One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
tian-blind of a henbane-visage!—had precipitated him into
his first real grasp of the abstract verity: and it opens on to
new realms, which are a new world to the practical mind.
But he made no advance. He stopped in a fever of sensibility,
to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from
a source that was nothing other than yonder weak lonely
woman.
In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged
to the school of its truancy by circumstances, for him to
learn the commonest of sums done on a slate, in regard to
payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the creditor on
the defaulter. Debtors are always paying like those who are
guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth, they
have made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance,
then in soul; and the nipping of the soul goes on for as long
as the concrete burden is undischarged. You know the Liar;
you must have seen him diminishing, until he has become a
face without features, withdrawn to humanity’s preliminary
sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on
our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of
things, he must from such time sweat in being the prodigy
of inventive nimbleness, up to the day when he propitiates
Truth by telling it again. There is a repentance that does
reconstitute! It may help to the traceing to springs of a fable
whereby men have been guided thus far out of the wood.
Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he
paid every debt with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of
course; and prompt apologies for a short brush of his temper.
Nay, he had such a conscience for the smallest eruptions
of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a friendly mending
word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge, softened
his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once.
Although this man was a presentation to mankind of the
force in Nature which drives to unresting speed, which is the
vitality of the heart seen at its beating after a plucking of it
from the body, he knew himself for the reverse of lawless; he
inclined altogether to good citizenship. So social a man could
not otherwise incline. But when it came to the examination
of accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of
physical revulsion, loathings, his excessive human nature, put
her out of Court. To men, it was impossible for him to speak
the torments of those days of the monstrous alliance. The
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