I do not defend the gambler: God forbid! I am merely endeavouring to present a psychological explanation of the very common phenomenon, which people generally regard as produced only by some innate wickedness. The gambler knows the folly of his act: no one so well! He knows that the bank must win, and in his cooler moments will demonstrate the matter clearly to you. But then comes this seductive imagination, like a syren, picturing to him gorgeous realities: he is dazzled, fascinated, and succumbs.
To resist imagination, to trample down temptation, a man needs strength of will; but this is precisely the quality men are most deficient in; and here, as almost everywhere, we find that vice is not, as Plato says, ignorance, but weakness!
Cecil held out manfully against temptation, and everyone believed him cured. No one knew what was constantly passing in his mind, or they would not have been so secure.
Meanwhile Blanche had passed safely through her blissful trial, and a little girl was nestled at her side. The joy and rapture of the happy parents, the delight of Rose, the pride of Vyner, and the supreme indifference of Mrs. Vyner, may well be conceived. Little Rose Blanche, that was her name, was more welcomed, and more caressed than if she had come into the world to preserve great estates from passing into other hands; and how she escaped being killed by the excess of attention and variety of advice, is only another illustration of the mysterious escapes of infancy: a period when it would seem some good genii must be always on the alert to prevent the ever imminent catastrophe. There is said to be a special god who looks after drunkards, and preserves them in their helpless state; but what are the perils of a drunkard to the perils of an infant surrounded with nurses, relations, and female friends?
Rose Blanche throve, however, and grew into a dimply, rosy babe enough, incomparably more beautiful than any other babe ever seen, as mother, father, nurse, and aunt incessantly testified. It did squall a little, to be sure, and Cecil who had irritable nerves could not be brought to consider that musical. But men! what do they know of babies?
My dear madam, answer me frankly, did you ever know a man who was worth listening to on that subject? Did you ever meet with one whose head was not crammed with absurd notions thereupon? Is not your husband, in particular, characterized by the most preposterous incapacity—is he not fidgety, crotchety, absurd? I knew it.
Let me not, therefore, admit one word of Cecil's respecting Rose Blanche, who promised to have more beauty, intelligence, and heart, than any other infant then sprawling in long clothes, or then looking with profound impenetrable calmness upon the wondrous universe to which it had been so recently introduced.
A beam of sunshine had been let into the existence of Blanche and Cecil, a beam which stretching far out into the future gilded the distant horizon, so that they, and all, pronounced great happiness in store for them. The exquisite expression of maternal love made Blanche incomparably beautiful; and Cecil, as he watched her gazing downwards on the infant at her breast, in that deep stillness of seraphic love, whose calm intensity Raphael, alone has succeeded in pourtraying,—would bend forward and press his lips upon her forehead chastened, purified, and exalted. In those moments he was another man; ennui fled, discouragement was conquered, and the cards were not before his mind's eye.