“What right have you to turn round on your Maker and upbraid him for the consequences of your own folly? You talk of being cursed; we make our own curses. We commit follies and sins, and we have to pay for it, and then we call it destiny! It is your own misdoing that is hunting you. You thought to make life into a holiday; to shirk every duty, everything that was the least irksome or distasteful; you flew in the face of common-sense, and family dignity, and all the responsibilities of life in your marriage; you rushed into the most solemn act of a man’s life with about as much decency and reverence as a masquerader at a fancy ball. Instead of acting openly in the matter and taking counsel with your relatives, you fall in love with a pretty face and marry it without even as much prudence as a man exercises in hiring a groom. You pay the penalty of this, and then, forsooth, you turn round on Providence and complain of being cursed! I don’t want to be hard on you, and I’m not fond of playing Job’s comforter; but I can’t sit here and listen to you blaspheming without protesting against it.”
When the admiral had finished this harangue, the longest he ever made in his life, he took out his snuff-box and gave it a sharp tap preparatory to taking a pinch.
“You are quite right, sir; you are perfectly right,” said Clide; “I have no one to blame but myself for that misfortune.”
“Well, if you see it and own it like a man that’s a great point,” said the admiral, mollified at once. “The first step towards getting on the right tack is to see that we have been going on the wrong one.”
“I was very young too,” pleaded Clide; “barely of age. That ought to count for something in my favor.”
“So it does; of course it does, my boy,” assented his uncle warmly.
“I came to see the folly and the sinfulness of it all—of shirking my duties, as you say—and I was resolved to turn over a new leaf and make up for what I had left undone too long. M. de la Bourbonais said to me, ‘We most of us are asleep until the sting of sorrow wakes us up.’ It had taken a long time to do it, but it did wake me up at last; and just as I was thoroughly stung into activity, into a desire to be of use to somebody, to make my life what it ought to be, there comes down this thunderclap upon me, and dashes it all to pieces again. That is what I complain of. That is what is hard. This has been no doing of mine.”
“Whose doing is it? It is the old mistake sticking to you still. It is the day of reckoning that comes sooner or later after every man’s guilt or folly. We bury it out of sight, but it rises up like a day of judgment on us when we least expect it.”
“I was not kept long waiting for the day of reckoning to my first folly—call it sin, if you like—” said Clide bitterly. “I should have thought it was expiated by this. Eight of the best years of my life wasted in wretchedness.”