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+The Project Gutenberg EBook What Will He Do With It, by Lytton, V6
+#92 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 6.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7664]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 1, 2003]
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+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, V6 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+     Etchings of Hyde Park in the month of June, which, if this history
+     escapes those villains the trunk-makers, may be of inestimable value
+     to unborn antiquarians.--Characters, long absent, reappear and give
+     some account of themselves.
+
+Five years have passed away since this history opened.  It is the month
+of June once more,--June, which clothes our London in all its glory,
+fills its languid ballrooms with living flowers, and its stony causeways
+with human butterflies.  It is about the hour of six P.M.  The lounge in
+Hyde Park is crowded; along the road that skirts the Serpentine crawl the
+carriages one after the other; congregate by the rails the lazy lookers-
+on,--lazy in attitude, but with active eyes, and tongues sharpened on the
+whetstone of scandal,--the Scaligers of club windows airing their
+vocabulary in the Park.  Slowly saunter on foot idlers of all degrees in
+the hierarchy of London idlesse: dandies of established-fame; youthful
+tyros in their first season.  Yonder in the Ride, forms less inanimate
+seem condemned to active exercise; young ladies doing penance in a
+canter; old beaux at hard labour in a trot.  Sometimes, by a more
+thoughtful brow, a still brisker pace, you recognize a busy member of
+the Imperial Parliament, who, advised by physicians to be as much on
+horseback as possible, snatches an hour or so in the interval between the
+close of his Committee and the interest of the Debate, and shirks the
+opening speech of a well-known bore.  Among such truant lawgivers (grief
+it is to say it) may be seen that once model member, Sir Gregory
+Stollhead.  Grim dyspepsia seizing on him at last, "relaxation from his
+duties" becomes the adequate punishment for all his sins.  Solitary he
+rides, and communing with himself, yawns at every second.  Upon chairs
+beneficently located under the trees towards the north side of the walk
+are interspersed small knots and coteries in repose.  There you might
+see the Ladies Prymme, still the Ladies Prymme,--Janet and Wilhelmina;
+Janet has grown fat, Wilhelmina thin.  But thin or fat, they are no
+less Prymmes.  They do not lack male attendants; they are girls of high
+fashion, with whom young inen think it a distinction to be seen talking;
+of high principle, too, and high pretensions (unhappily for themselves,
+they are co-heiresses), by whom young men under the rank of earls need
+not fear to be artfully entrapped into "honourable intentions."  They
+coquet majestically, but they never flirt; they exact devotion, but they
+do not ask in each victim a sacrifice on the horns of the altar; they
+will never give their hands where they do not give their hearts; and
+being ever afraid that they are courted for their money, they will
+never give their hearts save to wooers who have much more money than
+themselves.  Many young men stop to do passing homage to the Ladies
+Prymme: some linger to converse; safe young men,--they are all younger
+sons.  Farther on, Lady Frost and Mr. Crampe, the wit, sit amicably side
+by side, pecking at each other with sarcastic beaks; occasionally
+desisting, in order to fasten nip and claw upon that common enemy, the
+passing friend!  The Slowes, a numerous family, but taciturn, sit by
+themselves; bowed to much, accosted rarely.
+
+Note that man of good presence, somewhere about thirty, or a year or two
+more, who, recognized by most of the loungers, seems not at home in the
+lounge.  He has passed by the various coteries just described, made his
+obeisance to the Ladies Prymme, received an icy epigram from Lady Frost,
+and a laconic sneer from Mr. Crampe, and exchanged silent bows with seven
+silent Slowes.  He has wandered on, looking high in the air, but still
+looking for some one not in the air, and evidently disappointed in his
+search, comes to a full stop at length, takes off his hat, wipes his
+brow, utters a petulant "Prr--r--pshaw!" and seeing, a little in the
+background, the chairless shade of a thin, emaciated, dusty tree, thither
+he retires, and seats himself with as little care whether there to seat
+himself be the right thing in the right place, as if in the honeysuckle
+arbour of a village inn.  "It serves me right," said he to himself: "a
+precocious villain bursts in upon me, breaks my day, makes an appointment
+to meet me here, in these very walks, ten minutes before six; decoys me
+with the promise of a dinner at Putney,--room looking on the river and
+fried flounders.  I have the credulity to yield: I derange my habits;
+I leave my cool studio; I put off my easy blouse; I imprison my freeborn
+throat in a cravat invented by the Thugs; the dog-days are at hand, and I
+walk rashly over scorching pavements in a black frock-coat and a brimless
+hat; I annihilate 3s. 6d. in a pair of kid gloves; I arrive at this haunt
+of spleen; I run the gauntlet of Frosts, Slowes, and Prymmes: and my
+traitor fails me!  Half-past six,--not a sign of him! and the dinner at
+Putney,--fried flounders?  Dreams!  Patience, five minutes more; if then
+he comes not, breach for life between him and me!  Ah, voila! there he
+comes, the laggard!  But how those fine folks are catching at him!  Has
+he asked them also to dinner at Putney, and do they care for fried
+flounders?"
+
+The soliloquist's eye is on a young man, much younger than himself, who
+is threading the motley crowd with a light quick step, but is compelled
+to stop at each moment to interchange a word of welcome, a shake of the
+hand.  Evidently he has already a large acquaintance; evidently he is
+popular, on good terms with the world and himself.  What free grace in
+his bearing!  what gay good-humour in his smile!  Powers above!  Lady
+Wilhelmina surely blushes as she returns his bow.  He has passed Lady
+Frost unblighted; the Slowes evince emotion, at least the female Slowes,
+as he shoots by them with that sliding bow.  He looks from side to side,
+with the rapid glance of an eye in which light seems all dance and
+sparkle: he sees the soliloquist under the meagre tree; the pace
+quickens, the lips part half laughing.
+
+"Don't scold, Vance.  I am late, I know; but I did not make allowance for
+interceptions."
+
+"Body o' me, interceptions!  For an absentee just arrived in London, you
+seem to have no lack of friends."
+
+"Friends made in Paris and found again here at every corner, like
+pleasant surprises,--but no friend so welcome and dear as Frank Vance."
+
+"Sensible of the honour, O Lionello the Magnificent.  Verily you are /bon
+prince!/  The Houses of Valois and of Medici were always kind to artists.
+But whither would you lead me?  Back into that treadmill?  Thank you,
+humbly; no."
+
+"A crowd in fine clothes is of all mobs the dullest.  I can look
+undismayed on the many-headed monster, wild and rampant; but when the
+many-headed monster buys its hats in Bond Street, and has an eyeglass at
+each of its inquisitive eyes, I confess I take fright.  Besides, it is
+near seven o'clock; Putney not visible, and the flounders not fried!"
+
+"My cab is waiting yonder; we must walk to it: we can keep on the turf,
+and avoid the throng.  But tell me honestly, Vance, do you really dislike
+to mix in crowds; you, with your fame, dislike the eyes that turn back to
+look again, and the lips that respectfully murmur, 'Vance the Painter'?
+Ah, I always said you would be a great painter,--and in five short years
+you have soared high."
+
+"Pooh!"  answered Vance, indifferently.  "Nothing is pure and
+unadulterated in London use; not cream, nor cayenne pepper; least of all
+Fame,--mixed up with the most deleterious ingredients.  Fame! did you
+read the 'Times' critique on my pictures in the present Exhibition?  Fame
+indeed Change the subject.  Nothing so good as flounders.  Ho! is that
+your cab?  Superb!  Car fit for the 'Grecian youth of talents rare,' in
+Mr. Enfield's 'Speaker;' horse that seems conjured out of the Elgin
+Marbles.  Is he quiet?"
+
+"Not very; but trust to my driving.  You may well admire the horse,--
+present from Darrell, chosen by Colonel Morley."  When the young men had
+settled themselves into the vehicle, Lionel dismissed his groom, and,
+touching his horse, the animal trotted out briskly.
+
+"Frank," said Lionel, shaking his dark curls with a petulant gravity,
+"your cynical definitions are unworthy that masculine beard.  You despise
+fame! what sheer affectation!
+
+                         "'Pulverem Olympicum
+               Collegisse juvat; metaque fervidis
+                    Evitata rotis-----'"
+
+"Take care," cried Vance; "we shall be over."  For Lionel, growing
+excited, teased the horse with his whip; and the horse bolting, took the
+cab within an inch of a water-cart.
+
+"Fame, fame!" cried Lionel, unheeding the interruption.  "What would I
+not give to have and to hold it for an hour?"  "Hold an eel, less
+slippery; a scorpion, less stinging!  But--" added Vance, observing his
+companion's heightened colour--"but," he added seriously, and with an
+honest compunction, "I forgot, you are a soldier, you follow the career
+of arms!  Never heed what is said on the subject by a querulous painter!
+The desire of fame may be folly in civilians: in soldiers it is wisdom.
+Twin-born with the martial sense of honour, it cheers the march; it warms
+the bivouac; it gives music to the whir of the bullet, the roar of the
+ball; it plants hope in the thick of peril; knits rivals with the bond
+of brothers; comforts the survivor when the brother falls; takes from war
+its grim aspect of carnage; and from homicide itself extracts lessons
+that strengthen the safeguards to humanity, and perpetuate life to
+nations.  Right: pant for fame; you are a soldier!"
+
+This was one of those bursts of high sentiment from Vance, which, as they
+were very rare with him, had the dramatic effect of surprise.  Lionel
+listened to him with a thrilling delight.  He could not answer: he was
+too moved.  The artist resumed, as the cabriolet now cleared the Park,
+and rolled safely and rapidly along the road.  "I suppose, during the
+five years you have spent abroad completing your general education, you
+have made little study, or none, of what specially appertains to the
+profession you have so recently chosen."
+
+"You are mistaken there, my dear Vance.  If a man's heart be set on a
+thing, he is always studying it.  The books I loved best, and most
+pondered over, were such as, if they did not administer lessons,
+suggested hints that might turn to lessons hereafter.  In social
+intercourse, I never was so pleased as when I could fasten myself to some
+practical veteran,--question and cross-examine him.  One picks up more
+ideas in conversation than from books; at least I do.  Besides, my idea
+of a soldier who is to succeed some day is not that of a mere mechanician
+-at-arms.  See how accomplished most great captains have been.  What
+observers of mankind! what diplomatists! what reasoners! what men of
+action, because men to whom reflection had been habitual before they
+acted!  How many stores of idea must have gone to the judgment which
+hazards the sortie or decides on the retreat!"
+
+"Gently, gently!" cried Vance.  "We shall be into that omnibus!  Give me
+the whip,--do; there, a little more to the left,--so.  Yes; I am glad to
+see such enthusiasm in your profession: 't is half the battle.  Hazlitt
+said a capital thing, 'The 'prentice who does not consider the Lord Mayor
+in his gilt coach the greatest man in the world will live to be hanged!'"
+
+"Pish!" said Lionel, catching at the whip.
+
+VANCE (holding it back).--"No.  I apologize.  I retract the Lord Mayor:
+comparisons are odious.  I agree with you, nothing like leather.  I mean
+nothing like a really great soldier,--Hannibal, and so forth.  Cherish
+that conviction, my friend: meanwhile, respect human life; there is
+another omnibus!"
+
+The danger past, the artist thought it prudent to divert the conversation
+into some channel less exciting.
+
+"Mr. Darrell, of course, consents to your choice of a profession?"
+
+"Consents!  approves, encourages.  Wrote me such a beautiful letter!
+what a comprehensive intelligence that man has!"
+
+"Necessarily; since he agrees with you.  Where is he now?"
+
+"I have no notion: it is some months since I heard from him.  He was then
+at Malta, on his return from Asia Minor."
+
+"So! you have never seen him since he bade you farewell at his old Manor-
+house?"
+
+"Never.  He has not, I believe, been in England."
+
+"Nor in Paris, where you seem to have chiefly resided."
+
+"Nor in Paris.  Ah, Vance, could I but be of some comfort to him.  Now
+that I am older, I think I understand in him much that perplexed me as a
+boy when we parted.  Darrell is one of those men who require a home.
+Between the great world and solitude, he needs the intermediate filling-
+up which the life domestic alone supplies: a wife to realize the sweet
+word helpmate; children, with whose future he could knit his own toils
+and his ancestral remembrances.  That intermediate space annihilated,
+the great world and the solitude are left, each frowning on the other."
+
+"My dear Lionel, you must have lived with very clever people: you are
+talking far above your years."
+
+"Am I?  True; I have lived, if not with very clever people, with people
+far above my years.  That is a secret I learned from Colonel Morley, to
+whom I must present you,--the subtlest intellect under the quietest
+manner.  Once he said to me, 'Would you throughout life be up to the
+height of your century,--always in the prime of man's reason, without
+crudeness and without decline,--live habitually while young with persons
+older, and when old with persons younger, than yourself.'"
+
+"Shrewdly said indeed.  I felicitate you on the evident result of the
+maxim.  And so Darrell has no home,--no wife and no children?"
+
+"He has long been a widower; he lost his only son in boyhood, and his
+daughter--did you never hear?"
+
+"No, what?"
+
+"Married so ill--a runaway match--and died many years since, without
+issue."
+
+"Poor man!  It was these afflictions, then, that soured his life, and
+made him the hermit or the wanderer?"
+
+"There," said Lionel, "I am puzzled; for I find that, even after his
+son's death and his daughter's unhappy marriage and estrangement from
+him, he was still in Parliament and in full activity of career.  But
+certainly he did not long keep it up.  It might have been an effort to
+which, strong as he is, he felt himself unequal; or, might he have known
+some fresh disappointment, some new sorrow, which the world never
+guesses?  What I have said as to his family afflictions the world knows.
+But I think he will marry again.  That idea seemed strong in his own mind
+when we parted; he brought it out bluntly, roughly.  Colonel Morley is
+convinced that he will marry, if but for the sake of an heir."
+
+VANCE.--"And if so, my poor Lionel, you are ousted of--"
+
+LIONEL (quickly interrupting).--"Hush!  Do not say, my dear Vance, do not
+you say--you!--one of those low, mean things which, if said to me even by
+men for whom I have no esteem, make my ears tingle and my cheek blush.
+When I think of what Darrell has already done for me,--me who have no
+claim on him,--it seems to me as if I must hate the man who insinuates,
+'Fear lest your benefactor find a smile at his own hearth, a child of his
+own blood; for you may be richer at his death in proportion as his life
+is desolate.'"
+
+VANCE.--"You are a fine young fellow, and I beg your pardon.  Take care
+of that milestone: thank you.  But I suspect that at least two-thirds of
+those friendly hands that detained you on the way to me were stretched
+out less to Lionel Haughton, a subaltern in the Guards, than to Mr.
+Darrell's heir presumptive."
+
+LIONEL.--"That thought sometimes galls me, but it does me good; for it
+goads on my desire to make myself some one whom the most worldly would
+not disdain to know for his own sake.  Oh for active service!  Oh for a
+sharp campaign!  Oh for fair trial how far a man in earnest can grapple
+Fortune to his breast with his own strong hands!  You have done so,
+Vance; you had but your genius and your painter's brush.  I have no
+genius; but I have a resolve, and resolve is perhaps as sure of its ends
+as genius.  Genius and Resolve have three grand elements in common,--
+Patience, Hope, and Concentration."
