Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/210

 And I hear your mother speak of me--hear the soft sound of her damaging praises. 'Another long speech from your clever admirer! Don't fancy he frets; that kind of man thinks of nothing but blue-books and politics.' And your cousin proposes, and you say with a sigh, 'No; I am bound to Guy Darrell'; and your mother says to my Lord, 'Wait, and still come--as a cousin!' And then, day by day, the sweet Mrs. Lyndsay drops into your ear the hints that shall poison your heart. Some fable is dressed to malign me; and you cry, ''Tis not true; prove it true, or I still keep my faith to Guy Darrell.' Then comes the kind compact--'If the story be false, my cousin must go.' 'And if it be true, you will be my own duteous child. Alas! your poor cousin is breaking his heart. A lawyer of forty has a heart made of parchment!' Aha! you were entangled, and of course deceived! Your letter did not explain what was the tale told to you. I care not a rush what it was. It is enough for me to know that, if you had loved me, you would have loved me the more for every tale that belied me. So the tale was credited, because a relief to credit it. So the compact was kept--so the whole bargain hurried over in elegant privacy-place of barter, an ambassador's chapel. Bauble for bauble--a jilt's faith for a mannikin's coronet. Four days before the year of trial expired, 'Only four days more!' I exclaimed, drunk with rapture. The journals lie before me. Three columns to Guy Darrell's speech last night; a column more to its effect on a senate, on an empire; and two lines--two little lines--to the sentence that struck Guy Darrell out of the world of men! 'Marriage in high life.--Marquess of Montfort-Caroline Lyndsay.' And the sun did not fall from heaven! Vulgarest of ends to the tritest of romances! In the gay world these things happen every day. Young ladies are privileged to give hopes to one man--their hands to another. 'Is the sin so unpardonable?' you ask, with ingenuous simplicity. Lady Montfort, that depends! Reflect! What was my life before I put it into your keeping? Barren of happiness, I grant--saddened, solitary--to myself a thing of small value. But what was that life to others?--a thing full of warm beneficence, of active uses, of hardy powers fitted to noble ends! In paralysing that life as it was to others, there may be sin wider and darker than the mere