The soul sometimes has sudden inspirations, brilliant flashes whose
extent can no more be expressed, whose depth can no more be sounded by
an entire volume of thoughts and reflections, than the brightness of a
thousand torches can reproduce the intense, swift radiance of a flash of
lightning.
We will not, therefore, try to analyze the overwhelming and secret
impulse which upon young Norbith’s proposal led the noble son of the
Norwegian viceroy to join a party of bandits who had risen in revolt to
defend a proscribed man. It was doubtless a generous desire to fathom
this dark scheme at any cost, mixed with a bitter loathing for life, a
reckless indifference to the future; perhaps some vague doubt of
Schumacker’s guilt, inspired by all the various incidents which struck
the young man as equivocal and false, by a strange instinct for the
truth, and above all by his love for Ethel. In short, it was certainly a
secret sense of the help which a clear-sighted friend, in the midst of
his blind partisans, might render Schumacker.