Part 18 (1/2)
Lionel Haughton, as the reader may have noticed, was no premature man,--a manly boy, but still a habitant of the twilight, dreamy, shadow-land of boyhood. n.o.ble elements were stirring fitfully within him, but their agencies were crude and undeveloped. Sometimes, through the native acuteness of his intellect, he apprehended truths quickly and truly as a man; then, again, through the warm haze of undisciplined tenderness, or the raw mists of that sensitive pride in which objects, small in themselves, loom large with undetected outlines, he fell back into the pa.s.sionate dimness of a child's reasoning. He was intensely ambitious; Quixotic in the point of honour; dauntless in peril: but morbidly trembling at the very shadow of disgrace, as a foal, destined to be the war-horse and trample down levelled steel, starts in its tranquil pastures at the rustling of a leaf. Glowingly romantic, but not inclined to vent romance in literary creations, his feelings were the more high-wrought and enthusiastic because they had no outlet in poetic channels. Most boys of great ability and strong pa.s.sion write verses--it is Nature's relief to brain and heart at the critical turning age. Most boys thus gifted do so; a few do not, and out of those few Fate selects the great men of action,--those large luminous characters that stamp poetry on the world's prosaic surface. Lionel had in him the pith and substance of Fortune's grand n.o.bodies, who become Fame's abrupt somebodies when the chances of life throw suddenly in their way a n.o.ble something, to be ardently coveted and boldly won. But I repeat, as yet he was a boy; so he sat there, his hands before his face, an unreasoning self-torturer. He knew now why this haughty Darrell had written with so little tenderness and respect to his beloved mother. Darrell looked on her as the cause of his ign.o.ble kinsman's ”sale of name;” nay, most probably ascribed to her not the fond girlish love which levels all disparities of rank, but the vulgar cold-blooded design to exchange her father's bank-notes for a marriage beyond her station. And he was the debtor to this supercilious creditor, as his father had been before him.
His father! till then he had been so proud of that relations.h.i.+p! Mrs.
Haughton had not been happy with her captain; his confirmed habits of wild dissipation had embittered her union, and at last worn away her wifely affections. But she had tended and nursed him in his last illness as the lover of her youth; and though occasionally she hinted at his faults, she ever spoke of him as the ornament of all society,--poor, it is true, hara.s.sed by unfeeling creditors, but the finest of fine gentlemen. Lionel had never heard from her of the ancestral estates sold for a gambling debt; never from her of the county jail nor the mercenary misalliance. In boyhood, before we have any cause to be proud of ourselves, we are so proud of our fathers, if we have a decent excuse for it. Of his father could Lionel Haughton be proud now? And Darrell was cognizant of his paternal disgrace, had taunted his father in yonder old hall--for what?--the marriage from which Lionel sprang! The hands grew tighter and tighter before that burning face. He did not weep, as he had done in Vance's presence at a thought much less galling. Not that tears would have misbecome him. Shallow judges of human nature are they who think that tears in themselves ever misbecome boy or even man. Well did the sternest of Roman writers place the arch distinction of humanity aloft from all meaner of Heaven's creatures, in the prerogative of tears! Sooner mayst thou trust thy purse to a professional pickpocket than give loyal friends.h.i.+p to the man who boasts of eyes to which the heart never mounts in dew! Only, when man weeps he should be alone,--not because tears are weak, but because they should be sacred. Tears are akin to prayers. Pharisees parade prayer! impostors parade tears. O Pegasus, Pegasus,--softly, softly,--thou hast hurried me off amidst the clouds: drop me gently down--there, by the side of the motionless boy in the shadowy glen.
CHAPTER VII.
Lionel Haughton, having hitherto much improved his chance of fortune, decides the question, ”What will he do with it?”
”I have been seeking you everywhere,” said a well-known voice; and a hand rested lightly on Lionel's shoulder. The boy looked up, startled, but yet heavily, and saw Guy Darrell, the last man on earth he could have desired to see. ”Will you come in for a few minutes? you are wanted.”
”What for? I would rather stay here. Who can want me?”
Darrell, struck by the words and the sullen tone in which they were uttered, surveyed Lionel's face for an instant, and replied in a voice involuntarily more kind than usual,--
”Some one very commonplace, but since the Picts went out of fas.h.i.+on, very necessary to mortals the most sublime. I ought to apologize for his coming. You threatened to leave me yesterday because of a defect in your wardrobe. Mr. Fairthorn wrote to my tailor to hasten hither and repair it. He is here. I commend him to your custom! Don't despise him because he makes for a man of my remote generation. Tailors are keen observers and do not grow out of date so quickly as politicians.”
The words were said with a playful good-humour very uncommon to Mr.
Darrell. The intention was obviously kind and kinsmanlike. Lionel sprang to his feet; his lip curled, his eye flashed, and his crest rose.
”No, sir; I will not stoop to this! I will not be clothed by your charity,--yours! I will not submit to an implied taunt upon my poor mother's ignorance of the manners of a rank to which she was not born!
You said we might not like each other, and, if so, we should part forever. I do not like you, and I will go!” He turned abruptly, and walked to the house--magnanimous. If Mr. Darrell had not been the most singular of men, he might well have been offended. As it was, though few were less accessible to surprise, he was surprised. But offended? Judge for yourself. ”I declare,” muttered Guy Darrell, gazing on the boy's receding figure, ”I declare that I almost feel as if I could once again be capable of an emotion! I hope I am not going to like that boy! The old Darrell blood in his veins, surely. I might have spoken as he did at his age, but I must have had some better reason for it. What did I say to justify such an explosion?
