Barkilphedro. The message sent to God had reached the devil.
Space had committed an abuse of confidence, and a lurking sarcasm which
mingles with events had so arranged that it had complicated the loyal
triumph of the lost child's becoming Lord Clancharlie with a venomous
victory: in doing a good action, it had mischievously placed justice at
the service of iniquity. To save the victim of James II. was to give a
prey to Barkilphedro. To reinstate Gwynplaine was to crush Josiana.
Barkilphedro had succeeded, and it was for this that for so many years
the waves, the surge, the squalls had buffeted, shaken, thrown, pushed,
tormented, and respected this bubble of glass, which bore within it so
many commingled fates. It was for this that there had been a cordial
co-operation between the winds, the tides, and the tempests--a vast
agitation of all prodigies for the pleasure of a scoundrel; the infinite
co-operating with an earthworm! Destiny is subject to such grim
caprices.

Barkilphedro was struck by a flash of Titanic pride. He said to himself
that it had all been done to fulfil his intentions. He felt that he was
the object and the instrument.

But he was wrong. Let us clear the character of chance.

Such was not the real meaning of the remarkable circumstance of which
the hatred of Barkilphedro was to profit. Ocean had made itself father
and mother to an orphan, had sent the hurricane against his
executioners, had wrecked the vessel which had repulsed the child, had
swallowed up the clasped hands of the storm-beaten sailors, refusing
their supplications and accepting only their repentance; the tempest
received a deposit from the hands of death. The strong vessel containing
the crime was replaced by the fragile phial containing the reparation.
The sea changed its character, and, like a panther turning nurse, began
to rock the cradle, not of the child, but of his destiny, whilst he grew
up ignorant of all that the depths of ocean were doing for him.

The waves to which this flask had been flung watching over that past
which contained a future; the whirlwind breathing kindly on it; the
currents directing the frail waif across the fathomless wastes of water;
the caution exercised by seaweed, the swells, the rocks; the vast froth
of the abyss, taking under its protection an innocent child; the wave
imperturbable as a conscience; chaos re-establishing order; the
worldwide shadows ending in radiance; darkness employed to brin