"I'm very much obliged to you," said Morton. "Tell Professor Speyer that I am greatly indebted to his kindness, and shall be happy to avail myself of it. You are looking very pale; are you ill?"
"No, not at all," stammered Vinal, "but, what is nearly as bad, I have been kept awake all night with a raging toothache."
He had been awake all night, but not with toothache.
"There is one consolation for that trouble; cold steel will cure it."
"Yes, but the remedy is none of the pleasantest. I won't interrupt you any longer. Good by. I wish you a pleasant journey."
He shook hands with Morton, and, pressing his haggard cheek, as if to stifle the pain, left the room.
With a new letter from Edith Leslie before him, Morton saw the world in rose tint. Happiness blinded him, and he was in no mood to doubt of human nature. He blamed himself for his harsh opinions of Vinal.
"It's very generous of him to interest himself at this time, in my affairs. ''Tis my nature's plague to spy into abuses.' I have misjudged him. He is a better fellow than I ever took him for."
The notes were written in a peculiarly neat, small hand, and bore the signature of Henry Speyer. They all spoke of Morton as interested in a common object with the person addressed; but, with this exception, there was nothing in them which drew his attention, especially as they were in German, a language with which he was not very familiar. As for the circumstance of their having been given at all to a person whom the writer had never seen, Morton accounted for it on the score of the good natured professor's desire to oblige his valued friend Vinal.
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.--_Macbeth_.
The requisites of a successful villain are manifold. The toughened conscience, the ready wit, the sage experience, the mind tutored, like Iago, in all qualities of human dealing,--all these, in some reasonable measure, Vinal had; but he miserably lacked the vulgar, but no less needful requisite of a sound bodily fibre to support the workings of his brain. His mind was a good lever with a feeble fulcrum; a gun mounted on a tottering rampart. When every breath of emotion that touches the fine-strung organism quivers along the electric chord to the brain, kindling there strange perturbations, then philosophy must lower her tone, and stoicism itself must soon confess that its only resource is to avoid the enemy with whom it cannot cope. Vinal was but ill fitted to act the part he had undertaken. The excitements of villany were too much for him. Peace of mind was as needful to him as food and drink. He had been battling all his life against what he imagined to be a defect of his mental forces, but which had, in the main, no deeper root than in the sensitiveness of his bodily constitution. In prudence and common sense, he was bound to seek asylum in that blissful serenity, that benignant calm, said to be the unfailing attendant on piety and good works. Never did Nature give a sharper hint than she gave to Vinal to eschew evil courses, and leaving rascality to tougher nerves, to tread the placid paths of virtue and discretion. Vinal saw fit to disregard the hint, and the consequences became somewhat grievous.