“What guarantee was there for this conservation of the healthful tone of body and mind when the mainsprings of all action, restraint, and self-discipline were in one hour relaxed or broken?
“Could he bear to behold the gradual degeneration which might take place, which had so manifested itself, as he had witnessed, in natures perhaps not originally inferior to their own?”
Long and anxiously did Harold Stamford ponder over these thoughts, with nearly as grave a face, as anxious a brow, as he had worn in his deepest troubles.
At length he arose with a resolved air. He left the hotel, and took his way to the office of Mr. Worthington, whom he knew well, who had been his legal adviser and the depository of all official confidences for many years past.
It was he who had drawn the deed by which the slender dowry of his wife, with some moderate addition of his own, had been settled upon her. He knew that he could be trusted implicitly with his present intentions; that the secret he intended to confide in him this day would be inviolably preserved.
This, then, was the resolution at which Harold Stamford had arrived. He would not abruptly alter the conditions of his family life; he would gradually and unostentatiously ameliorate the circumstances of the household. But he would defer to a future period the information that riches had succeeded to this dreaded and probable poverty. He would endeavour to maintain the standard of “plain living and high thinking,” in which his family had been reared; he would preserve it in its integrity, as far as lay in his power until, with characters fully formed, tried, and matured, his children would in all probability be enabled to withstand the allurements of luxury, the flatteries of a facile society, the insidious temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Intent upon removing such dangers from their path in life, he felt himself warranted in using the suppressio veri which he meditated. And he implored the blessing of God upon his endeavours to that end.
Then, again, the station? It must stand apparently upon its own foundation. What pride and joy to Hubert’s ardent nature for the next few years would it be to plot and plan, to labour and to endure, in order to compass the freedom of the beloved home from debt! Now that the rain had come, that the account was in good standing, he had felt so sanguine of success that it would be cruel to deprive him of the gratification he looked forward to—the privilege he so prized.
And what task would employ every faculty of mind and body more worthily, more nobly, than this one to which he had addressed himself! Hubert’s favourite quotation occurred to him—
And how can man die better