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.
BOOK VII
CHAPTER I
VIGNETTES FOR THE NEXT BOOK OF BEAUTY.
“I quite agree with you, Alban; Honoria Vipont is a very superior young lady.”
“I knew you would think so!” cried the Colonel, with more warmth than usual to him.
“Many years since,” resumed Darrell, with reflective air, “I read Miss Edgeworth’s novels; and in conversing with Miss Honoria Vipont, methinks I confer with one of Miss Edgeworth’s heroines—so rational, so prudent, so well-behaved—so free from silly romantic notions—so replete with solid information, moral philosophy and natural history—so sure to regulate her watch and her heart to the precise moment, for the one to strike, and the other to throb—and to marry at last a respectable steady husband, whom she will win with dignity, and would lose with decorum! A very superior girl indeed.”
[“Darrell speaks—not the author. Darrell is unjust to the more exquisite female characters of a Novelist, admirable for strength of sense, correctness of delineation, terseness of narrative, and lucidity of style-nor less admirable for the unexaggerated nobleness of sentiment by which some of her heroines are notably distinguished.]
“Though your description of Miss Vipont is satirical,” said Alban Morley, smiling, in spite of some irritation, “yet I will accept it as panegyric; for it conveys, unintentionally, a just idea of the qualities that make an intelligent companion and a safe wife. And those are the qualities we must look to, if we marry at our age. We are no longer boys,” added the Colonel sententiously.
DARRELL.—“Alas, no! I wish we were. But the truth of your remark is indisputable. Ah, look! Is not that a face which might make an octogenarian forget that he is not a boy?—what regular features!—and what a blush!”
The friends were riding in the park; and as Darrell spoke, he bowed to a young lady, who, with one or two others, passed rapidly by in a barouche. It was that very handsome young lady to whom Lionel had seen him listening so attentively in the great crowd, for which Carr Vipont’s family party had been deserted.
“Yes; Lady Adela is one of the loveliest girls in London,” said the Colonel, who had also lifted his hat as the barouche whirled by—“and amiable too: I have known her ever since she was born. Her father and I are great friends—an excellent man but stingy. I had much difficulty in arranging the eldest girl’s marriage with Lord Bolton, and am a trustee in the settlement. If you feel a preference for Lady Adela, though I don’t think she would suit you so well as Miss Vipont, I will answer for her father’s encouragement and her consent. ‘Tis no drawback to you, though it is to most of her admirers, when I add, ‘There’s nothing with her!’”
“And nothing in her! which is worse,” said Darrell.
“Still, it is pleasant to gaze on a beautiful landscape, even though the soil be barren.”
COLONEL MORLEY.—“That depends upon whether you are merely the artistic spectator of the landscape, or the disappointed proprietor of the soil.”
“Admirable!” said Darrell; “you have disposed of Lady Adela. So ho! so ho!” Darrell’s horse (his old high-nettled horse, freshly sent to him from Fawley, and in spite of the five years that had added to its age, of spirit made friskier by long repose) here put down its ears lashed out—and indulged in a bound which would have unseated many a London rider. A young Amazon, followed hard by some two or three young gentlemen and their grooms, shot by, swift and reckless as a hero at Balaclava. But With equal suddenness, as she caught sight of Darrell—whose hand and voice had already soothed the excited nerves of his steed—the Amazon wheeled round and gained his side. Throwing up her veil, she revealed a face so prettily arch, so perversely gay—with eye of radiant hazel, and fair locks half loosened from their formal braid—that it would have beguiled resentment from the most insensible—reconciled to danger the most timid. And yet there was really a grace of humility in the apologies she tendered for her discourtesy and thoughtlessness. As the girl reined her light palfrey by Darrell’s side-turning from the young companions who had now joined her, their hackneys in a foam-and devoting to his ear all her lively overflow of happy spirits, not untempered by a certain deference, but still apparently free from dissimulation—Daxrell’s grand face lighted up—his mellow laugh, unrestrained, though low, echoed her sportive tones; her youth, her joyousness were irresistibly contagious. Alban Morley watched observant, while interchanging talk with her attendant comrades, young men of high ton, but who belonged to that jeunesse doree with which the surface of life patrician is fretted over—young men with few ideas, fewer duties—but with plenty of leisure—plenty of health—plenty of money in their pockets—plenty of debts to their tradesmen—daring at Melton—scheming at T’attersall’s—pride to maiden aunts—plague to thrifty fathers—fickle lovers, but solid matches—in brief, fast livers, who get through their youth betimes, and who, for the most part, are middle-aged before they are thirty—tamed by wedlock—sobered by the responsibilities that come with the cares of property and the dignities of rank—undergo abrupt metamorphosis into chairmen of quarter sessions, county members, or decorous peers;—their ideas enriched as their duties grow—their opinions, once loose as willows to the wind, stiffening into the palisades of fenced propriety—valuable, busy men, changed as Henry V., when coming into the cares of state, he said to the Chief Justice, “There is my hand;” and to Sir John Falstaff,
“I know thee not, old roan;
Fall to thy prayers!”
