Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/393

 poniard the Lovelace? Lock up the air! poniard all whose light word in St. James's can bring into fashion the matron of Bloomsbury! Go, lawyer, go, study briefs, and be parchment.

Agonies, agonies, shot again through Guy Darrell's breast as he looked on that large, most respectable house, and remembered his hourly campaign against disgrace! He has triumphed. Death fights for him: on the very brink of the last scandal, a cold, caught at some Vipont's ball, became fever; and so from that door the Black Horses bore away the Bloomsbury Dame, ere she was yet—the fashion! Happy in grief the widower who may, with confiding hand, ransack the lost wife's harmless desk, sure that no thought concealed from him in life will rise accusing from the treasured papers. But that pale proud mourner, hurrying the eye over sweet-scented billets; compelled, in very justice to the dead, to convince himself that the mother of his children was corrupt only at heart,—that the Black Horses had come to the door in time,—and, wretchedly consoled by that niggardly conviction, flinging into the flames the last flimsy tatters on which his honour (rock-like in his own keeping) had been fluttering to and fro in the charge of a vain treacherous fool,—envy you that mourner? No! not even in his release. Memory is not nailed down in the velvet coffin; and to great loyal natures less bitter is the memory of the lost when hallowed by tender sadness than when coupled with scorn and shame.

The wife is dead. Dead, too, long years ago, the Lothario! The world has forgotten them; they fade out of this very record when ye turn the page; no influence, no bearing have they on such future events as may mark what yet rests of life to Guy Darrell. But as he there stands and gazes into space, the two forms are before his eye as distinct as if living still. Slowly, slowly he gazes them down: the false smiles flicker away from their feeble lineaments; woe and terror on their aspects,—they sink, they shrivel, they dissolve!