BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE
| No. DCCCLXXXXVIII. | OCT. 1889. |
Vol. CXLVI. |
MASTER OF HIS FATE.
"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
CHAPTER I.—JULIUS COURTNEY.
The Hyacinth Club has the reputation of selecting its members from among the freshest and most active spirits in literature, science, and art. That is in a sense true, but activity in one or another of those fields is not a condition of membership; for, just as the listening Boswell was the necessary complement of the talking Johnson, so in the Hyacinth Club there is an indispensable contingent of passive members who find their liveliest satisfaction in hearing and looking on, rather than in speaking and doing. Something of the home principle of male and female is necessary for the completeness even of a club.
The Hyacinth Club-house looks upon Piccadilly and the Green Park. The favourite place of concourse of its members is the magnificent smoking-room on the first floor, the bow-windows of which command a view up and down the fashionable thoroughfare, and over the trees and the undulating sward of the Park to the gates of Buckingham Palace. On a Monday afternoon, in the beginning of May, the bow-windows were open, and several men sat in leather lounges (while one leaned against a window-sash), luxuriously smoking, and noting the warm, palpitating life of the world without. A storm which had been silently and doubtfully glooming and gathering the night before had burst and poured in the morning, and it was such a spring afternoon as thrills the heart with new life and suffuses the soul with expecta-
