THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY 623 L2)9w The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN IX ;'i 19'' UBRARY liljipifeglsiiihiiii^^^ 'and SOPHY WOULD NOT ACT. p. 4OO. What will he do with it? vol. i. Shi; 6lobc (Edition. WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT By PISISTEATUS CAXTON BY SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON, BART. COMPLETE IX TWO VOLUMES YOL. L PUILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPIXCOTT & CO. 1868 vv L^9 r WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? BOOK FIRST. . CHAPTER I. In which the History opens with a description of the Social Man- "^ ners, Habits, and Amusements of the English People, as exhi- bited in an immemorial National Festivity. — Characters to be commemorated in the History' introduced and graphically por- cd trayed, with a nasological illustration. — Original suggestions as 3. to the idiosynacracies engendered by trades and callings, with ^T* other matters worthy of note, conveyed in artless dialogue, after - O the manner of Herotv whiff. 56 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? " It is I who am to take the portrait, and it is I who will pay for it," said Yance. " I understand that you have a pressing occasion for — " " Three pounds ! " muttered Sophy, sturdily, through the tears which her grandfather's pathos had drawn forth from her downcast eyes — " Three pounds — three — three. " "You shall have them. But listen ; I meant only to take a sketch — I must now have a finished portrait. I cannot take this by candle-light. You must let me come here to-morrow ; and yet to-morrow, I understand, you meant to leave ? " Waife. " If you will generously bestow on us the sum you say, we shall not leave the village till you have com- pleted your picture. It is Mr. Rugge and his company we will leave." Yance. "And may I venture to ask what you propose to do toward a new livelihood for yourself and your grand- child, by the help of a sum which is certainly much for me to pay — enormous, I might say, quoad me — but small for a capital whereon to set up a business ? " Waife. "Excuse me if I do not answer that very natural question at present. Let me assure you that that precise sum is wanted for an investment which promises her and myself an easy existence. But to insure my scheme I must keep it secret. Do you believe me ? " " I do I " cried Lionel ; and Sophy, whom, by this time he had drawn upon his lap, put her arm gratefully round his neck. "There is your money. Sir, beforehand," suid Yance, WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 51 declining downward his betrayed and resentful nose, and depositing three sovereigns on the table. "And how do you know," said Waife, smiling, "that I may not be off to-night with your money and your model ? " " Well," said Vance, curtly, '' I think it is on the cards. Still, as John Kemble said when rebuked for too large an alms : 'It is not often that I do these things, But when I do, I do them handsomely.' " "Well applied, and well delivered, Sir," said the Comedian, " only you should put a little more emphasis on the word nrtbs of civilize^l humankind, male or female, would have nothing to talk about; so we can not too gratefully encourage that needful curiosity, termed, by the inconsiderate, tittle-tattle or scandal, which saves the vast ma- jority of our species from being reduced to the degraded condi- tion of dumb animal=^. The next day the sitting was renewed ; but Waife did i.ot go out, and the conver-sation was a little more re- strained ; or rather, Waife had the larger share in it. The comedian, when he pleased, could certainly be very entertaining. It was not so much in what he said, as his manner of saying it. He was a strange combination of sudden extremes, at one while on a tone of easy but not undignified familiarity with his visitors, as if their equal in position, their superior in years; then abruptly, humble, deprecating, almost obsequious, almost servile ; and then, again, jerked, as it were, into pride and stiflfuess, falling back, as if the effort were impossible, into meek de- jfclion. Siill, the prevalent character of the man's mood ttvd talk wfiH ».(iCA'.i]. quaint, chf-crful. Kvidcntly he was, 78 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? by original temperament, a droll and joyous humorist, with hi.o:h animal spirits ; and, withal, an infantine simplicity at times, like the clever man who never learns the world, and is always taken in. A circumstance, trifling in itself, but suggestive of speculation either as to the character or antecedent cir- cumstances of Gentleman Waife, did not escape Yance's observation. Since his rupture with Mr. Rugge, there was a considerable amelioration in that affection of the trachea which, while his engagement with Rugge lasted, had rendered the comedian's dramatic talents unavailable on the stage. He now expressed himself without the pathetic hoarseness or cavernous wheeze which had pre- viously thrown a wet blanket over his efforts at discourse. But Vance put no very stern construction on the dis- simulation which this change seemed to denote. Since Waife was still one-eyed and a cripple, he might very excusably shrink from reappearance on the stage, and affect a third infirmity to save his pride from the exhibi- tion of the two infirmities that were genuine. That which most puzzled Yance was that which had most puzzled the Cobbler — What could the man once have been ? — how fallen so low ! — for fall it was ! that was clear. The painter, though not himself of patrician extraction, had been much in the best society. He had been a petted favorite in great houses. He had traveled. He had seen the world. He had the habits and the instincts of good society. Now, in what the French term the beau month, there WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 79 are little traits that reveal those who have entered it — certain tricks of phrase, certain modes of exoressiou — even the pronunciation of familiar words, even the modu- lation of an accent. A man of the most refined bearing may not have these peculiarities ; a man, otherwise coarse and brusque in his manner, may. The slang of the beau moiide is quite apart from the code of hio^h-breeding. Xow and then, something in Waife's talk seemed to show that he had lighted on that beau-world ; now and then, that something wholly vanished. So that Yance might hare said, " He has been admitted there, not inhabited it." Yet Yance could not feel sure, after all ; comedians are such takes-in. But was the man, by the profession of his earlier life, a comedian ? Yance asked the question adroitly. " You must have taken to the stage young ? " said he. " The stage ! '' said Waife. " If you mean the public stage — no. I have acted pretty often in youth, even in childhood, to amuse others ; never professionally to sup- port myself, till Mr. Rugge civilly engaged me four years ago," " Is it possible — with your excellent education ! But pardon me ; I have hinted my surprise at your late voca- tion before, and it displeased you." " Displeased me ! " said Waife, with an abject, depressed manner ; " I hope I said nothing that would have mis become a poor broken vagabond like me. I am no prince in disguise — a good-for-nothing varlet, who should be too gratefulto have something to keep himself from a dung-hill. " 80 WUAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? Lionel. " Don't talk so. And but for your accident you might now be the great attraction on the metropolitan stage. Who does not respect a really fine actor ? " Waife (gloomily). " The Metropolitan Stage ! I was talked into it ; I am glad even of the accident that saved me — say no more of that, no more of that. But I have spoiled your sitting : Sophy, you see, has left her chair." "I have done for to-day," said Yance ; "to-morrow, and my task is ended." Lionel came up to Vance and whispered to him ; the painter, after a pause, nodded silently, and then said to Waife — " We are going to enjoy the fine weather on the Thames (after I have put away these things), and shall return to our inn — not far hence — to sup, at eight o'clock. Supper is our principal meal — we rarely spoil our days by the ceremonial of a formal dinner. Will you do us the favor to sup with us ? Our host has a wonder- ful whisky, which, when raw, is Glenlivat, but, refined into toddy, is nectar. Bring your pipe, and let us hear John Kerable again." Waife's face lighted up. " You are most kind ; nothing I should like so much. But — " and the light fled, the face darkened — " but no ; I can not — you don't know — that is — I — I have made a vow to myself to decline all such temptations. I humbly beg you'll excuse me." Yance. "Temptations! of what kind — the whisky- toddy?" Waife (puffing away a sigh). Ah, yes; whisky-todd^ WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 81 if you please. Perhaps I once loved a glass too well and could not resist a glass too much now ; and if I once broke the rule, and became a tippler, what would happen to Juliet Araminta ? For her sake, don't press me ? " "Oh, do go, Grandy ; he never drinks — never any thing stronger than tea, I assure you, Sir ; it can't be that." "It is, silly child, and nothing else," said Waife posi- tively — drawing himself up. "Excuse me." Lionel began brushing his hat with his sleeve, and his face worked ; at last he said, " Well, Sir, then may I ask another favor ? Mr. Yance and I are going to-morrow, after the sitting, to see Hampton Court ; we have kept that excursion to the last before leaving these parts. Would you and little Sophy come with us in the boat ? we will have no whisky-toddy, and we will bring you both safe home." Waife. " What — I — what — I ! You are very young, Sir — a gentleman born and bred, I'll swear ; and you to be seen, perhaps by some of your friends or family, with an old vagrant like me, in the Queen's palace — the public gardens ! I should be the vilest wretch if I took such advantage of your goodness. 'Pretty company,' they would say, 'you have got into.' With me — with me ! Don't be alarmed, Mr. Yance — not to be thought of." The young men were deeply affected. " I can't accept that reason," said Lionel, tremulously. ' Though I must not presume to derange your habits. But she may go with us, mayn't she ? We'll take care F 82 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? of hei, and she is dressed so plainly and neatly, and looks such a little lady" (turning to Yance). "Yes, let her come with us," said the artist, benevo- lently ; though he by no means shared in Lionel's enthu- siastic desire for her company. He thought she would be greatly in their way. "Heaven bless you both!" answered Waife ; "and she wants a holiday; she shall have it." " I'd rather stay with you, Grandy ; you'll be so lone." " No, I wish to be out all to-morrow — the investment I I shall not be alone — making friends with our future com- panion, Sophy." "And can do without me already ? — heigh-ho ! " Yance. " So that's settled ; good-by to you." CHAPTER XIII. Inspiring efifect of the Fine Arts: the Vulgar are moved by their exhibition into generous impulses and flights of fancy, checked by the ungracious severities of their supei'iors, as exemplified in the instance of Cobbler Merle and his Servant-of-All-Work. The next day, perhaps with the idea of removing all scruple from Sophy's mind, Waife had already gone after his investment when the friends arrived. Sophy at first was dull and dispirited, but by degrees she brightened up ; and when, the sitting over and the picture done (save such final touches as Yance reserved for solitary study), WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 83 she was permitted to gaze at her own efiBgy, she burst into exclamations of frank delight. "Am I like that ! is it possible ? Oh, how beautiful ! Mr. Merle, Mr. Merle, Mr. Merle ! " and running out of the room before Yance could stop her, she returned with the Cobbler, followed, too, by a thin, gaunt girl, whom he pompously called his housekeeper, but who, in sober truth, was servant-of-all- work. Wife he had none — his horoscope, he said, having Saturn in square to the Seventh House, forbade him to venture upon matrimony. All gathered round the pic- ture ; all admired, and with justice — it was a cJief-cVceuvre. Yance in his maturest day never painted more charmingly. The three pounds proved to be the best outlay of capital he had ever made. Pleased with his work, he was pleased even with that unsophisticated applause. " You must have Mercury and Yenus very strongly a?,pected," quoth the Cobbler ; " and if you have the Dragon's Head in the Tenth House, you may count on being much talked of after you are dead." "After I am dead ! — sinister omen ! " said Yance, dis- composed. " I have no faith in artists who count on be- ing talked of after they are dead. Never knew a dauber who did not ! But stand back — time flies — tie up your hair — put on your bonnet, Titania. You have a shawl ? — not tinsel, I hope ! — quieter the better. You stay and see to her, Lionel." Said the gaunt servant-of-all-work to Mr. Merle — " I'd let the gentleman paint me, if he likes it — shall I tell him, master ? " 84 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? " Go back to the bacon, foolish woman. Why, he gave £3 for her likeness, 'cause of her Benefics ! But you'd have to give him three years' wages afore he'd look you straight in the face, 'cause, you see, your Aspects are crooked. And," added the Cobbler, philosophizing, " when the Malefics are dead agin a girl's mug, man is so constituted by natur that he can't take to that mug unless it has a gold handle. Don't fret, 'tis not your fault : born under Scorpio— coarse-limbed — dull complexion — Head of the Dragon aspected of — In fortunes in all four angles !" CHAPTER XIV. The Historian takes advantage of the summer hours vouchsafed to the present life of Mr. Waife's grandchild, in order to throw a few gleams of light on her past. He leads her into the Palace of our Kings, and moralizes thereon; and entering the Royal Gardens, shows the uncertainty of Human Events, and the in- security of British Laws, by the abrupt seizure and canstrained deportation of an innocent and unforeboding Englishuian, Such a glorious afternoon ! The capricious English summer was so kind that day to the child and her new friends ! When Sophy's small foot once trod the sward, had she been really Queen of the Green People, sward and footstep could not more joyously have met cogether. The grasshopper bounded, in fearless trust, upon the hem of her frock ; she threw herself down on the grass, and caught him, but, oh, so tenderly ; and the gay insect, WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 85 dear to poet and fairy, seemed to look at her from that quaint, sharp face ctf his with sagacious recognition, rest- ing calmly on the palm of her pretty hand ; then when he sprang oflf, little moth-like butterflies peculiar to the mar- gins of running waters, quivered up from the herbage, fluttering round her. And there, in front, lay the Thames, glittering through the willows, Yance getting ready the boat, Lionel seated by her side, a child like herself, his pride of incipient manhood all forgotten ; happy in hex glee — she loving him for the joy she felt — and blending his image evermore in her remembrance with her first summer holiday — with sunny beams — glistening leaves — warbling birds — fairy wings — sparkling waves. Oh to live so in a child's heart — innocent, blessed, angel-like — better, better than the troubled reflection upon woman's later thoughts ; better than that mournful illusion, over which tears so bitter are daily shed — better than First Love ! They entered the boat. Sophy had never, to the best of her recollection, been in a boat before. All was new to her ; the life-like speed of the little vessel — that world of cool, green weeds, with the fish darting to and fro — the musical chime of oars — those distant, stately swans. She was silent now — her heart was very full. " What are you thinking of, Sophy ? " asked Leonard, resting on the oar. "Thinking — I was not thinking." " What then ? " "I don't know — feeling, I suppose." " Feeling what ? " I —8 86 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? "As if between sleep and waking — as the water per- haps feels, with the sunlight on it ! " " Poetical," said Yance, who, somewhat of a poet him- self, naturally sneered at poetical tendencies in others. " But not so bad in its way. Ah, have I hurt your vanity ? there are tears in your eyes." " No, Sir," said Sophy, falteringly. " But I was think- ing then." "Ah," said the artist, "that's the worst of it; after feeling ever conies thought — what was yours?" " I was sorry poor grandfather was not here, that's all." " It was not our fault ; we pressed him cordially," said Lionel. " You did, indeed. Sir — thank you ! And I don't know why he refused you." The young men exchanged com- passionate glances. Lionel then sought to make her talk of her past life — tell him more of Mrs, Crane. Who and what was she ? Sophy could not, or would not, tell. The remembrances were painful ; she had evidently tried to forget them. And tlie people with whom Waife had placed her, and who had been kind ? The Miss Burtons — and they kept a day-school, and taught Sophy to read, write, and cipher. They lived near London, in a lane opening on a great common, with a green rail before the house, and had a good many pupils, and kept a tortoise-shell cat and a canary. Not much to enlighten her listener did Sophy impart here. And now they neared that stately palace, rich in asso- 87 ciations of storm and splendor. The grand Cardinal — the iron-clad Protector ; Dutch William of the immortal memory, whom we try so hard to like, and, in spite of the great Whig historian, that Titian of English prose, can only frigidly respect. Hard task for us Britons to like a Dutchman who dethrones his father-in-law and drinks schnaps. Prejudice, certainly ; but so it is. Harder still to like Dutch William's uufilial Frau ! Like Queen Mary ! I could as soon like Queen Goneril ! Romance flies from the prosperous, phlegmatic -^neas ; flies from his plump Lavinia, his " fidus Achates,'" Bentinck, flies to follow the poor, deserted, fugitive Stuart, with all his sins upon his head. Kings have no rights divine, except when deposed and fallen ; they are then invested with the awe that be- longs to each solemn image of mortal vicissitude — Vicis- situde that startles the Epicurean, " inaamentis sapientice consultus,^^ and strikes from his careless lyre the notes that attest a God ! Some proud shadow chases another from the throne of Cyrus, and Horace hears in the thun- der the rush of Diespiter, and identifies Providence with the Fortune that snatches ofl" the diadem in her whirring swoop.* But fronts discrowned take a new majesty to Valet ima summis Mutate, et insignia attenuat Deus, Obscura promens. Hinc apicem rapax Fortuna cum stridore acuto Sustulit, — hie posuisse gaudet." — HoRAT. Carm. lib. i. xxxiv. The concluding allusion is evidently to the Parthian revolutions, and the changeful fate of Phraates IV. ; and I do not feel sure that 88 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? generous natures; — in all sleek prosperit}^ there is some- thing commonplace — in all grand adversity, something royal. The boat shot to the shore ; the young people landed, and entered the arch of the desolate palace. They gazed on the great hall and the presence-chamber and the long suite of rooms, with faded portraits — Yance as an artist, Lionel as an enthusiastic, well-read boy, Sophy as a won- dering, bewildered, ignorant child. And then they emerged into the noble garden, with its regal trees. Groups were there of well-dressed persons. Yance heard himself called by name. He had forgotten the London world — forgotten, amidst his midsummer ramblings that the London season was still ablaze — and there, stragglers from the great Focus, fine people, with languid tones and artificial jaded smiles, caught him in his wanderer's dress, and walking side by side with the infant wonder of Mr. Rugge's siiow, exquisitely neat indeed, but still in a colored print, of a pattern familiar to his observant eye in the windows of many a shop lavish of tickets, and inviting you to come in by the assurance that it is "selling oflf." The artist stopped, colored, bowed, answered the listless question put to him with shy haste ; he then attempted to escape — they would not let him. " You must come back and dine with us at the Star and Garter," said Lady Selina Yipont. "A pleasant party — the preceding lines upon the phenomenon of the thunder in a serene Bkj have not a latent and half-allegorical meaning, dimly applica- ble, throughout, to the historical reference at the close." WHAT AVILL HE DO WITH IT? 89 you know most of them — the Dudley Slowes, dear old Lady Frost, those pretty ladies Prymme, Janet and Wil- helmina." " We can't let you off," said sleepily Mr. Crampe, a fashionable wit, who rarely made more than one bou-uiot in the twenty-four hours, and spent the rest of his time in a torpid state. Vance. " Really you are too kind, but I am not even dressed for — " Lady Selina. " So charmingly dressed — so pictu- resque ! Besides, what matters ? Every one knows who you are. Where on earth have you been ? " Yance. " Rambling about, taking sketches." Lady Selina (directing her eye-glass toward Lionel and Sophy, who stood aloof). "But your companions, your brother ? — and that pretty little girl — your sister, I suppose ?" Yance (shuddering). " No, not relations. I took charge of the boy — clever young fellow; and the little girl is — " Lady Selina, "Yes. The little girl is — " Yance. "A little girl as you see ; and very pretty, as you say — subject for a picture." Lady Selina (indifferently). " Oh, let the children go and amuse themselves somewhere. Now we have found you — positively you are our prisoner." Lady Selina Yipont was one of the queens of London, she had with her that habit of command natural to such royalties. Frank Yaiice was no tuft-hunter, but once 90 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? under social influences, they had their effect on him, as on most men who are blessed with noses in the air. Those great ladies, it is true, never bought his pictures, but they gave him the position which induced others to buy them. Yance loved his art ; his art needed its career. Its career was certainly brightened and quickened by the help of rank and fashion. In short, Lady Selina triumphed, and the painter step- ped oack to Lionel. " I must go to Richmond with these people. I know you'll excuse me. I shall be back to-night somehow. By-the-by, you are going to the post- office here for the letter you expect from your mother ; ask for mine too. You will take care of little Sophy, and (in a whisper) hurry her out of the garden, or that Grand Mogul feminine, Lady Selina, whose condescension would crush the Andes, will be stopping her as my jin-o- tegee, falling in raptures with that horrid colored })rint, saying, ' Dear what pretty sprigs ! where can such things be got? ' and learning, perhaps, how Frank Yance saved the Bandit's Child from the Remorseless Baron. 'Tis your turn now. Save your friend. The Baron was a lamb compared to a fine lady." He pressed Lionel's un- responding hand, and was off to join the polite merry- making of the Frosts, Slowes, and Prymmes. Lionel's pride ran up to the fever heat of its thermome- ter ; more roused, though, on behalf of the unconscious Sopb^ than himself. "Let us come into the town, lady-bird, and choose r. doll. You may have one now without fear of distracting WHATWILLHEDOWITHIT? 91 you from — what I hate to think you ever stooped to per- form." As Lionel, his crest erect, and nostril dilated, and hold- ing Sophy firmly by the hand, took his way out fi*om the gardens, he was obliged to pass the patrician party of whom Yance now made one. His countenance and air, as he swept by, struck them all, especially Lady Selina. "A very distinguished-look- ing boy," said she. " What a fine face ! Who did you say he. was, Mr. Yance ? " Yance. " His name is Haughton — Lionel Haughton ?" Lady Selina. " Haughton ! Haughton ! Any relation to poor, dear Captain Haughton — Charlie Haughton, as he was generally called?" Yance, knowing little more of his young friend's parent- age than that his mother let lodgings, at which, once domiciliated himself, he had made the boy's acquaintance, and that she enjoyed the pension of a captain's widow, replied carelessly : " His father was a captain, but I don't know whether he was a Charlie." Mr. Crampe (the Wit). " Charlies are extinct ! I have the last in a fossil — box and all ! " General laugh. Wit shut up again. Lady Selina. " He has a great look of Charlie Haughton. Do you know if he is connected with that extraordinary man, Mr. Darrell ? " Yance. " Upon my word, I do not. What Mr. Dar- rell do you mean ? " 92 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? Lady Selina, with one of those sublime looks of celes- tial pity with which personages in the great world for- give ignorance of names and genealogies in those not born within its orbit, replied, " Oh, to be sure : it is not exactly in the way of your delightful art to know Mr. Darrell, one of the first men in Parliament, a connection of mine." Lady Frost (nippingly). " You mean Guy Darrell, the lawyer." ' Lady Selina. "Lawyer — true, now I think of it, he was a lawyer. But his chief fame was in the House of Commons. All parties agreed that he might have com- manded any station ; but he was too rich, perhaps, to care sufficiently about office. At all events, Parliament was dissolved when he was at the height of his reputa- tion, and he refused to be re-elected." One Sir Jasper Stollhead (a member of the House of Commons, young, wealthy, a constant attendant, of great promise, with speeches that were filled with facts, and emptied the benches). -" I have heard of him. Be- fore my time ; lawyers not much weight in the House now." Lady Selina. " I am told that Mr. Darrell did not speak like a lawyer. But his career is over — lives in the country, and sees nobody — a thousand pities — a connec- tion of mine, too — great loss to the country. Ask your young friend, Mr. Yance, if Mr. Darrell is not his