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+The Project Gutenberg EBook What Will He Do With It, by Lytton, V2
+#88 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
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+Title: What Will He Do With It, Book 2.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7660]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 1, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT, V2 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+     Primitive character of the country in certain districts of Great
+     Britain.--Connection between the features of surrounding scenery and
+     the mental and moral inclinations of man, after the fashion of all
+     sound ethnological historians.--A charioteer, to whom an experience
+     of British laws suggests an ingenious mode of arresting the progress
+     of Roman Papacy, carries Lionel Haughton and his fortunes to a place
+     which allows of description and invites repose.
+
+In safety, but with naught else rare enough, in a railway train, to
+deserve commemoration, Lionel reached the station to which he was bound.
+He there inquired the distance to Fawley Manor House; it was five miles.
+He ordered a fly, and was soon wheeled briskly along a rough parish road,
+through a country strongly contrasting the gay river scenery he had so
+lately quitted,--quite as English, but rather the England of a former
+race than that which spreads round our own generation like one vast
+suburb of garden-ground and villas.  Here, nor village nor spire, nor
+porter's lodge came in sight.  Rare even were the cornfields; wide spaces
+of unenclosed common opened, solitary and primitive, on the road,
+bordered by large woods, chiefly of beech, closing the horizon with
+ridges of undulating green.  In such an England, Knights Templars might
+have wended their way to scattered monasteries, or fugitive partisans in
+the bloody Wars of the Roses have found shelter under leafy coverts.
+
+The scene had its romance, its beauty-half savage, half gentle-leading
+perforce the mind of any cultivated and imaginative gazer far back from
+the present day, waking up long-forgotten passages from old poets.  The
+stillness of such wastes of sward, such deeps of woodland, induced the
+nurture of revery, gravely soft and lulling.  There, Ambition might give
+rest to the wheel of Ixion, Avarice to the sieve of the Danaids; there,
+disappointed Love might muse on the brevity of all human passions, and
+count over the tortured hearts that have found peace in holy meditation,
+or are now stilled under grassy knolls.  See where, at the crossing of
+three roads upon the waste, the landscape suddenly unfolds, an upland in
+the distance, and on the upland a building, the first sign of social man.
+What is the building? only a silenced windmill, the sails dark and sharp
+against the dull leaden sky.
+
+Lionel touched the driver,--"Are we yet on Mr. Darrell's property?"  Of
+the extent of that property he had involuntarily conceived a vast idea.
+
+"Lord, sir, no; we be two miles from Squire Darrell's.  He han't much
+property to speak of hereabouts.  But he bought a good bit o' land, too,
+some years ago, ten or twelve mile t' other side o' the county.  First
+time you are going to Fawley, sir?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah!  I don't mind seeing you afore; and I should have known you if I
+had, for it is seldom indeed I have a fare to Fawley old Manor House.  It
+must be, I take it, four or five years ago sin' I wor there with a gent,
+and he went away while I wor feeding the horse; did me out o' my back
+fare.  What bisness had he to walk when he came in my fly?  Shabby."
+
+"Mr. Darrell lives very retired, then? sees few persons?"  "S'pose so.
+I never seed him as I knows on; see'd two o' his hosses though,--rare
+good uns;" and the driver whipped on his own horse, took to whistling,
+and Lionel asked no more.
+
+At length the chaise stopped at a carriage gate, receding from the road,
+and deeply shadowed by venerable trees,--no lodge.  The driver,
+dismounting, opened the gate.
+
+"Is this the place?"
+
+The driver nodded assent, remounted, and drove on rapidly through what
+night by courtesy he called a park.  The enclosure was indeed little
+beyond that of a good-sized paddock; its boundaries were visible on every
+side: but swelling uplands covered with massy foliage sloped down to its
+wild, irregular turf soil,--soil poor for pasturage, but pleasant to the
+eye; with dell and dingle, bosks of fantastic pollards; dotted oaks of
+vast growth; here and there a weird hollow thorn-tree; patches of fern
+and gorse.  Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks; and deep, deep as from the
+innermost core of the lovely woodlands came the mellow note of the
+cuckoo.  A few moments more a wind of the road brought the house in
+sight.  At its rear lay a piece of water, scarcely large enough to be
+styled a lake; too winding in its shaggy banks, its ends too concealed by
+tree and islet, to be called by the dull name of pond.  Such as it was it
+arrested the eye before the gaze turned towards the house: it had an air
+of tranquillity so sequestered, so solemn.  A lively man of the world
+would have been seized with spleen at the first glimpse of it; but he who
+had known some great grief, some anxious care, would have drunk the calm
+into his weary soul like an anodyne.  The house,--small, low, ancient,
+about the date of Edward VI., before the statelier architecture of
+Elizabeth.  Few houses in England so old, indeed, as Fawley Manor House.
+A vast weight of roof, with high gables; windows on the upper story
+projecting far over the lower part; a covered porch with a coat of half-
+obliterated arms deep panelled over the oak door.  Nothing grand, yet all
+how venerable!  But what is this?  Close beside the old, quiet,
+unassuming Manor House rises the skeleton of a superb and costly pile,
+--a palace uncompleted, and the work evidently suspended,--perhaps long
+since, perhaps now forever.  No busy workmen nor animated scaffolding.
+The perforated battlements roofed over with visible haste,--here with
+slate, there with tile; the Elizabethan mullion casements unglazed; some
+roughly boarded across,--some with staring forlorn apertures, that showed
+floorless chambers, for winds to whistle through and rats to tenant.
+Weeds and long grass were growing over blocks of stone that lay at hand.
+A wallflower had forced itself into root on the sill of a giant oriel.
+The effect was startling.  A fabric which he who conceived it must have
+founded for posterity,--so solid its masonry, so thick its walls,--and
+thus abruptly left to moulder; a palace constructed for the reception of
+crowding guests, the pomp of stately revels, abandoned to owl and bat.
+And the homely old house beside it, which that lordly hall was doubtless
+designed to replace, looking so safe and tranquil at the baffled
+presumption of its spectral neighbour.
+
+The driver had rung the bell, and now turning back to the chaise met
+Lionel's inquiring eye, and said, "Yes; Squire Darrell began to build
+that--many years ago--when I was a boy.  I heerd say it was to be the
+show-house of the whole county.  Been stopped these ten or a dozen
+years."
+
+"Why?--do you know?"
+
+"No one knows.  Squire was a laryer, I b'leve: perhaps he put it into
+Chancery.  My wife's grandfather was put into Chancery jist as he was
+growing up, and never grew afterwards: never got out o' it; nout ever
+does.  There's our churchwarden comes to me with a petition to sign agin
+the Pope.  Says I, 'That old Pope is always in trouble: what's he bin
+doin' now?'  Says he, 'Spreading!  He's a-got into Parlyment, and he's
+now got a colledge, and we pays for it. I does n't know how to stop him.'
+Says I, 'Put the Pope into Chancery, along with wife's grandfather, and
+he'll never spread agin.'"
+
+The driver had thus just disposed of the Papacy, when an elderly servant
+out of livery opened the door.  Lionel sprang from the chaise, and paused
+in some confusion: for then, for the first time, there darted across him
+the idea that he had never written to announce his acceptance of Mr.
+Darrell's invitation; that he ought to have done so; that he might not be
+expected.  Meanwhile the servant surveyed him with some surprise.  "Mr.
+Darrell?"  hesitated Lionel, inquiringly.
+
+"Not at home, sir," replied the man, as if Lionel's business was over,
+and he had only to re-enter his chaise.  The boy was naturally rather
+bold than shy, and he said, with a certain assured air, "My name is
+Haughton.  I come here on Mr. Darrell's invitation."
+
+The servant's face changed in a moment; he bowed respectfully.  "I beg
+pardon, sir.  I will look for my master; he is somewhere on the grounds."
+The servant then approached the fly, took out the knapsack, and,
+observing Lionel had his purse in his hand, said, "Allow me to save you
+that trouble, sir.  Driver, round to the stable-yard."  Stepping back
+into the house, the servant threw open a door to the left, on entrance,
+and advanced a chair.  "If you will wait here a moment, sir, I will seek
+for my master."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Guy Darrell--and Stilled Life.
+
+The room in which Lionel now found himself was singularly quaint.  An
+antiquarian or architect would have discovered at a glance that at some
+period it had formed part of the entrance-hall; and when, in Elizabeth's
+or James the First's day, the refinement in manners began to penetrate
+from baronial mansions to the homes of the gentry, and the entrance-hall
+ceased to be the common refectory of the owner and his dependants, this
+apartment had been screened off by perforated panels, which for the sake
+of warmth and comfort had been filled up into solid wainscot by a
+succeeding generation.  Thus one side of the room was richly carved with
+geometrical designs and arabesque pilasters, while the other three sides
+were in small simple panels, with a deep fantastic frieze in plaster,
+depicting a deer-chase in relief and running be tween woodwork and
+ceiling.  The ceiling itself was relieved by long pendants without any
+apparent meaning, and by the crest of the Darrells,--a heron, wreathed
+round with the family motto, "Ardua petit Ardea."  It was a dining-room,
+as was shown by the character of the furniture.  But there was no attempt
+on the part of the present owner, and there had clearly been none on the
+part of his predecessor, to suit the furniture to the room.  The
+furniture, indeed, was of the heavy, graceless taste of George the
+First,--cumbrous chairs in walnut-tree, with a worm-eaten mosaic of the
+heron on their homely backs, and a faded blue worsted on their seats; a
+marvellously ugly sideboard to match, and on it a couple of black
+shagreen cases, the lids of which were flung open, and discovered the
+pistol-shaped handles of silver knives.  The mantelpiece reached to the
+ceiling, in panelled compartments, with heraldic shields, and supported
+by rude stone Caryatides.  On the walls were several pictures,--family
+portraits, for the names were inscribed on the frames.  They varied in
+date from the reign of Elizabeth to that of George I.  A strong family
+likeness pervaded them all,--high features, dark hair, grave aspects,--
+save indeed one, a Sir Ralph Haughton Darrell, in a dress that spoke him
+of the holiday date of Charles II.,--all knots, lace, and ribbons;
+evidently the beau of the race; and he had blue eyes, a blonde peruke, a
+careless profligate smile, and looked altogether as devil-me-care,
+rakehelly, handsome, good-for-nought, as ever swore at a drawer, beat a
+watchman, charmed a lady, terrified a husband, and hummed a song as he
+pinked his man.
+
+Lionel was still gazing upon the effigies of this airy cavalier when the
+door behind him opened very noiselessly, and a man of imposing presence
+stood on the threshold,--stood so still, and the carved mouldings of the
+doorway so shadowed, and as it were cased round his figure, that Lionel,
+on turning quickly, might have mistaken him for a portrait brought into
+bold relief from its frame by a sudden fall of light.  We hear it,
+indeed, familiarly said that such a one is like an old picture.  Never
+could it be more appositely said than of the face on which the young
+visitor gazed, much startled and somewhat awed.  Not such as inferior
+limners had painted in the portraits there, though it had something in
+common with those family lineaments, but such as might have looked
+tranquil power out of the canvas of Titian.
+
+The man stepped forward, and the illusion passed.  "I thank you," he
+said, holding out his hand, "for taking me at my word, and answering me
+thus in person."  He paused a moment, surveying Lionel's countenance with
+a keen but not unkindly eye, and added softly, "Very like your father."
+
+At these words Lionel involuntarily pressed the hand which he had taken.
+That hand did not return the pressure.  It lay an instant in Lionel's
+warm clasp--not repelling, not responding--and was then very gently
+withdrawn.
+
+"Did you come from London?"
+
+"No, sir; I found your letter yesterday at Hampton Court.  I had been
+staying some days in that neighbourhood.  I came on this morning: I was
+afraid too unceremoniously; your kind welcome reassures me there."
+
+The words were well chosen and frankly said.  Probably they pleased the
+host, for the expression of his countenance was, on the whole,
+propitious; but he merely inclined his head with a kind of lofty
+indifference, then, glancing at his watch, he rang the bell.
+The servant entered promptly.  "Let dinner be served within an hour."
+
+"Pray, sir," said Lionel, "do not change your hours on my account."
+
+Mr. Darrell's brow slightly contracted.  Lionel's tact was in fault
+there; but the great man answered quietly, "All hours are the same to me;
+and it were strange if a host could be deranged by consideration to his
+guest,--on the first day too.  Are you tired?  Would you like to go to
+your room, or look out for half an hour?  The sky is clearing."
+
+"I should so like to look out, sir."
+
+"This way then."
+
+Mr. Darrell, crossing the hall, threw open a door opposite to that by
+which Lionel entered, and the lake (we will so call it) lay before them,
+--separated from the house only by a shelving gradual declivity, on which
+were a few beds of flowers,--not the most in vogue nowadays, and disposed
+in rambling old-fashioned parterres.  At one angle, a quaint and
+dilapidated sun-dial; at the other, a long bowling-alley, terminated by
+one of those summer-houses which the Dutch taste, following the
+Revolution of 1688, brought into fashion.  Mr. Darrell passed down this
+alley (no bowls there now), and observing that Lionel looked curiously
+towards the summer-house, of which the doors stood open, entered it.  A
+lofty room with coved ceiling, painted with Roman trophies of helms and
+fasces, alternated with crossed fifes and fiddles, painted also.
+
+"Amsterdam manners," said Mr. Darrell, slightly shrugging his shoulders.
+"Here a former race heard music, sang glees, and smoked from clay pipes.
+That age soon passed, unsuited to English energies, which are not to be
+united with Holland phlegm!  But the view from the window-look out there.
+I wonder whether men in wigs and women in hoops enjoyed that.  It is a
+mercy they did not clip those banks into a straight canal!"