+
+Vance, more and more surprised, looked hard at Lionel without speaking.
+Five years of that critical age, from seventeen to twenty-two, spent in
+the great capital of Europe; kept from its more dangerous vices partly
+by a proud sense of personal dignity, partly by a temperament which,
+regarding love as an ideal for all tender and sublime emotion, recoiled
+from low profligacy as being to love what the Yahoo of the mocking
+satirist was to man; absorbed much by the brooding ambition that takes
+youth out of the frivolous present into the serious future, and seeking
+companionship, not with contemporary idlers, but with the highest and
+maturest intellects that the free commonwealth of good society brought
+within his reach: five years so spent had developed a boy, nursing noble
+dreams, into a man fit for noble action,--retaining freshest youth in its
+enthusiasm, its elevation of sentiment, its daring, its energy, and
+divine credulity in its own unexhausted resources; but borrowing from
+maturity compactness and solidity of idea,--the link between speculation
+and practice, the power to impress on others a sense of the superiority
+which has been self-elaborated by unconscious culture.
+
+"So!" said Vance, after a prolonged pause, "I don't know whether I have
+resolve or genius; but certainly if I have made my way to some small
+reputation, patience, hope, and concentration of purpose must have the
+credit of it; and prudence, too, which you have forgotten to name, and
+certainly don't evince as a charioteer.  I hope, my dear fellow, you are
+not extravagant?  No doubt, eh?--why do you laugh?"
+
+"The question is so like you, Frank,--thrifty as ever."
+
+"Do you think I could have painted with a calm mind if I knew that at my
+door there was a dun whom I could not pay?  Art needs serenity; and if an
+artist begin his career with as few shirts to his back as I had, he must
+place economy amongst the rules of perspective."
+
+Lionel laughed again, and made some comments on economy which were
+certainly, if smart, rather flippant, and tended not only to lower the
+favourable estimate of his intellectuai improvement which Vance had just
+formed, but seriously disquieted the kindly artist.  Vance knew the
+world,--knew the peculiar temptations to which a young man in Lionel's
+position would be exposed,--knew that contempt for economy belongs to
+that school of Peripatetics which reserves its last lessons for finished
+disciples in the sacred walks of the Queen's Bench.
+
+However, that was no auspicious moment for didactic warnings.
+
+"Here we are!"  cried Lionel,--"Putney Bridge."
+
+They reached the little inn by the river-side, and while dinner was
+getting ready they hired a boat.  Vance took the oars.
+
+VANCE.--"Not so pretty here as by those green quiet banks along which we
+glided, at moonlight, five years ago."
+
+LIONEL.--"Ah, no!  And that innocent, charming child, whose portrait you
+took,--you have never heard of her since?"
+
+VANCE.--"Never!  How should I?  Have you?"
+
+LIONEL.--"Only what Darrell repeated to me.  His lawyer had ascertained
+that she and her grandfather had gone to America.  Darrell gently implied
+that, from what he learned of them, they scarcely merited the interest I
+felt in their fate.  But we were not deceived, were we, Vance?"
+
+VANCE--"No; the little girl--what was her name?  Sukey?  Sally?  Sophy,
+true--Sophy had something about her extremely prepossessing, besides her
+pretty face; and, in spite of that horrid cotton print, I shall never
+forget it."
+
+LIONEL--"Her face!  Nor I.  I see it still before me!"
+
+VANCE--"Her cotton print!  I see it still before me!  But I must not be
+ungrateful.  Would you believe it,--that little portrait, which cost me
+three pounds, has made, I don't say my fortune, but my fashion?"
+
+LIONEL--"How!  You had the heart to sell it?"
+
+VANCE.--"No; I kept it as a study for young female heads--'with
+variations,' as they say in music.  It was by my female heads that I
+became the fashion; every order I have contains the condition, 'But be
+sure, one of your sweet female heads, Mr. Vance.'  My female heads are as
+necessary to my canvas as a white horse to Wouvermans'.  Well, that
+child, who cost me three pounds, is the original of them all.  Commencing
+as a Titania, she has been in turns a 'Psyche,' a 'Beatrice-Cenci,'
+a 'Minna,' 'A Portrait of a Nobleman's Daughter,' 'Burns's Mary in
+Heaven,' 'The Young Gleaner,' and 'Sabrina Fair,' in Milton's 'Comus.'
+I have led that child through all history, sacred and profane.  I have
+painted her in all costumes (her own cotton print excepted).  My female
+heads are my glory; even the 'Times' critic allows that!  'Mr. Vance,
+there, is inimitable! a type of childlike grace peculiarly his own,' etc.
+I'll lend you the article."
+
+LIONEL.--"And shall we never again see the original darling Sophy?  You
+will laugh, Vance, but I have been heartproof against all young ladies.
+If ever I marry, my wife must have Sophy's eyes!  In America!"
+
+VANCE.--"Let us hope by this time happily married to a Yankee!  Yankees
+marry girls in their teens, and don't ask for dowries.  Married to a
+Yankee! not a doubt of it! a Yankee who thaws, whittles, and keeps a
+'store'!"
+
+LIONEL.--"Monster!  Hold your tongue. /A propos/ of marriage, why are you
+still single?"
+
+VANCE.--"Because I have no wish to be doubled up!  Moreover, man is like
+a napkin, the more neatly the housewife doubles him, the more carefully
+she lays him on the shelf.  Neither can a man once doubled know how often
+he may be doubled.  Not only his wife folds him in two, but every child
+quarters him into a new double, till what was a wide and handsome
+substance, large enough for anything in reason, dwindles into a pitiful
+square that will not cover one platter,--all puckers and creases, smaller
+and smaller with every double, with every double a new crease.  Then, my
+friend, comes the washing-bill! and, besides all the hurts one receives
+in the mangle, consider the hourly wear and tear of the linen-press!  In
+short, Shakspeare vindicates the single life, and depicts the double in
+the famous line, which is no doubt intended to be allegorical of
+marriage,
+
+                    "'Double, double, toil and trouble.'
+
+Besides, no single man can be fairly called poor.  What double man can
+with certainty be called rich?  A single man can lodge in a garret, and
+dine on a herring: nobody knows; nobody cares.  Let him marry, and he
+invites the world to witness where he lodges, and how he dines.  The
+first necessary a wife demands is the most ruinous, the most indefinite
+superfluity; it is Gentility according to what her neighbours call
+genteel.  Gentility commences with the honeymoon; it is its shadow, and
+lengthens as the moon declines.  When the honey is all gone, your bride
+says, 'We can have our tea without sugar when quite alone, love; but, in
+case Gentility drop in, here's a bill for silver sugar-tongs!'  That's
+why I'm single."
+
+"Economy again, Vance."
+
+"Prudence,--dignity," answered Vance, seriously; and sinking into a
+revery that seemed gloomy, he shot back to shore.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+     Mr. Vance explains how he came to grind colours and save half-pence.
+     --A sudden announcement.
+
+The meal was over; the table had been spread by a window that looked upon
+the river.  The moon was up: the young men asked for no other lights;
+conversation between them--often shifting, often pausing--had gradually
+become grave, as it usually does with two companions in youth; while yet
+long vistas in the Future stretch before them deep in shadow, and they
+fall into confiding talk on what they wish,--what they fear; making
+visionary maps in that limitless Obscure.
+
+"There is so much power in faith," said Lionel, "even when faith is
+applied but to things human and earthly, that let a man be but firmly
+persuaded that he is born to do, some day, what at the moment seems
+impossible, and it is fifty to one but what he does it before he dies.
+Surely, when you were a child at school, you felt convinced that there
+was something in your fate distinct from that of the other boys, whom the
+master might call quite as clever,--felt that faith in yourself which
+made you sure that you would be one day what you are."
+
+"Well, I suppose so; but vague aspirations and self-conceits must be
+bound together by some practical necessity--perhaps a very homely and a
+very vulgar one--or they scatter and evaporate.  One would think that
+rich people in high life ought to do more than poor folks in humble life.
+More pains are taken with their education; they have more leisure for
+following the bent of their genius: yet it is the poor folks, often half
+self-educated, and with pinched bellies, that do three-fourths of the
+world's grand labour.  Poverty is the keenest stimulant; and poverty made
+me say, not 'I will do,' but 'I must.'"
+
+"You knew real poverty in childhood, Frank?"
+
+"Real poverty, covered over with sham affluence.  My father was Genteel
+Poverty, and my mother was Poor Gentility.  The sham affluence went when
+my father died.  The real poverty then came out in all its ugliness.  I
+was taken from a genteel school, at which, long afterwards, I genteelly
+paid the bills; and I had to support my mother somehow or other,--somehow
+or other I succeeded.  Alas, I fear not genteelly!  But before I lost
+her, which I did in a few years, she had some comforts which were not
+appearances; and she kindly allowed, dear soul, that gentility and shams
+do not go well together.  Oh, beware of debt, Lionello mio; and never
+call that economy meanness which is but the safeguard from mean
+degradation."
+
+"I understand you at last, Vance; shake hands: I know why you are
+saving."
+
+"Habit now," answered Vance, repressing praise of himself, as usual.
+"But I remember so well when twopence was a sum to be respected that to
+this day I would rather put it by than spend it.  All our ideas--like
+orange-plants--spread out in proportion to the size of the box which
+imprisons the roots.  Then I had a sister."  Vance paused a moment, as if
+in pain, but went on with seeming carelessness, leaning over the window-
+sill, and turning his face from his friend.  "I had a sister older than
+myself, handsome, gentle."
+
+"I was so proud of her!  Foolish girl! my love was not enough for her.
+Foolish girl! she could not wait to see what I might live to do for her.
+She married--oh! so genteelly!--a young man, very well born, who had
+wooed her before my father died.  He had the villany to remain constant
+when she had not a farthing, and he was dependent on distant relations,
+and his own domains in Parnassus.  The wretch was a poet!  So they
+married.  They spent their honeymoon genteelly, I dare say.  His
+relations cut him.  Parnassus paid no rents.  He went abroad.  Such
+heart-rending letters from her.  They were destitute.  How I worked! how
+I raged!  But how could I maintain her and her husband too, mere child
+that I was?  No matter.  They are dead now, both; all dead for whose sake
+I first ground colours and saved halfpence.  And Frank Vance is a stingy,
+selfish bachelor.  Never revive this dull subject again, or I shall
+borrow a crown from you and cut you dead.  Waiter, ho!--the bill.  I'll
+just go round to the stables, and see the horse put to."
+
+As the friends re-entered London, Vance said, "Set me down anywhere in
+Piccadilly; I will walk home.  You, I suppose, of course, are staying
+with your mother in Gloucester Place?"
+
+"No," said Lionel, rather embarrassed; "Colonel Morley, who acts for me
+as if he were my guardian, took a lodging for me in Chesterfield Street,
+Mayfair.  My hours, I fear, would ill suit my dear mother.  Only in town
+two days; and, thanks to Morley, my table is already covered with
+invitations."
+
+"Yet you gave me one day, generous friend!"
+
+"You the second day, my mother the first.  But there are three balls
+before me to-night.  Come home with me, and smoke your cigar while I
+dress."
+
+"No; but I will at least light my cigar in your hall, prodigal!"
+
+Lionel now stopped at his lodging.  The groom, who served him also as
+valet, was in waiting at the door.  "A note for you, sir, from Colonel
+Morley,--just come."  Lionel hastily opened it, and read,
+
+     MY DEAR HAUGHTON,--Mr. Darrell has suddenly arrived in London.  Keep
+     yourself free all to-morrow, when, no doubt, he will see you.  I am
+     hurrying off to him.
+
+     Yours in haste,  A.  V.  M.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+     Once more Guy Darrell.
+
+Guy Darrell was alone: a lofty room in a large house on the first floor,
+--his own house in Carlton Gardens, which he had occupied during his
+brief and brilliant parliamentary career; since then, left contemptuously
+to the care of a house agent, to be let by year or by season, it had
+known various tenants of an opulence and station suitable to its space
+and site.  Dinners and concerts, routs and balls, had assembled the
+friends and jaded the spirits of many a gracious host and smiling
+hostess.  The tenure of one of these temporary occupants had recently
+expired; and, ere the agent had found another, the long absent owner
+dropped down into its silenced halls as from the clouds, without other
+establishment than his old servant Mills and the woman in charge of the
+house.  There, as in a caravansery, the traveller took his rest, stately
+and desolate.  Nothing so comfortless as one of those large London houses
+all to one's self.  In long rows against the walls stood the empty
+fauteuils.  Spectral from the gilded ceiling hung lightless chandeliers.
+--The furniture, pompous, but worn by use and faded by time, seemed
+mementos of departed revels.  When you return to your house in the
+country--no matter how long the absence, no matter how decayed by neglect
+the friendly chambers may be, if it has only been deserted in the
+meanwhile (not let to new races, who, by their own shifting dynasties,
+have supplanted the rightful lord, and half-effaced his memorials)--the
+walls may still greet you forgivingly, the character of Home be still
+there.  You take up again the thread of associations which had, been
+suspended, not snapped.  But it is otherwise with a house in cities,
+especially in our fast-living London, where few houses descend from
+father to son,--where the title-deeds are rarely more than those of a
+purchased lease for a term of years, after which your property quits you.
+A house in London, which your father never entered, in which no elbow-
+chair, no old-fashioned work-table, recall to you the kind smile of a
+mother; a house that you have left as you leave an inn, let to people
+whose names you scarce know, with as little respect for your family
+records as you have for theirs,--when you return after a long interval
+of years to a house like that, you stand, as stood Darrell, a forlorn
+stranger under your own roof-tree.  What cared he for those who had last
+gathered round those hearths with their chill steely grates, whose forms
+had reclined on those formal couches, whose feet had worn away the gloss
+from those costly carpets?  Histories in the lives of many might be
+recorded within those walls.  "Lovers there had breathed their first
+vows; bridal feasts had been held; babes had crowed in the arms of proud
+young mothers; politicians there had been raised into ministers;
+ministers there had fallen back into independent members;" through those
+doors corpses had been borne forth to relentless vaults.  For these races
+and their records what cared the owner?  Their writing was not on the
+walls.  Sponged out, as from a slate, their reckonings with Time; leaving
+dim, here and there, some chance scratch of his own, blurred and bygone.
+Leaning against the mantelpiece, Darrell gazed round the room with a
+vague wistful look, as if seeking to conjure up associations that might
+link the present hour to that past life which had slipped away elsewhere;
+and his profile, reflected on the mirror behind, pale and mournful,
+seemed like that ghost of himself which his memory silently evoked.
+
+The man is but little altered externally since we saw him last, however
+inly changed since he last stood on those unwelcoming floors; the form
+still retained the same vigour and symmetry,--the same unspeakable
+dignity of mien and bearing; the same thoughtful bend of the proud neck,
+--so distinct, in its elastic rebound, from the stoop of debility or age.
