Barren Honour: A Novel

by George A. Lawrence

He read it through by the light of the shaded lamp that stood near. Helen watched his face all the while with a fearful, feverish anxiety; it betrayed not the faintest shade of confusion or shame, but it grew very grave and sad, and, at last, darkened, almost sternly. When he came to the end he was still silent, and seemed to muse for a few seconds. But she could bear suspense no longer. Yet there was no anger in the sweet voice, it was only plaintive and pleading—

"Ah, Alan, do speak to me. Won't you say it is all untrue?"

Wyverne roused himself from his reverie instantly; he drew nearer to his cousin's side, and took her little trembling hand in his own, looking down into her face—lovelier than ever in its pale, troubled beauty—with an intense love and pity in his eyes.

"The blow was cruelly meant, and craftily dealt," he said, "but they shall not part us yet, if you are brave enough to believe me thoroughly and implicitly, this once. I will never ask you to do so again. Yes, the facts are true—don't draw your hand back—I would not hold it another second if I could not say the inferences are as false as the Father of lies could make them. A dozen words answer all the questions. I was with Nina Lenox, in the Gardens; and yesterday afternoon I staid in town on her business, not on my own. There is the truth. The lie is—the insinuation that I had any other interest at stake than serving a rash unhappy woman in her hard need. That unfortunate is doomed to be fatal, it seems, even to her friends—she has right few left now to ruin. Darling, try to believe that neither she nor the world have ever had the right to call me by any other name."

Mrs. Rawson Lenox was one of the celebrities of that time. Her face and figure carried all before them, when she first came out; and even in the first season they set her up as a sort of standard of beauty with which others could only be compared in degrees of inferiority. She married early and very unhappily. Her husband was a coarse, rough-tempered man, and tried from the first to tyrannize over his wayward impetuous wife—who had been spoilt from childhood upwards—just as he was wont to do over the tenants of his broad acres, and his countless dependents. Of course it did not answer. Years had passed since then, each one giving more excuse to Nina Lenox for her wild ways and reckless disregard of the proprieties; but—not excuse enough. Men fell in love with her perpetually; but they did not come scathless out of the fire, like the admirers of Maud Brabazon. The taint and smirch of the furnace-blast remained; well if there were not angry scars, too, rankling and refusing to be healed. Mothers and mothers-in-law shook their heads ominously at the mention of Nina's name; the first, tracing the ruin of their son—moral or financial—the last, the domestic discomfort of her daughter, to those fatal lansquenet-parties and still more perilous morning tête-à-têtes.

Was it not hard to believe that a man, still short of his prime, and notoriously epicurean in his philosophy, could be in the secret of the sorceress without having drunk of her cup? That he could serve her as a friend, in sincerity and innocence, without ever having descended to be her accomplice? Yet this amount of faith or credulity—call it which you will—Wyverne did not scruple to ask from Helen, then.

It may not be denied that her heart seemed to contract, for an instant, painfully, when her lover's lips pronounced so familiarly that terrible name. But it shook off distrust before it could fasten there. She rose up, with her hand in Alan's, and nestled close to his breast, and looked up earnestly and lovingly into his eyes.

"My own—my own still," she murmured, "I do believe you thoroughly, now, even if you tell me not another word. But do be kind and prudent, and don't try me again soon, it is so very hard to bear."

"If I had only guessed—"

That sentence was never finished, for reasons good and sufficient; such delicious impediments to speech are unfortunately rather rare. The kiss of forgiveness was sweeter in its lingering fondness, than that which sealed the affiancement under the oak-trees of the Home Wood.