Barren Honour: A Novel

by George A. Lawrence

"Look into a man's Past, if you would understand his Present, or guess at his Future." So spake some sage, name unknown, but probably intermediate in date between the Great King and Mr. M. F. Tupper. The rule is not implicitly to be relied on, but perhaps there is as much of truth in it as in most apophthegms of proverbial philosophy.

So it may save some time and trouble hereafter, if we sketch briefly now some of Alan Wyverne's antecedents; for he is to be the chief character in this story, which has no hero, properly so-called, nor heroine either.

The main facts are very soon told: his twenty-first birthday saw him in possession of a perfectly unencumbered estate of £12,000 a year, and all the accumulations that two paragon guardians had toiled to amass during an unusually long minority; his twenty-eighth dawned on a comparative pauper.

The last score of centuries have taught us many things; amongst others, to go down hill with a certain caution and timidity, if not with sobriety. We never hear now of those great disasters to which the very vastness of their proportions lent a false grandeur; where a colossal fortune foundered suddenly, leaving on the world's surface a vortex of turbulence and terror, such as surrounds the spot where a three-decker has gone down. The Regent and his roués were wild in their generation, but they never quite attained the antique magnificence of recklessness. The expenses of a contested county election fifty years back, would have shown poorly by the Ædile's balance-sheet, A. C. 65, when Cæsar laughed to see his last sestertium vanish in the brilliancy of the Circensian Games. What modern general would carry £20,000 of debt as lightly as he did half-a-million, when he went out to battle with the Lusitanian? If we even hear nowadays of a like liability, it is probably in connexion with a great commercial "smash," involving curious disclosures as to the capabilities of stamped paper, and the extent of public credulity; but the interest of such rarely spreads west of Temple-bar. Truth to say—however moving the tale may be to the unfortunates ruined by the delinquent, there is little romance to be extracted out of mercantile atrocities.

Nevertheless, if you only give him time, and don't hurry him beyond his stride, a dwarf will "go to the dogs" just as easily and surely as a giant. After our mesquine fashion, that journey is performed so constantly, that only some peculiarities in Alan's case make it worth noting at all.

Few men have trodden the road to ruin with such a perfectly smooth and even pace; there was no rush or hurry about it from beginning to end; nothing like a crash to attract notice or scandal. He was known to bet high and play deep; but no one spoke of him at the clubs as having lost an extraordinary stake on any one night, nor did the chroniclers of the Turf ever allude to him amongst those "hit hard" on any single event. One destructive element never showed itself throughout his career. It must have been gratifying to those much-abused Hetæræ to reflect (do they ever reflect at all?) that none could charge any one of the sisterhood with having aided in Wyverne's downfall. Reckless and extravagant as the son of Clinias, he escaped—at least Timandra. More than one scruple, probably, helped him to maintain a continence which soon became so well-known, that the most persevering of feminine fowlers never thought of laying her snares in his way. Something might be ascribed to principles learnt at his dead mother's knee, which all the contagion of Bohemia failed quite to efface—something to a chivalrous reverence for the sex, which withheld him from deliberately abetting in its open degradation—something to the pride of race, with which he was thoroughly imbued. He loved his ancient name too dearly, to see it dragged through the dust past the statue of Achilles, at the chariot-wheels of the fairest Phryne of them all. For once—hearing a story of human folly and frailty, you asked, "Dove la donna?" and waited in vain for a reply.

If the Sirens failed to seduce Wyverne, that was about the only peril or temptation from which he escaped scathless. Profuse hospitality all the year round in London, Leicestershire, and at his home in the north, cost something: a string of ten horses in training (besides yearlings and untried two-year-olds), which only won when their owner had backed something else heavily, cost more: backing other men's bills currente calamo, receiving no substantial considerations for so doing, cost most of all. Alan's bold, careless handwriting was as well known in a certain branch of commerce as the official signature on the Bank of England's notes. There was joy in Israel when they saw his autograph: Ezekiel and Solomon—most cautious of their tribe (those crack bill-discounters are always lineally descended, it would seem, from some prophet or king)—smacked their bulbous lips in satisfaction as they clutched the paper bearing his endorsement: their keen eyes looked three months forward into futurity, and saw the spoil of the Egyptian secure. Alan's own resources, though rapidly diminishing, always sufficed his own wants: but he never tired of paying these disinterested liabilities as long as his friends could furnish him with any decent excuse for his doing so: if the defaulter failed in making out even a shadow of a case, Wyverne still paid, but never consorted with him afterwards. Then the dark side of his character came out. Generous and kind-hearted to a fault, he was at times obstinate to relentlessness: slow to take offence or to suspect intentional injury, he was yet slower in forgiving or forgetting either: he did not trouble himself to detect the falsehood at the bottom of any tale of distress, but against imposture carried with a high hand he set his face as it were a millstone.

