Donal shut the
door--not so softly as he intended, for he was agitated; a loud
curse at the noise came after him. He went down the stair not only
with a sense of failure, but with an exhaustion such as he had never
before felt.
There are men of natures so inactive that they cannot even enjoy the
sight of activity around them: men with schemes and desires are in
their presence intrusive. Their existence is a sleepy lake, which
would not be troubled even with the wind of far-off labour. Such
lord Morven was not by nature; up to manhood he had led even a
stormy life. But when his passions began to yield, his
self-indulgence began to take the form of laziness; and it was not
many years before he lay with never a struggle in the chains of the
evil power which had now reduced him to moral poltroonery. The
tyranny of this last wickedness grew worse after the death of his
wife. The one object of his life, if life it could be called, was
only and ever to make it a life of his own, not the life which God
had meant it to be, and had made possible to him. On first
acquaintance with the moral phenomenon, it had seemed to Donal an
inhuman and strangely exceptional one; but reflecting, he came
presently to see that it was only a more pronounced form of the
universal human disease--a disease so deep-seated that he who has it
worst, least knows or can believe that he has any disease,
attributing all his discomfort to the condition of things outside
him; whereas his refusal to accept them as they are, is one most
prominent symptom of the disease.
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