Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/237

 230 for his children, and poor Henri yielded himself at once to the only pure passion of his prematurely squandered life.

It was the first time in her life that Laura Vernon had felt her heart awakened, nor was it strange that the young and graceful Frenchman, with his deep blue eyes, pensive smile, and mingled religion and poesy should at once fascinate the carelessly educated girl. We have passed the stage of our story when it could be interesting to dwell on the progress he made in her affections, on the dreamlight with which she—she, at the age of dreams—invested the stranger, and how, with the alchemy of love, she found in her own disadvantages new reasons for loving him. When Henri turned his deep eyes upon her, and in that sweet voice told her of his religious doubts and fears, and exulted in urging upon her that her love had been vouchsafed as his reward, adding—we may be sure he did not forget them—all the more earthly and passionate pleadings of a lover who knows a shorter way to woman’s heart—Laura, at seventeen, felt that her time had come, and surrendered her heart, not to Henri Amyot, the worn libertine, but to an ideal of passion and of faith.

In that attitude of cloud-worship were written those letters of which we have heard so much, and many, many more, which Ernest Adair destroyed. He destroyed them, when it came to his turn to read them for a fiendish purpose, and he did so because they were too pure, too holy, to be blended into the foulness which he intermixed. There were but a few of Laura’s letters that, by accident, did not on their very faces refute the vileness which Adair and his accomplice sought to fix upon them—of these we have seen the fatal use.

Laura had loved Henri. Nor, as she sat under those beeches, did she seek by word or by tone to deny that it had been so.

The rest is soon told.

Henri Amyot died, and Adair killed him. Not with his hand, nor by violence, and yet at a blow.

With what base intent Adair had made his way to the weak and foolish heart of Laura’s sister, what shame followed, and what vile use he made of his power over the girl, to renew the exercise of that power when the girl became a wife, is already known. At first he concealed his treachery from Henri, and encouraged him in the belief that he was on a road of flowers, and on his way to fortune and happiness. It was not until the two young hearts had been knit, until each believed in the happy destiny before it, that Ernest Adair struck his blow. And then it was given almost by chance.

Maddened at the failure of some scheme for raising money, and further stung by the unexpected and firm refusal of Henri Amyot to join him in a plan of fraud, Ernest Adair, as one day the friends were standing on the hill overlooking Lipthwaite, broke out in a torrent of vindictive insult, and met the expostulations of Amyot by a brutal revelation which told all. Mr. Vernon was a beggar, and Laura was the sister of a wanton. He had perhaps added some word—some scoff—against Laura herself, but he looked in the face of Henri Amyot and he dared not.

He heard one curse—one of those utterances in which agony exhausts itself with a single effort—and then he had to raise the body of Henri Amyot from that hill-side, and to strive to staunch the blood that welled from the mouth. The earlier life of Henri had done its fatal work, and this one fierce blow was all that was needed. He did not die in Lipthwaite. Adair, in obedience to the only words Henri could speak, the only words he ever spoke again, removed him without farewell to a town at some distance, and in two days more chose his grave.

So broke that dream of Laura’s girlhood. Heaven is kinder to our young children than to permit such grief to be durable, and with womanhood came the graver sense of the meaning of life. But that girl-love and its rapid ending made their mark on the character of Laura, and the portrait that hangs on Lygon’s wall, and that speaks of troubles and of suffering, tells, though the painter knew it not—the husband knows it now—something that it had not told but for Henri Amyot. And that rosary of golden beads—you know now whence they came, and Arthur Lygon knows it too.

“And I will ask, darling, and yet I know the answer—why this was all kept from me. No, you shall not say. I did not deserve to be told.”

“My own Arthur—I dared not.”

“Dared not?”

“I thought I knew your nature, Arthur, and I loved you too well to risk the happiness of being your wife. I had heard you speak of first loves, and you had declared that no woman loved twice. This was before we married, and I kept a secret which I never dared to tell afterwards. Oh, when you have praised my courage, and I knew that I was a wicked coward—”

“You shall not say it.”

“But you know me now—you know me your own, heart and soul. Is it not so, my own?”

“My wife!”

“Yes. That is all I ask to hear. God bless you!”

“Does He not?”

And will they live happy ever afterwards? That is not for me to say, for, save one dark chapter, I have finished the story of the breaking and the re unitingre-uniting [sic] the Silver Cord.

Civil War in America has an interest for us beyond the political or the philanthropic view of it. We ought to make a study of it as an illustration of a new phase of human affairs. In Europe the true Military Period of society is over, the philosophers tell us; allowing for an old-fashioned outbreak now and then,—like the career of the first Napoleon. This does not mean that war is over. It means that such wars as there are have a different aim and character from those of the true Military Period. Modern wars will, for some time to come, be in connection with commercial