But meanwhile the elite of this jeunesse doree glittered round Flora Vyvyan: not a regular beauty like Lady Adela—not a fine girl like Miss Vipont, but such a light, faultless figure—such a pretty radiant face—more womanly for affection to be manlike—Hebe aping Thalestris. Flora, too, was an heiress—an only child—spoilt, wilful—not at all accomplished—(my belief is that accomplishments are thought great bores by the jeunesse doree)—no accomplishment except horsemanship, with a slight knack at billiards, and the capacity to take three whiffs from a Spanish cigarette. That last was adorable—four offers had been advanced to her hand on that merit alone.—(N.B. Young ladies do themselves no good with the jeunesse doree, which, in our time, is a lover that rather smokes than “sighs, like furnace,” by advertising their horror of cigars.) You would suppose that Flora Vyvyan must be coarse-vulgar perhaps; not at all; she was pignaute—original; and did the oddest things with the air and look of the highest breeding. Fairies cannot be vulgar, no matter what they do; they may take the strangest liberties—pinch the maids—turn the house topsy-turvy; but they are ever the darlings of grace and poetry. Flora Vyvyan was a fairy. Not peculiarly intellectual herself, she had a veneration for intellect; those fast young men were the last persons likely to fascinate that fast young lady. Women are so perverse; they always prefer the very people you would least suspect—the antithesis to themselves. Yet is it possible that Flora Vyvyan can have carried her crotchets to so extravagant a degree as to have designed the conquest of Guy Darrell—ten years older than her own father? She, too, an heiress—certainly not mercenary; she who had already refused better worldly matches than Darrell himself was—young men, handsome men, with coronets on the margin of their note-paper and the panels of their broughams! The idea seemed preposterous; nevertheless, Alban Morley, a shrewd observer, conceived that idea, and trembled for his friend.
At last the young lady and her satellites shot off, and the Colonel said cautiously, “Miss Vyvyan is—alarming.”
DARRELL.—“Alarming! the epithet requires construing.”
COLONEL MORLEY.—“The sort of girl who might make a man of our years really and literally an old fool!”
DARRELL.—“Old fool such a man must be if girls of any sort are permitted to make him a greater fool than he was before. But I think that, with those pretty hands resting on one’s arm-chair, or that sunny face shining into one’s study windows, one might be a very happy old fool—and that is the most one can expect!”
COLONEL MORLEY (checking an anxious groan).—“I am afraid, my poor friend, you are far gone already. No wonder Honoria Vipont fails to be appreciated. But Lady Selina has a maxim—the truth of which my experience attests—‘the moment it comes to woman, the most sensible men are the’—”
“Oldest fools!” put in Darrell. “If Mark Antony made such a goose of himself for that painted harridan Cleopatra, what would he have done for a blooming Juliet! Youth and high spirit! Alas! why are these to be unsuitable companions for us, as we reach that climax in time and sorrow—when to the one we are grown the most indulgent, and of the other have the most need? Alban, that girl, if her heart were really won—her wild nature wisely mastered, gently guided—would make a true, prudent, loving, admirable wife—”
“Heavens!” cried Alban Morley.
“To such a husband,” pursued Darrell, unheeding the ejaculation, “as—Lionel Haughton. What say you?” “Lionel—oh, I have no objection at all to that; but he’s too young yet to think of marriage—a mere boy. Besides, if you yourself marry, Lionel could scarcely aspire to a girl of Miss Vyvyan’s birth and fortune.”
