Chapter IV: A Beam of Sunshine in the House

Cecil was very earnest in his repentance, and sincerely meant to keep the oath he pledged. He at once sold his cab and horse; discharged his tiger; reduced his expenses in every practicable way; paid the great bulk of his debts; ceased to visit the club; ordered the servant to deny him to Frank Forrester, whenever that worthy called; and was assiduous at his painting.

Having thus shut himself out from temptation, and begun again the career of an honourable man, he ought once more to have been happy. He was so for a few days. Blanche's recovered gaiety, and her grateful fondness, made him bless the change. But the excitement soon wore off; and in getting into the broad monotonous rut of daily life, he began to miss the variety and excitement of his former pursuits.

He could not work with pleasure: he had lost all the "delight" which "physics pain." Work to him was drudgery, and it was no more. His spirits became low. From Blanche he hid the change as well as he could; but he could not hide it from himself. He would stand for half an hour before his easel, absorbed in reveries, and not once putting pencil to the canvass. He would sit for hours in an easy chair, smoking, or affecting to read; but his mind incessantly occupied playing imaginary games at _rouge et noir_, in which he was invariably a winner.

There is this excuse for the gambler: the temptation besets him in a more powerful shape than almost any other temptation to which man is exposed. Imagination, stimulated by cupidity, is treacherously active. The games being games of chance, imagination plays them not only with alarming distinctness, but with most delusive success. Heaps of gold glitter before the infatuated dreamer; and although he rouses himself with a sigh to find that he has only been dreaming, yet the dream has had the vividness of reality to him. Many and many an unhappy wight has started up from such dreams, goaded with a sense of their reality, and persuaded that, if he only play the game as he has just played it in imagination, he must infallibly win; has pawned his last remnant, or robbed his employers, to rush to the gaming-table, and venture everything on the strength of that conviction. Ruined, perhaps dishonoured, people have exclaimed, The wretch! or The scoundrel! and have been stern in their indignant condemnation of his pitiable folly. But little do they know to what fearful temptations he has succumbed; little do they know the _fascination_ of the gaming-table to one who has played much, and whose hours have been crowded with imaginary games, in which he has been eminently successful.

I do not defend the gambler: God forbid! I am merely endeavouring to present a psychological explanation of the very common phenomenon, which people generally regard as produced only by some innate wickedness. The gambler knows the folly of his act: no one so well! He knows that the bank must win, and in his cooler moments will demonstrate the matter clearly to you. But then comes this seductive imagination, like a syren, picturing to him gorgeous realities: he is dazzled, fascinated, and succumbs.

To resist imagination, to trample down temptation, a man needs strength of will; but this is precisely the quality men are most deficient in; and here, as almost everywhere, we find that vice is not, as Plato says, ignorance, but weakness!

Cecil held out manfully against temptation, and everyone believed him cured. No one knew what was constantly passing in his mind, or they would not have been so secure.

Meanwhile Blanche had passed safely through her blissful trial, and a little girl was nestled at her side. The joy and rapture of the happy parents, the delight of Rose, the pride of Vyner, and the supreme indifference of Mrs. Vyner, may well be conceived. Little Rose Blanche, that was her name, was more welcomed, and more caressed than if she had come into the world to preserve great estates from passing into other hands; and how she escaped being killed by the excess of attention and variety of advice, is only another illustration of the mysterious escapes of infancy: a period when it would seem some good genii must be always on the alert to prevent the ever imminent catastrophe. There is said to be a special god who looks after drunkards, and preserves them in their helpless state; but what are the perils of a drunkard to the perils of an infant surrounded with nurses, relations, and female friends?

Rose Blanche throve, however, and grew into a dimply, rosy babe enough, incomparably more beautiful than any other babe ever seen, as mother, father, nurse, and aunt incessantly testified. It did squall a little, to be sure, and Cecil who had irritable nerves could not be brought to consider that musical. But men! what do they know of babies?

My dear madam, answer me frankly, did you ever know a man who was worth listening to on that subject? Did you ever meet with one whose head was not crammed with absurd notions thereupon? Is not your husband, in particular, characterized by the most preposterous incapacity--is he not fidgety, crotchety, absurd? I knew it.

Let me not, therefore, admit one word of Cecil's respecting Rose Blanche, who promised to have more beauty, intelligence, and heart, than any other infant then sprawling in long clothes, or then looking with profound impenetrable calmness upon the wondrous universe to which it had been so recently introduced.

A beam of sunshine had been let into the existence of Blanche and Cecil, a beam which stretching far out into the future gilded the distant horizon, so that they, and all, pronounced great happiness in store for them. The exquisite expression of maternal love made Blanche incomparably beautiful; and Cecil, as he watched her gazing downwards on the infant at her breast, in that deep stillness of seraphic love, whose calm intensity Raphael, alone has succeeded in pourtraying,--would bend forward and press his lips upon her forehead chastened, purified, and exalted. In those moments he was another man; ennui fled, discouragement was conquered, and the cards were not before his mind's eye.