y creature and all impersonal anxieties. If he wished for fame,
power, wealth, it was that he might use them to the advantage of his
friends, or for the reparation, in some degree, of his father's sin. But
all the joy and all the melancholy in love give a free rein to egoism,
and now that he had gained, as he believed, the desire of his eyes, the
confused, tyrannical, inexplicable, triumphant selfishness dormant in
him, as in all of us, began to assert its terrible power. He forgot the
agonies, storms, and fevers of the past. Work had not always been able
to dominate his unrest. There had been times when he had been compelled
to follow the beckoning dreams; when, in tightening his clasp about the
mockeries of his hope, he lost the pale happiness which he held already.
Whole days had passed when some oppressive thought had spread its dark
wings, as a bird of prey, over his whole being, crushing him gradually
down to the earth. Now the occasion, the solitude, the glory of the
night cast their spell over his soul. For the first time his emotion, so
long dumb and imprisoned, found speech. Brigit listened, almost afraid,
to his burning words, which, new and strange to her, were, in reality,
but the echo of his interior life, his secret intimate thoughts, the
pent-up eloquence of a latent habitual devotion long distrusted for its
very strength and kept till that hour in strict silence, lest in the
torrent of feeling it should say too much. The love to which he had long
since surrendered himself now had complete possession of him. He spoke
as he had never spoken before--as he never spoke again. The storm was
restrained, subservient possibly still, but it was there, not to be
forbidden, denied, or gainsayed. One has to be very strong in order to
support the realisation of a long deferred, almost abandoned, hope.
Affliction seems to intensify a personality, adding to it a
distinctness, a power altogether commanding and irresistible, but even
in our purest happiness we lose something of ourselves, and become,
momentarily at least, less our own masters, and more pliant to the
reproof of chance, the sport of destiny. As Robert uttered his
passionate confession, he was conscious that much in him which had once
seemed strong was conquerable enough, and, in the torture of the
indescribable variety of vague, menacing feelings which this suspicion
called forth, he revolted against the influence which held him, which
left him neither liber