+
+The view was indeed lovely,--the water looked so blue and so large and so
+limpid, woods and curving banks reflected deep on its peaceful bosom.
+
+"How Vance would enjoy this!"  cried Lionel.  "It would come into a
+picture even better than the Thames."
+
+"Vance? who is Vance?"
+
+"The artist,--a great friend of mine.  Surely, sir, you have heard of him
+or seen his pictures!"
+
+"Himself and his pictures are since my time.  Days tread down days for
+the recluse, and be forgets that celebrities rise with their suns, to
+wane with their moons,
+
+                    "'Truditur dies die,
+          Novaeque pergunt interire lunae'"
+
+"All suns do not set; all moons do not wane!"  cried Lionel, with blunt
+enthusiasm.  "When Horace speaks elsewhere of the Julian star, he
+compares it to a moon--'inter ignes minores'--and surely Fame is not
+among the orbs which 'pergunt interire,'--hasten on to perish!"
+
+"I am glad to see that you retain your recollections of Horace," said Mr.
+Darrell, frigidly, and without continuing the allusion to celebrities;
+"the most charming of all poets to a man of my years, and" (he very dryly
+added) "the most useful for popular quotation to men at any age."
+
+Then sauntering forth carelessly, he descended the sloping turf, came to
+the water-side, and threw himself at length on the grass: the wild thyme
+which he crushed sent up its bruised fragrance.  There, resting his face
+on his hand, Darrell gazed along the water in abstracted silence.  Lionel
+felt that he was forgotten; but he was not hurt.  By this time a strong
+and admiring interest for his cousin had sprung up within his breast: he
+would have found it difficult to explain why.  But whosoever at that
+moment could have seen Guy Darrell's musing countenance, or whosoever,
+a few minutes before, could have heard the very sound of his voice,
+sweetly, clearly full; each slow enunciation unaffectedly, mellowly
+distinct,--making musical the homeliest; roughest word, would have
+understood and shared the interest which Lionel could not explain.  There
+are living human faces, which, independently of mere physical beauty,
+charm and enthrall us more than the most perfect lineaments which Greek
+sculptor ever lent to a marble face; there are key-notes in the thrilling
+human voice, simply uttered, which can haunt the heart, rouse the
+passions, lull rampant multitudes, shake into dust the thrones of guarded
+kings, and effect more wonders than ever yet have been wrought by the
+most artful chorus or the deftest quill.
+
+In a few minutes the swans from the farther end of the water came sailing
+swiftly towards the bank on which Darrell reclined.  He had evidently
+made friends with them, and they rested their white breasts close on the
+margin, seeking to claim his notice with a low hissing salutation, which,
+it is to be hoped, they changed for something less sibilant in that
+famous song with which they depart this life.
+
+Darrell looked up.  "They come to be fed," said he, "smooth emblems of
+the great social union.  Affection is the offspring of utility.  I am
+useful to them: they love me."  He rose, uncovered, and bowed to the
+birds in mock courtesy: "Friends, I have no bread to give you."
+
+LIONEL.--"Let me run in for some.  I would be useful too."
+
+MR. DARRELL.--"Rival!--useful to my swans?"
+
+LIONEL (tenderly).--"Or to you, sir."
+
+He felt as if he had said too much, and without waiting for permission,
+ran indoors to find some one whom he could ask for the bread.
+
+"Sonless, childless, hopeless, objectless!"  said Darrell, murmuringly to
+himself, and sank again into revery.
+
+By the time Lionel returned with the bread, another petted friend had
+joined the master.  A tame doe had caught sight of him from her covert
+far away, came in light bounds to his side, and was pushing her delicate
+nostril into his drooping hand.  At the sound of Lionel's hurried step,
+she took flight, trotted off a few paces, then turned, looking.
+
+"I did not know you had deer here."
+
+"Deer!--in this little paddock!--of course not; only that doe.  Fairthorn
+introduced her here.  By the by," continued Darrell, who was now throwing
+the bread to the swans, and had resumed his careless, unmeditative
+manner, "you were not aware that I have a brother hermit,--a companion be
+sides the swans and the doe.  Dick Fairthorn is a year or two younger
+than myself, the son of my father's bailiff.  He was the cleverest boy at
+his grammar-school.  Unluckily he took to the flute, and unfitted himself
+for the present century.  He condescends, however, to act as my
+secretary,--a fair classical scholar, plays chess, is useful to me,--I am
+useful to him.  We have an affection for each other.  I never forgive any
+one who laughs at him.  The half-hour bell, and you will meet him at
+dinner.  Shall we come in and dress?"
+
+They entered the house; the same man-servant was in attendance in the
+hall.  "Show Mr. Haughton to his room."  Darrell inclined his head--I use
+that phrase, for the gesture was neither bow nor nod--turned down a
+narrow passage and disappeared.
+
+Led up an uneven staircase of oak, black as ebony, with huge balustrades,
+and newel-posts supporting clumsy balls, Lionel was conducted to a small
+chamber, modernized a century ago by a faded Chinese paper, and a
+mahogany bedstead, which took up three-fourths of the space, and was
+crested with dingy plumes, that gave it the cheerful look of a hearse;
+and there the attendant said, "Have you the key of your knapsack, sir?
+shall I put out your things to dress?"  Dress!  Then for the first time
+the boy remembered that he had brought with him no evening dress,--nay,
+evening dress, properly so called, he possessed not at all in any corner
+of the world.  It had never yet entered into his modes of existence.
+Call to mind when you were a boy of seventeen, "betwixt two ages hovering
+like a star," and imagine Lionel's sensations.  He felt his cheek burn as
+if he had been detected in a crime.  "I have no dress things," he said
+piteously; "only a change of linen, and this," glancing at the summer
+jacket.  The servant was evidently a most gentleman-like man: his native
+sphere that of groom of the chambers.  "I will mention it to Mr. Darrell;
+and if you will favour me with your address in London, I will send to
+telegraph for what you want against to-morrow."
+
+"Many thanks," answered Lionel, recovering his presence of mind; "I will
+speak to Mr. Darrell myself."
+
+"There is the hot water, sir; that is the bell.  I have the honour to be
+placed at your commands."  The door closed, and Lionel unlocked his
+knapsack; other trousers, other waistcoat had he,--those worn at the
+fair, and once white.  Alas! they had not since then passed to the care
+of the laundress.  Other shoes,--double-soled for walking.  There was no
+help for it but to appear at dinner, attired as he had been before, in
+his light pedestrian jacket, morning waistcoat flowered with sprigs, and
+a fawn-coloured nether man.  Could it signify much,--only two men?  Could
+the grave Mr. Darrell regard such trifles?--Yes, if they intimated want
+of due respect.
+
+              "Durum! sed fit levius Patientia
+               Quicquid corrigere est nefas."
+
+On descending the stairs, the same high-bred domestic was in waiting to
+show him into the library.  Mr. Darrell was there already, in the simple
+but punctilious costume of a gentleman who retains in seclusion the
+habits customary in the world.  At the first glance Lionel thought he saw
+a slight cloud of displeasure on his host's brow.  He went up to Mr.
+Darrell ingenuously, and apologized for the deficiencies of his itinerant
+wardrobe.  "Say the truth," said his host; "you thought you were coming
+to an old churl, with whom ceremony was misplaced."
+
+"Indeed no!"  exclaimed Lionel.  "But--but I have so lately left school."
+
+"Your mother might have thought for you."
+
+"I did not stay to consult her, indeed, sir; I hope you are not
+offended."
+
+"No, but let me not offend you if I take advantage of my years and our
+relationship to remark that a young man should be careful not to let
+himself down below the standard of his own rank.  If a king could bear to
+hear that he was only a ceremonial, a private gentleman may remember that
+there is but a ceremonial between himself and--his hatter!"
+
+Lionel felt the colour mount his brow; but Darrell pressing the
+distasteful theme no further, and seemingly forgetting its purport,
+turned his remarks carelessly towards the weather.  "It will be fair
+to-morrow: there is no mist on the hill yonder.  Since you have a painter
+for a friend, perhaps you yourself are a draughtsman.  There are some
+landscape effects here which Fairthorn shall point out to you."
+
+"I fear, Mr. Darrell," said Lionel, looking down, "that to-morrow I must
+leave you."
+
+"So soon?  Well, I suppose the place must be very dull."
+
+"Not that--not that; but I have offended you, and I would not repeat the
+offence.  I have not the 'ceremonial' necessary to mark me as a
+gentleman,--either here or at home."
+
+"So!  Bold frankness and ready wit command ceremonials," returned
+Darrell, and for the first time his lip wore a smile.  "Let me present to
+you Mr. Fairthorn," as the door, opening, showed a shambling awkward
+figure, with loose black knee-breeches and buckled shoes.  The figure
+made a strange sidelong bow; and hurrying in a lateral course, like
+a crab suddenly alarmed, towards a dim recess protected by a long table,
+sank behind a curtain fold, and seemed to vanish as a crab does amidst
+the shingles.
+
+"Three minutes yet to dinner, and two before the lettercarrier goes,"
+said the host, glancing at his watch.  "Mr. Fairthorn, will you write a
+note for me?"  There was a mutter from behind the curtain.  Darrell
+walked to the place, and whispered a few words, returned to the hearth,
+rang the bell.  "Another letter for the post, Mills: Mr. Fairthorn is
+sealing it.  You are looking at my book-shelves, Lionel.  As I understand
+that your master spoke highly of you, I presume that you are fond of
+reading."
+
+"I think so, but I am not sure," answered Lionel, whom his cousin's
+conciliatory words had restored to ease and good-humour.
+
+"You mean, perhaps, that you like reading, if you may choose your own
+books."
+
+"Or rather, if I may choose my own time to read them, and that would not
+be on bright summer days."
+
+"Without sacrificing bright summer days, one finds one has made little
+progress when the long winter nights come."
+
+"Yes, sir.  But must the sacrifice be paid in books?  I fancy I learned
+as much in the play-ground as I did n the schoolroom, and for the last
+few months, in much my own master, reading hard in the forenoon, it is
+true, for many hours at a stretch, and yet again for a few hours at
+evening, but rambling also through the streets, or listening to a few
+friends whom I have contrived to make,--I think, if I can boast of any
+progress at all, the books have the smaller share in it."
+
+"You would, then, prefer an active life to a studious one?"
+
+"Oh, yes--yes."
+
+"Dinner is served," said the decorous Mr. Mills, throwing open the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+     In our happy country every man's house is his castle.  But however
+     stoutly he fortify it, Care enters, as surely as she did in Horace's
+     time, through the porticos of a Roman's villa.  Nor, whether
+     ceilings be fretted with gold and ivory, or whether only coloured
+     with whitewash, does it matter to Care any more than it does to a
+     house-fly.  But every tree, be it cedar or blackthorn, can harbour
+     its singing-bird; and few are the homes in which, from nooks least
+     suspected, there starts not a music.  Is it quite true that, "non
+     avium citharaeque cantus somnum reducent"?  Would not even Damocles
+     himself have forgotten the sword, if the lute-player had chanced on
+     the notes that lull?
+
+The dinner was simple enough, but well dressed and well served.  One
+footman, in plain livery, assisted Mr. Mills.  Darrell ate sparingly, and
+drank only water, which was placed by his side iced, with a single glass
+of wine at the close of the repast, which he drank on bending his head to
+Lionel, with a certain knightly grace, and the prefatory words of
+"Welcome here to a Haughton."  Mr. Fairthorn was less abstemious; tasted
+of every dish, after examining it long through a pair of tortoise-shell
+spectacles, and drank leisurely through a bottle of port, holding up
+every glass to the light.  Darrell talked with his usual cold but not
+uncourteous indifference.  A remark of Lionel on the portraits in the
+room turned the conversation chiefly upon pictures, and the host showed
+himself thoroughly accomplished in the attributes of the various schools
+and masters.  Lionel, who was very fond of the art, and indeed painted
+well for a youthful amateur, listened with great delight.
+
+"Surely, sir," said he, struck much with a very subtile observation upon
+the causes why the Italian masters admit of copyists with greater
+facility than the Flemish,--"surely, sir, you yourself must have
+practised the art of painting?"
+
+"Not I; but I instructed myself as a judge of pictures, because at one
+time I was a collector."
+
+Fairthorn, speaking for the first time: "The rarest collection,--such
+Albert Durers! such Holbeins! and that head by Leonardo da Vinci!"  He
+stopped; looked extremely frightened; helped himself to the port, turning
+his back upon his host, to hold, as usual, the glass to the light.
+
+"Are they here, sir?"  asked Lionel.
+
+Darrell's face darkened, and he made no answer; but his head sank on his
+breast, and he seemed suddenly absorbed in gloomy thought.  Lionel felt
+that he had touched a wrong chord, and glanced timidly towards Fairthorn;
+but that gentleman cautiously held up his finger, and then rapidly put it
+to his lip, and as rapidly drew it away.  After that signal the boy did
+not dare to break the silence, which now lasted uninterruptedly till
+Darrell rose, and with the formal and superfluous question, "Any more
+wine?" led the way back to the library.  There he ensconced himself in an
+easy-chair, and saying, "Will you find a book for yourself, Lionel?"
+took a volume at random from the nearest shelf, and soon seemed absorbed
+in its contents.  The room, made irregular by baywindows, and shelves
+that projected as in public libraries, abounded with nook and recess.  To
+one of these Fairthorn sidled himself, and became invisible.  Lionel
+looked round the shelves.  No belles lettres of our immediate generation
+were found there; none of those authors most in request in circulating
+libraries and literary institutes.  The shelves disclosed no poets, no
+essayists, no novelists, more recent than the Johnsonian age.  Neither in
+the lawyer's library were to be found any law books; no, nor the
+pamphlets and parliamentary volumes that should have spoken of the once
+eager politician.  But there were superb copies of the ancient classics.