+'thick as ever the rich mass of dark-brown hair, though, when in the
+impatience of some painful thought his hand swept the loose curls from
+his forehead, the silver threads might now be seen shooting here and
+there,--vanishing almost as soon as seen.  No, whatever the baptismal
+register may say to the contrary, that man is not old,--not even elderly;
+in the deep of that clear gray eye light may be calm, but in calm it is
+vivid; not a ray, sent from brain or from heart, is yet flickering down.
+On the whole, however, there is less composure than of old in his mien
+and bearing; less of that resignation which seemed to say, "I have done
+with the substances of life."  Still there was gloom, but it was more
+broken and restless.  Evidently that human breast was again admitting,
+or forcing itself to court, human hopes, human objects.  Returning to the
+substances of life, their movement was seen in the shadows which, when
+they wrap us round at remoter distance, seem to lose their trouble as
+they gain their width.  He broke from his musing attitude with an abrupt
+angry movement, as if shaking off thoughts which displeased him, and
+gathering his arms tightly to his breast, in a gesture peculiar to
+himself, walked to and fro the room, murmuring inaudibly.  The door
+opened; he turned quickly, and with an evident sense of relief, for his
+face brightened.  "Alban, my dear Alban!"
+
+"Darrell! old friend! old school-friend! dear, dear Guy Darrell!" The two
+Englishmen stood, hands tightly clasped in each other, in true English
+greeting, their eyes moistening with remembrances that carried them back
+to boyhood.
+
+Alban was the first to recover self-possession; and, when the friends had
+seated themselves, he surveyed Darrell's countenance deliberately, and
+said, "So little change!--wonderful!  What is your secret?"
+
+"Suspense from life,--hibernating.  But you beat me; you have been
+spending life, yet seem as rich in it as when we parted."
+
+"No; I begin to decry the present and laud the past; to read with
+glasses, to decide from prejudice, to recoil from change, to find sense
+in twaddle, to know the value of health from the fear to lose it; to feel
+an interest in rheumatism, an awe of bronchitis; to tell anecdotes, and
+to wear flannel.  To you in strict confidence I disclose the truth: I am
+no longer twenty-five.  You laugh; this is civilized talk: does it not
+refresh you after the gibberish you must have chattered in Asia Minor?"
+
+Darrell might have answered in the affirmative with truth.  What man,
+after long years of solitude, is not refreshed by talk, however trivial,
+that recalls to him the gay time of the world he remembered in his young
+day,--and recalls it to him on the lips of a friend in youth!  But
+Darrell said nothing; only he settled himself in his chair with a more
+cheerful ease, and inclined his relaxing brows with a nod of
+encouragement or assent.
+
+Colonel Morley continued.  "But when did you arrive? whence?  How long do
+you stay here?  What are your plans?"
+
+DARRELL.--"Caesar could not be more laconic.  When arrived? this evening.
+Whence?  Ouzelford.  How long do I stay? uncertain.  What are my plans?
+let us discuss them."
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"With all my heart.  You have plans, then?--a good sign.
+Animals in hibernation form none."
+
+DARRELL (putting aside the lights on the table, so as to leave, his face
+in shade, and looking towards the floor as he speaks).--"For the last
+five years I have struggled hard to renew interest in mankind, reconnect
+myself with common life and its healthful objects.  Between Fawley and
+London I desired to form a magnetic medium.  I took rather a vast one,
+--nearly all the rest of the known world.  I have visited both Americas,
+either end.  All Asia have I ransacked, and pierced as far into Africa as
+traveller ever went in search of Timbuctoo.  But I have sojourned also,
+at long intervals, at least they seemed long to me,--in the gay capitals
+of Europe (Paris excepted); mixed, too, with the gayest; hired palaces,
+filled them with guests; feasted and heard music.  'Guy Darrell,' said I,
+'shake off the rust of years: thou hadst no youth while young,--be young
+now.  A holiday may restore thee to wholesome work, as a holiday restores
+the wearied school-boy.'"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"I  comprehend; the  experiment succeeded?"
+
+DARRELL.--"I don't know: not yet; but it may.  I am here, and I intend to
+stay.  I would not go to a hotel for a single day, lest my resolution
+should fail me.  I have thrown myself into this castle of care without
+even a garrison.  I hope to hold it.  Help me to man it.  In a word, and
+without metaphor, I am here with the design of re-entering London life."
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"I am so glad.  Hearty congratulations!  How rejoiced
+all the Viponts will be!  Another 'CRISIS' is at hand.  You have seen the
+newspapers regularly, of course: the state of the country interests you.
+You say that you come from Ouzelford, the town you once represented.  I
+guess you will re-enter Parliament; you have but to say the word."
+
+DARRELL.--"Parliament!  No.  I received, while abroad, so earnest a
+request from my old constituents to lay the foundation-stone of a new
+Town-Hall, in which they are much interested; and my obligations to them
+have been so great that I could not refuse.  I wrote to fix the day as
+soon as I had resolved to return to England, making a condition that I
+should be spared the infliction of a public dinner, and landed just in
+time to keep my appointment; reached Ouzelford early this morning, went
+through the ceremony, made a short speech, came on at once to London, not
+venturing to diverge to Fawley (which is not very far from Ouzelford),
+lest, once there again, I should not have strength to leave it; and here
+I am."  Darrell paused, then repeated, in brisk emphatic tone,
+"Parliament?  No.  Labour?  No.  Fellow-man, I am about to confess to
+you: I would snatch back some days of youth,--a wintry likeness of youth,
+better than none.  Old friend, let us amuse ourselves!  When I was
+working hard, hard, hard! it was you who would say: 'Come forth, be
+amused,'--you! happy butterfly that you were!  Now, I say to you, 'Show
+me this flaunting town that you know so well; initiate me into the joys
+of polite pleasures, social commune,
+
+                    "'Dulce mihi furere est amico."
+
+You have amusements,--let me share them.'"
+
+"Faith," quoth the Colonel, crossing his legs, "you come late in the day!
+Amusements cease to amuse at last.  I have tried all, and begin to be
+tired.  I have had my holiday, exhausted its sports; and you, coming from
+books and desk fresh into the playground, say, 'Football and leapfrog.'
+Alas! my poor friend, why did not you come sooner?"
+
+DARRELL.--"One word, one question.  You have made EASE a philosophy and a
+system; no man ever did so with more felicitous grace: nor, in following
+pleasure, have you parted company with conscience and shame.  A fine
+gentleman ever, in honour as in elegance.  Well, are you satisfied with
+your choice of life?  Are you happy?"
+
+"Happy! who is?  Satisfied, perhaps."
+
+"Is there any one you envy,--whose choice, other than your own, you would
+prefer?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"You."
+
+"I!" said Darrell, opening his eyes with unaffected amaze.  "I! envy me!
+prefer my choice!"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY (peevishly).--"Without doubt.  You have had gratified
+ambition, a great career.  Envy you! who would not?  Your own objects in
+life fulfilled: you coveted distinction,--you won it; fortune,--your
+wealth is immense; the restoration of your name and lineage from
+obscurity and humiliation,--are not name and lineage again written in the
+/Libro d'oro/?  What king would not hail you as his counsellor?
+What senate not open its ranks to admit you as a chief?  What house,
+though the haughtiest in the land, would not accept your alliance?  And
+withal, you stand before me stalwart and unbowed, young blood still in
+your veins.  Ungrateful man, who would not change lots with Guy Darrell?
+Fame, fortune, health, and, not to flatter you, a form and presence that
+would be remarked, though you stood in that black frock by the side of a
+monarch in his coronation robes."
+
+DARRELL.--"You have turned my question against myself with a kindliness
+of intention that makes me forgive your belief in my vanity.  Pass on,
+--or rather pass back; you say you have tried all in life that distracts
+or sweetens.  Not so, lone bachelor; you have not tried wedlock.  Has not
+that been your mistake?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Answer for yourself.  You have tried it."  The words
+were scarce out of his mouth ere he repented the retort; for Darrell
+started as if stung to the quick; and his brow, before serene, his lip,
+before playful, grew, the one darkly troubled, the other tightly
+compressed.  "Pardon me," faltered out the friend.
+
+DARRELL.--"Oh, yes!  I brought it on myself.  What stuff we have been
+talking!  Tell me the news, not political, any other.  But first, your
+report of young Haughton.  Cordial thanks for all your kindness to him.
+You write me word that he is much improved,--most likeable; you add, that
+at Paris he became the rage, that in London you are sure he will be
+extremely popular.  Be it so, if for his own sake.  Are you quite sure
+that it is not for the expectations which I come here to disperse?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Much for himself, I am certain; a little,  perhaps,
+because--whatever he thinks, and I say to the  contrary--people  seeing
+no other heir to your property--"
+
+"I understand," interrupted Darrell, quickly.  "But he does not nurse
+those expectations? he will not be disappointed?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Verily I believe that, apart from his love for you and
+a delicacy of sentiment that would recoil from planting hopes of wealth
+in the graves of benefactors, Lionel Haughton would prefer carving his
+own fortunes to all the ingots hewed out of California by another's hand
+and bequeathed by another's will."
+
+DARRELL.--"I am heartily glad to hear and to trust you."
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"I gather from what you say that you are here with the
+intention to--to--"
+
+"Marry again," said Darrell, firmly.  "Right.  I am."
+
+"I always felt sure you would marry again.  Is the lady here too?"
+
+"What lady?"
+
+"The lady you have chosen."
+
+"Tush!  I have chosen none.  I come here to choose; and in this I ask
+advice from your experience.  I would marry again!  I! at my age!
+Ridiculous!  But so it is.  You know all the mothers and marriageable
+daughters that London--/arida nutrix/--rears for nuptial altars: where,
+amongst them, shall I, Guy Darrell, the man whom you think so enviable,
+find the safe helpmate, whose love he may reward with munificent
+jointure, to whose child he may bequeath the name that has now no
+successor, and the wealth he has no heart to spend?"
+
+Colonel Morley--who, as we know, is by habit a matchmaker, and likes the
+vocation--assumes a placid but cogitative mien, rubs his brow gently, and
+says in his softest, best-bred accents, "You would not marry a mere girl?
+some one of suitable age.  I know several most superior young women on
+the other side of thirty, Wilhelmina Prymme, for instance, or Janet--"
+
+DARRELL.--"Old maids.  No! decidedly no!"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY (suspiciously).--"But you would not risk the peace of your
+old age with a girl of eighteen, or else I do know a very accomplished,
+well-brought-up girl; just eighteen, who--"
+
+DARRELL.--"Re-enter life by the side of Eighteen! am I a madman?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Neither old maids nor young maids; the choice becomes
+narrowed.  You would prefer a widow.  Ha!  I have thought of one;
+a prize, indeed, could you but win her, the widow of--"
+
+DARRELL.--"Ephesus!--Bah! suggest no widow to me.  A widow, with her
+affections buried in the grave!"
+
+MORLEY.--"Not necessarily.  And in this case--"
+
+DARRELL (interrupting, and with warmth).--"In every case I tell you: no
+widow shall doff her weeds for me.  Did she love the first man?  Fickle
+is the woman who can love twice.  Did she not love him?  Why did she
+marry him?  Perhaps she sold herself to a rent-roll?  Shall she sell
+herself again to me for a jointure?  Heaven forbid!  Talk not of widows.
+No dainty so flavourless as a heart warmed up again."
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Neither maids, be they old or young, nor widows.
+Possibly you want an angel.  London is not the place for angels."
+
+DARRELL.--"I grant that the choice seems involved in perplexity.  How can
+it be otherwise if one's self is perplexed?  And yet, Alban, I am
+serious; and I do not presume to be so exacting as my words have implied.
+I ask not fortune, nor rank beyond gentle blood, nor youth nor beauty nor
+accomplishments nor fashion, but I do ask one thing, and one thing only."
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"What is that? you have left nothing worth the having to
+ask for."
+
+DARRELL.--"Nothing!  I have left all!  I ask some one whom I can love;
+love better than all the world,--not the /mariage de convenance/, not the
+/mariage de raison/, but the /mariage d'amour/.  All other marriage, with
+vows of love so solemn, with intimacy of commune so close,--all other
+marriage, in my eyes, is an acted falsehood, a varnished sin.  Ah, if I
+had thought so always!  But away regret and repentance!  The future alone
+is now before me!  Alban Morley!  I would sign away all I have in the
+world (save the old house at Fawley), ay, and after signing, cut off to
+boot this right hand, could I but once fall in love; love, and be loved
+again, as any two of Heaven's simplest human creatures may love each
+other while life is fresh!  Strange! strange! look out into the world;
+mark the man of our years who shall be most courted, most adulated, or
+admired.  Give him all the attributes of power, wealth, royalty, genius,
+fame.  See all the younger generation bow before him with hope or awe:
+his word can make their fortune; at his smile a reputation dawns.  Well;
+now let that man say to the young, 'Room amongst yourselves: all that
+wins me this homage I would lay at the feet of Beauty.  I enter the lists
+of love,' and straightway his power vanishes, the poorest booby of
+twenty-four can jostle him aside; before, the object of reverence, he is
+now the butt of ridicule.  The instant he asks right to win the heart of
+a woman, a boy whom in all else he could rule as a lackey cries, 'Off,
+Graybeard, that realm at least is mine!'"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"This were but eloquent extravagance, even if your beard
+were gray.  Men older than you, and with half your pretensions, even of
+outward form, have carried away hearts from boys like Adonis.  Only
+choose well: that's the difficulty; if it was not difficult, who would be
+a bachelor?"
+
+DARRELL.--"Guide my choice.  Pilot me to the haven."
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Accepted!  But you must remount a suitable
+establishment; reopen your way to the great world, and penetrate those
+sacred recesses where awaiting spinsters weave the fatal web.  Leave all
+to me.  Let Mills (I see you have him still) call on me to-morrow about
+your menage.  You will give dinners, of course?"
+
+DARRELL.--"Oh, of course; must I dine at them myself?"
+
+Morley laughed softly, and took up his hat.
+
+"So soon!" cried Darrell.  "If I fatigue you already, what chance shall I
+have with new friends?"
+
+"So soon! it is past eleven.  And it is you who must be fatigued."
+
+"No such good luck; were I fatigued, I might hope to sleep.  I will walk
+back with you.  Leave me not alone in this room,--alone in the jaws of a
+fish; swallowed up by a creature whose blood is cold."
+
+"You have something still to say to me," said Alban, when they were in
+the open air: "I detect it in your manner; what is it?"
+
+"I know not.  But you have told me no news; these streets are grown
+strange to me.  Who live now in yonder houses? once the dwellers were
+my friends."
+
+"In that house,--oh, new people!  I forget their names,--but rich; in a
+year or two, with luck, they may be exclusives, and forget my name.  In
+the other house, Carr Vipont still."
+
+"Vipont; those dear Viponts! what of them all?  Crawl they, sting they,
+bask they in the sun, or are they in anxious process of a change of
+skin?"
+
+"Hush! my dear friend: no satire on your own connections; nothing so
+injudicious.  I am a Vipont, too, and all for the family maxim, 'Vipont
+with Vipont, and come what may!'"
