Finally all was silent as Guy held his breath in eager listening, and making a desperate attempt he lifted the ponderous frame slowly and secured it above. Directly under it was the roof of a small balcony that shaded the side of the house. In the summer time it was covered with green vines, which climbed to the very top, but now the stiff withered leaves and dry branches, rustled and cracked in a horrible way as Guy threw down first his bundle, and then proceeded to follow it himself "the devils' children, have the devils' luck," it is said, and it certainly often looks as if that luck was the luckiest of all.
Without scratch, or hindrance of any kind, Elersley reached the ground, and as he buttoned up his overcoat, matters commenced to look beautifully smooth and easy. He half-expected that the jolly dogs had started on their trip without him, but he was sure of finding company in a great many other places besides, if the first failed him. He was emerging in all possible haste from the gate-way of his uncle's house when he was accosted by the police-man on beat in that vicinity. Here was a "fix." Guy was almost in despair, and it was only on producing cards, and letters, and other substantial proofs of his identity that he was left go. He made a quiet determination to have a good time after such hardships as he had endured, and indeed his determination did not fall too short of the mark. It would scarcely interest the readers to follow Guy Elersley any farther than the gloomy street corner to-night; though perhaps many of them may have often followed his prototype in spirit to such haunts as midnight revellers frequent. Did we accompany him we would have to tear away that opaque barrier, that many young polished gentlemen, have built up before the eyes of their day acquaintances; we would have to call forth tears of bitter bitter anguish, from trusting sorrowing mothers, who are at this same moment praying God on bended knees, to save their wild wayward boys. We would pierce the hearts of many pure confiding girls, who are buried in dreams of future happiness, and who would not dare suspect the awful truths that are born of the midnight hours. There are, therefore, too many innocent ones interested; too many mothers to wail; too many sisters to bow their heads in shame; too many young loving hearts that would burst were one to spell out the truth in legible characters. "They have eyes and they see not," let us mercifully leave them in their blindness.
Think of all that Guy had encountered to gratify the paltry ambition born of a moment s passionate desire; a soul so young, almost fresh from the hands of the Creator, and yet to be so covered with iniquities! How soon he had learned to jest and laugh at good, and to make his religion the worship of the senses. Saying with Byron,
"Man being reasonable, must get drunk,
The best of lift is but intoxication,"
and striving to find in the wine-cup, the satisfaction that our inner nature craves, trying to feed a soul, hungry for the beauties and perfections of the invisible world, with the poisonous food of sensuality. Let us say to it with Shakspeare,
"O thou invisible spirit of wine,
If thou hast no name to be known by
Let us call thee 'devil.'"
And lest these words betray any of the personal indignation that suggests itself at the moment the reflections upon such lives are indulged in, the voice of this same great poet ran be heard again telling in his emphatic terms,
"I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
The knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."
But we have only to look around us intelligently to find the secret out ourselves. Society is at the acme of sensuality; it has reached the strangest antithetical condition. It is degraded in its excessive refinement; it is coarse and repulsive in its cultivation, it is ignorant in its enlightenment. Necessarily all this is the effect of a cause, but such a pitiful cause! The total wreck of man's best element. The once individual corruption has spread its fearful contagion until it has become universal; falsehood is disguised in truth, vice in virtue, and fraud and diplomacy in honesty. If women are expected to live in blissful ignorance of this movement, that expectation is a crowning audacity, for woman's life is destined to be one of action, and she will not sacrifice her noble mission through purely human motives. She means to save her brother, her lover, her husband, her son, even if the effort includes the forfeiture of her title of woman in the eyes of society.
Thus it is, we have been persuaded into an unpremeditated leniency towards the sterner sex, blotting out the pictures of their vicious lives, not indeed to spare them in the very least, but only to save the blush, the sigh, the tear of many a woman whose heart is nigh enough to breaking without a stronger hand striking the last blow in the cruel work of laying bare the awful, the contemptible reality which fills their lives with bitterness and heart-burnings.