Mes frères! it is well for us that we are no seers! Were we cursed with prevision, could we know how, when the idle trifle of the present hour shall have been forged into a link of the past, it will stretch out and bind captive the whole future in its bonds, we should be paralysed, hopeless, powerless, old ere we were young! It is well for us that we are no seers. Were we cursed with second sight, we should see the white shroud breast-high above the living man, the phosphor light of death gleaming on the youthful radiant face, the feathery seed, lightly sown, bearing in it the germ of the upas-tree; the idle careless word, daily uttered, carrying in its womb the future bane of a lifetime; we should see these things till we sickened, and reeled, and grew blind with pain before the ghastly face of the Future, as men in ancient days before the loathsome visage of the Medusa!
Contretemps generally have some saving crumbs of consolation for those who laugh at fate, and look good-humouredly for them; life's only evil to him who wears it awkwardly, and philosophic resignation works as many miracles as Harlequin; grumble, and you go to the dogs in a wretched style; make mots on your own misery, and you've no idea how pleasant a trajet even drifting "to the bad" may become.
The statue that Strathmore at once moulded and marred was his life: the statue which we all, as we sketch it, endow with the strength of the Milo, the glory of the Belvedere, the winged brilliance of the Perseus! which ever lies at its best; when the chisel has dropped from our hands, as they grow powerless and paralysed with death; like the mutilated torso; a fragment unfinished and broken, food for the ants and worms, buried in the sands that will quickly suck it down from sight or memory, with but touches of glory and of value left here and there, only faintly serving to show what might have been, had we had time, had we had wisdom!
With which satirical reflection on his times and his order drifting through his mind, Strathmore's thoughts floated onward to a piece of statecraft then numbered among the delicate diplomacies and intricate embroglie of Europe, whose moves absorbed him as the finesses of a problem absorb a skilful chess-player, and from thence stretched onwards to his future, in which he lived, like all men of dominant ambition, far more than he lived in his present. It was a future brilliant, secure, brightening in its lustre, and strengthening in its power, with each successive year; a future which was not to him as to most wrapped in a chiaroscuro, with but points of luminance gleaming through the mist, but in whose cold glimmering light he seemed to see clear and distinct, as we see each object of the far-off landscape stand out in the air of a winter's noon, every thread that he should gather up, every distant point to which he should pass onward; a future singular and characteristic, in which state-power was the single ambition marked out, from which the love of women was banished, in which pleasure and wealth were as little regarded as in Lacedæmon, in which age would be courted, not dreaded, since with it alone would come added dominion over the minds of men, and in which, as it stretched out before him, failure and alteration were alike impossible. What, if he lived, could destroy a future that would be solely dependent on, solely ruled by, himself? By his own hand alone would his future be fashioned; would he hew out any shape save the idol that pleased him? When we hold the chisel ourselves, are we not secure to have no error in the work? Is it likely that our hand will slip, that the marble we select will be dark-veined, and brittle, and impure, that the blows of the mallet will shiver our handiwork, and that when we plan a Milo—god of strength—we shall but mould and sculpture out a Laocoön of torture? Scarcely; and Strathmore held the chisel, and, certain of his own skill, was as sure of what he should make of life as Benvenuto, when he bade the molten metal pour into the shape that he, master-craftsman, had fashioned, and gave to the sight of the world the Winged Perseus. But Strathmore did not remember what Cellini did—that one flaw might mar the whole!
In the little millefleurs-scented billet lay, unknown to its writer as to him, the turning-point of his life! God help us! what avail are experience, prescience, prudence, wisdom, in this world, when at every chance step the silliest trifle, the most commonplace meeting, an invitation to dinner, a turn down the wrong street, the dropping of a glove, the delay of a train, the introduction to an unnoticed stranger, will fling down every precaution, and build a fate for us of which we never dream? Of what avail for us to erect our sand-castle when every chance blast of air may blow it into nothing, and drift another into form that we have no power to move? Life hinges upon hazard, and at every turn wisdom is mocked by it, and energy swept aside by it, as the battled dykes are worn away, and the granite walls beaten down by the fickle ocean waves, which, never two hours together alike, never two instants without restless motion, are yet as changeless as they are capricious, as omnipotent as they are fickle, as cruel as they are countless! Men and mariners may build their bulwarks, but hazard and the sea will overthrow and wear away both alike at their will—their wild and unreined will, which no foresight can foresee, no strength can bridle.
Was it not the mere choice between the saddle and the barouche that day when Ferdinand d'Orléans flung down on second thoughts his riding-whip upon the console at the Tuileries, and ordered his carriage instead of his horse, that cost himself his life, his son a throne, the Bourbon blood their royalty, and France for long years her progress and her peace? Had he taken up his whip instead of laying it aside, he might be living to-day with the sceptre in his hand, and the Bee, crushed beneath his foot, powerless to sting to the core of the Lily! Of all strange things in human life, there is none stranger than the dominance of Chance.