LITMIR.BIZ

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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 passionate 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 passion 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 nobodies, who become Fame’s abrupt somebodies when the chances of life throw suddenly in their way a noble 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 ignoble 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 relationship! 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, harassed 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 friendship 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 fashion, 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 prickles! 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 passed 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 passionate repentance, honest,

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