+French and Italian authors were not wanting, nor such of the English as
+have withstood the test of time.  The larger portions of the shelves
+seemed, however, devoted to philosophical works.  Here alone was novelty
+admitted, the newest essays on science, or the best editions of old works
+thereon.  Lionel at length made his choice,--a volume of the "Faerie
+Queene."  Coffee was served; at a later hour tea.  The clock struck ten.
+Darrell laid down his book.
+
+"Mr. Fairthorn, the flute!"
+
+From the recess a mutter; and presently--the musician remaining still
+hidden--there came forth the sweetest note,--so dulcet, so plaintive!
+Lionel's ear was ravished.  The music suited well with the enchanted page
+through which his fancy had been wandering dreamlike,--the flute with the
+"Faerie Queene."  As the air flowed liquid on, Lionel's eyes filled with
+tears.  He did not observe that Darrell was intently watching him.  When
+the music stopped, he turned aside to wipe the tears from his eyes.
+Somehow or other, what with the poem, what with the flute, his thoughts
+had wandered far, far hence to the green banks and blue waves of the
+Thames,--to Sophy's charming face, to her parting childish gift!  And
+where was she now?  Whither passing away, after so brief a holiday, into
+the shadows of forlorn life?  Darrell's bell-like voice smote his ear.
+
+"Spenser; you love him!  Do you write poetry?"  "No, sir: I only feel
+it!"
+
+"Do neither!"  said the host, abruptly.  Then, turning away, he lighted
+his candle, murmured a quick good-night, and disappeared through a side-
+door which led to his own rooms.
+
+Lionel looked round for Fairthorn, who now emerged /ab anqulo/ from his
+nook.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Fairthorn, how you have enchanted me!  I never believed the
+flute could have been capable of such effects!"
+
+Mr. Fairthorn's grotesque face lighted up.  He took off his spectacles,
+as if the better to contemplate the face of his eulogist.  "So you were
+pleased! really?" he said, chuckling a strange, grim chuckle, deep in his
+inmost self.
+
+"Pleased! it is a cold word!  Who would not be more than pleased?"
+
+"You should hear me in the open air."
+
+"Let me do so-to-morrow."
+
+"My dear young sir, with all my heart.  Hist!"--gazing round as if
+haunted,--"I like you.  I wish him to like you.  Answer all his questions
+as if you did not care how he turned you inside out.  Never ask him a
+question, as if you sought to know what he did not himself confide.  So
+there is some thing, you think, in a flute, after all?  There are people
+who prefer the fiddle."
+
+"Then they never heard your flute, Mr. Fairthorn."  The musician again
+emitted his discordant chuckle, and, nodding his head nervously and
+cordially, shambled away without lighting a candle, and was engulfed in
+the shadows of some mysterious corner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+     The old world and the new.
+
+It was long before Lionel could sleep.  What with the strange house and
+the strange master, what with the magic flute and the musician's
+admonitory caution, what with tender and regretful reminiscences of
+Sophy, his brain had enough to work on.  When he slept at last, his
+slumber was deep and heavy, and he did not wake till gently shaken by the
+well-bred arm of Mr. Mills.  "I humbly beg pardon: nine o'clock, sir, and
+the breakfast-bell going to ring."  Lionel's toilet was soon hurried
+over; Mr. Darrell and Fairthorn were talking together as he entered the
+breakfast-room,--the same room as that in which they had dined.
+
+"Good morning, Lionel," said the host.  "No leave-taking to-day, as you
+threatened.  I find you have made an appointment with Mr. Fairthorn, and
+I shall place you under his care.  You may like to look over the old
+house, and make yourself"--Darrell paused  "at home," jerked out Mr.
+Fairthorn, filling up the hiatus.  Darrell turned his eye towards the
+speaker, who evidently became much frightened, and, after looking in vain
+for a corner, sidled away to the window and poked himself behind the
+curtain.  "Mr. Fairthorn, in the capacity of my secretary, has learned to
+find me thoughts, and put them in his own words," said Darrell, with a
+coldness almost icy.  He then seated himself at the breakfast-table;
+Lionel followed his example, and Mr. Fairthorn, courageously emerging,
+also took a chair and a roll.  "You are a true diviner, Mr. Darrell,"
+said Lionel; "it is a glorious day."
+
+"But there will be showers later.  The fish are at play on the surface of
+the lake," Darrell added, with a softened glance towards Fairthorn, who
+was looking the picture of misery.  "After twelve, it will be just the
+weather for trout to rise; and if you fish, Mr. Fairthorn will lend you a
+rod.  He is a worthy successor of Izaak Walton, and loves a companion as
+Izaak did, but more rarely gets one."
+
+"Are there trout in your lake, sir?"
+
+"The lake!  You must not dream of invading that sacred water.  The
+inhabitants of rivulets and brooks not within my boundary are beyond the
+pale of Fawley civilization, to be snared and slaughtered like Caifres,
+red men, or any other savages, for whom we bait with a missionary and
+whom we impale on a bayonet.  But I regard my lake as a politic
+community, under the protection of the law, and leave its denizens to
+devour each other, as Europeans, fishes, and other cold-blooded creatures
+wisely do, in order to check the overgrowth of population.  To fatten one
+pike it takes a great many minnows.  Naturally I support the vested
+rights of pike.  I have been a lawyer."
+
+It would be in vain to describe the manner in which Mr. Darrell vented
+this or similar remarks of mocking irony or sarcastic spleen.  It was not
+bitter nor sneering, but in his usual mellifluous level tone and
+passionless tranquillity.
+
+The breakfast was just over as a groom passed in front of the windows
+with a led horse.  "I am going to leave you, Lionel," said the host, "to
+make--friends with Mr. Fairthorn, and I thus complete, according to my
+own original intention, the sentence which he diverted astray."  He
+passed across the hall to the open house-door, and stood by the horse,
+stroking its neck and giving some directions to the groom.  Lionel and
+Fairthorn followed to the threshold, and the beauty of the horse provoked
+the boy's admiration: it was a dark muzzled brown, of that fine old-
+fashioned breed of English roadster which is now so seldom seen,--showy,
+bownecked, long-tailed, stumbling, reedy hybrids, born of bad barbs, ill-
+mated, having mainly supplied their place.  This was, indeed, a horse of
+great power, immense girth of loin, high shoulder, broad hoof; and such a
+head! the ear, the frontal, the nostril!  you seldom see a human
+physiognomy half so intelligent, half so expressive of that high spirit
+and sweet generous temper, which, when united, constitute the ideal of
+thorough-breeding, whether in horse or man.  The English rider was in
+harmony with the English steed.  Darrell at this moment was resting his
+arm lightly on the animal's shoulder, and his head still uncovered.  It
+has been said before that he was, of imposing presence; the striking
+attribute of his person, indeed, was that of unconscious grandeur; yet,
+though above the ordinary height, he was not very tall-five feet eleven
+at the utmost-and far from being very erect.  On the contrary, there was
+that habitual bend in his proud neck which men who meditate much and live
+alone almost invariably contract.  But there was, to use an expression
+common with our older writers, that "great air" about him which filled
+the eye, and gave him the dignity of elevated stature, the commanding
+aspect that accompanies the upright carriage.  His figure was inclined to
+be slender, though broad of shoulder and deep of chest; it was the figure
+of a young man and probably little changed from what it might have been
+at five-and-twenty.  A certain youthfulness still lingered even on the
+countenance,--strange, for sorrow is supposed to expedite the work of
+age; and Darrell had known sorrow of a kind most adapted to harrow his
+peculiar nature, as great in its degree as ever left man's heart in
+ruins.  No gray was visible in the dark brown hair, that, worn short
+behind, still retained in front the large Jove-like curl.  No wrinkle,
+save at the corner of the eyes, marred the pale bronze of the firm cheek;
+the forehead was smooth as marble, and as massive.  It was that forehead
+which chiefly contributed to the superb expression of his whole aspect.
+It was high to a fault; the perceptive organs, over a dark, strongly-
+marked, arched eyebrow, powerfully developed, as they are with most
+eminent lawyers; it did not want for breadth at the temples; yet, on the
+whole, it bespoke more of intellectual vigour and dauntless will than of
+serene philosophy or all-embracing benevolence.  It was the forehead of a
+man formed to command and awe the passions and intellect of others by the
+strength of passions in himself, rather concentred than chastised, and by
+an intellect forceful from the weight of its mass rather than the
+niceness of its balance.  The other features harmonized with that brow;
+they were of the noblest order of aquiline, at once high and delicate.
+The lip had a rare combination of exquisite refinement and inflexible
+resolve.  The eye, in repose, was cold, bright, unrevealing, with a
+certain absent, musing, self-absorbed expression, that often made the
+man's words appear as if spoken mechanically, and assisted towards that
+seeming of listless indifference to those whom he addressed, by which he
+wounded vanity without, perhaps, any malice prepense.  But it was an eye
+in which the pupil could suddenly expand, the hue change from gray to
+dark, and the cold still brightness flash into vivid fire.  It could not
+have occurred to any one, even to the most commonplace woman, to have
+described Darrell's as a handsome face; the expression would have seemed
+trivial and derogatory; the words that would have occurred to all, would
+have been somewhat to this effect: "What a magnificent countenance!  What
+a noble head!"  Yet an experienced physiognomist might have noted that
+the same lineaments which bespoke a virtue bespoke also its neighbouring
+vice; that with so much will there went stubborn obstinacy; that with
+that power of grasp there would be the tenacity in adherence which
+narrows, in astringing, the intellect; that a prejudice once conceived,
+a passion once cherished, would resist all rational argument for
+relinquishment.  When men of this mould do relinquish prejudice or
+passion, it is by their own impulse, their own sure conviction that what
+they hold is worthless: then they do not yield it graciously; they fling
+it from them in scorn, but not a scorn that consoles.  That which they
+thus wrench away had "grown a living part of themselves;" their own flesh
+bleeds; the wound seldom or never heals.  Such men rarely fail in the
+achievement of what they covet, if the gods are neutral; but, adamant
+against the world, they are vulnerable through their affections.  Their
+love is intense, but undemonstrative; their hatred implacable, but
+unrevengeful,--too proud to revenge, too galled to pardon.
+
+There stood Guy Darrell, to whom the bar had destined its highest
+honours, to whom the senate had accorded its most rapturous cheers; and
+the more you gazed on him as he there stood, the more perplexed became
+the enigma,--how with a career sought with such energy, advanced with
+such success, the man had abruptly subsided into a listless recluse, and
+the career had been voluntarily resigned for a home without neighbours, a
+hearth without children.
+
+"I had no idea," said Lionel, as Darrell rode slowly away, soon lost from
+sight amidst the thick foliage of summer trees,--"I had no idea that my
+cousin was so young!"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Mr. Fairthorn; "he is only a year older than I am!"
+
+"Older than you!" exclaimed Lionel, staring in blunt amaze at the
+elderly-looking personage beside him; "yet true, he told me so himself."
+
+"And I am fifty-one last birthday."  "Mr. Darrell fifty-two! Incredible!"
+
+"I don't know why we should ever grow old, the life we lead," observed
+Mr. Fairthorn, readjusting his spectacles.  "Time stands so still!
+Fishing, too, is very conducive to longevity.  If you will follow me, we
+will get the rods; and the flute,--you are quite sure you would like the
+flute?  Yes! thank you, my dear young sir.  And yet there are folks who
+prefer the fiddle!"
+
+"Is not the sun a little too bright for the fly at present; and will you
+not, in the meanwhile, show me over the house?"
+
+"Very well; not that this house has much worth seeing.  The other indeed
+would have had a music-room!  But, after all, nothing like the open air
+for the flute.  This way."
+
+I spare thee, gentle reader, the minute inventory of Fawley Manor House.
+It had nothing but its antiquity to recommend it.  It had a great many
+rooms, all, except those used as the dining-room and library, very small,
+and very low,--innumerable closets, nooks,--unexpected cavities, as if
+made on purpose for the venerable game of hide-and-seek.  Save a stately
+old kitchen, the offices were sadly defective even for Mr. Darrell's
+domestic establishment, which consisted but of two men and four maids
+(the stablemen not lodging in the house).  Drawing-room properly speaking
+that primitive mansion had none.  At some remote period a sort of gallery
+under the gable roofs (above the first floor), stretching from end to end
+of the house, might have served for the reception of guests on grand
+occasions; for fragments of mouldering tapestry still here and there
+clung to the walls; and a high chimney-piece, whereon, in plaster relief,
+was commemorated the memorable fishing party of Antony and Cleopatra,
+retained patches of colour and gilding, which must when fresh have made
+the Egyptian queen still more appallingly hideous, and the fish at the
+end of Antony's hook still less resembling any creature known to
+ichthyologists.
+
+The library had been arranged into shelves from floor to roof by Mr.
+Darrell's father, and subsequently, for the mere purpose of holding as
+many volumes as possible, brought out into projecting wings (college-
+like) by Darrell himself, without any pretension to mediaeval character.
+With this room communicated a small reading-closet, which the host
+reserved to himself; and this, by a circular stair cut into the massive
+wall, ascended first into Mr. Darrell's sleeping-chamber, and thence into
+a gable recess that adjoined the gallery, and which the host had fitted
+up for the purpose of scientific experiments in chemistry or other
+branches of practical philosophy.  These more private rooms Lionel was
+not permitted to enter.  Altogether the house was one of those cruel
+tenements which it would be a sin to pull down, or even materially to
+alter, but which it would be an hourly inconvenience for a modern family
+to inhabit.  It was out of all character with Mr. Darrell's former
+position in life, or with the fortune which Lionel vaguely supposed him
+to possess, and considerably underrated.  Like Sir Nicholas Bacon, the
+man had grown too large for his habitation.
