Calamities came
to them too, and their early errors carried hard consequences: perhaps
the love of some sweet maiden, the image of purity, order, and calm,
had opened their eyes to the vision of a life in which the days
would not seem too long, even without rioting; but the maiden was
lost, and the vision passed away, and then what was left to them,
especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt, or for
carrying a gun over the furrows, but to drink and get merry, or to
drink and get angry, so that they might be independent of variety, and
say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already
any time that twelvemonth? Assuredly, among these flushed and
dull-eyed men there were some whom- thanks to their native
human-kindness- even riot could never drive into brutality; men who,
when their cheeks were fresh, had felt the keen point of sorrow or
remorse, had been pierced by the reeds they leaned on, or had
lightly put their limbs in fetters from which no struggle could
loose them; and under these sad circumstances, common to us all, their
thoughts could find no resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of
their own petty history.
That, at least, was the condition of Godfrey Cass in this
six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction,
helped by those small indefinable influences which every personal
relation exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret
marriage, which was a blight on his life.
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