rela- tion. I hope so, for his sake. Now that our party is in power, Mr. Darrell could command any thing for others, WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 93 though he has ceased to act with us. Our party is not forgetful of talents." Lady Frost (with icy crispness). " I should think not ; it has so little of that kind to remember." Sir Jasper. " Talent is not wanted in the House of Commons now — don't go down, in fact. Business as- sembly." Lady Selina (suppressing a yawn). " Beautiful day! We had better think of going back to Richmond." General assent, and slow retreat. CHAPTER XY. The Historian records the fittachment to public business which dis- tintruishe-; the British Legisbitor. — Touching instance of the re- gret which ever in patriotic bosoms attends the neglect of a public duty. From the dusty height of a rumble-tumble aflBxed to Lady Selina Yipont's barouche, and by the animated side of Sir Jasper Stollhead, Yance caught sight of Lionel and Sophy at a corner of the spacious green near the Pa-ace. He sighed ; he envied them. He thought of the boat, the water, the honey-suckle arbor at the little inn — pleasures he had denied himself — pleasures all in his own way. They seemed still more alluring by con- trast with the prospect before him ; formal dinner at the Star and Garter, with titled Prymmes, Slowes, and Frosts 04 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? a couple of guineas a-head, including light wines, which he did not drink, and the expense of a chaise back by himself. But such are life and its social duties — such, above all, ambition and a career. Who, that would leave a name on his tombstone, can say to his own heart, " Perish, Stars and Garters ; my existence shall pass from day to day in honey-suckle arbors ? " Sir Jasper Stollhead interrupted Yance's reverie by an impassioned sneeze — " Dreadful smell of hay I " said the legislator, with watery eyes. "Are you subject to the hay fever ? I am ! A — tisha — tisha — tisha (sneezing) — country frightfully unwholesome at this time of year. And to think that I ought now to be in the House — in ray committee-room — no smell of hay there — most im- portant committee " Vance (rousing himself). "Ah ! — on what .'' " Sir Jasper (regretfully). " Sewers ! CHAPTER XYI. Signs of an impending revolution, which, like all revolutions, seems ta come of a sudden, though its causes have long been at ■work ; and to go off in a tantrum, though its effects must run on to the end of a history. Lionel could not find in the toy shops of the village a doll good enough to satisfy his liberal inclinations, but he bought one which amply contented the humbler aspira- WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 95 tions of Sophy. He then strolled to the post-office. There were several letters for Yanee — one for hhnself in his mother's handwriting. He delayed opening it for the moment. The day was far advanced — Sophy must be hungry. In vain she declared she was not. They passed by a fruiterer's stall. The strawberries and cherries were temptingly fresh — the sun still very powerful. At the back of the fruiterer's was a small garden, or rather orchard, smiling cool through the open door — little tables laid out there. The good woman who kept the shop was accustomed to the wants and tastes of humble metropolitan visitors. But the garden was luckily now empty — it was before the usual hour for tea-parties ; so the young folks had the pleasantest table under an apple- tree, and the choice of the freshest fruit. Milk and cakes were added to the fare. It was a banquet, in Sophy's eyes, worthy that happy day. And when Lionel had finished his share of the feast, eating fast, as spirited im- patient boys, formed to push on in life and spoil their di- gestion, are apt to do ; and while Sophy was still lingering over the last of the strawberries, he threw himself back on his chair, and drew forth his letter. Lionel was ex- tremely fond of his mother, but her letters were not often those which a boy is over eager to read. It is not all mothers who understand what boys are — their quick sus- ceptibilities, their precocious manliness, all their mystical ways and oddities. A letter from Mrs. Haughton gene- rally somewhat fretted and irritated Lionel's high-strung nerves, and he had instinctively put off the task of reading 96 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? the one he held, till satisfied hunger and cool-breathing shadows, and rest from the dusty road, had lent their soothing aid to his undeveloped philosophy. He broke the seal slowly ; another letter was inclosed within. At the first few words his countenance changed ; he uttered a slight exclamation, read on eagerly ; then, before concluding his mother's epistle, hastily tore open that which it had contained, ran his eye over its contents, and, dropping both letters on the turf below, rested his face on his hand, in agitated thought. Thus ran his mother's letter : " My Dear Boy, — How could you ? Do it slyly ! I Unknown to your own mother ! ! ! I could not believe it of you ! ! ! ! Take advantage of my confidence in showing you the letters of your father's cousin, to write to himself — clandestinely! — you, who I thought had such an open character, and who ought to appreciate mine. Every one who knows me says I am a woman in ten thousand — not for beauty and talent (though I have had ray admirers for them too), but for goodness ! As a wife and mother, I may say I have been exemplary. I had sore trials with the dear captain — and immense temptations. But he said on his death-bed, 'Jessica, you are an angel.' And I have had offers since — immense offers — but I devoted myself to my child, as you know. And what I have put up with, letting the first floor, no- body can tell ; and only a widow's pension — going before a magistrate to get it paid. And to think my own child, WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 97 for whom I have borne so much, should behave so cruelly to me ! Clandestine ! 'tis that which stabs me. Mrs. Iiiman found me crying, and said, 'What is the matter ? — you, who are such an angel, crying like a baby ! ' And I could not help saying, ' 'Tis the serpent's tooth, Mrs. I.' What you wrote to your benefactor (and I had hoped patron) I don't care to guess ; something very rude and imprudent it must be, judging by the few lines he ad- dressed to me. I don't mind copying them for you to read. All my acts are above board — as often and often and often Captain H. used to say, ' Your heart is in a glass-case, Jessica ; ' and so it is ! hut my son keeps his under lock and key. " ' Madam' (this is what he writes to me), * your son has thought fit to infringe the condition upon which I agreed to assist you on his behalf. I inclose a reply to himself, which I beg you will give to his own hands with- out breaking the seal. Since it did not seem to you in- discreet to communicate to a boy of his years letters written solely to yourself, you can not blame me if I take your implied estimate of his capacity to judge for himself of the nature of a correspondence, and of the views and temper of. Madam, your very obedient servant.' And that's all, to me. I send his letter to you — seal un- broken. I conclude he has done with you forever, and your CAREER is lost! But if it be so, oh, my poor, poor child ! at that thought I have not the heart to scold you farther. If it be so, come home to me, and I'll work and slave for you, and you shall keep up your head and be a I. — 9 u 98 WHAT WILL 1/ E DO WITH IT? gentleman still, as you are, every inch of you. Don't mind what I've said at the beginning, dear — don't ! you know I'm hasty, and I was hurt. But you could not mean to be sly and underhand — 'twas only your high spirit — and it was my fault; I should not have shown you the letters. I hope you are well, and have quite lost that nasty cough, and that Mr. Vance treats you with proper respect. I think him rather too pushing and familiar, though a pleasant young man on the whole. But, after all, he is only a painter. Bless you, my child, and don't have secrets again from your poor mother. Jessica Haughton. The inclosed letter was as follows : " Lionel Haughton, — Some men might be displeased at receiving such a letter as you have addressed to me ; I am not. At your years, and under the same circumstances, I might have written a letter much in the same spirit. Re- lieve your mind — as yet you owe me no obligations ; you have only received back a debt due to you. My father was poor ; your grandfather, Robert Haughton, assisted him in the cost of my education. I have assisted your father's son ; we are quits. Before, however, we decide on having done with each other for the future, I suggest to you to pay me a short visit. Probably I shall not like you, nor you me. But we are both gentlemen, and need not show dislike too coarsely. If you decide on coming, come at once, or possibly you may not find me here. If you refuse, T shall have a poor opinion of your sense nud WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 99 temper, and iu a week I shall have forgotten your existence. 1 ought to add that your father and I were once warm friends, and that by descent I am the head not only of my own race, which ends with me, but of the Haughton family, of which, though your line assumed the name, it was but a younger branch. Nowadays young men are probably not brought up to care for these things — I was. Yours, " Guy Haughton Darrell. *' Manor House, Fawley." Sophy picked up the fallen letters, placed them on Lionel's lap, and looked into his face wistfully. He smiled, resumed his' mother's epistle, and read the concluding passages which he had before omitted. Their sudden turn from reproof to tenderness melted him. He began to feel that his mother had a right to blame him for an act of concealment. Still she never would have consented to his writing such a letter ; and had that letter been attended with so ill a result ? Again he read Mr. DarreFs blunt but not offensive lines. His pride was soothed — why should he not now love his father's friend ? He rose briskly, paid for the fruit, and went his way back to the boat with Sophy. As his oars cut the wave he talked gayly, but he ceased to interrogate Sophy on her past. Energetic, sanguine^ ambitious, his own future entered now into his thoughts. Still, when the sun sunk as the inn came partially into view from the winding of the banks and the fringe of the willows, his mind again settled on llie patient, (^uiet little girl, who had not ventured to ask 100 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? him one question in return for all he had put so uncere- moniously to her. Indeed, she was silently musing over words he had inconsiderately let fall — "What I hate to think you had ever stooped to perform." Little could Lionel guess the unquiet thoughts which those words might hereafter call forth from the brooding, deepening meditations of lonely childhood I At length, said the boy, abruptly, as he had said once before — "I wish, Sophy, you were my sister." He added, in a saddened tone, " I never had a sister — I have so longed for one ! However, surely we shall meet again. You go to-morrow — so must I." Sophy's tears flowed softly, noiselessly. " Cheer up, lady-bird ; I wish you liked me half as much as I like you ! " " I do like you — oh, so much ! " cried Sophy, passion- ately. "Well, then, you can write, you say?" "A little." " You shall write to me now and then, and I to you. I'll talk to your grandfather about it. Ah, there he is, surely ! " The boat now ran into the shelving creek, and by the honey-suckle arbor stood Gentleman Waife, leaning on his stick. " You are late," said the actor, as they landed, and Sophy sprang into his arms. " I began to be uneasy, and came here to inquire after you. You have not caught cold, child?" WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 101 Sophy. "Oh, no." Lionel. *' She is the best of children. Pray, come into the inn, Mr. Waife : no toddy, but some refreshment." Waife. " I thank you — no, Sir ; I wish to get home at once. I walk slowly; it will be dark soon." Lionel tried in vain to detain him. There was a certain change in Mr. Waife's manner to him ; it was much more distant — it was even pettish, if not surly. Lionel could not account for it — thought it mere whim at first, but as he walked part of the way back with them toward the village, this asperity continued, nay, increased. Lionel was hurt ; he arrested his steps. " I see you wish to have your grandchild to yourself now. May I call early to-morrow ? Sophy will tell you that I hope we may not altogether lose sight of each other. I will give you my address when I call." "What time to-morrow, Sir?" "About nine." Waife bowed his head and walked on, but Sophy looked back toward her boy friend, sorrowfully, gratefully — twilight in the skies that had been so sunny — twilight in her face that had been so glad ! She looked once, twice, thrice, as Lionel halted on the road and kissed his hand. The third time Waife said, with unwonted crossness — " Enough of that, Sophy ; looking after young men is not proper! What does he mean about 'seeing each other, and