+
+"I don't wonder," said Lionel, as, their wanderings over, he and
+Fairthorn found themselves in the library, "that Mr. Darrell began to
+build a new house.  But it would have been a great pity to pull down this
+for it."
+
+"Pull down this!  Don't hint at such an idea to Mr. Darrell.  He would as
+soon have pulled down the British Monarchy!  Nay, I suspect, sooner."
+
+"But the new building must surely have swallowed up the old one?"
+
+"Oh, no; Mr. Darrell had a plan by which he would have enclosed this
+separately in a kind of court, with an open screen-work or cloister; and
+it was his intention to appropriate it entirely to mediaeval antiquities,
+of which he has a wonderful collection.  He had a notion of illustrating
+every earlier reign in which his ancestors flourished,--different
+apartments in correspondence with different dates.  It would have been a
+chronicle of national manners."
+
+"But, if it be not an impertinent question, where is this collection?
+In London?"
+
+"Hush! hush! I will give you a peep of some of the treasures, only don't
+betray me."
+
+Fairthorn here, with singular rapidity, considering that he never moved
+in a straightforward direction, undulated into the open air in front of
+the house, described a rhomboid towards a side-buttress in the new
+building, near to which was a postern-door; unlocked that door from a key
+in his pocket, and, motioning Lionel to follow him, entered within the
+ribs of the stony skeleton.  Lionel followed in a sort of supernatural
+awe, and beheld, with more substantial alarm, Mr. Fairthorn winding up an
+inclined plank which lie embraced with both arms, and by which he
+ultimately ascended to a timber joist in what should have been an upper
+floor, only flooring there was none.  Perched there, Fairthorn glared
+down on Lionel through his spectacles.  "Dangerous," he said
+whisperingly; "but one gets used to everything!  If you feel afraid,
+don't venture!"
+
+Lionel, animated by that doubt of his courage, sprang up the plank,
+balancing himself schoolboy fashion, with outstretched arms, and gained
+the side of his guide.
+
+"Don't touch me!" exclaimed Mr. Fairthorn, shrinking, "or we shall both
+be over.  Now observe and imitate."  Dropping himself, then, carefully
+and gradually, till he dropped on the timber joist as if it were a
+velocipede, his long legs dangling down, he with thigh and hand impelled
+himself onward till he gained the ridge of a wall, on which he delivered
+his person, and wiped his spectacles.
+
+Lionel was not long before he stood in the same place.  "Here we are,"
+said Fairthorn.
+
+"I don't see the collection," answered Lionel, first peering down athwart
+the joists upon the rugged ground overspread with stones and rubbish,
+then glancing up through similar interstices above to the gaunt rafters.
+
+"Here are some,--most precious," answered Fairthorn, tapping behind him.
+"Walled up, except where these boards, cased in iron, are nailed across,
+with a little door just big enough to creep through; but that is locked,
+--Chubb's lock, and Mr. Darrell keeps the key!--treasures for a palace!
+No, you can't peep through here--not a chink; but come on a little
+further,--mind your footing."
+
+Skirting the wall, and still on the perilous ridge, Fairthorn crept on,
+formed an angle, and stopping short, clapped his eye to the crevice of
+some planks nailed rudely across a yawning aperture.  Lionel found
+another crevice for himself, and saw, piled up in admired disorder,
+pictures, with their backs turned to a desolate wall, rare cabinets, and
+articles of curious furniture, chests, boxes, crates,--heaped pell-mell.
+This receptacle had been roughly floored in deal, in order to support its
+miscellaneous contents, and was lighted from a large window (not visible
+in front of the house), glazed in dull rough glass, with ventilators.
+
+"These are the heavy things, and least costly things, that no one could
+well rob.  The pictures here are merely curious as early specimens,
+intended for the old house, all spoiling and rotting; Mr. Darrell wishes
+them to do so, I believe!  What he wishes must be done! my dear young sir:
+a prodigious mind; it is of granite!"
+
+"I cannot understand it," said Lionel, aghast.  "The last man I should
+have thought capriciously whimsical."
+
+"Whimsical!  Bless my soul! don't say such a word, don't, pray! or the
+roof will fall down upon us!  Come away.  You have seen all you can see.
+You must go first now; mind that loose stone there!"
+
+Nothing further was said till they were out of the building; and Lionel
+felt like a knight of old who had been led into sepulchral halls by a
+wizard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+     The annals of empire are briefly chronicled in family records
+     brought down to the present day, showing that the race of men is
+     indeed "like leaves on trees, now green in youth, now withering on
+     the ground."  Yet to the branch the most bare will green leaves
+     return, so long as the sap can remount to the branch from the root;
+     but the branch which has ceased to take life from the root--hang it
+     high, hang it low--is a prey to the wind and the woodman.
+
+It was mid-day.  The boy and his new friend were standing apart, as
+becomes silent anglers, on the banks of a narrow brawling rivulet,
+running through green pastures, half a mile from the house.  The sky was
+overcast, as Darrell had predicted, but the rain did not yet fall.  The
+two anglers were not long before they had filled a basket with small
+trout.  Then Lionel, who was by no means fond of fishing, laid his rod on
+the bank, and strolled across the long grass to his companion.
+
+"It will rain soon," said he.  "Let us take advantage of the present
+time, and hear the flute, while we can yet enjoy the open air.  No, not
+by the margin, or you will be always looking after the trout.  On the
+rising ground, see that old thorn tree; let us go and sit under it.  The
+new building looks well from it.  What a pile it would have been!  I may
+not ask you, I suppose, why it is left uncompleted.  Perhaps it would
+have cost too much, or would have been disproportionate to the estate."
+
+"To the present estate it would have been disproportioned, but not to the
+estate Mr. Darrell intended to add to it.  As to cost, you don't know
+him.  He would never have undertaken what he could not afford to
+complete; and what he once undertook, no thoughts of the cost would have
+scared him from finishing.  Prodigious mind,--granite!  And so rich!"
+added Fairthorn, with an air of great pride.  "I ought to know; I write
+all his letters on money matters.  How much do you think he has, without
+counting land?"
+
+"I cannot guess."
+
+"Nearly half a million; in two years it will be more than half a million.
+And he had not three hundred a year when he began life; for Fawley was
+sadly mortgaged."
+
+"Is it possible!  Could any lawyer make half a million at the bar?"
+
+"If any man could, Mr. Darrell would.  When he sets his mind on a thing,
+the thing is done; no help for it.  But his fortune was not all made at
+the bar, though a great part of it was.  An old East Indian bachelor of
+the same name, but who had never been heard of hereabouts till he wrote
+from Calcutta to Mr. Darrell (inquiring if they were any relation, and
+Mr. Darrell referred him to the College-at-Arms, which proved that they
+came from the same stock ages ago), left him all his money.  Mr. Darrell
+was not dependent on his profession when he stood up in Parliament.  And
+since we have been here, such savings!  Not that Mr. Darrell is
+avaricious, but how can he spend money in this place?  You should have
+seen the establishment we kept in Carlton Gardens.  Such a cook too,
+--a French gentleman, looked like a marquis.  Those were happy days, and
+proud ones!  It is true that I order the dinner here, but it can't be the
+same thing.  Do you like fillet of veal?--we have one to-day."
+
+"We used to have fillet of veal at school on Sundays.  I thought it good
+then."
+
+"It makes a nice mince," said Mr. Fairthorn, with a sensual movement of
+his lips.  "One must think of dinner when one lives in the country: so
+little else to think of!  Not that Mr. Darrell does, but then he is
+granite!"
+
+"Still," said Lionel, smiling, "I do not get my answer.  Why was the
+house uncompleted?  and why did Mr. Darrell retire from public life?"
+
+"He took both into his head; and when a thing once gets there, it is no
+use asking why.  But," added Fairthorn, and his innocent ugly face
+changed into an expression of earnest sadness,--"but no doubt he had his
+reasons.  He has reasons for all he does, only they lie far, far away
+from what appears on the surface,--far as that rivulet lies from its
+source!  My dear young sir, Mr. Darrell has known griefs on which it does
+not become you and me to talk.  He never talks of them.  The least I can
+do for my benefactor is not to pry into his secrets, nor babble them out.
+And he is so kind, so good, never gets into a passion; but it is so awful
+to wound him,--it gives him such pain; that's why he frightens me,--
+frightens me horribly; and so he will you when you come to know him.
+Prodigious mind!--granite,--overgrown with sensitive plants.  Yes, a
+little music will do us both good."
+
+Mr. Fairthorn screwed his flute, an exceedingly handsome one.  He pointed
+out its beauties to Lionel--a present from Mr. Darrell last Christmas--
+and then he began.  Strange thing, Art!  especially music.  Out of an
+art, a man may be so trivial you would mistake him for an imbecile,--at
+best a grown infant.  Put him into his art, and how high he soars above
+you!  How quietly he enters into a heaven of which he has become a
+denizen, and unlocking the gates with his golden key, admits you to
+follow, a humble reverent visitor.
+
+In his art, Fairthorn was certainly a master, and the air he now played
+was exquisitely soft and plaintive; it accorded with the clouded yet
+quiet sky, with the lone but summer landscape, with Lionel's melancholic
+but not afflicted train of thought.  The boy could only murmur
+"Beautiful!" when the musician ceased.
+
+"It is an old air," said Fairthorn; "I don't think it is known.  I found
+its scale scrawled down in a copy of the 'Eikon Basilike,' with the name
+of 'Joannes Darrell, Esq., Aurat,' written under it.  That, by the date,
+was Sir John Darrell, the cavalier who fought for Charles I., father of
+the graceless Sir Ralph, who flourished under Charles II.  Both their
+portraits are in the dining-room."
+
+"Tell me something of the family; I know so little about it,--not even
+how the Haughtons and Darrells seem to have been so long connected.  I
+see by the portraits that the Haughton name was borne by former Darrells,
+then apparently dropped, now it is borne again by my cousin."
+
+"He bears it only as a Christian name.  Your grandfather was his sponsor.
+But he is nevertheless the head of your family."
+
+"So he says.  How?"
+
+Fairthorn gathered himself up, his knees to his chin, and began in the
+tone of a guide who has got his lesson by heart; though it was not long
+before he warmed into his subject.
+
+"The Darrells are supposed to have got their name from a knight in the
+reign of Edward III., who held the lists in a joust victoriously against
+all comers, and was called, or called himself, John the Dare-all; or, in
+old spelling, the Der-all.  They were amongst the most powerful families
+in the country; their alliances were with the highest houses,--
+Montfichets, Nevilles, Mowbrays; they descended through such marriages
+from the blood of Plantagenet kings.  You'll find their names in
+chronicles in the early French wars.  Unluckily they attached themselves
+to the fortunes of Earl Warwick, the king-maker, to whose blood they were
+allied; their representative was killed in the fatal field of Barnet;
+their estates were of course confiscated; the sole son and heir of that
+ill-fated politician passed into the Low Countries, where he served as a
+soldier.  His son and grandson followed the same calling under foreign
+banners.  But they must have kept up the love of the old land; for in the
+latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., the last male Darrell returned
+to England with some broad gold pieces saved by himself or his exiled
+fathers, bought some land in this county, in which the ancestral
+possessions had once been large, and built the present house, of a size
+suited to the altered fortunes of a race that in a former age had manned
+castles with retainers.  The baptismal name of the soldier who thus
+partially refounded the old line in England was that now borne by your
+cousin, Guy,--a name always favoured by Fortune in the family annals; for
+in Elizabeth's time, from the rank of small gentry, to which their
+fortune alone lifted them since their return to their native land, the
+Darrells rose once more into wealth and eminence under a handsome young
+Sir Guy,--we have his picture in black flowered velvet,--who married the
+heiress of the Haughtons, a family that had grown rich under the Tudors,
+and was in high favour with the Maiden-Queen.  This Sir Guy was
+befriended by Essex and knighted by Elizabeth herself.  Their old house
+was then abandoned for the larger mansion of the Haughtons, which had
+also the advantage of being nearer to the Court,  The renewed prosperity
+of the Darrells was of short duration.  The Civil Wars came on, and Sir
+John Darrell took the losing side.  He escaped to France with his only
+son.  He is said to have been an accomplished, melancholy man; and my
+belief is, that he composed that air which you justly admire for its
+mournful sweetness.  He turned Roman Catholic and died in a convent.  But
+the son, Ralph, was brought up in France with Charles II, and other gay
+roisterers.  On the return of the Stuart, Ralph ran off with the daughter
+of the Roundhead to whom his estates had been given, and, after getting
+them back, left his wife in the country, and made love to other men's
+wives in town.  Shocking profligate! no fruit could thrive upon such a
+branch.  He squandered all he could squander, and would have left his
+children beggars, but that he was providentially slain in a tavern brawl
+for boasting of a lady's favours to her husband's face.  The husband
+suddenly stabbed him,--no fair duello, for Sir Ralph was invincible with
+the small sword.  Still the family fortune was much dilapidated, yet
+still the Darrells lived in the fine house of the Haughtons, and left
+Fawley to the owls.  But Sir Ralph's son, in his old age, married a
+second time, a young lady of high rank, an earl's daughter.  He must have
+been very much in love with her, despite his age, for to win her consent
+or her father's he agreed to settle all the Haughton estates on her and
+the children she might bear to him.  The smaller Darrell property had
+already been entailed on his son by his first marriage.  This is how the
+family came to split.  Old Darrell had children by his second wife; the
+eldest of those children took the Haughton name and inherited the
+Haughton property.  The son by the first marriage had nothing but Fawley
+and the scanty domain round it.  You descend from the second marriage,
+Mr. Darrell from the first.  You understand now, my dear young sir?"
