But there was this strange attack upon him. He found himself repeating in his own mind her words. Nature, Constance said, makes no man perfectly happy. He himself, she went on, presented the appearance of the one exception to the rule. He was well born, wealthy enough, strong and tall, sound of wind and limb, sufficiently well favoured, with proved abilities, already successful, and without any discoverable drawback. Was there any other man in the whole world like unto him? It would be better for him, this disturbing girl--this oracle--had gone on to prophesy, if something of the common lot--the dash of bitterness--had been thrown in with all these great and glorious gifts of fortune; something would certainly happen: something was coming; there would be disaster: then he would be more human; he would understand the world. As soon as he had shared the sorrows and sufferings, the shames and the humiliations, of the world, he would become more in harmony with men and women. For the note of the common life is suffering.
At this point there came back to him again out of the misty glades of childhood the memory of those two women who sat together, widows both, in the garb of mourning, and wept together.
“My dear,” said the elder lady--the words came back to him, and the scene, as plainly as on that day when he watched the old man sleeping in his chair--“my dear, we are a family of misfortune.”
“But why--why--why?” asked the other. “What have we done?”
“Things,” said the elder lady, “are done which are never suspected. Nobody knows; nobody finds out: the arm of the Lord is stretched out, and vengeance falls, if not upon the guilty, then upon his children and----”
Leonard drove the memory back--the lawn and the garden: the two women sitting in the veranda: the child playing on the grass: the words--all vanished. Leonard returned to the present. “Ghosts!” he said. “Ghosts! Were these superstitious fears ever anything but ghosts?” He refused to think of these things: he put aside the oracle of the wise woman, the admonition that he was too fortunate a youth.
You have seen how he opened the first of a small heap of letters. His eye fell upon the others: he took up the first and opened it: the address was that of a fashionable West-End hotel: the writing was not familiar. Yet it began “My dear nephew.”