+
+"I stand rebuked.  But I am no Vipont.  I married, it is true, into their
+house, and they married, ages ago, into mine; but no drop in the blood of
+time-servers flows through the veins of the last childless Darrell.
+Pardon.  I allow the merit of the Vipont race; no family more excites my
+respectful interest.  What of their births, deaths, and marriages?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"As to the births, Carr has just welcomed the birth of a
+grandson; the first-born of his eldest son (who married last year a
+daughter of the Duke of Halifax),--a promising young man, a Lord in the
+Admiralty.  Carr has a second son in the Hussars; has just purchased his
+step: the other boys are still at school.  He has three daughters too,
+fine girls, admirably brought up; indeed, now I think of it, the eldest,
+Honoria, might suit you, highly accomplished; well read; interests
+herself in politics; a great admirer of intellect; of a very serious turn
+of mind too."
+
+DARRELL.--"A female politician with a serious turn of mind,--a farthing
+rushlight in a London fog!  Hasten on to subjects less gloomy.  Whose
+funeral achievement is that yonder?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"The late Lord Niton's, father to Lady Montfort."
+
+DARRELL.--"Lady Montfort!  Her father was a Lyndsay, and died before the
+Flood.  A deluge, at least, has gone over me and my world since I looked
+on the face of his widow."
+
+COLONEL  MORLEY.--"I  speak  of  the present  Lord Montfort's wife,--the
+Earl's.  You of the poor Marquess's, the last Marquess; the marquisate is
+extinct.  Surely, whatever your wanderings, you must have heard of the
+death of the last Marquess of Montfort?"
+
+"Yes, I heard of that," answered Darrell, in a somewhat husky and
+muttered voice.  "So he is dead, the young man!  What killed him?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"A violent attack of croup,--quite sudden.  He was
+staying at Carr's at the time.  I suspect that Carr made him talk!
+a thing he was not accustomed to do.  Deranged his system altogether.
+But don't let us revive painful subjects."
+
+DARRELL.--"Was she with him at the time?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Lady Montfort?  No; they were very seldom together."
+
+DARRELL.--"She is not married again yet?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"No, but still young and so beautiful she will have many
+offers.  I know those who are waiting to propose.  Montfort has been only
+dead eighteen months; died just before young Carr's marriage.  His widow
+lives, in complete seclusion, at her jointure-house near Twickenham.  She
+has only seen even me once since her loss."
+
+DARRELL.--"When was that?"
+
+MORLEY.--"About six or seven months ago; she asked after you with much
+interest."
+
+DARRELL.--"After me!"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"To be sure.  Don't I remember how constantly she and
+her mother were at your house?  Is it strange that she should ask after
+you?  You ought to know her better,--the most affectionate, grateful
+character."
+
+DARRELL.--"I dare say.  But at the time you refer to, I was too occupied
+to acquire much accurate knowledge of a young lady's character.  I should
+have known her mother's character better, yet I mistook even that."
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Mrs. Lyndsay's character you might well mistake,--
+charming but artificial: Lady Montfort is natural.  Indeed, if you had
+not that illiberal prejudice against widows, she was the very person I
+was about to suggest to you."
+
+DARRELL.--"A fashionable beauty! and young enough to be my daughter.
+Such is human friendship!  So the marquisate is extinct, and Sir James
+Vipont, whom I remember in the House of Commons--respectable man, great
+authority on cattle, timid, and always saying, 'Did you read that article
+in to-day's paper?'--has the estates and the earldom?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"Yes.  There was some fear of a disputed succession, but
+Sir James made his claim very clear.  Between you and me, the change has
+been a serious affliction to the Viponts.  The late lord was not wise,
+but on state occasions he looked his part,--/tres grand seigneur/,--and
+Carr managed the family influence with admirable tact.  The present lord
+has the habits of a yeoman; his wife shares his tastes.  He has taken the
+management not only of the property, but of its influence, out of Carr's
+hands, and will make a sad mess of it, for he is an impracticable,
+obsolete politician.  He will never keep the family together, impossible,
+a sad thing.  I remember how our last muster, five years ago next
+Christmas, struck terror into Lord's Cabinet; the mere report of it in
+the newspapers set all people talking and thinking.  The result was that,
+two weeks after, proper overtures were made to Carr: he consented to
+assist the ministers; and the country was saved!  Now, thanks to this
+stupid new earl, in eighteen months we have lost ground which it took at
+least a century and a half to gain.  Our votes are divided; our influence
+frittered away; Montfort House is shut up; and Carr, grown quite thin,
+says that in the coming 'CRISIS' a Cabinet will not only be formed, but
+will also last--last time enough for irreparable  mischief--without a
+single Vipont in office."
+
+Thus Colonel Morley continued in mournful strain, Darrell silent by his
+side, till the Colonel reached his own door.  There, while applying his
+latch-key to the lock, Alban's mind returned from the perils that
+threatened the House of Vipont and the Star of Brunswick to the petty
+claims of private friendship.  But even these last were now blended with
+those grander interests, due care for which every true patriot of the
+House of Vipont imbibed with his mother's milk.
+
+"Your appearance in town, my dear Darrell, is most opportune.  It will be
+an object with the whole family to make the most of you at this coming
+'CRISIS;' I say coming, for I believe it must come.  Your name is still
+freshly remembered; your position greater for having been out of all the
+scrapes of the party the last sixteen or seventeen years: your house
+should be the nucleus of new combinations.  Don't forget to send Mills to
+me; I will engage your chef and your house-steward to-morrow.  I know
+just the men to suit you.  Your intention to marry too, just at this
+moment, is most seasonable; it will increase the family interest.  I may
+give out that you intend to marry?"
+
+"Oh, certainly cry it at Charing Cross."
+
+"A club-room will do as well.  I beg ten thousand pardons; but people
+will talk about money whenever they talk about marriage.  I should not
+like to exaggerate your fortune: I know it must be very large, and all
+at your own disposal, eh?"
+
+"Every shilling."
+
+"You must have saved a great deal since you retired into private life?"
+
+"Take that for granted.  Dick Fairthorn receives my rents, and looks to
+my various investments; and I accept him as an indisputable authority
+when I say that, what with the rental of lands I purchased in my poor
+boy's lifetime and the interest on my much more lucrative moneyed
+capital, you may safely whisper to all ladies likely to feel interest in
+that diffusion of knowledge, 'Thirty-five thousand a year, and an old
+fool.'"
+
+"I certainly shall not say an old fool, for I am the same age as
+yourself; and if I had thirty-five thousand pounds a year, I would marry
+too."
+
+"You would!  Old fool!"  said Darrell, turning away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+     Revealing glimpses of Guy Darrell's past in his envied prime.  Dig
+     but deep enough, and under all earth runs water, under all life runs
+     grief.
+
+Alone in the streets, the vivacity which had characterized Darrell's
+countenance as well as his words, while with his old school friend,
+changed as suddenly and as completely into pensive abstracted gloom
+as if he had been acting a part, and with the exit the acting ceased.
+Disinclined to return yet to the solitude of his home, he walked on at
+first mechanically, in the restless desire of movement, he cared not
+whither.  But as, thus chance-led, he found himself in the centre of that
+long straight thoroughfare which connects what once were the separate
+villages of Tyburn and Holborn, something in the desultory links of
+revery suggested an object to his devious feet.  He had but to follow
+that street to his right hand, to gain in a quarter of an hour a sight of
+the humble dwelling-house in which he had first settled down, after his
+early marriage, to the arid labours of the bar.  He would go, now that,
+wealthy and renowned, he was revisiting the long-deserted focus of
+English energies, and contemplate the obscure abode in which his powers
+had been first concentrated on the pursuit of renown and wealth.  Who
+among my readers that may have risen on the glittering steep ("Ah, who
+can tell how hard it is to climb!"*) has not been similarly attracted
+towards the roof at the craggy foot of the ascent, under which golden
+dreams refreshed his straining sinews?
+
+          *['Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb
+          The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar?  BEATTIE.]
+
+Somewhat quickening his steps, now that a bourne was assigned to them,
+the man growing old in years, but, unhappily for himself, too tenacious
+of youth in its grand discontent and keen susceptibilities to pain,
+strode noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under the stars; gaslights
+primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem to the naked eye
+dotted over space without symmetry or method: man's order, near and
+finite, is so distinct; the Maker's order remote, infinite, is so beyond
+man's comprehension even of what is order!
+
+Darrell paused hesitating.  He had now gained a spot in which improvement
+had altered the landmarks.  The superb broad thoroughfare continued where
+once it had vanished abrupt in a labyrinth of courts and alleys.  But the
+way was not hard to find.  He turned a little towards the left,
+recognizing, with admiring interest, in the gay, white, would-be Grecian
+edifice, with its French grille, bronzed, gilded, the transformed Museum,
+in the still libraries of which he had sometimes snatched a brief and
+ghostly respite from books of law.  Onwards yet through lifeless
+Bloomsbury, not so far towards the last bounds of Atlas as the desolation
+of Podden Place, but the solitude deepening as he passed.  There it is,
+a quiet street indeed! not a soul on its gloomy pavements, not even a
+policeman's soul.  Nought stirring save a stealthy, profligate, good-for-
+nothing cat, flitting fine through yon area bars.  Down that street had
+he come, I trove, with a livelier, quicker step the day when, by the
+strange good-luck which had uniformly attended his worldly career of
+honours, he had been suddenly called upon to supply the place of an
+absent senior, and in almost his earliest brief the Courts of Westminster
+had recognized a master, come, I trove, with a livelier step, knocked at
+that very door whereat he is halting now; entered the room where the
+young wife sat, and at sight of her querulous peevish face, and at sound
+of her unsympathizing languid voice, fled into his cupboard-like back
+parlour, and muttered "Courage! Courage!" to endure the home he had
+entered longing for a voice which should invite and respond to a cry of
+joy.
+
+How closed up, dumb, and blind looked the small mean house, with its
+small mean door, its small mean rayless windows!  Yet a FAME had been
+born there!  Who are the residents now?  Buried in slumber, have they any
+"golden dreams"?  Works therein any struggling brain, to which the
+prosperous man might whisper "Courage!" or beats, there, any troubled
+heart to which faithful woman should murmur "Joy"?  Who knows?  London is
+a wondrous poem, but each page of it is written in a different language,
+--no lexicon yet composed for any.
+
+Back through the street, under the gaslights, under the stars, went Guy
+Darrell, more slow and more thoughtful.  Did the comparison between what
+he had been, what he was, the mean home just revisited, the stately home
+to which he would return, suggest thoughts of natural pride?  It would
+not seem so; no pride in those close-shut lips, in that melancholy stoop.
+
+He came into a quiet square,--still Bloomsbury,--and right before him was
+a large respectable mansion, almost as large as that one in courtlier
+quarters to which he loiteringly delayed the lone return.  There, too,
+had been for a time the dwelling which was called his home; there, when
+gold was rolling in like a tide, distinction won, position assured;
+there, not yet in Parliament, but foremost at the bar,--already pressed
+by constituencies, already wooed by ministers; there, still young--
+O luckiest of lawyers!--there had he moved his household gods.  Fit
+residence for a Prince of the Gown!  Is it when living there that you
+would envy the prosperous man?  Yes, the moment his step quits that door;
+but envy him when he enters its threshold?--nay, envy rather that
+roofless Savoyard who has crept under yonder portico, asleep with his
+ragged arm round the cage of his stupid dormice!  There, in that great
+barren drawing-room, sits a
+
+                    "Pale and elegant Aspasia."
+
+Well, but the wife's face is not querulous now.  Look again,--anxious,
+fearful, secret, sly.  Oh! that fine lady, a Vipont Crooke, is not
+contented to be wife to the wealthy, great Mr. Darrell.  What wants she?
+that he should be spouse to the fashionable fine Mrs. Darrell?  Pride in
+him! not a jot of it; such pride were unchristian.  Were he proud of her,
+as a Christian husband ought to be of so elegant a wife, would he still
+be in Bloomsbury?  Envy him! the high gentleman, so true to his blood,
+all galled and blistered by the moral vulgarities of a tuft-hunting,
+toad-eating mimic of the Lady Selinas.  Envy him!  Well, why not?  All
+women have their foibles.  Wise husbands must bear and forbear.  Is that
+all? wherefore, then, is her aspect so furtive, wherefore on his a wild,
+vigilant sternness?  Tut, what so brings into coveted fashion a fair lady
+exiled to Bloomsbury as the marked adoration of a lord, not her own, who
+gives law to St. James's!  Untempted by passion, cold as ice to
+affection; if thawed to the gush of a sentiment secretly preferring the
+husband she chose, wooed, and won to idlers less gifted even in outward
+attractions,--all this, yet seeking, coquetting for, the eclat of
+dishonour!  To elope?  Oh, no, too wary for that, but to be gazed at and
+talked of as the fair Mrs. Darrell, to whom the Lovelace of London was so
+fondly devoted.  Walk in, haughty son of the Dare-all.  Darest thou ask
+who has just left thy house?  Darest thou ask what and whence is the note
+that sly hand has secreted?  Darest thou?--perhaps yes: what then?  canst
+thou lock up thy wife? canst thou poniard the Lovelace?  Lock up the air!
+poniard all whose light word in St. James's can bring into fashion the
+matron of Bloomsbury!  Go, lawyer, go, study briefs, and be parchment.
+
+Agonies, agonies, shot again through Guy Darrell's breast as he looked on
+that large, most respectable house, and remembered his hourly campaign
+against disgrace!  He has triumphed.  Death fights for him: on the very
+brink of the last scandal, a cold, caught at some Vipont's ball, became
+fever; and so from that door the Black Horses bore away the Bloomsbury
+Dame, ere she was yet--the fashion!  Happy in grief the widower who may,
+with confiding hand, ransack the lost wife's harmless desk, sure that no
+thought concealed from him in life will rise accusing from the treasured
+papers.  But that pale proud mourner, hurrying the eye over sweet-scented
+billets; compelled, in very justice to the dead, to convince himself that
+the mother of his children was corrupt only at heart,--that the Black
+Horses had come to the door in time,--and, wretchedly consoled by that
+niggardly conviction, flinging into the flames the last flimsy tatters on
+which his honour (rock-like in his own keeping) had been fluttering to
+and fro in the charge of a vain treacherous fool,--envy you that mourner?
+No! not even in his release.  Memory is not nailed down in the velvet
+coffin; and to great loyal natures less bitter is the memory of the lost
+when hallowed by tender sadness than when coupled with scorn and shame.
+
+The wife is dead.  Dead, too, long years ago, the Lothario!  The world
+has forgotten them; they fade out of this very record when ye turn the
+page; no influence, no bearing have they on such future events as may
+mark what yet rests of life to Guy Darrell.  But as he there stands and
+gazes into space, the two forms are before his eye as distinct as if
+living still.  Slowly, slowly he gazes them down: the false smiles
+flicker away from their feeble lineaments; woe and terror on their
+aspects,--they sink, they shrivel, they dissolve!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+                    The wreck cast back from Charybdis.
+
+                      /Souviens-toi de to Gabrielle/.