Hercules St. Levant (of the Chilian Cuirassiers) would tell you—if he could be brought to speak coherently on the subject—that he dates his ruin from the day when he miscalculated the extent of Sir Alan Wyverne's long-suffering or laziness. Surely some of us can remember that wonderful Copper Captain—the round, ringing tones tempting you with a point over the proper odds—the scarfs and waistcoats blinding in their gorgeousness, so "loud" that you heard them coming all the way up from the distance post—the supernatural whiskers, whose sable volutes shaded his broad shoulders like the leaves of a talipat-palm? Hercules was very successful at first: he must have started with a nominal capital, but he had plenty of courage, some judgment, and more luck; so, by dint of industry, and now and then picking up crumbs from the table of those by whom the "good things" of the turf are shared, he contrived to ruffle it for awhile with the best of them. Men of mark and high estate would meet and hold communion with him—as they have done with deeper and darker villains—on the neutral ground at "The Corner," without caring to inquire too closely what Cacique had signed his commission, or on what foughten-fields the rainbow of his ribbons was won. With common prudence he might have held his own till now. But St. Levant was a buccaneer to the backbone: he spent his winnings as lavishly as any one of the young patricians whom he delighted to honour and imitate; and took his ease in the sunshine, scorning to make the slightest provision for the season of the rains. It came at last, in an Epsom Summer Meeting. The adverse Fates had it all their own way there: several of the Captain's certainties were overturned, and several promising "plants" were withered in their bud. It was the fourth "day of rebuke and blasphemy," and still the battle went hard against the Peruvian plunger. The Oaks dealt him the coup de grace: it was won by an extreme outsider. Hercules saw the number go up, and staggered out of the enclosure like a drunken man, with hardly breath enough left to hiss out a curse between his white lips. "Hecuba" was one of six that Wyverne had taken with him against the field for an even thousand: her name had never been mentioned in the betting at the time, and Alan only selected her because he chanced to know her owner and breeder well.

St. Levant was ruined horse-and-foot, without power or hope of redemption: that one bet would have pulled him through. Some pleasanter engagement had kept Wyverne away from The Corner on the "comparing day," and with his usual carelessness he had even omitted to send his book down by other hands: Hercules saw a last desperate chance, and grasped at it, as drowning men will do. He appeared at the settling with his well-known betting book (gorgeous, like all his other belongings, in green morocco and gold,) but Hecuba's name was replaced by the second favourite's. He chanced to have in his possession a fac-simile of the original volume, and had copied out, in the interim, every bet it contained, with this one trifling alteration. The matter came before the authorities, of course. The discussion that ensued, though stormy (on one side) was very short and decisive: the swindler's foamy asseverations were shivered, like spray, on the granite of the other's calm, contemptuous firmness. The judges did not hesitate long in pronouncing against St. Levant their sentence of perpetual banishment. All his piteous petitions addressed to Wyverne in after days to induce the latter to obtain a mitigation of his punishment, remained absolutely unanswered. There still survives—a pale, blurred shadow of his former self—as it were, the wraith of the Great Captain. We see occasionally a hirsute head rising above the sea of villanous figures and faces that seethe and surge against the rails of the enclosure: we catch glimpses of a meteoric waistcoat flashing through the surrounding seediness; and we hear a voice, thunderous as that of the elder Ajax, dominating the din of the meaner mêlée; but there is no reversal of his doom. The poor lost spirit must ramp and roar among the "welshers" of the outer darkness, for the paradise of the Ring is closed to him for evermore.

Everybody—including the two or three friends who might hope to ride his horses—was sorry for Wyverne when a heavy fall over timber laid him up, quite early in the season, with a broken arm and collar-bone. The only pity was, that the fortunate accident should not have happened three years earlier. The indoor resources of a country-town, where all one's associates hunt five days a-week at least, are limited. One morning Alan felt so bored, that the whim seized him to look into his affairs, and ascertain how he stood with the world: so he went for his solicitor (as much for the sake of having some one to talk to as anything else), and went in at business with great patience and determination. The men who sat with him on the second evening after the lawyer's arrival, thought Wyverne looking paler and graver than usual, but he listened to their account of the run with apparently undiminished interest, and sympathized with his friends' mishaps or successes as cordially as ever. Only once his lips shook a little as he answered in the negative a question—"If he felt in much pain?" Yet that morning had been a sore trial both of brain and nerve. It is not a pleasant time, when you have to call for the reckoning of ten thousand follies and faults, and to pay it too—when the bitter quart d'heure de Rabelais is prolonged through days.