“Ho, not aspire! That boy at least shall not have to woo in vain from the want of fortune. The day I marry—if ever that day come—I settle on Lionel Haughton and his heirs five thousand a-year; and if, with gentle blood, youth, good looks, and a heart of gold, that fortune does not allow him to aspire to any girl whose hand he covets, I can double it, and still be rich enough to buy a superior companion in Honoria Vipont—”
MORLEY.—“Don’t say buy—”
DARRELL.—“Ay, and still be young enough to catch a butterfly in Lady Adela—still be bold enough to chain a panther in Flora Vyvyan. Let the world know—your world in each nook of its gaudy auction-mart—that Lione: Haughton is no pauper cousin—no penniless fortune-hunter. I wish that world to be kind to him while he is yet young, and can enjoy it. Ah, Morley, Pleasure, like Punishment, hobbles after us, pede claudo. What would have delighted us yesterday does not catch us up till to-morrow, and yesterday’s pleasure is not the morrow’s. A pennyworth of sugar-plums would have made our eyes sparkle when we were scrawling pot-hooks at a preparatory school, but no one gave us sugar-plums then. Now every day at dessert France heaps before us her daintiest sugar-plums in gilt bonbonnieres. Do you ever covet them? I never do. Let Lionel have his sugar-plums in time. And as we talk, there he comes. Lionel, how are you?”
“I resign you to Lionel’s charge now,” said the Colonel, glancing at his watch. “I have an engagement—trouble some. Two silly friends of mine have been quarrelling—high words—in an age when duels are out of the question. I have promised to meet another man, and draw up the form for a mutual apology. High words are so stupid nowadays. No option but to swallow them up again if they were as high as steeples. Adieu for the present. We meet to-night at Lady Dulcett’s concert?”
“Yes,” said Darrell. “I promised Miss Vyvyan to be there, and keep her from disturbing the congregation. You Lionel, will come with me.”
LIONELL (embarrassed).—“No; you must excuse me. I have long been engaged elsewhere.”
“That’s a pity,” said the Colonel, gravely. “Lady Dulcett’s conceit is just one of the places where a young man should be seen.” Colonel Morley waved his hand with his usual languid elegance, and his hack cantered off with him, stately as a charger, easy as a rocking-horse.
“Unalterable man,” said Darrell, as his eye followed the horseman’s receding figure. “‘Through all the mutations on Time’s dusty high-road-stable as a milestone. Just what Alban Morley was as a school-boy he is now; and if mortal span were extended to the age of the patriarchs, just what Alban Morley is now, Alban Morley would be a thousand years hence. I don’t mean externally, of course; wrinkles will come—cheeks will fade. But these are trifles: man’s body is a garment, as Socrates said before me, and every seven years, according to the physiologists, man has a new suit, fibre and cuticle, from top to toe. The interior being that wears the clothes is the same in Alban Morley. Has he loved, hated, rejoiced, suffered? Where is the sign? Not one. At school, as in life, doing nothing, but decidedly somebody—respected by small boys, petted by big boys—an authority with all. Never getting honours—arm and arm with those who did; never in scrapes—advising those who were; imperturbable, immovable, calm above mortal cares as an Epicurean deity. What can wealth give that he has not got? In the houses of the richest he chooses his room. Talk of ambition, talk of power—he has their rewards without an effort. True prime minister of all the realm he cares for; good society has not a vote against him—he transacts its affairs, he knows its secrets—he yields its patronage. Ever requested to do a favour—no loan great enough to do him one. Incorruptible, yet versed to a fraction in each man’s price; impeccable, yet confidant in each man’s foibles; smooth as silk, hard as adamant; impossible to wound, vex, annoy him—but not insensible; thoroughly kind. Dear, dear Alban! nature never polished a finer gentleman out of a solider block of man!” Darrell’s voice quivered a little as he completed in earnest affection the sketch begun in playful irony, and then with a sudden change of thought, he resumed lightly:
“But I wish you to do me a favour, Lionel. Aid me to repair a fault in good breeding, of which Alban Morley would never have been guilty. I have been several days in London, and not yet called on your mother. Will you accompany me now to her house and present me?”
“Thank you, thank you; you will make her so proud and happy; but may I ride on and prepare her for your visit?”
“Certainly; her address is—”
“Gloucester Place, No.—.”
“I will meet you there in half an hour.”