+
+Guy Darrell turned hurriedly from the large house in the great square,
+and, more and more absorbed in revery, he wandered out of his direct way
+homeward, clear and broad though it was, and did not rouse himself till
+he felt, as it were, that the air had grown darker; and looking vaguely
+round, he saw that he had strayed into a dim maze of lanes and passages.
+He paused under one of the rare lamp-posts, gathering up his
+recollections of the London he had so long quitted, and doubtful for a
+moment or two which turn to take.  Just then, up from an alley fronting
+him at right angles, came suddenly, warily, a tall, sinewy, ill-boding
+tatterdemalion figure, and, seeing Darrell's face under the lamp, halted
+abrupt at the mouth of the narrow passage from which it had emerged,
+--a dark form filling up the dark aperture.  Does that ragged wayfarer
+recognize a foe by the imperfect ray of the lamplight? or is he a mere
+vulgar footpad, who is doubting whether he should spring upon a prey?
+Hostile his look, his gestures, the sudden cowering down of the strong
+frame as if for a bound; but still he is irresolute.  What awes him?
+What awes the tiger, who would obey his blood-instinct without fear,
+in his rush on the Negro, the Hindoo; but who halts and hesitates at the
+sight of the white man, the lordly son of Europe?  Darrell's eye was
+turned towards the dark passage, towards the dark figure,--carelessly,
+neither recognizing nor fearing nor defying,--carelessly, as at any
+harmless object in crowded streets and at broad day.  But while that
+eye was on him, the tatterdemalion halted; and indeed, whatever his
+hostility, or whatever his daring, the sight of Darrell took him by so
+sudden a surprise that he could not at once re-collect his thoughts, and
+determine how to approach the quiet unconscious man, who, in reach of his
+spring, fronted his overwhelming physical strength with the habitual air
+of dignified command.  His first impulse was that of violence; his second
+impulse curbed the first.  But Darrell now turns quickly, and walks
+straight on; the figure quits the mouth of the passage, and follows with
+a long and noiseless stride.  It has nearly gained Darrell.  With what
+intent?  A fierce one, perhaps,--for the man's face is sinister, and his
+state evidently desperate,--when there emerges unexpectedly from an ugly
+looking court or cul-de-sac, just between Darrell and his pursuer, a
+slim, long-backed, buttoned-up, weazel-faced policeman.  The policeman
+eyes the tatterdemalion instinctively, then turns his glance towards the
+solitary defenceless gentleman in advance, and walks on, keeping himself
+between the two.  The tatterdemalion stifles an impatient curse.  Be his
+purpose force, be it only supplication, be it colloquy of any kind,
+impossible to fulfil it while that policeman is there.  True that in his
+powerful hands he could have clutched that slim, long-backed officer, and
+broken him in two as a willow-wand.  But that officer is the Personation
+of Law, and can stalk through a legion of tatterdemalions as a ferret may
+glide through a barn full of rats.  The prowler feels he is suspected.
+Unknown as yet to the London police, he has no desire to invite their
+scrutiny.  He crosses the way; he falls back; he follows from afar.  The
+policeman may yet turn away before the safer streets of the metropolis be
+gained.  No; the cursed Incarnation of Law, with eyes in its slim back,
+continues its slow strides at the heels of the unsuspicious Darrell.  The
+more solitary defiles are already passed,--now that dim lane, with its
+dead wall on one side.  By the dead wall skulks the prowler; on the other
+side still walks the Law.  Now--alas for the prowler!--shine out the
+throughfares, no longer dim nor deserted,--Leicester Square, the
+Haymarket, Pall Mall, Carlton Gardens; Darrell is at his door.  The
+policeman turns sharply round.  There, at the corner near the learned
+Club-house, halts the tatterdemalion.  Towards the tatterdemalion the
+policeman now advances quickly.  The tatterdemalion is quicker still;
+fled like a guilty thought.
+
+Back, back, back into that maze of passages and courts, back to the mouth
+of that black alley.  There he halts again.  Look at him.  He has arrived
+in London but that very night, after an absence of more than four years.
+He has arrived from the sea-side on foot; see, his shoes are worn into
+holes.  He has not yet found a shelter for the night.  He has been
+directed towards that quarter, thronged with adventurers, native and
+foreign, for a shelter, safe, if squalid.  It is somewhere near that
+court at the mouth of which he stands.  He looks round: the policeman is
+baffled; the coast clear.  He steals forth, and pauses under the same
+gaslight as that under which Guy Darrell had paused before,--under the
+same gaslight, under the same stars.  From some recess in his rags he
+draws forth a large, distained, distended pocket-book,--last relic of
+sprucer days,--leather of dainty morocco, once elaborately tooled, patent
+springs, fairy lock, fit receptacle for bank-notes, /billets-doux/,
+memoranda of debts of honour, or pleasurable engagements.  Now how worn,
+tarnished, greasy, rascallion-like, the costly bauble!  Filled with what
+motley, unlovable contents: stale pawn-tickets of foreign /monts de
+piete/, pledges never henceforth to be redeemed; scrawls by villanous
+hands in thievish hierolgyphics; ugly implements replacing the malachite
+penknife, the golden toothpick, the jewelled pencil-case, once so neatly
+set within their satin lappets.  Ugly implements, indeed,--a file, a
+gimlet, loaded dice.  Pell-mell, with such more hideous and recent
+contents, dishonoured evidences of gaudier summer life,--locks of ladies'
+hair, love-notes treasured mechanically, not from amorous sentiment, but
+perhaps from some vague idea that they might be of use if those who gave
+the locks or wrote the notes should be raised in fortune, and could buy
+back the memorials of shame.  Diving amidst these miscellaneous documents
+and treasures, the prowler's hand rested on some old letters, in clerk-
+like fair calligraphy, tied round with a dirty string, and on them, in
+another and fresher writing, a scrap that contained an address,--"Samuel
+Adolphus Poole, Esq., Alhambra Villa, Regent's Park."  "To-morrow, Nix my
+Dolly; to-morrow," muttered the tatterdemalion; "but to-night,--plague on
+it, where is the other blackguard's direction?  Ah, here!"  And he
+extracted from the thievish scrawls a peculiarly thievish-looking
+hieroglyph.  Now, as he lifts it up to read by the gaslight, survey him
+well.  Do you not know him?  Is it possible?  What! the brilliant
+sharper!  The ruffian exquisite!  Jasper Losely!  Can it be?  Once
+before, in the fields of Fawley, we beheld him out at elbows, seedy,
+shabby, ragged.  But then it was the decay of a foppish spendthrift,
+--clothes distained, ill-assorted, yet, still of fine cloth; shoes in
+holes, yet still pearl-coloured brodequins.  But now it is the decay of
+no foppish spendthrift: the rags are not of fine cloth; the tattered
+shoes are not the brodequins.  The man has fallen far below the politer
+grades of knavery, in which the sharper affects the beau.  And the
+countenance, as we last saw it, if it had lost much of its earlier
+beauty, was still incontestably handsome.  What with vigour and health
+and animal spirits, then on the aspect still lingered light; now from
+corruption the light itself was gone.  In that herculean constitution
+excess of all kinds had at length forced its ravage, and the ravage was
+visible in the ruined face.  The once sparkling eye was dull and
+bloodshot.  The colours of the cheek, once clear and vivid, to which
+fiery drink had only sent the blood in a warmer glow, were now of a
+leaden dulness, relieved but by broken streaks of angry red, like gleams
+of flame struggling through gathered smoke.  The profile, once sharp and
+delicate like Apollo's, was now confused in its swollen outline; a few
+years more, and it would be gross as that of Silenus,--the nostrils,
+distended with incipient carbuncles, which betray the gnawing fang that
+alcohol fastens into the liver.  Evil passions had destroyed the outlines
+of the once beautiful lips, arched as a Cupid's bow.  The sidelong,
+lowering, villanous expression which had formerly been but occasional was
+now habitual and heightened.  It was the look of the bison before it
+gores.  It is true, however, that even yet on the countenance there
+lingered the trace of that lavish favour bestowed on it by nature.  An
+artist would still have said, "How handsome that ragamuffin must have
+been!"  And true is it, also, that there was yet that about the bearing
+of the man which contrasted his squalor, and seemed to say that he had
+not been born to wear rags and loiter at midnight amongst the haunts of
+thieves.  Nay, I am not sure that you would have been as incredulous now,
+if told that the wild outlaw before you had some claim by birth or by
+nurture to the rank of gentleman, as you would had you seen the gay
+spendthrift in his gaudy day.  For then he seemed below, and now he
+seemed above, the grade in which he took place.  And all this made his
+aspect yet more sinister, and the impression that he was dangerous yet
+more profound.  Muscular strength often remains to a powerful frame long
+after the constitution is undermined, and Jasper Losely's frame was still
+that of a formidable athlete; nay, its strength was yet more apparent now
+that the shoulders and limbs had increased in bulk than when it was half-
+disguised in the lissome symmetry of exquisite proportion,--less active,
+less supple, less capable of endurance, but with more crushing weight in
+its rush or its blow.  It was the figure in which brute force seems so to
+predominate that in a savage state it would have worn a crown,--the
+figure which secures command and authority in all societies where force
+alone gives the law.  Thus, under the gaslight and under the stars, stood
+the terrible animal,--a strong man imbruted; SOUVIENS-TOI DE TA
+GABRIELLE."  There, still uneffaced, though the gold threads are all
+tarnished and ragged, are the ominous words on the silk of the she-
+devil's love-token!  But Jasper has now inspected the direction on the
+paper he held to the lamp-light, and, satisfying himself that he was in
+the right quarter, restored the paper to the bulky distended pocket-book
+and walked sullenly on towards the court from which had emerged the
+policeman who had crossed his prowling chase.
+
+"It is the most infernal shame," said Losely between his grinded teeth,
+"that I should be driven to these wretched dens for a lodging, while that
+man, who ought to feel bound to maintain me, should be rolling in wealth,
+and cottoned up in a palace.  But he shall fork out.  Sophy must be
+hunted up.  I will clothe her in rags like these.  She shall sit at his
+street-door.  I will shame the miserly hunks.  But how track the girl?
+Have I no other hold over him?  Can I send Dolly Poole to him?  How
+addled my brains are!--want of food, want of sleep.  Is this the place?
+Peuh!--"
+
+Thus murmuring, he now reached the arch of the court, and was swallowed
+up in its gloom.  A few strides and he came into a square open space only
+lighted by the skies.  A house, larger than the rest, which were of the
+meanest order, stood somewhat back, occupying nearly one side of the
+quadrangle,--old, dingy, dilapidated.  At the door of this house stood
+another man, applying his latch-key to the lock.  As Losely approached,
+the man turned quickly, half in fear, half in menace,--a small, very
+thin, impish-looking man, with peculiarly restless features that seemed
+trying to run away from his face.  Thin as he was, he looked all skin and
+no bones, a goblin of a man whom it would not astonish you to hear could
+creep through a keyhole, seeming still more shadowy and impalpable by his
+slight, thin, sable dress, not of cloth, but a sort of stuff like alpaca.
+Nor was that dress ragged, nor, as seen but in starlight, did it look
+worn or shabby; still you had but to glance at the creature to feel that
+it was a child in the same Family of Night as the ragged felon that
+towered by its side.  The two outlaws stared at each other.  "Cutts!"
+said Losely, in the old rollicking voice, but in a hoarser, rougher key,
+"Cutts, my boy, here I am; welcome me!
+
+"What?  General Jas.!" returned Cutts, in a tone which was not without a
+certain respectful awe, and then proceeded to pour out a series of
+questions in a mysterious language, which may be thus translated and
+abridged: "How long have you been in England?  How has it fared with you?
+You seem very badly off; coming here to hide?  Nothing very bad, I hope?
+What is it?"
+
+Jasper answered in the same language, though with less practised mastery
+of it, and with that constitutional levity which, whatever the time or
+circumstances, occasionally gave a strange sort of wit, or queer,
+uncanny, devil-me-care vein of drollery, to his modes of expression.
+
+"Three months of the worst luck man ever had; a row with the gens-
+d'armes,--long story: three of our pals seized; affair of the galleys for
+them, I suspect (French frogs can't seize me!); fricasseed one or two of
+them; broke away, crossed the country, reached the coast; found an honest
+smuggler; landed off Sussex with a few other kegs of brandy; remembered
+you, preserved the address you gave me, and condescend to this rat-hole
+for a night or so.  Let me in; knock up somebody, break open the larder.
+I want to eat, I am famished; I should have eaten you by this time, only
+there's nothing on your bones."
+
+The little man opened the door,--a passage black as Erebus.  "Give me
+your hand, General."  Jasper was led through the pitchy gloom for a few
+yards; then the guide found a gas-cock, and the place broke suddenly into
+light: a dirty narrow staircase on one side; facing it a sort of lobby,
+in which an open door showed a long sanded parlour, like that in public
+houses; several tables, benches, the walls whitewashed, but adorned with
+sundry ingenious designs made by charcoal or the smoked ends of clay-
+pipes; a strong smell of stale tobacco and of gin and rum.  Another
+gaslight, swinging from the centre of the ceiling, sprang into light as
+Cutts touched the tap-cock.
+
+"Wait here," said the guide.  "I will go and get you some supper."
+
+"And some brandy," said Jasper.
+
+"Of course."
+
+The bravo threw himself at length on one of the tables, and, closing his
+eyes, moaned.  His vast strength had become acquainted with physical
+pain.  In its stout knots and fibres, aches and sharp twinges, the
+dragon-teeth of which had been sown years ago in revels or brawls, which
+then seemed to bring but innocuous joy and easy triumph, now began to
+gnaw and grind.  But when Cutts reappeared with coarse viands and the
+brandy bottle, Jasper shook off the sense of pain, as does a wounded wild
+beast that can still devour; and after regaling fast and ravenously, he
+emptied half the bottle at a draught, and felt himself restored and
+fresh.
+
+"Shall you fling yourself amongst the swell fellows who hold their club
+here, General?"  asked Cutts; "'tis a bad trade; every year it gets
+worse.  Or have you not some higher game in your eye?"
+
+"I have higher game in my eye.  One bird I marked down this very night.
+But that may be slow work, and uncertain.  I have in this pocket-book a
+bank to draw upon meanwhile."
+
+"How? forged French /billets de banque/? dangerous."
+
+"Pooh!  better than that,--letters which prove theft against a
+respectable rich man."
+
+"Ah, you expect hush-money?"
+
+"Exactly so.  I have good friends in London."
+
+"Among them, I suppose, that affectionate 'adopted mother,' who would
+have kept you in such order."
+
+"Thousand thunders!  I hope not.  I am not a superstitious man, but I
+fear that woman as if she were a witch, and I believe she is one.  You
+remember black Jean, whom we call Sansculotte.  He would have filled a
+churchyard with his own brats for a five-franc piece; but he would not
+have crossed a churchyard alone at night for a thousand naps.  Well, that
+woman to me is what a churchyard was to black Jean.  No: if she is in
+London, I have but to go to her house and say, 'Food, shelter, money;'
+and I would rather ask Jack Ketch for a rope."