+"Yes, a little; but I should very much like to know where those fine
+Haughton estates are now?"
+
+"Where they are now?  I can't say.  They were once in Middlesex.
+Probably much of the land, as it was sold piecemeal, fell into small
+allotments, constantly changing hands.  But the last relics of the
+property were, I know, bought on speculation by Cox the distiller; for,
+when we were in London, by Mr. Darrell's desire I went to look after
+them, and inquire if they could be repurchased.  And I found that so
+rapid in a few years has been the prosperity of this great commercial
+country, that if one did buy them back, one would buy twelve villas,
+several streets, two squares, and a paragon!  But as that symptom of
+national advancement, though a proud thought in itself, may not have any
+pleasing interest for you, I return to the Darrells.  From the time in
+which the Haughton estate had parted from them, they settled back in
+their old house of Fawley.  But they could never again hold up their
+heads with the noblemen and great squires in the county.  As much as they
+could do to live at all upon the little patrimony; still the reminiscence
+of what they had been made them maintain it jealously and entail it
+rigidly.  The eldest son would never have thought of any profession or
+business; the younger sons generally became soldiers, and being always a
+venturesome race, and having nothing particular to make them value their
+existence, were no less generally killed off betimes.  The family became
+thoroughly obscure, slipped out of place in the county, seldom rose to be
+even justices of the peace, never contrived to marry heiresses again,
+but only the daughters of some neighbouring parson or squire as poor as
+themselves, but always of gentle blood.  Oh, they were as proud as
+Spaniards in that respect!  So from father to son, each generation grew
+obscurer and poorer; for, entail the estate as they might, still some
+settlements on it were necessary, and no settlements were ever brought
+into it; and thus entails were cut off to admit some new mortgage, till
+the rent-roll was somewhat less than L300 a year when Mr. Darrell's
+father came into possession.  Yet somehow or other he got to college,
+where no Darrell had been since the time of the Glorious Revolution, and
+was a learned man and an antiquary,--A GREAT ANTIQUARY!  You may have
+read his works.  I know there is one copy of them in the British Museum,
+and there is another here, but that copy Mr. Darrell keeps under lock and
+key."
+
+"I am ashamed to say I don't even know the titles of those works."
+
+"There were 'Popular Ballads on the Wars of the Roses;' 'Darrelliana,'
+consisting of traditional and other memorials of the Darrell family;
+'Inquiry into the Origin of Legends Connected with Dragons;' 'Hours
+amongst Monumental Brasses,' and other ingenious lucubrations above the
+taste of the vulgar; some of them were even read at the Royal Society of
+Antiquaries.  They cost much to print and publish.  But I have heard my
+father, who was his bailiff, say that he was a pleasant man, and was fond
+of reciting old scraps of poetry, which he did with great energy; indeed,
+Mr. Darrell declares that it was the noticing, in his father's animated
+and felicitous elocution, the effects that voice, look, and delivery can
+give to words, which made Mr. Darrell himself the fine speaker he is.
+But I can only recollect the antiquary as a very majestic gentleman, with
+a long pigtail--awful, rather, not so much so as his son, but still awful
+--and so sad-looking; you would not have recovered your spirits for a
+week if you had seen him, especially when the old house wanted repairs,
+and he was thinking how he could pay for them!"
+
+"Was Mr. Darrell, the present one, an only child?"
+
+"Yes, and much with his father, whom he loved most dearly, and to this
+day he sighs if he has to mention his father's name!  He has old Mr.
+Darrell's portrait over the chimney-piece in his own reading-room; and he
+had it in his own library in Carlton Gardens.  Our Mr. Darrell's mother
+was very pretty, even as I remember her: she died when he was about ten
+years old.  And she too was a relation of yours,--a Haughton by blood,--
+but perhaps you will be ashamed of her, when I say she was a governess in
+a rich mercantile family.  She had been left an orphan.  I believe old
+Mr. Darrell (not that he was old then) married her because the Haughtons
+could or would do nothing for her, and because she was much snubbed and
+put upon, as I am told governesses usually are,--married her because,
+poor as he was, he was still the head of both families, and bound to do
+what he could for decayed scions.  The first governess a Darrell, ever
+married; but no true Darrell would have called that a mesalliance since
+she was still a Haughton and 'Fors non mutat genus,'--Chance does not
+change race."
+
+"But how comes it that the Haughtons, my grandfather Haughton, I suppose,
+would do nothing for his own kinswoman?"
+
+"It was not your grandfather Robert Haughton, who was a generous man,--
+he was then a mere youngster, hiding himself for debt,--but your great--
+grandfather, who was a hard man and on the turf.  He never had money to
+give,--only money for betting.  He left the Haughton estates sadly
+clipped.  But when Robert succeeded, he came forward, was godfather to
+our Mr. Darrell, insisted on sharing the expense of sending him to Eton,
+where he became greatly distinguished; thence to Oxford, where he
+increased his reputation; and would probably have done more for him, only
+Mr. Darrell, once his foot on the ladder, wanted no help to climb to the
+top."
+
+"Then my grandfather, Robert, still had the Haughton estates?  Their last
+relics had not been yet transmuted by Mr. Cox into squares and a
+paragon?"
+
+"No; the grand old mansion, though much dilapidated, with its park,
+though stripped of salable timber, was still left with a rental from
+farms that still appertained to the residence, which would have sufficed
+a prudent man for the luxuries of life, and allowed a reserve fund to
+clear off the mortgages gradually.  Abstinence and self-denial for one or
+two generations would have made a property, daily rising in value as the
+metropolis advanced to its outskirts, a princely estate for a third.  But
+Robert Haughton, though not on the turf, had a grand way of living; and
+while Guy Darrell went into the law to make a small patrimony a large
+fortune, your father, my dear young sir, was put into the Guards to
+reduce a large patrimony--into Mr. Cox's distillery."
+
+Lionel coloured, but remained silent.
+
+Fairthorn, who was as unconscious in his zest of narrator that he was
+giving pain as an entomologist in his zest for collecting when he pins a
+live moth in his cabinet, resumed: "Your father and Guy Darrell were warm
+friends as boys and youths.  Guy was the elder of the two, and Charlie
+Haughton (I beg your pardon, he was always called Charlie) looked up to
+him as to an elder brother.  Many's the scrape Guy got him out of; and
+many a pound, I believe, when Guy had some funds of his own, did Guy lend
+to Charlie."
+
+"I am very sorry to hear that," said Lionel, sharply.  Fairthorn looked
+frightened.  "I 'm afraid I have made a blunder.  Don't tell Mr.
+Darrell."
+
+"Certainly not; I promise.  But how came my father to need this aid, and
+how came they at last to quarrel?"
+
+Your father Charlie became a gay young man about town, and very much the
+fashion.  He was like you in person, only his forehead was lower, and his
+eye not so steady.  Mr. Darrell studied the law in chambers.  When Robert
+Haughton died, what with his debts, what with his father's, and what with
+Charlie's post-obits and I O U's, there seemed small chance indeed of
+saving the estate to the Haughtons.  But then Mr. Darrell looked close
+into matters, and with such skill did he settle them that he removed the
+fear of foreclosure; and what with increasing the rental here and there,
+and replacing old mortgages by new at less interest, he contrived to
+extract from the property an income of nine hundred pounds a year to
+Charlie (three times the income Darrell had inherited himself), where
+before it had seemed that the debts were more than the assets.
+Foreseeing how much the land would rise in value, he then earnestly
+implored Charlie (who unluckily had the estate in fee-simple, as Mr.
+Darrell has this, to sell if he pleased) to live on his income, and in a
+few years a part of the property might be sold for building purposes, on
+terms that would save all the rest, with the old house in which Darrells
+and Haughtons both had once reared generations.  Charlie promised, I
+know, and I've no doubt, my dear young sir, quite sincerely; but all men
+are not granite!  He took to gambling, incurred debts of honour, sold the
+farms one by one, resorted to usurers, and one night, after playing six
+hours at piquet, nothing was left for him but to sell all that remained
+to Mr. Cox the distiller, unknown to Mr. Darrell, who was then married
+himself, working hard, and living quite out of news of the fashionable
+world.  Then Charlie Haughton sold out of the Guards, spent what he got
+for his commission, went into the Line; and finally, in a country town,
+in which I don't think he was quartered, but having gone there on some
+sporting speculation, was unwillingly detained, married--"
+
+"My mother!"  said Lionel, haughtily; "and the best of women she is.
+What then?"
+
+"Nothing, my dear young sir,--nothing, except that Mr. Darrell never
+forgave it.  He has his prejudices: this marriage shocked one of them."
+
+"Prejudice against my poor mother!  I always supposed so!  I wonder why?
+The most simple-hearted, inoffensive, affectionate woman."
+
+"I have not a doubt of it; but it is beginning to rain.  Let us go home.
+I should like some luncheon: it breaks the day."
+
+"Tell me first why Mr. Darrell has a prejudice against my mother.
+I don't think that he has even seen her.  Unaccountable caprice!  Shocked
+him, too,--what a word!  Tell me--I beg--I insist."
+
+"But you know," said Fairthorn, half piteously, half snappishly, "that
+Mrs. Haughton was the daughter of a linendraper, and her father's money
+got Charlie out of the county jail; and Mr. Darrell said, 'Sold even your
+name!'  My father heard him say it in the hall at Fawley.  Mr. Darrell
+was there during a long vacation, and your father came to see him.  Your
+father fired up, and they never saw each other, I believe, again."
+
+Lionel remained still as if thunder-stricken.  Something in his mother's
+language and manner had at times made him suspect that she was not so
+well born as his father.  But it was not the discovery that she was a
+tradesman's daughter that galled him; it was the thought that his father
+was bought for the altar out of the county jail!  It was those cutting
+words, "Sold even your name."  His face, before very crimson, became
+livid; his head sank on his breast.  He walked towards the old gloomy
+house by Fairthorn's side, as one who, for the first time in life, feels
+on his heart the leaden weight of an hereditary shame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+     Showing how sinful it is in a man who does not care for his honour
+     to beget children.
+
+When Lionel saw Mr. Fairthorn devoting his intellectual being to the
+contents of a cold chicken-pie, he silently stepped out of the room and
+slunk away into a thick copse at the farthest end of the paddock.  He
+longed to be alone.  The rain descended, not heavily, but in penetrating
+drizzle; he did not feel it, or rather he felt glad that there was no
+gaudy mocking sunlight.  He sat down forlorn in the hollows of a glen
+which the copse covered, and buried his face in his clasped hands.
+
+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.  Noble 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
+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, 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 passed, 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
+fleshiness, 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 grass, 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 pass 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 illustrate 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."
+
+After dinner, which was not over till past eight o'clock, they always
+adjourned to the library, Fairthorn vanishing into a recess, Darrell and
+Lionel each with his several book, then an air on the flute, and each to
+his own room before eleven.  No life could be more methodical; yet to
+Lionel it had an animating charm, for his interest in his host daily
+increased, and varied his thoughts with perpetual occupation.  Darrell,
+on the contrary, while more kind and cordial, more cautiously on his
+guard not to wound his young guest's susceptibilities than he had been
+before the quarrel and its reconciliation, did not seem to feel for
+Lionel the active interest which Lionel felt for him.  He did not, as
+most clever men are apt to do in their intercourse with youth, attempt
+to draw him out, plumb his intellect, or guide his tastes.  If he was
+at times instructive, it was because talk fell on subjects on which it
+pleased himself to touch, and in which he could not speak without
+involuntarily instructing.  Nor did he ever allure the boy to talk of his
+school-days, of his friends, of his predilections, his hopes, his future.
+In short, had you observed them together, you would have never supposed
+they were connections, that one could and ought to influence and direct
+the career of the other.  You would have said the host certainly liked
+the guest, as any man would like a promising, warm-hearted, high-
+spirited, graceful boy, under his own roof for a short time, but who felt
+that that boy was nothing to him; would soon pass from his eye; form
+friends, pursuits, aims, with which he could be in no way commingled, for
+which he should be wholly irresponsible.  There was also this peculiarity
+in Darrell's conversation; if he never spoke of his guest's past and
+future, neither did he ever do more than advert in the most general terms
+to his own.  Of that grand stage on which he had been so brilliant an
+actor he imparted no reminiscences; of those great men, the leaders of
+his age, with whom he had mingled familiarly, he told no anecdotes.
+Equally silent was he as to the earlier steps in his career, the modes
+by which he had studied, the accidents of which he had seized advantage,
+--silent there as upon the causes he had gained, or the debates he had
+adorned.  Never could you have supposed that this man, still in the prime
+of public life, had been the theme of journals and the boast of party.
+Neither did he ever, as men who talk easily at their own hearths are
+prone to do, speak of projects in the future, even though the projects be
+no vaster than the planting of a tree or the alteration of a parterre,--
+projects with which rural life so copiously and so innocently teems.  The
+past seemed as if it had left to him no memory, the future as if it
+stored for him no desire.  But did the past leave no memory?  Why then
+at intervals would the book slide from his eye, the head sink upon the
+breast, and a shade of unutterable dejection darken over the grand beauty
+of that strong stern countenance?  Still that dejection was not morbidly
+fed and encouraged, for he would fling it from him with a quick impatient
+gesture of the head, resume the book resolutely, or change it for another
+which induced fresh trains of thought, or look over Lionel's shoulder,
+and make some subtile comment on his choice, or call on Fairthorn for the
+flute; and in a few minutes the face was severely serene again.  And be
+it here said, that it is only in the poetry of young gentlemen, or the
+prose of lady novelists, that a man in good health and of sound intellect
+wears the livery of unvarying gloom.  However great his causes of sorrow,
+he does not forever parade its ostentatious mourning, nor follow the
+hearse of his hopes with the long face of an undertaker.  He will still
+have his gleams of cheerfulness, his moments of good humour.  The old
+smile will sometimes light the eye, and awake the old playfulness of the
+lip.  But what a great and critical sorrow does leave behind is often far
+worse than the sorrow itself has been.  It is a change in the inner man,
+which strands him, as Guy Darrell seemed stranded, upon the shoal of the
+Present; which the more he strives manfully to bear his burden warns him
+the more from dwelling on the Past; and the more impressively it enforces
+the lesson of the vanity of human wishes strikes the more from his
+reckoning illusive hopes in the Future.  Thus out of our threefold
+existence two parts are annihilated,--the what has been, the what shall
+be.  We fold our arms, stand upon the petty and steep cragstone, which
+alone looms out of the Measureless Sea, and say to ourselves, looking
+neither backward nor beyond, "Let us bear what is;" and so for the moment
+the eye can lighten and the lip can smile.