”_Quid feci?--ubi lapsus?_ Gone, no doubt, to pack up his knapsack, and take the Road to Ruin! Shall I let him go? Better for me, if I am really in danger of liking him; and so be at his mercy to sting--what? my heart! I defy him; it is dead. No; he shall not go thus. I am the head of our joint houses. Houses! I wish he had a house, poor boy! And his grandfather loved me. Let him go? I will beg his pardon first; and he may dine in his drawers if that will settle the matter.”
Thus, no less magnanimous than Lionel, did this misanthropical man follow his ungracious cousin. ”Ha!” cried Darrell, suddenly, as, approaching the threshold, he saw Mr. Fairthorn at the dining-room window occupied in nibbing a pen upon an ivory thumb-stall--”I have hit it! That abominable Fairthorn has been shedding its p.r.i.c.kles! How could I trust flesh and blood to such a bramble? I'll know what it was this instant!” Vain menace! No sooner did Mr. Fairthorn catch glimpse of Darrell's countenance within ten yards of the porch, than, his conscience taking alarm, he rushed incontinent from the window, the apartment, and, ere Darrell could fling open the door, was lost in some lair--”nullis penetrabilis astris”--in that sponge-like and cavernous abode wherewith benignant Providence had suited the locality to the creature.
CHAPTER VIII.
New imbroglio in that ever-recurring, never-to-be-settled question, ”What will he do with it?”
With a disappointed glare and a baffled shrug of the shoulder, Mr.
Darrell turned from the dining-room, and pa.s.sed up the stairs to Lionel's chamber, opened the door quickly, and extending his hand said, in that tone which had disarmed the wrath of ambitious factions, and even (if fame lie not) once seduced from the hostile Treasury-bench a placeman's vote, ”I must have hurt your feelings, and I come to beg your pardon!”
But before this time Lionel's proud heart, in which ungrateful anger could not long find room, had smitten him for so ill a return to well-meant and not indelicate kindness. And, his wounded egotism appeased by its very outburst, he had called to mind Fairthorn's allusions to Darrell's secret griefs,--griefs that must have been indeed stormy so to have revulsed the currents of a life. And, despite those griefs, the great man had spoken playfully to him,--playfully in order to make light of obligations. So when Guy Darrell now extended that hand, and stooped to that apology, Lionel was fairly overcome. Tears, before refused, now found irresistible way. The hand he could not take, but, yielding to his yearning impulse, he threw his arms fairly round his host's neck, leaned his young cheek upon that granite breast, and sobbed out incoherent words of pa.s.sionate repentance, honest, venerating affection. Darrell's face changed, looking for a moment wondrous soft; and then, as by an effort of supreme self-control, it became severely placid. He did not return that embrace, but certainly he in no way repelled it; nor did he trust himself to speak till the boy had exhausted the force of his first feelings, and had turned to dry his tears.
Then he said, with a soothing sweetness: ”Lionel Haughton, you have the heart of a gentleman that can never listen to a frank apology for unintentional wrong but what it springs forth to take the blame to itself and return apology tenfold. Enough! A mistake no doubt, on both sides. More time must elapse before either can truly say that he does not like the other. Meanwhile,” added Darrell, with almost a laugh,--and that concluding query showed that even on trifles the man was bent upon either forcing or stealing his own will upon others,--”meanwhile must I send away the tailor?” I need not repeat Lionel's answer.
CHAPTER IX.
DARRELL--mystery in his past life--What has he done with it?
Some days pa.s.sed, each day varying little from the other. It was the habit of Darrell if he went late to rest to rise early. He never allowed himself more than five hours sleep. A man greater than Guy Darrell--Sir Walter Raleigh--carved from the solid day no larger a slice for Morpheus. And it was this habit perhaps, yet more than temperance in diet, which preserved to Darrell his remarkable youthfulness of aspect and frame, so that at fifty-two he looked, and really was, younger than many a strong man of thirty-five. For, certain it is, that on entering middle life, he who would keep his brain clear, his step elastic, his muscles from fles.h.i.+ness, his nerves from tremor,--in a word, retain his youth in spite of the register,--should beware of long slumbers. Nothing ages like laziness. The hours before breakfast Darrell devoted first to exercise, whatever the weather; next to his calm scientific pursuits. At ten o'clock punctually he rode out alone and seldom returned till late in the afternoon. Then he would stroll forth with Lionel into devious woodlands, or lounge with him along the margin of the lake, or lie down on the tedded gra.s.s, call the boy's attention to the insect populace which sports out its happy life in the summer months, and treat of the ways and habits of each varying species, with a quaint learning, half humorous, half grave. He was a minute observer and an accomplished naturalist. His range of knowledge was, indeed, amazingly large for a man who has had to pa.s.s his best years in a dry and absorbing study: necessarily not so profound in each section as that of a special professor; but if the science was often on the surface, the thoughts he deduced from what he knew were as often original and deep. A maxim of his, which he dropped out one day to Lionel in his careless manner, but pointed diction, may perhaps ill.u.s.trate his own practice and its results ”Never think it enough to have solved the problem started by another mind till you have deduced from it a corollary of your own.”