+
+"How do you account for it, General?  She does not beat you; she is not
+your wife.  I have seen many a stout fellow, who would stand fire without
+blinking, show the white feather at a scold's tongue.  But then he must
+be spliced to her--"
+
+"Cutts, that Griffin does not scold: she preaches.  She wants to make me
+spoony, Cutts: she talks of my young days, Cutts; she wants to blight me
+into what she calls an honest man, Cutts,--the virtuous dodge!  She snubs
+and cows me, and frightens me out of my wits, Cutts; for I do believe
+that the witch is determined to have me, body and soul, and to marry me
+some day in spite of myself, Cutts; and if ever you see me about to be
+clutched in those horrible paws, poison me with ratsbane, or knock me on
+the head, Cutts."
+
+The little man laughed a little laugh, sharp and eldrich, at the strange
+cowardice of the stalwart dare-devil.  But Jasper did not echo the laugh.
+
+"Hush!" he said timidly, "and let me have a bed, if you can; I have not
+slept in one for a week, and my nerves are shaky."
+
+The imp lighted a candle-end at the gas-lamp, and conducted Losely up the
+stairs to his own sleeping-room, which was less comfortless than might be
+supposed.  He resigned his bed to the wanderer, who flung himself on it,
+rags and all.  But sleep was no more at his command than it is at a
+king's.
+
+"Why the ---- did you talk of that witch?"  he cried peevishly to Cutts,
+who was composing himself to rest on the floor.  "I swear I fancy I feel
+her sitting on my chest like a nightmare."
+
+He turned with a vehemence which shook the walls, and wrapped the
+coverlet round him, plunging his head into its folds.  Strange though it
+seem to the novice in human nature, to Jasper Losely the woman who had so
+long lived but for one object--namely, to save him from the gibbet--was
+as his evil genius, his haunting fiend.  He had conceived a profound
+terror of her from the moment he perceived that she was resolutely bent
+upon making him honest.  He had broken from her years ago, fled, resumed
+his evil courses, hid himself from her,--in vain.  Wherever he went,
+there went she.  He might baffle the police, not her.  Hunger had often
+forced him to accept her aid.  As soon as he received it, he hid from her
+again, burying himself deeper and deeper in the mud, like a persecuted
+tench.  He associated her idea with all the ill-luck that had befallen
+him.  Several times some villanous scheme on which he had counted to make
+his fortune had been baffled in the most mysterious way; and just when
+baffled, and there seemed no choice but to cut his own throat or some one
+else's, up turned grim Arabella Crane, in the iron-gray gown, and with
+the iron-gray ringlets,--hatefully, awfully beneficent,--offering food,
+shelter, gold,--and some demoniacal, honourable work.  Often had he been
+in imminent peril from watchful law or treacherous accomplice.  She had
+warned and saved him, as she had saved him from the fell Gabrielle
+Desmarets, who, unable to bear the sentence of penal servitude, after a
+long process, defended with astonishing skill and enlisting the romantic
+sympathies of young France, had contrived to escape into another world by
+means of a subtle poison concealed about her /distinguee/ person, and
+which she had prepared years ago with her own bloodless hands, and no
+doubt scientifically tested its effects on others.  The cobra di capella
+is gone at last!  "/Souviens-toi de ta Gabrielle/," O Jasper Losely!  But
+why Arabella Crane should thus continue to watch over him whom she no
+longer professed to love, how she should thus have acquired the gift of
+ubiquity and the power to save him, Jasper Losely could not conjecture.
+The whole thing seemed to him weird and supernatural.  Most truly did he
+say that she had cowed him.  He had often longed to strangle her; when
+absent from her, had often resolved upon that act of gratitude.  The
+moment he came in sight of her stern, haggard face, her piercing lurid
+eyes; the moment he heard her slow, dry voice in some such sentences as
+these: "Again you come to me in your trouble, and ever shall.  Am I not
+still as your mother, but with a wife's fidelity, till death us do part?
+There's the portrait of what you were: look at it, Jasper.  Now turn to
+the glass: see what you are.  Think of the fate of Gabrielle Desmarets!
+But for me, what, long since, had been your own?  But I will save you:
+I have sworn it.  You shall be wax in these hands at last,"--the moment
+that voice thus claimed and insisted on redeeming him, the ruffian felt
+a cold shudder, his courage oozed, he could no more have nerved his arm
+against her than a Thug would have lifted his against the dire goddess of
+his murderous superstition.  Jasper could not resist a belief that the
+life of this dreadful protectress was, somehow or other, made essential
+to his; that, were she to die, he should perish in some ghastly and
+preternatural expiation.  But for the last few months he had, at length,
+escaped from her; diving so low, so deep into the mud, that even her net
+could not mesh him.  Hence, perhaps, the imminence of the perils from
+which he had so narrowly escaped, hence the utterness of his present
+destitution.  But man, however vile, whatever his peril, whatever his
+destitution, was born free, and loves liberty.  Liberty to go to Satan
+in his own way was to Jasper Losely a supreme blessing compared to
+that benignant compassionate espionage, with its relentless eye and
+restraining hand.  Alas and alas! deem not this perversity unnatural
+in that headstrong self-destroyer!  How many are there whom not a grim,
+hard-featured Arabella Crane, but the long-suffering, divine, omniscient,
+gentle Providence itself, seeks to warn, to aid, to save; and is shunned,
+and loathed, and fled from, as if it were an evil genius!  How many are
+there who fear nothing so much as the being made good in spite of
+themselves?--how many? who can count them?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+     The public man needs but one patron; namely, THE LUCKY MOMENT.
+
+"At his house in Carlton Gardens, Guy Darrell, Esq., for the season."
+
+Simple insertion in the pompous list of Fashionable Arrivals! the name
+of a plain commoner embedded in the amber which glitters with so many
+coronets and stars!  Yet such is England, with all its veneration for
+titles, that the eyes of the public passed indifferently over the rest
+of that chronicle of illustrious "whereabouts," to rest with interest,
+curiosity, speculation, on the unemblazoned name which but a day before
+had seemed slipped out of date,--obsolete as that of an actor who figures
+no more in play-bills.  Unquestionably the sensation excited was due,
+in much, to the "ambiguous voices" which Colonel Morley had disseminated
+throughout the genial atmosphere of club-rooms.  "Arrived in London for
+the season!"--he, the orator, once so famous, long so forgotten, who had
+been out of the London world for the space of more than half a
+generation.  "Why now?  why for the season?"  Quoth the Colonel, "He is
+still in the prime of life as a public man, and--a CRISIS is at hand!"
+
+But that which gave weight and significance to Alban Morley's hints
+was the report in the newspapers of Guy Darrell's visit to his old
+constituents, and of the short speech he had addressed to them, to which
+he had so slightly referred in his conversation with Alban.  True, the
+speech was short: true, it touched but little on passing topics of
+political interest; rather alluding, with modesty and terseness, to the
+contests and victories of a former day.  But still, in the few words
+there was the swell of the old clarion, the wind of the Paladin's horn
+which woke Fontarabian echoes.
+
+It is astonishing how capricious, how sudden, are the changes in value of
+a public man.  All depends upon whether the public want, or believe they
+want, the man; and that is a question upon which the public do not know
+their own minds a week before; nor do they always keep in the same mind,
+when made up, for a week together.  If they do not want a man; if he do
+not hit the taste, nor respond to the exigency of the time,--whatever his
+eloquence, his abilities, his virtues, they push him aside or cry him
+down.  Is he wanted? does the mirror of the moment reflect his image?--
+that mirror is an intense magnifier--his proportions swell; they become
+gigantic.  At that moment the public wanted some man; and the instant the
+hint was given, "Why not Guy Darrell?"  Guy Darrell was seized upon as
+the man wanted.  It was one of those times in our Parliamentary history
+when the public are out of temper with all parties; when recognized
+leaders have contrived to damage themselves; when a Cabinet is shaking,
+and the public neither care to destroy nor to keep it,--a time too, when
+the country seemed in some danger, and when, mere men of business held
+unequal to the emergency, whatever name suggested associations of vigour,
+eloquence, genius rose to a premium above its market price in times of
+tranquillity and tape.  Without effort of his own, by the mere force of
+the undercurrent, Guy Darrell was thrown up from oblivion into note.  He
+could not form a Cabinet, certainly not; but he might help to bring a
+Cabinet together, reconcile jarring elements, adjust disputed questions,
+take in such government some high place, influence its councils, and
+delight a public weary of the oratory of the day with the eloquence of
+a former race.  For the public is ever a /laudator temporis acti/, and
+whatever the authors or the orators immediately before it, were those
+authors and orators Homers and Ciceros, would still shake a disparaging
+head, and talk of these degenerate days as Homer himself talked ages
+before Leonidas stood in the pass of Thermopylae, or Miltiades routed
+Asian armaments at Marathon.  Guy Darrell belonged to a former race.  The
+fathers of those young members rising now into fame had quoted to their
+sons his pithy sentences, his vivid images; and added, as Fox added when
+quoting Burke, "But you should have heard and seen the man!"
+
+Heard and seen the man!  But there he was again! come up as from a
+grave,--come up to the public just when such a man was wanted.  Wanted
+how? wanted where?  Oh, somehow and somewhere!  There he is! make the
+most of him.  The house in Carlton Gardens is prepared, the establishment
+mounted.  Thither flock all the Viponts, nor they alone; all the chiefs
+of all parties, nor they alone; all the notabilities of our grand
+metropolis.  Guy Darrell might be startled at his own position; but he
+comprehended its nature, and it did not discompose his nerves.  He knew
+public life well enough to be aware how much the popular favour is the
+creature of an accident.  By chance he had nicked the time; had he thus
+come to town the season before, he might have continued obscure, a man
+like Guy Darrell not being wanted then.  Whether with or without design,
+his bearing confirmed and extended the effect produced by his
+reappearance.  Gracious, but modestly reserved, he spoke little, listened
+beautifully.  Many of the questions which agitated all around him had
+grown up into importance since his day of action; nor in his retirement
+had he traced their progressive development, with their changeful effects
+upon men and parties.  But a man who has once gone deeply into practical
+politics might sleep in the Cave of Trophonius for twenty years, and
+find, on waking, very little to learn.  Darrell regained the level of
+the day, and seized upon all the strong points on which men were divided,
+with the rapidity of a prompt and comprehensive intellect, his judgment
+perhaps the clearer from the freshness of long repose and the composure
+of dispassionate survey.  When partisans wrangled as to what should have
+been done, Darrell was silent; when they asked what should be done, out
+came one of his terse sentences, and a knot was cut.  Meanwhile it is
+true this man, round whom expectations grouped and rumour buzzed, was in
+neither House of Parliament; but that was rather a delay to his energies
+than a detriment to his consequence.
+
+Important constituencies, anticipating a vacancy, were already on the
+look-out for him; a smaller constituency, in the interim, Carr Vipont
+undertook to procure him any day.  There was always a Vipont ready to
+accept something, even the Chiltern Hundreds.  But Darrell, not without
+reason, demurred at re-entering the House of Commons after an absence of
+seventeen years.  He had left it with one of those rare reputations which
+no wise man likes rashly to imperil.  The Viponts sighed.  He would
+certainly be more useful in the Commons than the Lords, but still in the
+Lords he would be of great use.  They would want a debating lord, perhaps
+a lord acquainted with law in the coming CRISIS,--if he preferred the
+peerage?  Darrell demurred still.  The man's modesty was insufferable;
+his style of speaking might not suit that august assembly: and as to law,
+he could never now be a law lord; he should be but a ci-devant advocate,
+affecting the part of a judicial amateur.
+
+In short, without declining to re-enter public life, seeming, on the
+contrary, to resume all his interest in it, Darrell contrived with
+admirable dexterity to elude for the present all overtures pressed upon
+him, and even to convince his admirers, not only of his wisdom, but of
+his patriotism in that reticence.  For certainly he thus managed to
+exercise a very considerable influence: his advice was more sought, his
+suggestions more heeded, and his power in reconciling certain rival
+jealousies was perhaps greater than would have been the case if he had
+actually entered either House of Parliament, and thrown himself
+exclusively into the ranks, not only of one party, but of one section of
+a party.  Nevertheless, such suspense could not last very long; he must
+decide at all events before the next session.  Once he was seen in the
+arena of his old triumphs, on the benches devoted to strangers
+distinguished by the Speaker's order.  There, recognized by the older
+members, eagerly gazed at by the younger, Guy Darrell listened calmly,
+throughout a long field-night, to voices that must have roused from
+forgotten graves kindling and glorious memories; voices of those veterans
+now--by whose side he had once struggled for some cause which he had
+then, in the necessary exaggeration of all honest enthusiasm, identified
+with a nation's life-blood.  Voices, too of the old antagonists over
+whose routed arguments he had marched triumphant amidst applauses that
+the next day rang again through England from side to side.  Hark! the
+very man with whom, in the old battle-days, he had been the most
+habitually pitted, is speaking now!  His tones are embarrassed, his
+argument confused.  Does he know who listens yonder?  Old members think
+so,--smile; whisper each other, and glance significantly where Darrell
+sits.
+
+Sits, as became him, tranquil, respectful, intent, scemingly, perhaps
+really, unconscious of the sensation he excites.  What an eye for an
+orator! how like the eye in a portrait; it seems to fix on each other eye
+that seeks it,--steady, fascinating.  Yon distant members, behind the
+Speaker's chair, at the far distance, feel the light of that eye travel
+towards them.  How lofty and massive, among all those rows of human
+heads, seems that forehead, bending slightly down, with the dark strong
+line of the weighty eyebrow!  But what is passing within that secret
+mind?  Is there mournfulness in the retrospect?  Is there eagerness to
+renew the strife?  Is that interest in the hour's debate feigned or real?
+Impossible for him who gazed upon that face to say.  And that eye would
+have seemed to the gazer to read himself through and through to the
+heart's core, long ere the gazer could hazard a single guess as to the
+thoughts beneath that marble forehead,--as to the emotions within the
+heart over which, in old senatorial fashion, the arms were folded with so
+conventional an ease.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+     Darrell and Lionel.
+
+Darrell had received Lionel with some evident embarrassment, which soon
+yielded to affectionate warmth.  He took to the young man whose fortunes
+he had so improved; he felt that with the improved fortunes the young
+man's whole being was improved: assured position, early commune with the
+best social circles, in which the equality of fashion smooths away all
+disparities in rank, had softened in Lionel much of the wayward and
+morbid irritability of his boyish pride; but the high spirit, the
+generous love of independence, the scorn of mercenary calculation, were
+strong as ever; these were in the grain of his nature.  In common with
+all who in youth aspire to be one day noted from the "undistinguishable
+many," Lionel had formed to himself a certain ideal standard, above the
+ordinary level of what the world is contented to call honest, or esteem
+clever.  He admitted into his estimate of life the heroic element, not
+undesirable even in the most practical point of view, for the world is
+so in the habit of decrying; of disbelieving in high motives and pure
+emotions; of daguerreotyping itself with all its ugliest wrinkles,
+stripped of the true bloom that brightens, of the true expression that
+redeems, those defects which it invites the sun to limn, that we shall
+never judge human nature aright, if we do not set out in life with our
+gaze on its fairest beauties, and our belief in its latent good.  In a
+word we should begin with the Heroic, if we would learn the Human.  But
+though to himself Lionel thus secretly prescribed a certain superiority
+of type, to be sedulously aimed at, even if never actually attained, he
+was wholly without pedantry and arrogance towards his own contemporaries.