giving me his address?'" "He wished me to write to him sometimes, and he would write to me." 9* 102 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? Wa'ife's brow contracted ; but if, in the excess of grand- fatherly caution, he could have supposed that the bright- hearted boy of seventeen meditated ulterior ill to that fairy child in such a scheme for correspondence, he must have been in his dotage, and he had not hitherto evinced any signs of that. Farewell, pretty Sophy ! The evening star shines upon yon elm-tree that hides thee from view. Fading — fading grows the summer landscape ; faded already from the land- scape thy gentle image ! So ends a holiday in life. Hal- low it, Sophy ; hallow it, Lionel. Life's holidays are not too many ! CHAPTER XYII. By this chapter it appeareth that he who sets out on a career can scarcely expect to walk in perfect comfort, if he exchange his own thick-soled shoes for dress-boots which were made for an- other man's measure, and that the said boots may not the less pinch for being brilliantly varnished. — It also showeth for the instruction of Men and States, the connection between demo- cratic opinion and wounded self-love ; so that, if some Liberal statesman desire to rouse against an aristocracy the class just below it, he has only to persuade a fine lady to be exceedingly civil "to that sort of people." Yance, returning late at night, found his friend still up in the little parlor, the windows open, pacing the floor with restless strides, stopping now and then to look at the moon upon the river. " Such a day as I have had ! and twelve shillings for ■WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 103 the fly, 'pikes not included," said Yance, much out oi humor. "'I fly from plate, I fly from pomp, fly from falsehood's specinus grin;' I forget the third line ; I know the last is, 'To find my -welcome at an inn.' You are silent : I annoyed you by going — could not help it — pity me, and lock up your pride." "Xo, my dear Yance, I was hurt for a moment — but that's long since over ! " " Still you seem to have something on your mind," said Yance, who had now finished reading his letters, lighted his cigar, and was leaning against the window as the boy continued to walk to and fro. " That is true — I have. I should like your advice. Read that letter. Ought I to go ? — would it look mer- cenary — grasping? You know what I mean." Yance approached the candles, and took the letter. He glanced first at the signature. " Darrell ! " he ex- claimed. " Oh, it is so, then ! " He read with great attention, put down the letter, and shook Lionel by the hand. " I congratulate you ; all is settled as it should be. Go ? of course — you would be an ill-mannered lout if you did not. Is it far from hence — must you return to town first ? " Lionel. " No ! I find I can get across the country — two hours by the railway. There is a station at the town which bears the postmark of the letter. I shall make for that, if you advise it." 104 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? '* You knew I should advise it, or you would not have made those researches into Bradshaw\" " Shrewdly said," answered Lionel, laughing; "but I wished for your sanction of my crude impressions." " You never told me your cousin's name was Darrell — not that I should have been much wiser, if you had ; but, thunder and lightning, Lionel, do you know that your cousin Darrell is a famous man ? " Lionel. " Famous ! — nonsense. I suppose he was a good lawyer, for I have heard my mother say, with a sort of contempt, that he had made a great fortune at the bar ! " Vance. "But he was in Parliament." Lionel. "Was he? I did not know." Yance. " And this is senatorial fame ! You never heard your school-fellows talk of Mr. Darrell ? — they would not have known his name if you had boasted of it ! " Lionel. "Certainly not." Yance. "Would your school-fellows have known the names of Wilkie, of Landseer, of Turner, Maclise — I speak of Painters ! " Lionel. "I should think so, indeed." Yance (soliloquizing). "And yet Her Serene Sublimi- tyship. Lady Selina Yipont, says to me with divine com- passion, ' Not in the way of your delightful art to know such men as Mr. Darrell ! ' Oh, as if I did not see through it — oh, as if I did not see through it too when she said, apropos of my jean cap and velveteen jacket, * What mat- ters how you dress ? Every one knows who you ai-e ! ' WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 105 Would she have said that to the Earl of D under, or even to Sir Jasper Stollhead ? Xo. I am the painter Frank Vance — nothing more nor less; and if I stood on my head in a check shirt and a sky-colored apron, Lady Se- lina Yipont would kindly murmur, ' Only Frank Vance the painter — what does it signify ? ' Aha I — and they think to put me to use ! — puppets and lay figures ! — it is I who put them to use ! Harkye, Lionel, you are nearer akin to these fine folks than I knew of. Promise me one thing : you may become of their set. by right of your famous Mr. Darrell ; if ever you hear an artist, musician, scribbler, no matter what, ridiculed as a tuft-hunter — seeking the great — and so forth — before you join in the laugh, ask some great man's son, with a pedigree that dates from the Ark, 'Are you not a toad-eater too ? Do you want political influence? — do you stand contested elections ? — do you curry and fawn upon greasy Sam the butcher, and grimy Tom the blacksmith for a vote ? Why ? useful to your career — necessary to your ambition ! ' Aha ! is it meaner to curry and fawn upon whitehanded women and elegant coxcombs ? Tut, tut ! useful to a career — necessary to ambition ?" Vance paused, out of breath. The spoiled darling of the circles — he — to talk such radical rubbish ! Certainly he must have taken his two guineas' worth out of those light wines. Xothing .'^o treacherous ! they inflame the brain like fire, while melting on the palate like ice. All Inhabitants of light-wine coun- tries are quarrelsome and democratic. Lionel (astounded). '* No one, I am sure, could have 106 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? meant to call you a tuft-hunter — of course, every one knows that a great painter — " Yanck. " Dates from Michael Angelo, if not from Zeuxis ! Common individuals trace their pedigree from their own fathers ! — the children of Art from Art's founders ! " Oh Yance, Yance, you are certainly drunk I If that comes from dining with fine people at the Star and Gar- ter, you would be a happier man and as good a painter if you sipped your toddy in honey-suckle arbors. "But," said Lionel, bewildered, and striving to turn his friend's thoughts, " what has all this to do with Mr. Darrell ?" Yance. " Mr. Darrell might have been one of the first men in the kingdom. Lady Selina Yipont says so, and she is related, I believe, to every member in the Cabinet. Mr. Darrell can push you in life, and make your fortune, without any great trouble on your own part. Bless your stars, and rejoice that you are not a painter!" Lionel flung his arm round the artist's broad breast. " Yance, you are cruel ! " It was his turn to console the painter, as the painter had three nights before (apropos of the same Mr. Darrell) consoled him. Yance gradually sobered down, and the young men walked forth in the moonlight. And the eternal stars had the same kind looks for Yance as they had vouchsafed to Lionel. " When do you start ? " asked the painter, as they mounted the stairs to bed. " To-morrow evening. I miss the early train, for I WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 107 mnst call first and take leave of Sophj. I hope I may see her again in after-life." "And I hope, for your sake, that if so, she may not be in the same colored print with Lady Selina Yipont's eye- glass upon her I " "What!" said Lionel, laughing; "is Lady Selina Yipont so formidably rude ? " " Rude ! nobody is rude in that delightful set. Lady Selina Yipont is excruciatingly — civil." CHAPTER XYIII Being devoted exclusively to a reflection, not inapposite to the events in this history, nor to those in any other which chronicles the life of man. There is one warning lesson in life which few of us have not received, and no book that I can call to memory has noted down with an adequate emphasis. It is this, "Beware of parting!" The true sadness is not in the pain of the parting, it is in the When and the How you are to meet again with the face about to vanish from your view ! From the passionate farewell to the woman who has your heart in her keeping, to the cordial good-by ex- changed with pleasant companions at a watering-place, a country-house, or the close of a festive day's blithe and careless excursion — a cord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and Time's busy fingers are not 108 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? practised in re-splicing broken ties. Meet again you may : will it be in the same way ? — with the same sympathies ? — with the same sentiments ? Will the souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream ? Rarely, rarely ! Have you not, after even a year, even a month's absence, returned to the same place, found the same groups reassembled, and yet sighed to yourself, " But where is the charm that once breathed from the spot, and once smiled from the faces ? " A poet has said — " Eternity itself can not restore the loss struck from the minute." Are you happy in the spot on which you tarry with the persons whose voices are now melodious to your ear ? — beware of parting ; or, if part you must, say not in insolent defiance to Time and Destiny — "What matters? — we shall soon meet again." Alas, and alas ! when we think of the lips which mur- mured, " Soon meet again," and remember how, in heart, soul, and thought, we stood forever divided the one from the other, when, once more face to face, we each inly ex- claimed — " Met again ! " The air that we breathe makes the medium through which sound is conveyed ; be the instrument unchanged, be the force which is applied to it the same, still, the air that thou seest not, the air to thy ear gives the music. Ring a bell underneath an exhausted receiver, thou wilt scarce hear the sound ; give a bell due vibration by free air in warm daylight, or sink it down to the heart of the ocean, where the air, all compressed, fills the vessel around WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 109 it,* and the chime, heard afar, starts thy soul, checks thy footstep — unto deep calls the deep — a voice from the ocean is borne to thy soul, "Where, then, the change, when thou sayest, " Lo, the same metal — why so faint-heard the ringing?" Ask the air that thou seest not, or above thee in the sky, or below thee in ocean. Art thou sure that the bell, so faint-heard, is not struck underneath an exhausted receiver ? CHAPTER XIX. The wandering inclinations of Nomad Tribes not to be accounted for on the principles of action peculiar to civilized men, who are accustomed to live in good houses and able to paj the income- tax. — When the money that once belonged to a man civilized vanishes into the pockets of a nomad, neither lawful art nor oc- cult science can, with certainty, discover what he will do with it. — Mr. Vance narrowly escapes well-merited punishment from the nails of the British Fair. — Lionel Haughton, in the temerity of youth, braves the dangers of a British railway. The morning was dull and overcast, rain gathering in the air, when Yance and Lionel walked to Waife's lodging. As Lionel placed his hand on the knocker of the private door, the Cobbler, at his place by the window in the stall beside, glanced toward him, and shook his head. * The bell in a sunk diving-bell, where the air is compressed, sounds with increased power. Sound travels four times quicker in water than in the upper air. I. — 10 110 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? " No use knocking, gentlemen. Will you kindly step in ? — this way. " " Do you mean that your lodgers are out ? " asked Yance. " Gone ! " said the Cobbler, thrusting his awl with great vehemence through the leather destined to the repair of a plowman's boot. " Gone — for good ! " cried Lionel ; "you cannot mean it. I call by appointment." " Sorry, Sir, for your trouble. Stop a bit ; I have a letter here for you." The Cobbler dived into a drawer, and, from a medley of nails and thongs, drew torth a letter addressed to L. Haughton, Esq. " Is this from Waife ? How on earth did he know my surname ? you never mentioned it, Yance ? " " Not that I remember. But you said you found him at the inn, and they knew it there. It is on the brass plate of your knapsack. No matter — what does he say ? " and Yance looked over his friend's slioulder and read : — " Sir, — I most respectfully thank you for your con- descending kindness to me and my grandchild ; and your friend, for his timely and generous aid. You will pardon me, that the necessity which knows no law obliges me to leave this place some hours before the time of your pro- posed visit. My grandchild says you intended to ask her sometimes to write to you. Excuse me, Sir : on reflec- tion, you will perceive how different your ways of lite are from those which she must tread with me. You see WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? Ill before you a man who — but I forget — vou see him no more, and probably never will. Your most humble and most obliged obedient servant, W. W.