Ordeal of Richard Feverel — Volume 4 by George Meredith
page 94 of 106 (88%)
page 94 of 106 (88%)
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you his letter to me?"
"I think I have enough to meditate upon," he replied, coldly bowing. "God bless you," she whispered. "And--may I say it? do not shut your heart." He assured her that he hoped not to do so and the moment she was gone he set about shutting it as tight as he could. If, instead of saying, Base no system on a human being, he had said, Never experimentalize with one, he would have been nearer the truth of his own case. He had experimented on humanity in the person of the son he loved as his life, and at once, when the experiment appeared to have failed, all humanity's failings fell on the shoulders of his son. Richard's parting laugh in the train--it was explicable now: it sounded in his ears like the mockery of this base nature of ours at every endeavour to exalt and chasten it. The young man had plotted this. From step to step Sir Austin traced the plot. The curious mask he had worn since his illness; the selection of his incapable uncle Hippias for a companion in preference to Adrian; it was an evident, well-perfected plot. That hideous laugh would not be silenced: Base, like the rest, treacherous, a creature of passions using his abilities solely to gratify them--never surely had humanity such chances as in him! A Manichaean tendency, from which the sententious eulogist of nature had been struggling for years (and which was partly at the bottom of the System), now began to cloud and usurp dominion of his mind. As he sat alone in the forlorn dead-hush of his library, he saw the devil. How are we to know when we are at the head and fountain of the fates of |
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