+From this he was saved not only by good-nature, animal spirits, frank
+hardihood, but by the very affluence of ideas which animated his tongue,
+coloured his language, and whether to young or old, wise or dull, made
+his conversation racy and original.  He was a delightful companion; and
+if he had taken much instruction from those older and wiser than himself,
+he so bathed that instruction in the fresh fountain of his own lively
+intelligence, so warmed it at his own beating impulsive heart, that he
+could make an old man's gleanings from experience seem a young man's
+guesses into truth.  Faults he had, of course,--chiefly the faults common
+at his age; amongst them, perhaps, the most dangerous were,--firstly,
+carelessness in money matters; secondly, a distaste for advice in which
+prudence was visibly predominant.  His tastes were not in reality
+extravagant: but money slipped through his hands, leaving little to show
+for it; and when his quarterly allowance became due, ample though it
+was,--too ample, perhaps,--debts wholly forgotten started up to seize
+hold of it.  And debts as yet being manageable were not regarded with
+sufficient horror.  Paid or put aside, as the case might be, they were
+merely looked upon as bores.  Youth is in danger till it learn to look
+upon them as furies.  For advice, he took it with pleasure, when clothed
+with elegance and art, when it addressed ambition, when it exalted the
+loftier virtues.  But advice, practical and prosy, went in at one ear and
+out at the other.  In fact, with many talents, he had yet no adequate
+ballast of common-sense; and if ever he get enough to steady his bark
+through life's trying voyage, the necessity of so much dull weight must
+be forcibly stricken home less to his reason than his imagination or his
+heart.  But if, somehow or other, he get it not, I will not insure his
+vessel.
+
+I know not if Lionel Haughton had genius; he never assumed that he had:
+but he had something more like genius than that prototype, RESOLVE, of
+which he boasted to the artist.  He had YOUTH,--real youth,--youth of
+mind, youth of heart, youth of soul.  Lithe and supple as he moved before
+you, with the eye to which light or dew sprang at once from a nature
+vibrating to every lofty, every tender thought, he seemed more than
+young,--the incarnation of youth.
+
+Darrell took to him at once.  Amidst all the engagements crowded on the
+important man, he contrived to see Lionel daily.  And what may seem
+strange, Guy Darrell felt more at home with Lionel Haughton than with any
+of his own contemporaries,--than even with Alban Morley.  To the last,
+indeed, he opened speech with less reserve of certain portions of the
+past, or of certain projects in the future.  But still, even there, he
+adopted a tone of half-playful, half-mournful satire, which might be in
+itself disguise.  Alban Morley, with all his good qualities, was a man of
+the world; as a man of the world, Guy Darrell talked to him.  But it was
+only a very small part of Guy Darrell the Man, of which the world could
+say "mine."
+
+To Lionel he let out, as if involuntarily, the more amiable, tender,
+poetic attributes of his varying, complex, uncomprehended character; not
+professedly confiding, but not taking pains to conceal.  Hearing what
+worldlings would call "Sentiment" in Lionel, he seemed to glide softly
+down to Lionel's own years and talk "sentiment" in return.  After all,
+this skilled lawyer, this noted politician, had a great dash of the boy
+still in him.  Reader, did you ever meet a really clever man who had not?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+     Saith a very homely proverb (pardon its vulgarity), "You cannot make
+     a silk purse out of a sow's ear."  But a sow's ear is a much finer
+     work of art than a silk purse; and grand, indeed, the mechanician
+     who could make a sow's ear out of a silk purse, or conjure into
+     creatures of flesh and blood the sarcenet and /tulle/ of a London
+     drawing-room.
+
+"Mamma," asked Honoria Carr Vipont, "what sort of a person was Mrs.
+Darrell?"
+
+"She was not in our set, my dear," answered Lady Selina.  "The Vipont
+Crookes are just one of those connections with which, though of course
+one is civil to all connections, one is more or less intimate according
+as they take after the Viponts or after the Crookes.  Poor woman! she
+died just before Mr. Darrell entered Parliament and appeared in society.
+But I should say she was not an agreeable person.  Not nice," added Lady
+Selina, after a pause, and conveying a world of meaning in that
+conventional monosyllable.
+
+"I suppose she was very accomplished, very clever?"
+
+"Quite the reverse, my dear.  Mr. Darrell was exceedingly young when he
+married, scarcely of age.  She was not the sort of woman to suit him."
+
+"But at least she must have been very much attached to him, very proud of
+him?"
+
+Lady Selina glanced aside from her work, and observed her daughter's
+face, which evinced an animation not usual to a young lady of a breeding
+so lofty, and a mind so well disciplined.
+
+"I don't think," said Lady Selina, "that she was proud of him.  She would
+have been proud of his station, or rather of that to which his fame and
+fortune would have raised her, had she lived to enjoy it.  But for a few
+years after her marriage they were very poor; and though his rise at the
+bar was sudden and brilliant, he was long wholly absorbed in his
+profession, and lived in Bloomsbury.  Mrs. Darrell was not proud of that.
+The Crookes are generally fine, give themselves airs, marry into great
+houses if they can: but we can't naturalize them; they always remain
+Crookes,--useful connections, very!  Carr says we have not a more
+useful,--but third-rate, my dear.  All the Crookes are bad wives, because
+they are never satisfied with their own homes, but are always trying to
+get into great people's homes.  Not very long before she died, Mrs.
+Darrell took her friend and relation, Mrs. Lyndsay, to live with her.
+I suspect it was not from affection, or any great consideration for Mrs.
+Lyndsay's circumstances (which were indeed those of actual destitution,
+till--thanks to Mr. Darrell--she won her lawsuit), but simply because she
+looked to Mrs. Lyndsay to get her into our set.  Mrs. Lyndsay was a great
+favourite with all of us, charming manners,--perfectly correct, too,--
+thorough Vipont, thorough gentlewoman, but artful!  Oh, so artful!  She
+humoured poor Mrs. Darrell's absurd vanity; but she took care not to
+injure herself.  Of course, Darrell's wife, and a Vipont--though only a
+Vipont Crooke--had free passport into the outskirts of good society, the
+great parties, and so forth.  But there it stopped; even I should have
+been compromised if I had admitted into our set a woman who was bent on
+compromising herself.  Handsome, in a bad style, not the Vipont
+/tournure/; and not only silly and flirting, but (we are alone, keep the
+secret) decidedly vulgar, my dear."
+
+"You amaze me!  How such a man--" Honoria stopped, colouring up to the
+temples.
+
+"Clever men," said Lady Selina, "as a general rule, do choose the oddest
+wives!  The cleverer a man is, the more easily, I do believe, a woman can
+take him in.  However, to do Mr. Darrell justice, he has been taken in
+only once.  After Mrs. Darrell's death, Mrs. Lyndsay, I suspect, tried
+her chance, but failed.  Of course, she would not actually stay in the
+same house with a widower who was then young, and who had only to get rid
+of a wife to whom one was forced to be shy in order to be received into
+our set with open arms, and, in short, to be of the very best monde.  Mr.
+Darrell came into Parliament immensely rich (a legacy from an old East
+Indian, besides his own professional savings); took the house he has now,
+close by us.  Mrs. Lyndsay was obliged to retire to a cottage at Fulham.
+But as she professed to be a second mother to poor Matilda Darrell, she
+contrived to be very much at Carlton Gardens; her daughter Caroline was
+nearly always there, profiting by Matilda's masters; and I did think that
+Mrs. Lyndsay would have caught Darrell, but your papa said 'No,' and he
+was right, as he always is.  Nevertheless, Mrs. Lyndsay would have been
+an excellent wife to a public man: so popular; knew the world so well;
+never made enemies till she made an enemy of poor dear Montfort, but that
+was natural.  By the by, I must write to Caroline.  Sweet creature!  but
+how absurd, shutting herself up as if she were fretting for Montfort!
+That's so like her mother,--heartless, but full of propriety."
+
+Here Carr Vipont and Colonel Morley entered the room.  "We have just left
+Darrell," said Carr; "he will dine here to-day, to meet our cousin Alban.
+I have asked his cousin, young Haughton, and--and, your cousins, Selina
+(a small party of cousins); so lucky to find Darrell disengaged."
+
+"I ventured to promise," said the Colonel, addressing Honoria in an under
+voice, "that Darrell should hear you play Beethoven."
+
+HONORIA.--"Is Mr. Darrell so fond of music, then?"
+
+COLONEL MORLEY.--"One would not have thought it.  He keeps a secretary at
+Fawley who plays the flute.  There's something very interesting about
+Darrell.  I wish you could hear his ideas on marriage and domestic life:
+more freshness of heart than in the young men one meets nowadays.  It may
+be prejudice; but it seems to me that the young fellows of the present
+race, if more sober and staid than we were, are sadly wanting in
+character and spirit,--no warm blood in their veins.  But I should not
+talk thus to a demoiselle who has all those young fellows at her feet."
+
+"Oh," said Lady Selina, overhearing, and with a half laugh, "Honoria
+thinks much as you do: she finds the young men so insipid; all like one
+another,--the same set phrases."
+
+"The same stereotyped ideas," added Honoria, moving away with a gesture
+of calm disdain.
+
+"A very superior mind hers," whispered the Colonel to Carr Vipont.
+"She'll never marry a fool."
+
+Guy Darrell was very pleasant at "the small family dinnerparty."  Carr
+was always popular in his manners; the true old House of Commons manner,
+which was very like that of a gentleman-like public school.  Lady Selina,
+as has been said before, in her own family circle was natural and genial.
+Young Carr, there, without his wife, more pretentious than his father,--
+being a Lord of the Admiralty,--felt a certain awe of Darrell, and spoke
+little, which was much to his own credit and to the general conviviality.
+The other members of the symposium, besides Lady Selina, Honoria, and a
+younger sister, were but Darrell, Lionel, and Lady Selina's two cousins;
+elderly peers,--one with the garter, the other in the Cabinet,--jovial
+men who had been wild fellows once in the same mess-room, and still joked
+at each other whenever they met as they met now.  Lionel, who remembered
+Vance's description of Lady Selina, and who had since heard her spoken of
+in society as a female despot who carried to perfection the arts by which
+despots flourish, with majesty to impose, and caresses to deceive--an
+Aurungzebe in petticoats--was sadly at a loss to reconcile such
+portraiture with the good-humoured, motherly woman who talked to him of
+her home, her husband, her children, with open fondness and becoming
+pride, and who, far from being so formidably clever as the world cruelly
+gave out, seemed to Lionel rather below par in her understanding; strike
+from her talk its kindliness, and the residue was very like twaddle.
+After dinner, various members of the Vipont family dropped in,--asked
+impromptu by Carr or by Lady Selina, in hasty three-cornered notes, to
+take that occasion of renewing their acquaintance with their
+distinguished connection.  By some accident, amongst those invited there
+were but few young single ladies; and, by some other accident, those few
+were all plain.  Honoria Vipont was unequivocally the belle of the room.
+It could not but be observed that Darrell seemed struck with her,--talked
+with her more than with any other lady; and when she went to the piano,
+and played that great air of Beethoven's, in which music seems to have
+got into a knot that only fingers the most artful can unravel, Darrell
+remained in his seat aloof and alone, listening no doubt with ravished
+attention.  But just as the air ended, and Honoria turned round to look
+for him, he was gone.
+
+Lionel did not linger long after him.  The gay young man went thence to
+one of those vast crowds which seemed convened for a practical parody of
+Mr. Bentham's famous proposition,--contriving the smallest happiness for
+the greatest number.
+
+It was a very good house, belonging to a very great person.  Colonel
+Morley had procured an invitation for Lionel, and said, "Go; you should
+be seen there."  Colonel Morley had passed the age of growing into
+society: no such cares for the morrow could add a cubit to his
+conventional stature.  One amongst a group of other young men by the
+doorway, Lionel beheld Darrell, who had arrived before him, listening to
+a very handsome young lady, with an attention quite as earnest as that
+which had gratified the superior mind of the well-educated Honoria,--a
+very handsome young lady certainly, but not with a superior mind, nor
+supposed hitherto to have found young gentlemen "insipid."  Doubtless she
+would henceforth do so.  A few minutes after Darrell was listening again;
+this time to another young lady, generally called "fast."  If his
+attentions to her were not marked, hers to him were.  She rattled on to
+him volubly, laughed, pretty hoyden, at her own sallies, and seemed at
+last so to fascinate him by her gay spirits that he sat down by her side;
+and the playful smile on his lips--lips that had learned to be so gravely
+firm--showed that he could enter still into the mirth of childhood; for
+surely to the time-worn man the fast young lady must have seemed but a
+giddy child.  Lionel was amused.  Could this be the austere recluse whom
+he had left in the shades of Fawley?  Guy Darrell, at his years, with his
+dignified repute, the object of so many nods, and becks, and wreathed
+smiles,--could he descend to be that most frivolous of characters, a male
+coquet?  Was he in earnest?  Was his vanity duped?  Looking again, Lionel
+saw in his kinsman's face a sudden return of the sad despondent
+expression which had moved his own young pity in the solitudes of Fawley.
+But in a moment the man roused himself: the sad expression was gone.  Had
+the girl's merry laugh again chased it away?  But Lionel's attention was
+now drawn from Darrell himself to the observations murmured round him, of
+which Darrell was the theme.
+
+"Yes, he is bent on marrying again!  I have it from Alban Morley: immense
+fortune; and so young-looking, any girl might fall in love with such eyes
+and forehead; besides, what a jointure he could settle!  .  .  .  Do look
+at that girl, Flora Vyvyan, trying to make a fool of him.  She can't
+appreciate that kind of man, and she would not be caught by his money;
+does not want it.  .  .  .  I wonder she is not afraid of him.  He is
+certainly quizzing her.  .  .  .  The men think her pretty; I don't.  .
+.  .  They say he is to return to Parliament, and have a place in the
+Cabinet.  .  .  .  No!  he has no children living: very natural he should
+marry again.  .  .  .  A nephew!--you are quite mistaken.  Young Haughton
+is no nephew: a very distant connection; could not expect to be the heir
+.  .  .  .  It was given out, though, at Paris.  The Duchess thought so,
+and so did Lady Jane.  They'll not be so civil to young Haughton now.  .
+.  .  Hush--"
+
+Lionel, wishing to hear no more, glided by, and penetrated farther into
+the throng.  And then, as he proceeded, with those last words on his ear,
+the consciousness came upon him that his position had undergone a change.