+
+Lionel could no longer glean from Mr. Fairthorn any stray hints upon
+the family records.  That gentleman had evidently been reprimanded for
+indiscretion, or warned against its repetition, and he became as reserved
+and mum as if he had just emerged from the cave of Trophonius.  Indeed he
+shunned trusting himself again alone to Lionel, and affecting a long
+arrear of correspondence on behalf of his employer, left the lad during
+the forenoons to solitary angling, or social intercourse with the swans
+and the tame doe.  But from some mystic concealment within doors would
+often float far into the open air the melodies of that magic flute; and
+the boy would glide back, along the dark-red mournful walls of the old
+house, or the futile pomp of pilastered arcades in the uncompleted new
+one, to listen to the sound: listening, he, blissful boy, forgot the
+present; he seized the unchallenged royalty of his years.  For him no
+rebels in the past conspired with poison to the wine-cup, murder to the
+sleep.  No deserts in the future, arresting the march of ambition, said,
+"Here are sands for a pilgrim, not fields for a conqueror."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+     In which chapter the history quietly moves on to the next.
+
+Thus nearly a week had gone, and Lionel began to feel perplexed as to the
+duration of his visit.  Should he be the first to suggest departure?  Mr.
+Darrell rescued him from that embarrassment.  On the seventh day, Lionel
+met his host in a lane near the house, returning from his habitual ride.
+The boy walked home by the side of the horseman, patting the steed,
+admiring its shape, and praising the beauty of another saddle-horse,
+smaller and slighter, which he had seen in the paddock exercised by a
+groom.  "Do you ever ride that chestnut?  I think it even handsomer than
+this."
+
+"Half our preferences are due to the vanity they flatter.  Few can ride
+this horse; any one, perhaps, that."
+
+"There speaks the Dare-all!" said Lionel, laughing.  The host did not
+look displeased.
+
+"Where no difficulty, there no pleasure," said he in his curt laconic
+diction.  "I was in Spain two years ago.  I had not an English horse
+there, so I bought that Andalusian jennet.  What has served him at need,
+no /preux chevalier/ would leave to the chance of ill-usage.  So the
+jennet came with me to England.  You have not been much accustomed to
+ride, I suppose?"
+
+"Not much; but my dear mother thought I ought to learn.  She pinched for
+a whole year to have me taught at a riding-school during one school
+vacation."
+
+"Your mother's relations are, I believe, well off.  Do they suffer her to
+pinch?"
+
+"I do not know that she has relations living; she never speaks of them."
+
+"Indeed!"  This was the first question on home matters that Darrell had
+ever directly addressed to Lionel.  He there dropped the subject, and
+said, after a short pause, "I was not aware that you are a horseman, or I
+would have asked you to accompany me; will you do so to-morrow, and mount
+the jennet?"
+
+"Oh, thank you; I should like it so much."
+
+Darrell turned abruptly away from the bright, grateful eyes.  "I am only
+sorry," he added, looking aside, "that our excursions can be but few.  On
+Friday next I shall submit to you a proposition; if you accept it, we
+shall part on Saturday,--liking each other, I hope: speaking for myself,
+the experiment has not failed; and on yours?"
+
+"On mine!--oh, Mr. Darrell, if I dared but tell you what recollections of
+yourself the experiment will bequeath to me!"
+
+"Do not tell me, if they imply a compliment," answered Darrell, with the
+low silvery laugh which so melodiously expressed indifference and
+repelled affection.  He entered the stable-yard, dismounted; and on
+returning to Lionel, the sound of the flute stole forth, as if from the
+eaves of the gabled roof.  "Could the pipe of Horace's Faunus be sweeter
+than that flute?"  said Darrell,
+
+                  "'Utcunque dulci, Tyndare, fistula,
+                    Valles,' etc.
+
+What a lovely ode that is!  What knowledge of town life!  what
+susceptibility to the rural!  Of all the Latins, Horace is the only one
+with whom I could wish to have spent a week.  But no!  I could not have
+discussed the brief span of human life with locks steeped in Malobathran
+balm and wreathed with that silly myrtle.  Horace and I would have
+quarrelled over the first heady bowl of Massie.  We never can quarrel
+now!  Blessed subject and poet-laureate of Queen Proserpine, and, I dare
+swear, the most gentlemanlike poet she ever received at court; henceforth
+his task is to uncoil the asps from the brows of Alecto, and arrest the
+ambitious Orion from the chase after visionary lions."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+     Showing that if a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good
+     heart is a letter of credit.
+
+The next day they rode forth, host and guest, and that ride proved an
+eventful crisis in the fortune of Lionel Haughton.  Hitherto I have
+elaborately dwelt on the fact that whatever the regard Darrell might
+feel for him, it was a regard apart from that interest which accepts a
+responsibility and links to itself a fate.  And even if, at moments, the
+powerful and wealthy man had felt that interest, he had thrust it from
+him.  That he meant to be generous was indeed certain, and this he had
+typically shown in a very trite matter-of-fact way.  The tailor, whose
+visit had led to such perturbation, had received instructions beyond the
+mere supply of the raiment for which he had been summoned; and a large
+patent portmanteau, containing all that might constitute the liberal
+outfit of a young man in the rank of gentleman, had arrived at Fawley,
+and amazed and moved Lionel, whom Darrell had by this time thoroughly
+reconciled to the acceptance of benefits.  The gift denoted this:
+"In recognizing you as kinsman, I shall henceforth provide for you as
+gentleman."  Darrell indeed meditated applying for an appointment in one
+of the public offices, the settlement of a liberal allowance, and a
+parting shake of the hand, which should imply, "I have now behaved as
+becomes me: the rest belongs to you.  We may never meet again.  There is
+no reason why this good-by may not be forever."
+
+But in the course of that ride, Darrell's intentions changed.  Wherefore?
+You will never guess!  Nothing so remote as the distance between cause
+and effect, and the cause for the effect here was--poor little Sophy.
+
+The day was fresh, with a lovely breeze, as the two riders rode briskly
+over the turf of rolling commons, with the feathery boughs of
+neighbouring woodlands tossed joyously to and fro by the sportive summer
+wind.  The exhilarating exercise and air raised Lionel's spirits, and
+released his tongue from all trammels; and when a boy is in high spirits,
+ten to one but he grows a frank egotist, feels the teeming life of his
+individuality, and talks about himself.  Quite unconsciously, Lionel
+rattled out gay anecdotes of his school-days; his quarrel with a
+demoniacal usher; how he ran away; what befell him; how the doctor went
+after, and brought him back; how splendidly the doctor behaved,--neither
+flogged nor expelled him, but after patiently listening, while he rebuked
+the pupil, dismissed the usher, to the joy of the whole academy; how he
+fought the head boy in the school for calling the doctor a sneak; how,
+licked twice, he yet fought that head boy a third time, and licked him;
+how, when head boy himself, he had roused the whole school into a civil
+war, dividing the boys into Cavaliers and Roundheads; how clay was rolled
+out into cannon-balls and pistol-shots, sticks shaped into swords, the
+playground disturbed to construct fortifications; how a slovenly stout
+boy enacted Cromwell; how he himself was elevated into Prince Rupert; and
+how, reversing all history, and infamously degrading Cromwell, Rupert
+would not consent to be beaten; and Cromwell at the last, disabled by an
+untoward blow across the knuckles, ignominiously yielded himself
+prisoner, was tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to be shot!  To all
+this rubbish did Darrell incline his patient ear,--not encouraging, not
+interrupting, but sometimes stifling a sigh at the sound of Lionel's
+merry laugh, or the sight of his fair face, with heightened glow on his
+cheeks, and his long silky hair, worthy the name of lovelocks, blown by
+the wind from the open loyal features, which might well have graced the
+portrait of some youthful Cavalier.  On bounded the Spanish jennet, on
+rattled the boy rider.  He had left school now, in his headlong talk; he
+was describing his first friendship with Frank Vance, as a lodger at his
+mother's; how example fired him, and he took to sketch-work and painting;
+how kindly Vance gave him lessons; how at one time he wished to be a
+painter; how much the mere idea of such a thing vexed his mother, and how
+little she was moved when he told her that Titian was of a very ancient
+family, and that Francis I., archetype of gentleman, visited Leonardo da
+Vinci's sick-bed; and that Henry VIII. had said to a pert lord who had
+snubbed Holbein, "I can make a lord any day, but I cannot make a
+Holbein!" how Mrs. Haughton still confounded all painters in the general
+image of the painter and the plumber who had cheated her so shamefully in
+the renewed window-sashes and redecorated walls, which Time and the four
+children of an Irish family had made necessary to the letting of the
+first floor.  And these playful allusions to the maternal ideas were
+still not irreverent, but contrived so as rather to prepossess Darrell in
+Mrs. Haughton's favour by bringing out traits of a simple natural mother,
+too proud, perhaps, of her only son, not caring what she did, how she
+worked, so that he might not lose caste as a born Haughton.  Darrell
+understood, and nodded his head approvingly.  "Certainly," he said,
+speaking almost for the first time, "Fame confers a rank above that of
+gentlemen and of kings; and as soon as she issues her patent of nobility,
+it matters not a straw whether the recipient be the son of a Bourbon or
+of a tallow-chandler.  But if Fame withhold her patent; if a well-born
+man paint aldermen, and be not famous (and I dare say you would have been
+neither a Titian nor a Holbein),--why, he might as well be a painter and
+plumber, and has a better chance even of bread and cheese by standing to
+his post as gentleman.  Mrs. Haughton was right, and I respect her."
+
+"Quite right.  If I lived to the age of Methuselah, I could not paint a
+head like Frank Vance."
+
+"And even he is not famous yet.  Never heard of him."
+
+"He will be famous: I am sure of it; and if you lived in London, you
+would hear of him even now.  Oh, sir!  such a portrait as he painted the
+other day!  But I must tell you all about it."  And therewith Lionel
+plunged at once, medias res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy,
+and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and
+then begged; with what artless eloquence he brought out the colours of
+the whole story,--now its humour, now its pathos; with what beautifying
+sympathy he adorned the image of the little vagrant girl, with her mien
+of gentlewoman and her simplicity of child; the river excursion to
+Hampton Court; her still delight; how annoyed he felt when Vance seemed
+ashamed of her before those fine people; the orchard scene in which he
+had read Darrell's letter, that, for the time, drove her from the
+foremost place in his thoughts; the return home, the parting, her wistful
+look back, the visit to the Cobbler's next day; even her farewell gift,
+the nursery poem, with the lines written on the fly-leaf, he had them by
+heart!  Darrell, the grand advocate, felt he could not have produced on a
+jury, with those elements, the effect which that boy-narrator produced on
+his granite self.
+
+"And, oh, sir!" cried Lionel, checking his horse, and even arresting
+Darrell's with bold right hand--"oh," said he, as he brought his moist
+and pleading eyes in full battery upon the shaken fort to which he had
+mined his way--"oh, sir! you are so wise and rich and kind, do rescue
+that poor child from the penury and hardships of such a life!  If you
+could but have seen and heard her!  She could never have been born to it!
+You look away: I offend you!  I have no right to tax your benevolence for
+others; but, instead of showering favours upon me, so little would
+suffice for her!--if she were but above positive want, with that old man
+(she would not be happy without him), safe in such a cottage as you give
+to your own peasants!  I am a man, or shall be one soon; I can wrestle
+with the world, and force my way somehow; but that delicate child, a
+village show, or a beggar on the high road!--no mother, no brother, no
+one but that broken-down cripple, leaning upon her arm as his crutch.  I
+cannot bear to think of it.  I am sure I shall meet her again somewhere;
+and when I do, may I not write to you, and will you not come to her help?
+Do speak; do say 'Yes,' Mr. Darrell."
+
+The rich man's breast heaved slightly; he closed his eyes, but for a
+moment.  There was a short and sharp struggle with his better self, and
+the better self conquered.
+
+"Let go my reins; see, my horse puts down his ears; he may do you a
+mischief.  Now canter on: you shall be satisfied.  Give me a moment to
+--to unbutton my coat: it is too tight for me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+     Guy Darrell gives way to an impulse, and quickly decides what he
+     will do with it.
+
+"Lionel Haughton," said Guy Darrell, regaining his young cousin's side,
+and speaking in a firm and measured voice, "I have to thank you for one
+very happy minute; the sight of a heart so fresh in the limpid purity of
+goodness is a luxury you cannot comprehend till you have come to my age;
+journeyed, like me, from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren.  Heed
+me: if you had been half-a-dozen years older, and this child for whom you
+plead had been a fair young woman, perhaps just as innocent, just as
+charming,--more in peril,--my benevolence would have lain as dormant as a
+stone.  A young man's foolish sentiment for a pretty girl,--as your true
+friend, I should have shrugged my shoulders and said, 'Beware!'  Had I
+been your father, I should have taken alarm and frowned.  I should have
+seen the sickly romance which ends in dupes and deceivers.  But at your
+age, you, hearty, genial, and open-hearted boy,--you, caught but by the
+chivalrous compassion for helpless female childhood,--oh, that you were
+my son,--oh, that my dear father's blood were in those knightly veins!
