Fiction > Book editions > London, 1889 - Master of Ballantrae

17^ THE MASTER, OF balt,a?:trae.
again^ there was uotliinc^ excessive in tiiese relaxations,
or I would have been no party to them. But the whole
thing marked a change, very slight yet very perceptible ;
and though no man could say my master had gone at
all out of his mind, no man could deny that he had
drifted from his character. It was the same to the encl^
with his manner and appearance. Some of the heat of
the fever lingered in his veins : his movements a little
hurried, his speech notably more voluble, yet neither
truly amiss. His whole mind stood open to happy
impressions, welcoming these and making much of
them ; but the smallest suggestion of trouble or sorrow
he received with visible impatience and dismissed again
with immediate relief. It was to this temper that he
owed the felicity of his later days ; and yet here it was, if
anywhere, that you could call the man insane. A great
part of this life consists in contemplating what we cannot
cure; but Mr. Henry, if he could not dismiss solici-
tude by an effort of the mind, must instantly and at
whatever cost annihilate the cause of it; so that he
played alternately the ostrich and the bull. It is to this
strenuous cowardice of pain that I have to set down all
the unfortunate and excessive steps of his subsequent
career. Certainly this was the reason of his beating
]\IcManus, the groom, a thing so much out of all his
former practice, and which awakened so much comment
at the time. It is to this, again, that I must lay the
total loss of near upon two hundred pounds, more than