+Difficult to define it; to an ordinary bystander people would have seemed
+to welcome him cordially as ever.  The gradations of respect in polite
+society are so exquisitely delicate, that it seems only by a sort of
+magnetism that one knows from day to day whether one has risen or
+declined.  A man has lost high office, patronage, power, never perhaps to
+regain them.  People don't turn their backs on him; their smiles are as
+gracious, their hands as flatteringly extended.  But that man would be
+dull as a rhinoceros if he did not feel--as every one who accosts him
+feels--that he has descended in the ladder.  So with all else.  Lose even
+your fortune, it is not the next day in a London drawing-room that your
+friends look as if you were going to ask them for five pounds.  Wait a
+year or so for that.  But if they have just heard you are ruined, you
+will feel that they have heard it, let them bow ever so courteously,
+smile ever so kindly.  Lionel at Paris, in the last year or so, had been
+more than fashionable: he had been the fashion,--courted, run after,
+petted, quoted, imitated.  That evening he felt as an author may feel who
+has been the rage, and without fault of his own is so no more.  The rays
+that had gilded him had gone back to the orb that lent.  And they who
+were most genial still to Lionel Haughton were those who still most
+respected thirty-five thousand pounds a year--in Guy Darrell!
+
+Lionel was angry with himself that he felt galled.  But in his wounded
+pride there was no mercenary regret,--only that sort of sickness which
+comes to youth when the hollowness of worldly life is first made clear to
+it.  From the faces round him there fell that glamour by which the /amour
+propre/ is held captive in large assemblies, where the /amour propre/ is
+flattered.  "Magnificent, intelligent audience," thinks the applauded
+actor.  "Delightful party," murmurs the worshipped beauty.  Glamour!
+glamour!  Let the audience yawn while the actor mouths; let the party
+neglect the beauty to adore another, and straightway the "magnificent
+audience" is an "ignorant public," and the "delightful party" a
+"heartless world."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+     Escaped from a London drawing-room, flesh once more tingles and
+     blood flows.--Guy Darrell explains to Lionel Haughton why he holds
+     it a duty to be an old fool.
+
+Lionel Haughton glided through the disenchanted rooms, and breathed a
+long breath of relief when he found himself in the friendless streets.
+
+As he walked slow and thoughtful on, he suddenly felt a hand upon his
+shoulder, turned, and saw Darrell.
+
+"Give me your arm, my dear Lionel; I am tired out.  What a lovely night!
+What sweet scorn in the eyes of those stars that we have neglected for
+yon flaring lights."
+
+LIONEL.--"Is it scorn? is it pity? is it but serene indifference?"
+
+DARRELL.--"As we ourselves interpret: if scorn be present in our own
+hearts, it will be seen in the disc of Jupiter.  Man, egotist though he
+be, exacts sympathy from all the universe.  Joyous, he says to the sun,
+'Life-giver, rejoice with me.'  Grieving, he says to the moon, 'Pensive
+one, thou sharest my sorrow.'  Hope for fame; a star is its promise!
+
+"Mourn for the dead; a star is the land of reunion!  Say to earth, 'I have
+done with thee;' to Time, 'Thou hast nought to bestow;' and all space
+cries aloud, 'The earth is a speck, thine inheritance infinity.  Time
+melts while thou sighest.  The discontent of a mortal is the instinct
+that proves thee immortal.'  Thus construing Nature, Nature is our
+companion, our consoler.  Benign as the playmate, she lends herself to
+our shifting humours.  Serious as the teacher, she responds to the
+steadier inquiries of reason.  Mystic and hallowed as the priestess, she
+keeps alive by dim oracles that spiritual yearning within us, in which,
+from savage to sage,--through all dreams, through all creeds,--thrills
+the sense of a link with Divinity.  Never, therefore, while conferring
+with Nature, is Man wholly alone, nor is she a single companion with
+uniform shape.  Ever new, ever various, she can pass from gay to severe,
+from fancy to science,--quick as thought passes from the dance of a leaf,
+from the tint of a rainbow, to the theory of motion, the problem of
+light.  But lose Nature, forget or dismiss her, make companions, by
+hundreds, of men who ignore her, and I will not say with the poet, 'This
+is solitude.'  But in the commune, what stale monotony, what weary
+sameness!"
+
+Thus Darrell continued to weave together sentence with sentence, the
+intermediate connection of meaning often so subtle that when put down on
+paper it requires effort to discern it.  But it was his peculiar gift to
+make clear when spoken what in writing would seem obscure.  Look, manner,
+each delicate accent in a voice wonderfully distinct in its unrivalled
+melody, all so aided the sense of mere words that it is scarcely
+extravagant to say he might have talked an unknown language, and a
+listener would have understood.  But, understood or not, those sweet
+intonations it was such delight to hear that any one with nerves alive to
+music would have murmured, "Talk on forever."  And in this gift lay one
+main secret of the man's strange influence over all who came familiarly
+into his intercourse; so that if Darrell had ever bestowed confidential
+intimacy on any one not by some antagonistic idiosyncrasy steeled against
+its charm, and that intimacy had been withdrawn, a void never to be
+refilled must have been left in the life thus robbed.
+
+Stopping at his door, as Lionel, rapt by the music, had forgotten the
+pain of the revery so bewitchingly broken, Darrell detained the hand held
+out to him, and said, "No, not yet; I have something to say to you: come
+in; let me say it now."
+
+Lionel bowed his head, and in surprised conjecture followed his kinsman
+up the lofty stairs into the same comfortless stately room that has been
+already described.  When the servant closed the door, Darrell sank into a
+chair.  Fixing his eye upon Lionel with almost parental kindness, and
+motioning his young cousin to sit by his side, close, he thus began,
+
+"Lionel, before I was your age I was married; I was a father.  I am
+lonely and childless now.  My life has been moulded by a solemn
+obligation which so few could comprehend that I scarce know a man living
+beside yourself to whom I would frankly confide it.  Pride of family is a
+common infirmity,--often petulant with the poor, often insolent with the
+rich; but rarely, perhaps, out of that pride do men construct a positive
+binding duty, which at all self-sacrifice should influence the practical
+choice of life.  As a child, before my judgment could discern how much of
+vain superstition may lurk in our reverence for the dead, my whole heart
+was engaged in a passionate dream, which my waking existence became vowed
+to realize.  My father!--my lip quivers, my eyes moisten as I recall him,
+even now,--my father!--I loved him so intensely!--the love of childhood,
+how fearfully strong it is!  All in him was so gentle, yet so sensitive,
+--chivalry without its armour.  I was his constant companion: he spoke to
+me unreservedly, as a poet to his muse.  I wept at his sorrows; I chafed
+at his humiliations.  He talked of ancestors as he thought of them; to
+him they were beings like the old Lares,--not dead in graves, but images
+ever present on household hearths.  Doubtless he exaggerated their worth,
+as their old importance.  Obscure, indeed, in the annals of empire, their
+deeds and their power, their decline and fall.  Not so thought he; they
+were to his eyes the moon-track in the ocean of history,--light on the
+waves over which they had gleamed,--all the ocean elsewhere dark!  With
+him thought I; as my father spoke, his child believed.  But what to the
+eyes of the world was this inheritor of a vaunted name?--a threadbare,
+slighted, rustic pedant; no station in the very province in which
+mouldered away the last lowly dwelling-place of his line,--by lineage
+high above most nobles, in position below most yeomen.  He had learning;
+he had genius: but the studies to which they were devoted only served yet
+more to impoverish his scanty means, and led rather to ridicule than to
+honour.  Not a day but what I saw on his soft features the smart of a
+fresh sting, the gnawing of a new care.  Thus, as a boy, feeling in
+myself a strength inspired by affection, I came to him one day as he sat
+grieving, and kneeling to him, said, 'Father, courage yet a little while;
+I shall soon be a man, and I swear to devote myself as man to revive the
+old fading race so prized by you; to rebuild the House that, by you so
+loved, is loftier in my eyes than all the heraldry of kings.'  And my
+father's face brightened, and his voice blessed me; and I rose up-
+ambitious!"  Darrell paused, heaved a short, quick sigh, and then rapidly
+continued,
+
+"I was fortunate at the University.  That was a day when chiefs of party
+looked for recruits amongst young men who had given the proofs and won
+the first-fruits of emulation and assiduity; for statesmanship then was
+deemed an art which, like that of war, needs early discipline.  I had
+scarcely left college when I was offered a seat in Parliament by the head
+of the Viponts, an old Lord Montfort.  I was dazzled but for one moment;
+I declined the next.  The fallen House of Darrell needed wealth; and
+Parliamentary success, in its higher honours, often requires wealth,--
+never gives it.  It chanced that I had a college acquaintance with a
+young man named Vipont Crooke.  His grandfather, one of the numberless
+Viponts, had been compelled to add the name of Crooke to his own, on
+succeeding to the property of some rich uncle, who was one of the
+numberless Crookes.  I went with this college acquaintance to visit the
+old Lord Montfort, at his villa near London, and thence to the country-
+house of the Vipont Crookes.  I stayed at the last two or three weeks.
+While there, I received a letter from the elder Fairthorn, my father's
+bailiff, entreating me to come immediately to Fawley, hinting at some
+great calamity.  On taking leave of my friend and his family, something
+in the manner of his sister startled and pained me,--an evident
+confusion, a burst of tears,--I know not what.  I had never sought to
+win her affections.  I had an ideal of the woman I could love,--it did
+not resemble her.  On reaching Fawley, conceive the shock that awaited
+me.  My father was like one heart-stricken.  The principal mortgagee was
+about to foreclose,--Fawley about to pass forever from the race of the
+Darrells.  I saw that the day my father was driven from the old house
+would be his last on earth.  What means to save him?--how raise the
+pitiful sum--but a few thousands--by which to release from the spoiler's
+gripe those barren acres which all the lands of the Seymour or the Gower
+could never replace in my poor father's eyes?  My sole income was a
+college fellowship, adequate to all my wants, but useless for sale or
+loan.  I spent the night in vain consultation with Fairthorn.  There
+seemed not a hope.  Next morning came a letter from young Vipont Crooke.
+It was manly and frank, though somewhat coarse.  With the consent of his
+parents he offered me his sister's hand, and a dowry of L10,000.  He
+hinted, in excuse for his bluntness, that, perhaps from motives of
+delicacy, if I felt a preference for his sister, I might not deem myself
+rich enough to propose, and--but it matters not what else he said.  You
+foresee the rest.  My father's life could be saved from despair; his
+beloved home be his shelter to the last.  That dowry would more than
+cover the paltry debt upon the lands.  I gave myself not an hour to
+pause.  I hastened back to the house to which fate had led me.  But,"
+said Darrell, proudly, "do not think I was base enough, even with such
+excuses, to deceive the young lady.  I told her what was true; that I
+could not profess to her the love painted by romance-writers and poets;
+but that I loved no other, and that if she deigned to accept my hand,
+I should studiously consult her happiness and gratefully confide to her
+my own."
+
+"I said also, what was true, that if she married me, ours must be for
+some years a life of privation and struggle; that even the interest of
+her fortune must be devoted to my father while he lived, though every
+shilling of its capital would be settled on herself and her children.
+How I blessed her when she accepted me, despite my candour!--how
+earnestly I prayed that I might love and cherish and requite her!"
+Darrell paused, in evident suffering.  "And, thank Heaven!  I have
+nothing on that score wherewith to reproach myself; and the strength of
+that memory enabled me to bear and forbear more than otherwise would have
+been possible to my quick spirit and my man's heart.  My dear father!
+his death was happy: his home was saved; he never knew at what sacrifice
+to his son!  He was gladdened by the first honours my youth achieved.  He
+was resigned to my choice of a profession, which, though contrary to his
+antique prejudices, that allowed to the representative of the Darrells no
+profession but the sword, still promised the wealth which would secure
+his name from perishing.  He was credulous of my future, as if I had
+uttered not a vow, but a prediction.  He had blessed my union, without
+foreseeing its sorrows.  He had embraced my first-born,--true, it was a
+girl, but it was one link onward from ancestors to posterity.  And almost
+his last words were these: 'You will restore the race; you will revive
+the name! and my son's children will visit the antiquary's grave, and
+learn gratitude to him for all that his idle lessons taught to your
+healthier vigour.'  And I answered, 'Father, your line shall not perish
+from the land; and when I am rich and great, and lordships spread far
+round the lowly hall that your life ennobled, I will say to your
+grandchildren, 'Honour ye and your son's sons, while a Darrell yet treads
+the earth, honour him to whom I owe every thought which nerved me to toil
+for what you who come after me may enjoy.'
+
+"And so the old man, whose life had been so smileless, died smiling."
+
+By this time Lionel had stolen Darrell's hand into his own--his heart
+swelling with childlike tenderness, and the tears rolling down his
+cheeks.
+
+Darrell gently kissed his young kinsman's forehead, and, extricating
+himself from Lionel's clasp, paced the room, and spoke on while pacing
+it.
+
+"I made, then, a promise; it is not kept.  No child of mine survives to
+be taught reverence to my father's grave.  My wedded life was not happy:
+its record needs no words.  Of two children born to me, both are gone.
+My son went first.  I had thrown my life's life into him,--a boy of
+energy, of noble promise.  'T was for him I began to build that baffled
+fabric, 'Sepulchri immemor.'  For him I bought, acre on acre, all the
+land within reach of Fawley,-lands twelve miles distant.  I had meant to
+fill up the intervening space, to buy out a mushroom earl whose woods and
+cornfields lie between.  I was scheming the purchase, scrawling on the
+county map, when they brought the news that the boy I had just taken back
+to school was dead,--drowned bathing on a calm summer eve.  No, Lionel.
+I must go on.  That grief I have wrestled with,--conquered.  I was
+widowed then.  A daughter still left,--the first-born, whom my father had
+blest on his death-bed.  I transferred all my love, all my hopes, to her.
+I had no vain preference for male heirs.  Is a race less pure that runs
+on through the female line?  Well, my son's death was merciful compared
+to--"  Again Darrell stopped, again hurried on.  "Enough!  all is
+forgiven in the grave!  I was then still in the noon of man's life, free
+to form new ties.  Another grief that I cannot tell you; it is not all
+conquered yet.  And by that grief the last verdure of existence was so
+blighted that--that--in short, I had no heart for nuptial altars, for the
+social world.  Years went by.  Each year I said, 'Next year the wound
+will be healed; I have time yet.'  Now age is near, the grave not far;
+now, if ever, I must fulfil the promise that cheered my father's death-
+bed.  Nor does that duty comprise all my motives.  If I would regain
+healthful thought, manly action, for my remaining years, I must feel that
+one haunting memory is exorcised and forever laid at rest.  It can be so
+only,--whatever my risk of new cares, whatever the folly of the hazard
+at my age,--be so only by--by--"  Once more Darrell paused, fixed his
+eyes steadily on Lionel, and, opening his arms, cried out, "Forgive me,
+my noble Lionel, that I am not contented with an heir like you; and do
+not you mock at the old man who dreams that woman may love him yet, and
+that his own children may inherit his father's home."
+
+Lionel sprang to the breast that opened to him; and if Darrell had
+planned how best to remove from the young man's mind forever the
+possibility of one selfish pang, no craft could have attained his object
+like that touching confidence before which the disparities between youth
+and age literally vanished.  And, both made equal, both elevated alike,
+verily I know not which at the moment felt the elder or the younger!  Two
+noble hearts, intermingled in one emotion, are set free from all time
+save the present: par each with each, they meet as brothers twin-born.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT, V6 ***
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