The Sphinx in Aubrey Parish; A Novel (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SIR CHAUNCEY DE VERB. Sir Chauncey De Vere came home on Good Friday; but Sir Chauncey had denied Good Friday all his life. The solemn Sacrifice it commemorated had been, so far he was concerned, in vain. His career for half a century had mocked the cross and refused the life from it. His heart, harder than Jew, Turk, infidel, or heretic, wasted to ashes, by a life of elegant blasphemies against itself and God, no longer asked or allowed the pure flame of religion and love to be rekindled by any altar on any day. Truth to say, Sir Chauncey, living all his life in a Christian realm, was a profound heathen, and not a very clean one at that. He had been born to wealth and a position. His only ambition in life had been to spend the one to degrade' the other, and in that career his had been a great success. If there had been in his heart in his younger days, as indeed there were, any pure thoughts or manly wishes, he had delved down and dug them out. If either man, woman, or church by accident had written some holylegend on his heart, he had erased it. His was the faith that kept the promise of his own perdition; his the power that wrought it. Sir Chauncey was a man of the world. He had its polish, its craft, its coldness, its balance, its selfishness, its remorseless will, its elegant drapery cloaking foul things; but he lacked that love and generous self-denial, with a certain unclouded rectitude of soul, which this world can neither give nor take away. He had lived nearly all his life in the clubs and the cafe's, and his estimate of human nature had been made on no more generous premises. His idea of women was such as fitted them to be the comrades of the men he had met. Of anything better in his race he had no conception. And yet Sir Chauncey assumed the ...