Tiennent comme un for?at son esprit à la cha?ne.—Boileau.
Nobody knew Vinal but Vinal himself. Know thyself was his favorite maxim. He practised upon it, as he flattered himself, with a rigorous and unsparing logic, applying the dissecting knife and microscope to the secrets of his mind, probing, testing, studying, pitilessly ripping up all that would fain hide itself. The aim of all this scrutiny was, thoroughly to comprehend the machine, in order to direct and perfect it to its highest efficiency.
Vinal, as men go, knew himself very well; and yet there were points of his character which escaped him, or which, rather, he misnamed. He knew perfectly that he was ambitious, selfish, unscrupulous: this he confessed in his own ear, pluming himself much on his philosophic candor. But he never would see that he was envious. In his mental map of himself, envy was laid down as pride and emulation. The wrestlings of human nature are not all of the sort figured in the Pilgrim's Progress and set forth in the Catechism. Vinal had an ideal; he had cherished it from boyhood, and battled ever since to realize it. He would fain make himself the finished man of the world, the unflinching, all-knowing, all-potential man of affairs, like a blade of steel, smooth and polished, but keen, searching, resistless. This was his aim; but nature was always balking him. He was the victim of a constitutional timidity, his scourge from childhood. He had been known to swoon outright, on being run away with in a chaise, and he never could muster nerve enough to fire a gun. Against this defect his pride rose in revolt. It thwarted him at every turn, and conflicted with all his aspirations. In short, he could not endure its presence, and fought against it with an iron energy of will. Thus his life was a secret, unremitting struggle, whose mark was written on his pale, nervous, resolute features. It's an ill wind that blows no good. This painful warfare achieved a singular vigor and concentration of character, and would have led to still better issues, had the assailing force been marshalled under a better banner. A lofty purpose may turn timidity to heroism; but a purpose like Vinal's is by no means so efficacious, and the man remains, if not quite a coward, yet something very like one.
It would have been well for Vinal if, like Morton, he had been born to a fortune. In that case—for he had no aptitude for pleasure hunting—his restless energies would probably have spurred him into some creditable field of effort, natural science, mathematics, or philology, to all of which he inclined. But Fate had not been so propitious; and to achieve the task which she had forgotten was the zenith of his aspirations.
There was one person who had always been an eyesore to him, and a stumbling block in his way. This was Vassall Morton. Morton, at twenty-three, was, in feeling, still a boy; Vinal, at twenty-three, was a well-ripened man. But the man hated the boy; and the boy retorted with a dislike which was largely dashed with scorn. Vinal felt the scorn, and it cut him to the quick, the more so, that he could not hide from himself that he stood in awe of Morton. He hated him, too, because he had that which he, Vinal, lacked—fortune, good health, steady nerve. He hated him, because he thought that Morton understood him; because the frankness of the latter's nature rebuked the secrecy of his own; and, above all, because he saw in him his most formidable rival in the affections of Edith Leslie.
Vinal's nature, self-drilled as it was, could not be called a cold one. It had in it spots and veins of sensitiveness. When a child, this sensitiveness had often been morbidly awake, and had caused him much suffering; but as he grew towards manhood, it had been overlaid and hidden by very different qualities, not often found in connection with it. Of late, however, he had been in love,—with Edith Leslie, as well as with her money,—and the dormant susceptibilities of his childhood had been in some sort reawakened.
His mind, inharmonious and unhappy as nature and himself had jointly made it, had never yet felt a pang so sharp as when, arriving at Matherton, he learned privately from Colonel Leslie the engagement which had passed between Morton and his daughter. Miss Leslie's twice rejected suitor compressed his thin lips in silence; it was his usual sign of strong emotion. Leslie pressed his favorite's hand,—he would fain have called him son-in-law,—and, turning away abruptly, Vinal left the house.
The man whom he envied and hated had triumphed; robbed him of fortune, and robbed him of happiness; happiness of which Morton had had already his full share, and a fortune which would but swell the ample bulk of his possessions. Vinal was frenzied with grief, rage, and jealousy.