-' Vance. " Who never more may trouble you, trouble yon ! Where have they gone ? " Cobbler. " Don't know ; would you like to take a peep in the crystal ? perhaps you've the gift, unbeknown." Yance. " Xot I — Bah! Come away, Lionel." "Did not Sophy even leave any message for me?" asked the boy, sorrowfully. "To be sure she did; I forgot — no, not exactly a message, but this — I was to be sure to give it to you." And, out of his miscellaneous receptacle the Cobbler ex- tracted a little book. Yance looked and laughed — " The Butterflies^ Ball and the Gi^asshoppers^ Feast." Lionel did not share the laugh. He plucked the book to himself, and read on the fly-leaf, in a child's irregular scrawl, blistered too with the unmistakable trace of fallen tears, these words: " Do not Scorn it. I have nothing else I can think of which is All ^liue. Miss Jane Burton gave it me for being Goode. Grandfather says you are too high for us, and that I shall not see you More ; but I shall never forget how kind you were — never — never. — Sophy." Said the Cobbler, his awl upright in the hand which rested on his knee, ' What a plague did the 'Stronomers discover Herschell for ? You see, Sir," addressing Yance, "things odd and strange all come along o' Herschell." 112 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? " What ! — Sir John ? " " No, the star he poked out. He's a awful star for females ! — hates 'em like poison ! I suspect he's been worriting hisself into her nativity, for I got out from her the year, month, and day she was born — hour unbeknown — but, calkelating by noon, Herschell was dead agin her in the Third and Ninth House — voyages, travels, letters, news, church matters, and sichlike. But it will all come right after he's transited. Her Jupiter must be good. But I only hope," added the Cobbler, solemnly, "that they won't go a discovering any more stars. The world did a deal better without the new one, and they do talk of a Neptune — as bad as Saturn ! 'j "And this is the last of her ! " said Lionel, sadly put- ting the book into his breast-pocket. " Heaven shield her wherever she goes ! " Yance. " Don't you think Waife and the poor little girl will come back again?" Cobbler. " P'raps ; I know he was looking hard into the county map at the stationer's over the way ; that seems as if he did not mean to go very far. P'raps he may come back." Yance. " Did he take all his goods with him ? " Cobbler. " Barrin' an old box — nothing in it, I ex- pect, but theater rubbish — play-books, paints, an old wig, and sichlike. He has good clothes — always bad ; and so has she, but they don't make more than a bundle." Yance. " But surely you must know what the old fel- low's project is. He has got from me a great sura — what will h(^ do with it ? " WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 113 Cobbler. " Just what has been a bothering me. Wliat will he do with it ? I cast a figure to know — could not make it out. Strange signs in Twelfth House. Ene- mies and big animals Well, well, he's a marbellous man, and if he warn'.t a misbeliever in the crystal, I should say he was under Herschell ; for you see, Sir'^ (laying hold of Vance's button, as he saw that gentleman turning to escape) — " you see Herschell, though he be a sinister chap eno', specially in affairs connected with 'tother sex, dis- poses the native to dive into the mysteries of natur. I'm a Herschell man, out and outer ! Born in March, and — " "As mad as its hares," muttered Vance, wrenching his button from the Cobbler's grasp, and impatiently striding off. But he did not effect his escape so easily, for, close at hand, just at the corner of the lane, a female group, headed by Merle's gaunt housekeeper, had been silently collecting from the moment the two friends had paused at the Cobbler's door. And this petticoated divan suddenly closing round the painter, one pulled him by the sleeve, another by the jacket, and a third, with a nose upon which somebody had sat in early infancy, whispered, " Please, Sir, take my picter fust." Vance stared aghast — " Your picture, you drab ! " Here another model of rustic charms, who might have furnished an ideal for the fat scullion in Tristram Shandy, bobbing a courtesy, put in her rival claim. " Sir, if you don't objex to coming in to the kitching, after the family has gone to bed, I don't care if I lets yo^ make a minnytur of me for two pounds." 10* H tl4 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? '* Miniature of you, porpoise ! " "Polly, Sir, not Porpus — ax pardon, I shall clean myself, and I have a butyful new cap — Honeytun, and — " " Let the gentleman go, will you ? " said a third ; " I am supprised at ye, Polly. The kitching unbeknown ! Sir, I'm in the nussary — yes, Sir — and missus says you may take me any time, purvided you'll take the babby, in the back parlor — yes, Sir. No. 5 in the High Street. Mrs. Spratt — yes, Sir. Babby has had the small-pox — in case you're a married gentleman with a family — quite safe there — yes, Sir." Yance could endure no more, and, forgetful of that gallantry which should never desert the male sex, burst through the phalanx with an anathema, blackening alike the beauty and the virtue of those on whom it fell — ^that would have justified a cry of shame from every manly bosom, and at once changed into shrill wrath the suppli- catory tones with which he had been hitherto addressed. Down the street he hurried, and down the street followed the insulted fair. " Hiss — hiss — no gentleman, no gen- tleman ! Aha — skulk off — do — low blaggurd ! " shrieked Polly. From their counters shop-folks rushed to their doors. Stray dogs, excited by the clamor, ran wildly after the fugitive man, yelping "in madding bray!" Vance, fearing to be clawed by the females if he merely walked, sure to be bitten by the dogs if he ran, ambled on, strove to look composed, and carry his nose high in Its native air, till, clearing the street, he saw a hedgerow to the right — leaped it with an agility which no stimulus WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 115 less preternatural than that of self-preservation could have given to his limbs, and then shot off like an arrow, and did not stop till, out of breath, he dropped upon the bench in the sheltering honej-snckle arbor. Here he was still fanning himself with his cap, and muttering un- mentionable expletives, when he was joined bv Lionel, who had tarried behind to talk more about Sophv to the Cobbler, and who, unconscious that the din which smote his ear was caused by his ill-starred friend, had been en- ticed to go up stairs and look after Sophy in the crystal — vainly. When Yance had recited his misadventures, and Lionel had sufiBciently condoled with him, it became time for the latter to pay his share of the bill, pack up his knapsack, and start for the train. Now the station could only be reached by penetrating the heart of the village, and Yance swore that he had had enough of that. " Pede ! " said he ; " I should pass right before No. 5 in the High Street, and the nuss and the babby will be there on the threshold, like Yirgil's picture of the infernal regions — » Infanturnque animse flentes in limine primo.' "We will take leave of each other here. I shall go by the boat to Chertsey whenever I shall have sufiBciently re- covered my shaken nerves. There are one or two pictu- resque spots to be seen in that neighborhood. In a few days I shall be in town ; write to me there, and tell me how you get on. Shake hands, and Heaven speed you. But, ah, now you have paid your moiety of the bill, have you enough left for the train ? " 116 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? '' Oh, yes, the fare is but a few shillings ; but, to be sure, a fly to Fawley ? I ought not to go on foot " (proudly) ; " and, too, supposing he affronts me, and I have to leave his house suddenly ? May I borrow a sovereign ? my mother will call and repay it. " Yance (magnificently). " There it is, and not much more left in my purse — that cursed Star and Garter! and those three pounds ! " Lionel (sighing). " Which were so well spent I Before you sell that picture, do let me make a copy." Vance. "Better take a model of your own. Village full of them ; you could bargain with a porpoise for half the money which I was duped into squandering away on a chit ! But don't look so grave ; you may copy me if you can ! " "Time to start, and must walk brisk. Sir," said the jolly landlord, looking in. " Good-by, good-by." And so departed Lionel Haughton upon an enterprise as momentous to that youth-errant as Perilous Bridge or Dragon's Cave could have been to knight-errant of old. " Before we decide on having done with each other, a short visit" — so ran the challenge from him who had everything to give unto him who had everything to gain. And how did Lionel Haughton, the ambitious and aspiring, contemplate the venture in which success would admit him within the gates of the golden Carduel an equal in the lists with the sons of paladins, or throw him back to the arms of the widow who let a first floor in the WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 117 back streets of Pimlico ? Truth to say, as he strode musingly toward the station for starting, where the smoke- cloud now curled from the wheel-track of iron — truth to say, the anxious doubt which disturbed him was not that which his friends might have felt on his behalf In words, it would have shaped itself thus, "Where is that poor little Sophy! and what will become of her — what?" But, when, launched on the journey, hurried on to its goal, the thought of the ordeal before him forced itself on his mind, he muttered inly to himself, " Done with each other ; let it be as he pleases, so that I do not fawn on his pleasure. Better a million times enter life as a penniless gentleman, who must work his way up like a man, than as one who creeps on his knees into fortune, shaming birthright of gentleman, or soiling honor of man. '' Therefore, taking into account the poor cousin's vigilant ])ride on the qui vice for offense, and the rich cousin's temper (as judged by his letters) rude enough to present it, we must own that if Lionel Haughton has at this moment what is commonly called " a chance," the ques- tion as yet is not, what is that chance, but ichat will he do with it ? And as the reader advances in this history, he will acknowledge that there are few questions in this world so frequently agitated, to which the solution is more important to each puzzled mortal, than that upon which starts every sage's discovery, every novelist's plot — that which applies to man's life, from its first sleep in the cradle, "What will he do with it?" BOOK SECOND CHAPTER I. Primitive character of the country in certain districts of Great Britain. — Connection between the features of surrounding scenery and the mental and moral inclinations of man, after the fashion of all sound Ethnological Historians. — A charioteer, to whom an experience of British Laws suggests an ingenious mode of arresting the progress of Roman Papacy, carries Lionel Haughton and his fortunes to a place which allows of descrip- tion and invites repose. In safety, but with naught else rare enough, in a rail- way train, to deserve commemoration, Lionel reached'the station to which he was bound. He there inquired the distance to Fawley Manor House ; it was five miles. He ordered a fly, and was soon wheeled briskly along a rough parish-road, through a country strongly contrast- ing the gay river scenery he had so lately quitted. Quite as English, but rather the England of a former race than that which spreads round our own generation like one vast suburb of garden-ground and villas. Here, nor village, nor spire, nor porter's lodge came in sight. Kare even were the corn-fields — wide spaces of unin- closed common opened, solitary and primitive, on the (118) WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 119 road, bordered by large woods, chiefly of beech, closing the horizon with ridges of undulating green. In such an England, Knights-Templars might have wended their way to scattered monasteries, or fugitive partisans in the bloody Wars of the Roses have found shelter under leafy coverts. The scene had its romance, its beauty — half-savage, half-gentle — leading perforce the mind of any cultivated and imaginative gazer far back from the present day — waking up long-forgotten passages from old poets. The stillness of such wastes of sward — such deeps of wood- land — induced the nurture of reverie, gravely soft and lulling. There, Ambition might give rest to the wheel of Ixion, Avarice to the sieve of the Danaids ; there, disappointed Love might muse on the brevity of all hu- man passions, and count over the tortured hearts that have found peace in holy meditation, or are now stilled under grassy knolls. See where, at the crossing of three roads upon the waste, the landscape suddenly unfolds — an upland in the distance, and on the upland a building, the first sign of social man. What is the building ? only a silenced wind-mill — the sails dark and sharp against the dull, leaden sky. Lionel touched the driver — " Are we yet on Mr. Dar- rell's property ?" Of the extent of that property he had involuntarily conceived a vast idea. " Lord, Sir, no ; we be two miles from Squire Darrell's. He han't much property to speak of hereabouts. But he bought a good bit o' land, too, some years ago, ten or 120 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? twelve mile t'other side o' the country. First time you are going to Fawley, Sir ?" "Yes." "Ah ! I don't mind seeing you afore — and I should have known you if I had, for it is seldom indeed I have a fare to Fawley old Manor House. It must be, I take it, four or five year ago sin' I wor there with a gent, and he went away while I wor feeding the horse — did me out o' my back fare. What bissness had he to walk when he came in my fly? — Shabby." " Mr. Darrell lives very retired, then — sees few per- sons?" " S'pose so. I never see'd him, as I knows on ; see'd two o' his hosses though — rare good uns ;" and the driver whipped on his own horse, took to whistling, and Lionel asked no more. At length the chaise stopped at a carriage-gate, rece- ding from the road, and deeply shadowed by venerable trees — no lodge. The driver, dismounting, opened the gate. " Is this the place ?" The driver nodded assent, remounted, and drove on rap- idly through what might, by courtesy, be called a park. The inclosure was indeed little beyond that of a good- sized paddock — its boundaries were visible on every side — but swelling uplands, covered with massy foliage, sloped down to its wild, irregular turf soil — soil poor for pas- turage, but pleasant to the eye ; with dell and dingle, bosks of fantastic pollards — dotted oaks of vast growth — here and there aweird hollow thorn-tree — patches of WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 121 fern and gorse. Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks — and deep, deep as from the innermost core of the lovely wood- lands, came the mellow notes of the cnckoo. A few mo- ments more a wind of the road brought the house in sight. At its rear lay a piece of water, scarcely large enough to be styled a lake ; — too winding in its shaggy banks — its ends too concealed by tree and islet to be called by the dull name of pond. Such as it was, it arrested the eye before the gaze turned toward the house — it had an air of tranquillity so sequestered, so solemn. A lively man of the world would have been seized with spleen at tlie first glimpse of it. But he who had known some great grief — some anxious care — would have drunk the calm into his weary soul like au anodyne. The house — small, low, ancient, about the date of Edward YI., before the statelier architecture of Elizabeth. Few houses in Eng- land so old, indeed, as Fawley Manor house. A vast weight of roof, with high gables — windows on the upper story projecting far over the lower part — a covered porch with a coat of half-obliterated arms deep panneled over the oak door. Nothing grand, yet all how venerable I But what is this? Close beside the old, quiet, unassuming Manor House, rises the skeleton of a superb and costly pile — a palace uncompleted, and the work evidently sus- pended — perhaps long since, perhaps now forever. No busy workmen nor animated scalfolding. The perforated battlements roofed over with visible haste — here with slate, there with tile ; the Elizabethan mullion casements unglazed ; some roughly bijarded across — some with I.— 11 122 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT/ staring, forlorn apertures, that showed floorless chambers — for winds to whistle through and rats to tenant. Weeds and long grass were growing over blocks of stone that lay at hand. A wall-flower had forced into root on the sill of a giant oriel. The effect was startling. A fabric which he who conceived it must have founded for poste- rity — so solid its masonry, so thick its walls — and thus abruptly left to molder — a palace constructed for the re- ception of crowding guests — the pomp of stately revels — abandoned to owl and bat. And the homely old house beside it, which that lordly hall was doubtless designed to replace, looking so safe and tranquil at the baffled pre- sumption of its spectral neighbor. The driver had rung the bell, and now, turning back to the chaise, met Lionel's inquiring eye, and said — " Yes.; Squire Darrell began to build that — many years ago — when I was a boy. I heerd say it was to be the show- house of the wiiole county. Been stopped these ten or a dozen years." "Why? — do you know?" " No one knows. Squire was a laryer, I b'leve — per- haps he put it into Chancery. My wife's grandfather was put into Chancery jist as he was growing up, and never grew afterward — never got out o' it — nout ever does. There's our churchwarden comes to me with a petition to sign agin the Pope. Says I, ' That old Pope is always in trouble — what's he bin doin' now ? ' Says he, ' Spread- ing ! He's got into Parlyment, and he's now got a col- ledge, and we pays for it. I doesn't know how to stop WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 123 him.' Says I, 'Put the Pope into Chancery along with wife's grandfather, and he'll never hold up his head agin ' " The driver had thus just disposed of the Papacy when an elderly servant, out of livery, opened the door. Lionel sprung from the chaise, and paused in some confusion — for then, for the first time, there darted across him the idea that he had never written to announce his accept- ance of Mr. Darrell's invitation — that he ought to have done so — that he might not be expected. Meanwhile the servant surveyed him with some surprise. " Mr. Darreil ? " hesitated Lionel, inquiringly. " Xot at home, Sir," replied the man, as if Lionel's business was over, and he had only to re-enter his chaise. The boy was naturally rather bold than shy, and he said, with a certain assured air, " My name is Haughton. I come here on Mr. DarrelPs invitation." The servant's face changed in a moment — he bowed respectfully. " I beg pardon, Sir. I will look for my master — he is somewhere on the grounds." The servant then approached the fly, took out the knapsack, and ob- serving Lionel had his purse in his hand, said — "Allow me to save you that trouble, Sir. Driver, round to the stable-yard." Stepping back into the house, the servant threw open a door to the left, on entrance, and advanced a chair—" If you will wait here a moment, Sir, I will see for my master." 124 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? CHAPTER II. Guy Darrell — and Still'd Life. The room in which Lionel now found himself was sin* gularly qnaint. An antiquarian or architect would have discovered at a glance that, at some period, it had formed part of the entrance-hall ; and when, in Elizabeth's or James tlie First's day, the refinement in manners begac to penetrate from baronial mansions to the homes of the gentry, and the entrance-hall ceased to be the common refectory of the owner and his dependents, this apartment had been screened off by perforated panels, which, for the sake of warmth and comfort, had been filled up into solid wainscot by a succeeding generation. Thus one side of the room was richly carved with geometrical designs and arabesque pilasters, while the other three sides were in small simple panels, with a deep fantastic frieze in plaster, depicting a deer-chase in relief, and running between woodwork and ceiling. The ceiling itself was relieved by long pendants without any apparent meaning, and by the crest of the Darrells, a heron, wreathed round with the family motto, "Ardiia petil ArdeaJ^ It was a dining- room, as was shown by the character of the furniture. But there was no attempt on the part of the present owner, and had clearly been none on the part of his pre- WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 125 decessor, to suit the furniture to the room. This last was of the heavy graceless taste of George the First — cum- brous chairs in walnut-tree — with a worm-eaten mosaic of the heron on their homely backs, and a faded blue worsted on their seats — a marvellous ugly sideboard to match, and on it a couple of black shagreen cases, the lids of which were flung open, and discovered the pistol- shaped handles of silver knives. The mantle-piece reached to the ceiling, in paneled compartments, with heraldic shields, and supported by rude stone Caryatides. On the walls were several pictures — family portraits, for the names were inscribed on the frames. They varied in date from the reign of Elizabeth to that of George I. A strong family likeness pervaded them all — high features, dark hair, grave aspects — save indeed one, a Sir Ralpli Haugh- ton Darrell, in a dress that spoke him of tlve holiday date of Charles 11. — all knots, lace, and ribbons-; evidently the beau of the race ; and he had blue eyes, a blonde peruke, a careless profligate smile, and looked altogether as devil-me-care, rakehelly, handsome, good-for-naught, as ever swore at a drawer, beat a watchman, charmed a lady, terrified a husband, and hummed a song as he pinked his man. Lionel was still gazing upon the eflBgies of this airy cavalier, when the door behind him opened very noise- lessly, and a man of imposing presence stood on the threshold — stood so still, and the carved moldings of the door-way so shadowed, and, as it were, cased round his figure, that Lionel, on turning quickly, might have mis- 11* 126 tvaat will he do with it? taken him for a portrait brought into bold relief, fi'om its frame, by a sudden fall of light. We hear it, indeed, familiarly said that such a one is like an old picture. Kever could it be more appositely said than of the face on which the young visitor gazed, much startled and some- what awed. Not such as inferior limners had painted in the portraits there, though it had something in comman with those family lineaments, but such as might have looked tranquil power out of the canvas of Titian. The man stepped forward, and the illusion passed. " I thank you," he said, holding out his hand, " for taking me at my word, and answering me thus in person." He paused a moment, surveying Lionel's countenance with a keen but not unkindly eye, and added softly, " Yery like your father." At these words Lionel involuntarily pressed the hand which he had taken. That hand did not return the pressure. It lay an instant in Lionel's warm clasp — not repelling, not responding — and was then very gently withdrawn. " Did you come from London ? " " No, Sir, I found your letter yesterday at Hampton Court. I had been staying some days in that neighbor- hood. I came on this morning — I was afraid, too un- ceremoniously; your kind welcome reassures me then." The words were well chosen, and frankly said. Probably they pleased the host, for the expression of his countenance was, on the whole, propitious ; but he merely inclined his head with a kind of lofty indifference, then, glancing at 127 his watch, he rang the bell. The servant entered promptly. " Let dinner be served within an hour." "Pray, Sir," said Lionel, "do not change your hours on my account." Mr, Darreirs brow slightly contracted. Lionel's tact was in fault there ; but the great man answered quietly, "All hours are the same to me ; and it were strange if a host could be deranged by consideration to his guest — • on the first day too. Are you tired ? Would you like to go to your room, or look out for half an hour ? The sky is clearing." "I should so like to look out, Sir." "This way, then." Mr. Darrell, crossing the hall, threw open a door op- posite to that by which Lionel entered, and the lake (we will so call it) lay before them. Separated from the house only by a shelving, gradual declivity, on which were a few beds of flowers — not the most in vogue nowadays — and disposed in rambling, old-fashioned parterres. At on© angle a quaint and dilapidated sun-dial ; at the other a long bowling-alley, terminated by one of those summer- houses which the Dutch taste, following the Revolution of 1688, brought into fashion. Mr. Darrell passed down this alley (no bowls there now;, and, observing that Lionel looked curiously toward the summer liouse, of which the doors stood open, entered it. A lofty room, with coved ceiling, painted with Roman trophies of helms and fasces, alternated with crossed fifes and fiddles, painted also. 128 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? " Amsterdam manners, " said Mr. Darrell, slightly shrugging his shoulders. " Here a former race heard music, sung glees, and smoked from clay pipes. That age soon passed, unsuited to English energies, which are not to be united with Holland phlegm ! But the view from the window — look out there. I wonder whether men in wigs and women in hoops enjoyed that. It is a mercy they did not clip those banks into a straight canal ! " The view was indeed lovely ; the water looked so blue, and so large, and so limpid, woods and curving banks re- flected deep on its peaceful bosom. " How Yance would enjoy this ! " cried Lionel. " It would come into a picture even better than the Thames." " Vance — who is Yance ? " " The artist — a great friend of mine. Surely. Sir, you have heard of him, or seen his pictures ? " " Himself and his pictures are since my time. Days tread down days for the Recluse, and he forgets that ce- lebrities rise with their suns, to wane with their moons — ' Truditur dies die, Novgeque pergunt intei-ire luuae.'" "All suns do not set — all moons do not wane !" cried Lionel, with blunt enthusiasm. " When Horace speaks elsewhere of the Julian star, he compares it to a moon — ^ inter ignefi minores^ — and surely Fame is not among the orbs which 'pergunt interire^ hasten on to perish !" " I am glad to see that you retain your recollection of Horace," said Mr. Darrell, frigidly, and without continuing WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 129 the allusion to celebrities, "the most charming of all poets to a man of my years, and " (he very dryly added^ " the most useful for popular quotation to men at any age." Then sauntering forth carelessly, he descended the sloping turf, came to the water-side, and threw himself at length on the grass — the wild thyme which he crushed sent up its bruised fragrance. There, resting his face on his hand, Darrell gazed along the water in abstracted si- lence. Lionel felt that he was forgotten ; but he was not hurt. By this time a strong and admiring interest for his cousin had sprung up within his breast — he would have found it difficult to explain why. But whosoever at that moment could have seen Guy Darrell's musing coun- tenance, or whosoever, a few minutes before, could have heard the very sound of his voice — sweetly, clearly full — each slow enunciation unaffectedly, mellowly distinct — making musical the homeliest, roughest word, would have understood and shared the interest which Lionel could not explain. There are living human faces which, inde- pendently of mere physical beauty, charm and enthrall us more than the most perfect lineaments which Greek sculptor ever lent to a marble face : there are key-notes in the thrilling human voice, simply uttered, which can haunt the heart, rouse the passions, lull rampant multi- tudes, shake into dust the thrones of guarded kings, and effect more wonders than ever yet have been wrought by Ihe most artiul chorus or the deftest quill. In a few minutes the swans from the farther end of the J 130 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? water came sailing swiftly toward the bank on which Darrell reclined. He had evidently made friends with them, and they rested their white breasts close on the margin, seeking to claim his notice with a low hissing salutation, which, it is to be hoped, they change for something less sibilant in that famous song with which they depart this life. Darrell looked up. " They come to be fed," said he, "smooth emblems of the great social union. Affection is the offspring of utility. I am useful to them — they love me." He rose, uncovered, and bowed to the birds in mock courtesy : " Friends, I have no bread to give you." Lionel. " Let me run in for some : I would be useful too." Mr. Darrell. " Rival ! useful to my swans ? " Lionel (tenderly). " Or to you, Sir." He felt as if he had said too much, and without wait- ing for permission, ran in-doors to find some one whom he could ask for the bread. " Sonless, childless, hopeless, objectless ! " said Darrell, murmuringly, to himself, and sunk again into reverie. By the time Lionel returned with the bread, another petted friend had joined the master. A tame doe had cauglU sight of him from her covert far away, came in light bounds to his side, and was putting her delicate nostril into his drooping hand. At the sound of Lionel's hurried step she took flight, trotted off a few paces, then turned, looking wistfully. WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 131 "I did not know you had deer here." " Deer ! in this little paddock ! of course not ; only that doe. Fairthorn introduced her here. By-the-by," con- tinued Darrell, who was now throwing the bread to the swans, and had resumed his careless, unmeditative manner, *'you were not aware that I have a brother hermit — a companion besides the swans and the doe. Dick Fair- thorn is a year or two younger than myself, the son of my father's bailiff. He was the cleverest boy at his grammar- school. Unluckily he took to the flute, and unfitted him- self for the present century. He condescends, however, to act as my secretary — a fair classical scholar — plays chess — is useful to me — I am useful to him. We have an affection for each other. I never forgive any one who laughs at him. The half-hour bell, and you will meet him at dinner. Shall we come in and dress ? " They entered the house — the same man-servant was in attendance in the hall. " Show Mr. Haughton to his room." Darrell inclined his head — I use that phrase, for the gesture was neither bow nor nod — turned down a narrow passage, and disappeared. Led up an uneven stair-case of oak, black as ebony, with huge balustrades, and newel-posts supporting clumsy balls, Lionel was conducted to a small chamber, modern- ized a century ago by a faded Chinese paper, and a mahogany bedstead, which took up three-fourths of the space, and was crested with dingy plumes, that gave it the cheerful look of a hearse ; and there the attendant said, " Have you the key of your knapsack. Sir ? shall I 132 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? put out your things to dress ? " Dress ! Then for the first time the boy remembered that he had brought with him no evening-dress — nay, evening-dress, properly so called, he possessed not at all in any corner of the world. It had never yet entered into his modes of existence. Call to mind when you were a boy of seventeen, "betwixt two ages hovering like a star," and imagine Lionel's sensations. He felt his cheek burn as if he had been de- tected in a crime. "I have no dress things," he said, piteously ; " only a change of linen, and this," glancing at the summer jacket. The servant was evidently a most gentlemanlike man — his native sphere that of groom of the chambers. " I will mention it to Mr. Darrell ; and if you will favor me with your address in London, I will send to telegraph for what you want against to-morrow." "Many thanks," answered Lionel, recovering his pre- sence of mind ; "I will speak to Mr. Darrell myself." " There is the hot water. Sir ; that is the bell. I have the honor to be placed at your commands." The door closed, and Lionel unlocked his knapsack — other trow- sers, other waistcoat, had he — those worn at the fair, and once white. Alas ! they had not since then passed to the care of the laundress. Other shoes — double-soled, for walking. There was no help for it, but to appear at dinner attired as he had been before, in his light pedes- trian jacket, morning waistcoat flowered with sprigs, and a fawn-colored nether man. Could it signify much — onlv two men ? Could the grave Mr. Darrell regard such trifles ? Yes, if they intimated want of due rt'si)ect WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT*/ 133 Durum ! sed fit levius Patientia Quicquid corrigere est nefas. On descending the stairs, the same high-bred domestic was in waiting to show him into the library, Mr. Darrell was there already, in the simple but punctilious costume of a gentleman who retains in seclusion the habits custo- mary in the world. At the first glance Lionel thought he saw a slight cloud of displeasure on his host's brow. He went up to Mr. Darrell ingenuously, and apologized for the deficiencies of his itinerant wardrobe. " Say the truth," said his host; "you thought you were coming to an old churl, with whom ceremony was misplaced." " Indeed, no 1 " exclaimed Lionel. "But — but I have so lately left school." "Your mother might have thought for you." " I did not stay to consult her, indeed, Sir ; I hope you are not offended." " No, but let me not offend you if I take advantage of my years and our relationship to remark that a young man should be careful not to let himself down below the measure of his own rank. If a king could bear to hear that he was only a ceremonial, a private gentleman may remember that there is but a ceremonial between himself and — his hatter ! " Lionel felt the color mount his brow ; but Darrell, press- ing the distasteful theme no farther, and seemingly for- getting its purport, turned his remarks carelessly toward the weather. " It will be fair to-morrow ; there is no mist on the hill yonder. Since you have a painter for a L — 12 134 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? friend, perhaps you yourself are a draughtsman. There are some landscape-effects here which Fairthorn shall point out to you." " I fear, Mr. Darrell," said Lionel, looking down, " that to-morrow I must leave you.'' ' So soon ? Well, I suppose the place must be very dull." " Not that — not that; but I have offended you, and I would not repeat the offence. T have not the 'ceremo- nial ' necessary to mark me as a gentleman, either here or at home." \ " So 1 Bold frankness and ready wit command cere- monials," returned Darrell, and for the first time his lip wore a smile. " Let me present to you Mr. Fairthorn," as the door opening showed a shambling, awkward figure, with loose black knee-breeches and buckled shoes. The figure made a strange sidelong bow, and hurrying in a lateral course, like a crab suddenly alarmed, toward a dim recess protected by a long table, sunk behind a curtain-fold, and seemed to vanish as a crab does amidst the shingles. " Three minutes yet to dinner, and two before the letter-carrier goes," said the host, glancing at his watch. "Mr. Fairthorn, will you write a note for me ?" There was a mutter from behind the curtain. Darrell walked to the place, and whispered a few words, returned to the hearth, rang the bell. " Another letter for the post, Mills : Mr. Fairthorn is sealing it. You are looki ag at my book-shelves, Lionel. As I understand that your WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 135 master spoke highly of you, I presume that you are fond of reading." " I think so, but I am not sure," answered Lionel, whom his cousin's conciliatory words had restored to ease and good-humor. " You mean, perhaps, that you like reading, if you may choose your own books." " Or rather if I may choose my own time to read them, and that would not be on bright summer days." " Without sacrificing bright summer days, one finds one has made little progress when the long winter nights come." "Yes, Sir. But must the sacrifice be paid in books? I fancy I learned as much in the play-ground as I did in the school-room, and for the last few months, in much my own master, reading hard, in the forenoon, it is true, for many hours at a stretch, and yet again for a few hours at evening, but rambling also through the streets, or listen- ing to a few friends whom I have contrived to make — 1 think, if I can boast of any progress at all, the books have the smaller share in it." " You would, then, prefer an active life to a studious one ?" " Oh, yes — yes." " Dinner is served," said the decorous Mr. Miles, throw- ing open the door. 136 -WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? CHAPTER III. In our happy country every man's house is his castle. But, how* ever stoutly he fortify it, Care enters, as surely as she did iit Horace's time, through the porticoes of a Roman's villa. Nor, whether ceilings be fretted with gold and ivory, or whether only colored with whitewash, does it matter to Care any more than it does to a house-fly. But every tree, be it cedar or blackthorn, can harbor its singing-bird; and few are the homes in which, from nooks least suspected, there starts not a music. Is it quite true that " nora avium citharaeque cantus somnum reducent?" Would not even Damocles himself have forgotten the sword, if the lute player had chanced upon the notes that lull? The dinner was simple enough, but well-dressed and well-served. One footman, in plain livery, assisted Mr. Mills. Darrell ate sparingly, and drank only water, which was placed by his side, iced, with a single glass of wine at the close of the repast, which he drank on bending his head to Lionel with a certain knightly grace, and the prefatory words of " Welcome here to a Haughton.'' Mr. Fairthorn was less abstemious — tasted of every dish, after examining it long through a pair of tortoise-shell specta- cles, and drank leisurely through a bottle of port, holding up every glass to the light. Darrell talked with his usual cold but not uncourteous indifference. A remark of Lionel's on the portraits in the room turned the conver- sation chiefly upon pictures, and the host showed himself thoroughly accomplished in the attributes of the various WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 137 schools and masters. Lionel, who was very fond of the art, and, indeed, painted well for a youthful amateur, listened with great delight. "Surely, Sir," said he, struck much with a very subtU observation upon the causes why the Italian masters admit of copyists with greater facility than the Flemish — " snrely, Sir, you must yourself have practised the art of painting ?" " Not I ; but I instructed myself as a judge of pictures, because at