes upon the youth, and staring steadfastly at him; then passing his hand over his brow, he added, in a tone of much feeling: ‘And yet it is as I have said. Look at the portraits around us on these walls. There they are, great or infamous, as accident has made them. That fellow yonder, with that noble forehead and generous look, he stabbed the confessor who gave the last rites to his father, just because the priest had heard some tales to his disadvantage; a scrupulous sense of delicacy moved him—there was a woman’s name in it—and he preferred a murder to a scandal! There, too, there’s Marocchi, who poisoned his mother the day of her second marriage. Ask old Pippo if he ever saw a gentler-hearted creature: he lived here two years, and died of the Maremma fever, that he caught from a peasant whom he was nursing. And there again, that wild-looking fellow with the scarlet cap—he it was who stole the Medici jewels out of the Pitti to give his mistress, and killed himself afterwards when she deserted him. Weigh the good and evil of these men’s hearts, boy, and you have subtle weights if you can strike the balance for or against them. We are all but what good or evil fortune makes us, just as a landscape catches its tone from light; and what is glorious in sunshine is bleak and desolate and dreary beneath a leaden sky and lowering atmosphere!’
‘I’ll not believe it,’ said the boy boldly. ‘I have read of fellows that never showed the great stuff they were made of until adversity had called it forth. They were truly great!’
‘Truly great!’ repeated the other, with an intense mockery. ‘The truly great we never hear of. They die in workhouses or garrets—poor, dreary optimists, working out of their finespun fancies hopeful destinies for those who sneer at them.
The idols men call great are but the types of Force—mere Force. One day it is courage; another, it is money; another day, political craft is the object of worship. Come, boy,’ said he, in a lighter vein, ‘what have these worthy Jesuits taught you?’
‘Very different lessons from yours,’ said the youth stoutly. ‘They taught me to honour and reverence those set in authority over me.’
‘Good; and then——’
‘They taught me the principles of my faith; the creed of the Church.’
‘What Church?’