"Bertie--Bertie!" he stammered, in hurried appeal--and the name of his
youth touched the hearer of it strangely, making him for the moment
forget all save that he looked once more upon one of his own race--"on
my soul, I never doubted that the story of your death was true. No one
did. All the world believed it. If I had known you lived, I would have
said that you were innocent; I would--I would have told them how I
forged your friend's name and your own when I was so desperate that
I scarce knew what I did. But they said that you were killed, and I
thought then--then--it was not worth while; it would have broken my
father's heart. God help me! I was a coward!"
He spoke the truth; he was a coward; he had ever been one. Herein lay
the whole story of his fall, his weakness, his sin, and his ingratitude.
Cecil knew that never will gratitude exist where craven selfishness
holds reign; yet there was an infinite pity mingled with the scorn that
moved him. After the years of bitter endurance he had passed, the heroic
endurance he had witnessed, the hard and unending miseries that he had
learned to take as his daily portion, this feebleness and fear roused
his wondering compassion almost as a woman's weakness would have done.
Still he never answered. The hatred of the stain that had been brought
upon their name by his brother's deed (stain none the less dark, in his
sight, because hidden from the world), his revulsion from this man, who
was the only creature of their race who ever had turned poltroon,
the thousand remembrances of childhood that uprose before him, the
irresistible yearning for some word from the other's lips that should
tell of some lingering trace in him of the old love strong enough to
kill, for the moment at least, the selfish horror of personal peril--all
these kept him silent.
Pages:
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688