+I had a son once!  God took him;" the strong man's lips quivered: he
+hurried on.  "I felt there was manhood in you, when you wrote to fling my
+churlish favours in my teeth; when you would have left my roof-tree in a
+burst of passion which might be foolish, but was nobler than the wisdom
+of calculating submission, manhood, but only perhaps man's pride as man,
+--man's heart not less cold than winter.  To-day you have shown me
+something far better than pride; that nature which constitutes the heroic
+temperament is completed by two attributes,--unflinching purpose,
+disinterested humanity.  I know not yet if you have the first; you reveal
+to me the second.  Yes! I accept the duties you propose to me; I will do
+more than leave to you the chance of discovering this poor child.  I will
+direct my solicitor to take the right steps to do so.  I will see that
+she is safe from the ills you feel for her.  Lionel, more still, I am
+impatient till I write to Mrs. Haughton.  I did her wrong.  Remember, I
+have never seen her.  I resented in her the cause of my quarrel with your
+father, who was once dear to me.  Enough of that.  I disliked the tone of
+her letters to me.  I disliked it in the mother of a boy who had Darrell
+blood; other reasons too,--let them pass.  But in providing for your
+education; I certainly thought her relations provided for her support.
+She never asked me for help there; and, judging of her hastily, I thought
+she would not have scrupled to do so, if my help there had not been
+forestalled.  You have made me understand her better; and, at all events,
+three-fourths of what we are in boyhood most of us owe to our mothers!
+You are frank, fearless, affectionate, a gentleman.  I respect the mother
+who has such a son."
+
+Certainly praise was rare upon Darrell's lips; but when he did praise, he
+knew how to do it!  And no man will ever command others who has not by
+nature that gift!  It cannot be learned.  Art and experience can only
+refine its expression.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and
+possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here,
+as a period but closed with a comma.  He who sees his heir in another
+man's child, sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.
+
+Lionel's departure was indefinitely postponed; nothing more was said of
+it.  Meanwhile Darrell's manner towards him underwent a marked change.
+The previous indifference the rich kinsman had hitherto shown as to the
+boy's past life, and the peculiarities of his intellect and character,
+wholly vanished.  He sought now, on the contrary, to plumb thoroughly the
+more hidden depths which lurk in the nature of every human being, and
+which, in Lionel, were the more difficult to discern from the vivacity
+and candour which covered with so smooth and charming a surface a pride
+tremulously sensitive, and an ambition that startled himself in the hours
+when solitude and revery reflect upon the visions of youth the giant
+outline of its own hopes.
+
+Darrell was not dissatisfied with the results of his survey; yet often,
+when perhaps most pleased, a shade would pass over his countenance; and
+had a woman who loved him been by to listen, she would have heard the
+short slight sigh which came and went too quickly for the duller sense of
+man's friendship to recognize it as the sound of sorrow.
+
+In Darrell himself, thus insensibly altered, Lionel daily discovered more
+to charm his interest and deepen his affection.  In this man's nature
+there were, indeed, such wondrous under-currents of sweetness, so
+suddenly gushing forth, so suddenly vanishing again!  And exquisite in
+him were the traits of that sympathetic tact which the world calls fine
+breeding, but which comes only from a heart at once chivalrous and
+tender, the more bewitching in Darrell from their contrast with a manner
+usually cold, and a bearing so stamped with masculine, self-willed,
+haughty power.  Thus--days went on as if Lionel had become a very child
+of the house.  But his sojourn was in truth drawing near to a close not
+less abrupt and unexpected than the turn in his host's humours to which
+he owed the delay of his departure.
+
+One bright afternoon, as Darrell was standing at the window of his
+private study, Fairthorn, who had crept in on some matter of business,
+looked at his countenance long and wistfully, and then, shambling up to
+his side, put one hand on his shoulder with a light timid touch, and,
+pointing with the other to Lionel, who was lying on the grass in front of
+the casement reading the "Faerie Queene," said, "Why do you take him to
+your heart if he does not comfort it?"
+
+Darrell winced and answered gently, "I did not know you were in the room.
+Poor Fairthorn; thank you!"
+
+"Thank me!--what for?"
+
+"For a kind thought.  So, then, you like the boy?"
+
+"Mayn't I like him?"  asked Fairthorn, looking rather frightened; "surely
+you do!"
+
+"Yes, I like him much; I am trying my best to love him.  But, but"--
+Darrell turned quickly, and the portrait of his father over the
+mantelpiece came full upon his sight,--an impressive, a haunting face,
+--sweet and gentle, yet with the high narrow brow and arched nostril of
+pride, with restless melancholy eyes, and an expression that revealed the
+delicacy of intellect, but not its power.  There was something forlorn,
+but imposing, in the whole effigy.  As you continued to look at the
+countenance, the mournful attraction grew upon you.  Truly a touching and
+a most lovable aspect.  Darrell's eyes moistened.
+
+"Yes, my father, it is so!"  he said softly.  "All my sacrifices were in
+vain.  The race is not to be rebuilt!  No grandchild of yours will
+succeed me,--me, the last of the old line!  Fairthorn, how can I love
+that boy?  He may be my heir, and in his veins not a drop of my father's
+blood!"
+
+"But he has the blood of your father's ancestors; and why must you think
+of him as your heir?--you, who, if you would but go again into the world,
+might yet find a fair wi--"
+
+With such a stamp came Darrell's foot upon the floor that the holy and
+conjugal monosyllable dropping from Fairthorn's lips was as much cut in
+two as if a shark had snapped it.  Unspeakably frightened, the poor man
+sidled away, thrust himself behind a tall reading-desk, and, peering
+aslant from that covert, whimpered out, "Don't, don't now, don't be so
+awful; I did not mean to offend, but I'm always saying something I did
+not mean; and really you look so young still "(coaxingly), "and, and--"
+
+Darrell, the burst of rage over, had sunk upon a chair, his face bowed
+over his hands, and his breast heaving as if with suppressed sobs.
+
+The musician forgot his fear; he sprang forward, almost upsetting the
+tall desk; he flung himself on his knees at Darrell's feet, and exclaimed
+in broken words, "Master, master, forgive me!  Beast that I was!  Do look
+up--do smile or else beat me--kick me."
+
+Darrell's right hand slid gently from his face, and fell into Fairthorn's
+clasp.
+
+"Hush, hush," muttered the man of granite; "one moment, and it will be
+over."
+
+One moment!  That might be but a figure of speech; yet before Lionel had
+finished half the canto that was plunging him into fairyland, Darrell was
+standing by him with his ordinary tranquil mien; and Fairthorn's flute
+from behind the boughs of a neighbouring lime-tree was breathing out an
+air as dulcet as if careless Fauns still piped in Arcady, and Grief were
+a far dweller on the other side of the mountains, of whom shepherds,
+reclining under summer leaves, speak as we speak of hydras and unicorns,
+and things in fable.
+
+On, on swelled the mellow, mellow, witching music; and now the worn man
+with his secret sorrow, and the boy with his frank glad laugh, are
+passing away, side by side, over the turf, with its starry and golden
+wild-flowers, under the boughs in yon Druid copse, from which they start
+the ringdove,--farther and farther, still side by side, now out of sight,
+as if the dense green of the summer had closed around them like waves.
+But still the flute sounds on, and still they hear it, softer and softer
+as they go.  Hark!  do you not hear it--you?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+     There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to
+     the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the
+     ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet
+     true to their own laws, potent in their own influences.  Philosophy
+     speculates on their effects, and disputes upon their uses; men who
+     do not philosophize regard them as special messengers and bodes of
+     evil.
+
+They came out of the little park into a by-lane; a vast tract of common
+land, yellow with furze and undulated with swell and hollow, spreading in
+front; to their right the dark beechwoods, still beneath the weight of
+the July noon.  Lionel had been talking about the "Faerie Queene,"
+knight-errantry, the sweet impossible dream-life that, safe from Time,
+glides by bower and hall, through magic forests and by witching eaves in
+the world of poet-books.  And Darrell listened, and the flute-notes
+mingled with the atmosphere faint and far off, like voices from that
+world itself.
+
+Out then they came, this broad waste land before them; and Lionel said
+merrily,--
+
+"But this is the very scene!  Here the young knight, leaving his father's
+hall, would have checked his destrier, glancing wistfully now over that
+green wild which seems so boundless, now to the 'umbrageous horror' of
+those breathless woodlands, and questioned himself which way to take for
+adventure."
+
+"Yes," said Darrell, coming out from his long reserve on all that
+concerned his past life,--"Yes, and the gold of the gorse-blossoms
+tempted me; and I took the waste land."  He paused a moment, and renewed:
+"And then, when I had known cities and men, and snatched romance from
+dull matter-of-fact, then I would have done as civilization does with
+romance itself,--I would have enclosed the waste land for my own
+aggrandizement.  Look," he continued, with a sweep of the hand round the
+width of prospect, "all that you see to the verge of the horizon, some
+fourteen years ago, was to have been thrown into the pretty paddock we
+have just quitted, and serve as park round the house I was then building.
+Vanity of human wishes!  What but the several proportions of their common
+folly distinguishes the baffled squire from the arrested conqueror?
+Man's characteristic cerebral organ must certainly be acquisitiveness."
+
+"Was it his organ of acquisitiveness that moved Themistocles to boast
+that 'he could make a small state great'?"  "Well remembered,--
+ingeniously quoted," returned Darrell, with the polite bend of his
+stately head.  "Yes, I suspect that the coveting organ had much to do
+with the boast.  To build a name was the earliest dream of Themistocles,
+if we are to accept the anecdote that makes him say, 'The trophies of
+Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep,' To build a name, or to create a
+fortune, are but varying applications of one human passion.  The desire
+of something we have not is the first of our childish remembrances: it
+matters not what form it takes, what object it longs for; still it is to
+acquire! it never deserts us while we live."
+
+"And yet, if I might, I should like to ask, what you now desire that you
+do not possess?"
+
+"I--nothing; but I spoke of the living!  I am dead.  Only," added
+Darrell, with his silvery laugh, "I say, as poor Chesterfield said before
+me, 'It is a secret: keep it.'"
+
+Lionel made no reply; the melancholy of the words saddened him: but
+Darrell's manner repelled the expression of sympathy or of interest; and
+the boy fell into conjecture, what had killed to the world this man's
+intellectual life?
+
+And thus silently they continued to wander on till the sound of the flute
+had long been lost to their ears.  Was the musician playing still?
+
+At length they came round to the other end of Fawley village, and Darrell
+again became animated.
+
+"Perhaps," said he, returning to the subject of talk that had been
+abruptly suspended,--"perhaps the love of power is at the origin of each
+restless courtship of Fortune: yet, after all, who has power with less
+alloy than the village thane?  With so little effort, so little thought,
+the man in the manor-house can make men in the cottage happier here below
+and more fit for a hereafter yonder.  In leaving the world I come from
+contest and pilgrimage, like our sires the Crusaders, to reign at home."
+
+As he spoke, he entered one of the cottages.  An old paralytic man was
+seated by the fire, hot though the July sun was out of doors; and his
+wife, of the same age, and almost as helpless, was reading to him a
+chapter in the Old Testament,--the fifth chapter in Genesis, containing
+the genealogy, age, and death of the patriarchs before the Flood.  How
+the faces of the couple brightened when Darrell entered.  "Master Guy!"
+said the old man, tremulously rising.  The world-weary orator and lawyer
+was still Master Guy to him.
+
+"Sit down, Matthew, and let, me read you a chapter."  Darrell took the
+Holy Book, and read the Sermon on the Mount.  Never had Lionel heard
+anything like that reading; the feeling which brought out the depth of
+the sense, the tones, sweeter than the flute, which clothed the divine
+words in music.  As Darrell ceased, some beauty seemed gone from the day.
+He lingered a few minutes, talking kindly and familiarly, and then turned
+into another cottage, where lay a sick woman.  He listened to her
+ailments, promised to send her something to do her good from his own
+stores, cheered up her spirits, and, leaving her happy, turned to Lionel
+with a glorious smile, that seemed to ask, "And is there not power in
+this?"
+
+Put it was the sad peculiarity of this remarkable man that all his moods
+were subject to rapid and seemingly unaccountable variations.  It was as
+if some great blow had fallen on the mainspring of his organization, and
+left its original harmony broken up into fragments each impressive in
+itself, but running one into the other with an abrupt discord, as a harp
+played upon by the winds.  For, after this evident effort at self-
+consolation or self-support in soothing or strengthening others, suddenly
+Darrell's head fell again upon his breast, and he walked on, up the
+village lane, heeding no longer either the open doors of expectant
+cottagers or the salutation of humble passers-by.  "And I could have been
+so happy here!"  he said suddenly.  "Can I not be so yet?  Ay, perhaps,
+when I am thoroughly old,--tied to the world but by the thread of an
+hour.  Old men do seem happy; behind them, all memories faint, save those
+of childhood and sprightly youth; before them, the narrow ford, and the
+sun dawning up through the clouds on the other shore.  'T is the critical
+descent into age in which man is surely most troubled; griefs gone, still
+rankling; nor-strength yet in his limbs, passion yet in his heart-
+reconciled to what loom nearest in the prospect,--the armchair and the
+palsied head.  Well! life is a quaint puzzle.  Bits the most incongruous
+join into each other, and the scheme thus gradually becomes symmetrical
+and clear; when, lo! as the infant claps his hands and cries, 'See!  see!
+the puzzle is made out!' all the pieces are swept back into the box,--
+black box with the gilded nails.  Ho!  Lionel, look up; there is our
+village church, and here, close at my right, the churchyard!"
+
+Now while Darrell and his young companion were directing their gaze to
+the right of the village lane, towards the small gray church,--towards
+the sacred burial-ground in which, here and there amongst humbler graves,
+stood the monumental stone inscribed to the memory of some former
+Darrell, for whose remains the living sod had been preferred to the
+family vault; while both slowly neared the funeral spot, and leaned,
+silent and musing, over the rail that fenced it from the animals turned
+to graze on the sward of the surrounding green,--a foot-traveller, a
+stranger in the place, loitered on the threshold of the small wayside
+inn, about fifty yards off to the left of the lane, and looked hard at
+the still figures of the two kinsmen.
+
+Turning then to the hostess, who was standing somewhat within the
+threshold, a glass of brandy-and-water in her hand, the third glass that
+stranger had called for during his half hour's rest in the hostelry,
+quoth the man,
+
+"The taller gentleman yonder is surely your squire, is he not?  but who
+is the shorter and younger person?"
+
+The landlady put forth her head.
+
+"Oh!  that is a relation of the squire down on a visit, sir.  I heard
+coachman say that the squire's taken to him hugely; and they do think at
+the Hall that the young gentleman will be his heir."
+
+"Aha!--indeed--his heir!  What is the lad's name?  What relation can he
+be to Mr. Darrell?"
+
+"I don't know what relation exactly, sir; but he is one of the Haughtons,
+and they've been kin to the Fawley folks time out of mind."
+
+"Haughton?--aha!  Thank you, ma'am.  Change, if you please."
+
+The stranger tossed off his dram, and stretched his hand for his change.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir, but this must be forring money," said the landlady,
+turning a five-franc piece on her palm with suspicious curiosity.
+
+"Foreign!  Is it possible?"  The stranger dived again into his pocket,
+and apparently with some difficulty hunted out half-a-crown.
+
+"Sixpence more, if you please, sir; three brandies, and bread-and-cheese
+and the ale too, sir."
+
+"How stupid I am!  I thought that French coin was a five shilling piece.
+I fear I have no English money about me but this half-crown; and I can't
+ask you to trust me, as you don't know me."
+
+"Oh, sir, 't is all one if you know the squire.  You may be passing this
+way again."
+
+"I shall not forget my debt when I do, you may be sure," said the
+stranger; and, with a nod, he walked away in the same direction as
+Darrell and Lionel had already taken, through a turnstile by a public
+path that, skirting the churchyard and the neighbouring parsonage, led
+along a cornfield to the demesnes of Fawley.
+
+The path was narrow, the corn rising on either side, so that two persons
+could not well walk abreast.  Lionel was some paces in advance, Darrell
+walking slow.  The stranger followed at a distance: once or twice he
+quickened his pace, is if resolved to overtake Darrell; then apparently
+his mind misgave him, and he again fell back.
+
+There was something furtive and sinister about the man.  Little could be
+seen of his face, for he wore a large hat of foreign make, slouched deep
+over his brow, and his lips and jaw were concealed by a dark and full
+mustache and beard.  As much of the general outline of the countenance as
+remained distinguishable was nevertheless decidedly handsome; but a
+complexion naturally rich in colour seemed to have gained the heated look
+which comes with the earlier habits of intemperance before it fades into
+the leaden hues of the later.
+
+His dress bespoke pretension to a certain rank: but its component parts
+were strangely ill-assorted, out of date, and out of repair; pearl-
+coloured trousers, with silk braids down their sides; brodequins to
+match,--Parisian fashion three years back, but the trousers shabby, the
+braiding discoloured, the brodequins in holes.  The coat-once a black
+evening dress-coat--of a cut a year or two anterior to that of the
+trousers; satin facing,-cloth napless, satin stained.  Over all, a sort
+of summer travelling-cloak, or rather large cape of a waterproof silk,
+once the extreme mode with the lions of the Chaussee d'Autin whenever
+they ventured to rove to Swiss cantons or German spas; but which, from a
+certain dainty effeminacy in its shape and texture, required the minutest
+elegance in the general costume of its wearer as well as the cleanliest
+purity in itself.  Worn by this traveller, and well-nigh worn out too,
+the cape became a finery mournful as a tattered pennon over a wreck.
+
+Yet in spite of this dress, however unbecoming, shabby, obsolete, a
+second glance could scarcely fail to note the wearer as a man wonderfully
+well-shaped,--tall, slender in the waist, long of limb, but with a girth
+of chest that showed immense power; one of those rare figures that a
+female eye would admire for grace, a recruiting sergeant for athletic
+strength.
+
+But still the man's whole bearing and aspect, even apart from the dismal
+incongruities of his attire, which gave him the air of a beggared
+spendthrift, marred the favourable effect that physical comeliness in
+itself produces.  Difficult to describe how,--difficult to say why,--but
+there is a look which a man gets, and a gait which he contracts when the
+rest of mankind cut him; and this man had that look and that gait.
+
+"So, so," muttered the stranger.  "That boy his heir? so, so.  How can I
+get to speak to him?  In his own house he would not see me: it must be as
+now, in the open air; but how catch him alone?  and to lurk in the inn,
+in his own village,--perhaps for a day,--to watch an occasion;
+impossible!  Besides, where is the money for it?  Courage, courage!"
+He  quickened his pace, pushed back his hat.  "Courage!  Why not now?
+Now or never!"
+
+While the man thus mutteringly soliloquized, Lionel had reached the gate
+which opened into the grounds of Fawley, just in the rear of the little
+lake.  Over the gate he swung himself lightly, and, turning back to
+Darrell cried, "Here is the doe waiting to welcome you."
+
+Just as Darrell, scarcely heeding the exclamation, and with his musing
+eyes on the ground, approached the gate, a respectful hand opened it
+wide, a submissive head bowed low, a voice artificially soft faltered
+forth words, broken and, indistinct, but of which those most audible
+were--"Pardon, me; something to communicate,--important; hear me."
+
+Darrell started, just as the traveller almost touched him, started,
+recoiled, as one on whose path rises a wild beast.  His bended head
+became erect, haughty, indignant, defying; but his cheek was pale, and
+his lip quivered.  "You here!  You in England-at Fawley!  You presume to
+accost me!  You, sir,--you!"
+
+Lionel just caught the sound of the voice as the doe had come timidly up
+to him.  He turned round sharply, and beheld Darrell's stern, imperious
+countenance, on which, stern and imperious though it was, a hasty glance
+could discover, at once, a surprise that almost bordered upon fear.  Of
+the stranger still holding the gate he saw but the back, and his voice he
+did not hear, though by the man's gesture he was evidently replying.
+Lionel paused a moment irresolute; but as the man continued to speak, he
+saw Darrell's face grow paler and paler, and in the impulse of a vague
+alarm he hastened towards him; but just within three feet of the spot,
+Darrell arrested his steps.
+
+"Go home, Lionel; this person would speak to me in private."  Then,
+in a lower tone, he said to the stranger, "Close the gate, sir; you are
+standing upon the land of my fathers.  If you would speak with me, this
+way;"  and, brushing through the corn, Darrell strode towards a patch of
+waste land that adjoined the field: the man followed him, and both passed
+from Lionel's eyes.  The doe had come to the gate to greet her master;
+she now rested her nostrils on the bar, with a look disappointed and
+plaintive.
+
+"Come," said Lionel, "come."  The doe would not stir.
+
+So the boy walked on alone, not much occupied with what had just passed.
+"Doubtless," thought he, "some person in the neighbourhood upon country
+business."
+
+He skirted the lake, and seated himself on a garden bench near the house.
+What did he there think of?--who knows?  Perhaps of the Great World;
+perhaps of little Sophy!  Time fled on: the sun was receding in the west
+when Darrell hurried past him without speaking, and entered the house.
+
+The host did not appear at dinner, nor all that evening.  Mr. Mills made
+an excuse: Mr. Darrell did not feel very well.
+
+Fairthorn had Lionel all to himself, and having within the last few days
+reindulged in open cordiality to the young guest, he was especially
+communicative that evening.  He talked much on Darrell, and with all the
+affection that, in spite of his fear, the poor flute-player felt for his
+ungracious patron.  He told many anecdotes of the stern man's tender
+kindness to all that came within its sphere.  He told also anecdotes more
+striking of the kind man's sternness where some obstinate prejudice, some
+ruling passion, made him "granite."
+
+"Lord, my dear young sir," said Fairthorn, "be his most bitter open
+enemy, and fall down in the mire, the first hand to help you would be Guy
+Darrell's; but be his professed friend, and betray him to the worth of a
+straw, and never try to see his face again if you are wise,--the most
+forgiving and the least forgiving of human beings.  But--"
+
+The study door noiselessly opened, and Darrell's voice called out,
+"Fairthorn, let me speak with you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+     Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny.  When two
+     men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny
+     side: he will be the younger man of the two.
+
+The next morning, neither Darrell nor Fairthorn appeared at breakfast;
+but as soon as Lionel had concluded that meal, Mr. Mills informed him,
+with customary politeness, that Mr. Darrell wished to speak with him in
+the study.  Study, across the threshold of which Lionel had never yet set
+footstep!  He entered it now with a sentiment of mingled curiosity and
+awe.  Nothing in it remarkable, save the portrait of the host's father
+over the mantelpiece.  Books strewed tables, chairs, and floors in the
+disorder loved by habitual students.  Near the window was a glass bowl
+containing gold-fish, and close by, in its cage, a singing-bird.  Darrell
+might exist without companionship in the human species, but not without
+something which he protected and cherished,--a bird, even a fish.
+
+Darrell looked really ill: his keen eye was almost dim, and the lines in
+his face seemed deeper.  But he spoke with his usual calm, passionless
+melody of voice.
+
+"Yes," he said, in answer to Lionel's really anxious inquiry; "I am ill.
+Idle persons like me give way to illness.  When I was a busy man, I never
+did; and then illness gave way to me.  My general plans are thus, if not
+actually altered, at least hurried to their consummation sooner than I
+expected.  Before you came here, I told you to come soon, or you might
+not find me.  I meant to go abroad this summer; I shall now start at
+once.  I need the change of scene and air.  You will return to London
+to-day."
+
+"To-day!  You are not angry with me?"
+
+"Angry!  boy and cousin--no!" resumed Darrell, in a tone of unusual
+tenderness.  "Angry-fie!  But since the parting must be, 't is well to
+abridge the pain of long farewell.  You must wish, too, to see your
+mother, and thank her for rearing you up so that you may step from
+poverty into ease with a head erect.  You will give to Mrs. Haughton this
+letter: for yourself, your inclinations seem to tend towards the army.
+But before you decide on that career, I should like you to see something
+more of the world.  Call to-morrow on Colonel Morley, in Curzon Street:
+this is his address.  He will receive by to-day's post a note from me,
+requesting him to advise you.  Follow his counsels in what belongs to the
+world.  He is a man of the world,--a distant connection of mine, who will
+be kind to you for my sake.  Is there more to say?  Yes.  It seems an
+ungracious speech; but I should speak it.  Consider yourself sure from
+me of an independent income.  Never let idle sycophants lead you into
+extravagance by telling you that you will have more.  But indulge not the
+expectation, however plausible, that you will be my heir."
+
+"Mr. Darrell--oh, sir--"
+
+"Hush! the expectation would be reasonable; but I am a strange being.
+I might marry again,--have heirs of my own.  Eh, sir,-0why not?"  Darrell
+spoke these last words almost fiercely, and fixed his eyes on Lionel as
+he repeated,--"Why not?"  But seeing that the boy's face evinced no
+surprise, the expression of his own relaxed, and he continued calmly,--
+"Enough; what I have thus rudely said was kindly meant.  It is a treason
+to a young man to let him count on a fortune which at last is left away
+from him.  Now, Lionel, go; enjoy your spring of life!  Go, hopeful and
+light-hearted.  If sorrow reach you, battle with it; if error mislead
+you, come fearlessly to me for counsel.  Why, boy, what is this?--tears?
+Tut, tut."
+
+"It is your goodness," faltered Lionel.  "I cannot help it.  And is there
+nothing I can do for you in return?"
+
+Yes, much.  Keep your name free from stain, and your heart open to such
+noble emotions as awaken tears like those.  Ah, by the by, I heard from
+my lawyer to-day about your poor little protegee.  Not found yet, but he
+seems sanguine of quick success.  You shall know the moment I hear more."
+
+"You will write to me, then, sir, and I may write to you?"
+
+"As often as you please.  Always direct to me here."
+
+"Shall you be long abroad?"
+
+Darrell's brows met.  "I don't know," said he, curtly.  "Adieu."
+
+He opened the door as he spoke.
+
+Lionel looked at him with wistful yearning, filial affection, through his
+swimming eyes.  "God bless you, sir," he murmured simply, and passed
+away.
+
+"That blessing should have come from me!"  said Darrell to himself, as he
+turned back, and stood on his solitary hearth.  "But they on whose heads
+I once poured a blessing, where are they,--where?  And that man's tale,
+reviving the audacious fable which the other, and I verily believe the
+less guilty knave of the two, sought to palm on me years ago!  Stop; let
+me weigh well what he said.  If it were true!  Oh, shame, shame!"
+
+Folding his arms tightly on his breast, Darrell paced the room with slow,
+measured strides, pondering deeply.  He was, indeed, seeking to suppress
+feeling, and to exercise only judgment; and his reasoning process seemed
+at length fully to satisfy him, for his countenance gradually cleared,
+and a triumphant smile passed across it.  "A lie,--certainly a palpable
+and gross lie; lie it must and shall be.  Never will I accept it as
+truth.  Father" (looking full at the portrait over the mantel-shelf),
+"Father, fear not--never--never!"
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT, V2 ***
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