one time I was a collector." Fairthorn, speaking for the first time : " The rarest collection — such Albert Durers ! such Holbeins ! and that head by Leonardo da Tinci I " He stopped — looked- extremely frightened — helped himself to the port — turn- ing his back upon his host, to hold, as usual, the glass to the light, "Are they here, Sir," asked Lionel. Darrell's face darkened, and he made no answer ; but his head sank on his breast, and he seemed suddenly absorbed in gloomy thought. Lionel felt that he had touched a wrong chord, and glanced timidly toward Fair- thorn, but that gentleman cautiously held up his finger, and then rapidly put it to his lip, and as rapidly drew it away. After that signal the boy did not dare to break the silence, which now lasted uninterruptedly till Darrell rose, and with the formal and superfluous question, "Any more wine ? " led the way back to the library. There he ensconced himself in an easy chair, and saying, " Will you find a book for yourself, Lionel ? " took a volume at 12* 138 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? random fiom the nearest shelf, and soon seemed absorbed in its contents. The room, made irregular by bay-windows, and shelves that projected as in public libraries, abounded with nook and recess. To one of these Fairthorn sidled himself, and became invisible. Lionel looked round the shelves. No belles leftres of our immediate generation were found there — none of those authors most in request at circulating libraries and literary institutes. The shelves could discover none more recent than the Johnsonian age. Neither in the lawyer's library were to be found any law- books — no, nor the pamphlets and parliamentary volumes that should have spoken of the once eager politician. But there were superb copies of the ancient classics. French and Italian authors were not wanting, nor such of the English as have withstood the test of time. The larger portion of the shelves seemed, however, devoted to philosophical works. Here alone was novelty admitted — the newest essays on science, or the best editions of old works thereon. Lionel at length made his choice — a volume of the " Faerie Queen." Coffee was served ; at a later hour, tea. The clock struck ten. Darrell laid down his book. " Mr. Fairthorn —the Flute ! " From the recess a mutter, and presently — the musician remaining still hidden — there came forth the sweetest note — so dulcet, so plaintive ! Lionel's ear was ravished. The music suited well with the enchanted page through which his fancy had been wandering dream-like — the flute with the "Faerie Queen." As the air flowed Jjquid WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 139 on Lionel-s eyes filled with tears. He did not observe that Darrell was intently watching him. When the music stopped, he turned aside to wipe the tears from his eyes. Somehow or other, what with the poem, what with the flute, his thoughts had wandered far, far hence to the green banks and blue waves of the Thames — to Sophy'[\ charming face, to her parting childish gift ! And where was she now ? Whither passing away, after so brief a holiday, into the shadows of forlorn life ? Darrell's bell-like voice smote his ear. " Spenser ! You love him ! Do you write poetry ?" " No, Sir, I only feel it ! " " Do neither ! " said the host, abruptly. Then turning away, he lighted his candle, murmured a quick good-night, and disappeared through a side-door which led to his own rooms. Lionel looked round for Fairthorn, who now emerged ah angulo — from his nook, " Oh, Mr. Fairthorn, how you have enchanted me ! I never believed the flute could have been capable of such effects ! " Mr. Fairthorn 's grotesque face lighted up. He took off his spectacles, as if the better to contemplate the face of his eulogist. "So you were pleased! really?" he said, chuckling a strange, grim chuckle, deep in his inmost self. " Pleased ! it is a cold word ! Who would not be more tban pleased ? " "You should hear me iu the open air." 140 "WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? "Let me do so — to-morrow." "My dear young Sir, with all my heart. Hist I" gazing round as if haunted — "I like you. I wish him to like you. Answer all his questions as if you did not care how he turned you inside out. Never ask him a question, as if you sought to know what he did not him- self confide. So there is something, you think, in a flute, after all ? There are people who prefer the fiddle." "Then they never heard your flute, Mr. Fairthorn." The musician again emitted his discordant chuckle, and, nodding his head nervously and cordially, shambled away without lighting a candle, and was ingulfed in the shadows of some mysterious corner. CHAPTER ly. The Old World, and the New. It was long before Lionel could sleep. What with the strange house, and the strange master — what with the magic flute, and the musician's admonitory caution — what with tender and regretful reminiscences of Sophy, his brain had enough to work on. When he slept at last, his slumber was deep and heavy, and he did not wake till gently shaken by the well-bred arm of Mr. Mills. " I humbly beg pardon — nine o'clock, Sir, and the breakfast- bell going to ring." Lionel's toilet was soon hurried over ; Mr. Darrell and Fairthorn were talking together WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 141 as he entered the breakfast-room — the same room as that in which they had dined. " Good-morning, Lionel,'' said the host. " Xo leave- taking to-day, as you threatened. I find you have made an appointment with Mr. Fairthom, and I shall place you under his care. You may like to look over the old house, and make yourself"' — Darrell paused — '"'At home," jerked out Mr. Fairthorn, filling up the hiatus. Darrell turned his eye toward the speaker, who evidently becamt much frightened, and, after looking in vain for a corner, sidled away to the window, and poked himself behind the curtain. " Mr. Fairthorn, in the capacity of my secretary, has learned to find me thoughts, and put them in his own words," said Darrell, with a coldness almost icy. He then seated himself at the breakfast-table ; Lionel followed his example, and Mr. Fairthorn, courageously emerging, also took a chair and a roll. " You were a true diviner, Mr. Darrell," said Lionel; "it is a glorious day." "But there will be showers later. The fish are at play on the surface of the lake,'' Darrell added, with a softened glance toward Fairthorn, who was looking the picture of misery. "After twelve, it will be just the weather for trout to rise ; and if you fish.. Mr. Fairthom will lend you a rod. He is a worthy successor of Izaak Walton, and I'jves a companion as Izaak did, but more rarely gets one." "Are there trout in your lake, Sir ? " " The lake ! You must not dream of invading that sacred water. The inhabitants of rivulets and brooks not within my boundary are beyond the pale of Fawley ]42 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? civilization, to be snared and slaughtered like Caffres, red men. or any other savages, for whom we bait with a missionary, and whom we impale on a bayonet. But I regard my lake as a political community, under the pro- tection of the law, and leave its denizens to devour each other, as Europeans, fishes and other cold-blooded creatures wisely do, in order to check the overgrowth of population. To fatten one pike it takes a great many minnows. Naturally I support the vested rights of pike. I have been a lawyer." It would be in vain to describe the manner in which Mr. Darrell vented this or similar remarks of mocking irony, or sarcastic spleen. It was not bitter nor sneer- ing, but in his usual mellifluous level tone and passionless tranquility. The breakfast was just over as a groom passed in front of the windows with a led horse. " I am going to leave you, Lionel," said the host, " to make — friends with Mr. Fairthorn, and I thus complete the sentence which he diverted astray, according to my own original intention." He passed across the hall to the open house-door, and stood by the horse stroking its neck and giving some directions to the groom. Lionel and Fairthorn followed to the threshold, and the beauty of the horse provoked the boy's admiration : it was a dark muzzled brown, of that fine old-fashioned breed of English roadster which is now so seldom seen ; showy, bow-necked, long-tailed, stumbling reedy hybrids, born of bad barbs, ill-mated, having mainly supplied their place. This-was, indeed, a WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 143 horse of great power, immense girth of loin, high slioulder, broad hoof ; and such a head ! the ear, the frontai, the nostril ! you seldom see a human physiogomy half so in- telligent, half so expressive of that high spirit and sweet generous temper, which, when united, constitute the ideal of thorough-breed'ng, whether in horse or man. The English rider was in harmony with the English steed. Darrell at this moment was resting his arm lightly on the animal's shoulder, and his head still uncovered. It has been said before that he was of imposing presence ; the striking attribute of his person, indeed, was that of uncon- scious grandeur ; yet, though above the ordinary height, he was not very tall — five feet eleven at the utmost — ar.d far from being very erect. On the contrary, there was that habitual bend in his proud neck which men who meditate much and live alone almost invariably contract. But there was, to use an expression common with our older writers, that " great air " about him which filled the eye, and gave him the dignity of elevated stature, the commanding as- pect that accompanies the upright carriage. His figure was inclined to be slender ; though broad of shouMer and deep of chest ; it was the figure of a young man, and probably little changed from what it might have been at five-and-twenty. A certain youthfulness still lingered even on the countenance — vStrange, for sorrow is supposed to expedite the work of age ; and Darrell had known sorrow of a kind most adapted to harrow his peculiar nature, as great in its degree as ever left man's heart in ruins. No gray was visible in the dark brown hair, that, worn short 144 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? behind, still retained in front the large Jovelike curl. No wrinkle, save at the corner of the eyes, marred the pale bronze of the firm cheek ; the forehead was smooth as marble, and as massive. It was that forehead which chiefly contributed to the superb expression of his whole aspect. It was high to a fault ; the perceptive organs, over a dark, strongly-marked, arched eyebrow, powerfully developed, as they are with most eminent lawyers : it did not want for breadth at the temples ; yet on the whole, it bespoke more of intellectual vigor and dauntless will than of serene philosophy or all-embracing benevolence. It was the forehead of a man formed to command and awe the passions and intellect of others by the strength of pas- sions in himself, rather concentred than chastised, and an intellect forceful from the weight of its mass rather than the niceness of its balance. The other features harmon- ized with that brow ; they were of the noblest order of aquiline, at once high and delicate. The lip had a rare combination of exquisite refinement and inflexible resolve. The eye, in repose, was cold, bright, unrevealing, with a certain absent, musing, self-absorbing expression, that often made the man's words appear as if spoken mechan- ically, and assisted toward that seeming of listless indif- ference to those whom he addressed, by which he wounded vanity, without, perhaps, any malice prepense. But it was an eye in which the pupil could suddenly expand, the hue change from gray to dark, and the cold still brightness flash into vivid fire. It could not have occurred to any one, even to the ntost commonplace woman, to have de- WHAT WILL HB DO WITH IT? 145 scribed Darrell's as a handsome face ; the expression would have seemed trivial and derogatory ; the words that would have occurred to all, would have been somewhat to this effect — ''What a magnificent countenance! What a noble head ! " Yet an experienced physiognomist might have noted that the same lineaments which bespoke a vir- tue bespoke also its neighboring vice ; that with so much will there went stubborn obstinacy ; that with that power of grasp there would be the tenacity in adherence which narrows in astriuging the intellect ; that a prejudice once conceived, a passion once cherished, would resist all rational argument for relinquishment. When men of this mould do relinquish prejudice or passion, it is by their own impulse, their own sure conviction that what they hold is worthless : then they do not yield it graciously ; they fling it from them in scorn, but not a scorn that con- soles. That which they thus wrench away had grown a living part of themselves; their own flesh bleeds — the wound seldom or never heals. Such men rarely fail in the achievement of what they covet, if the gods are neutral ; but adamant against the world, they are vulnerable through their affections. Their love is intense, but undemonstra- tive ; their hatred implacable, but unrevengeful. Too proud to revenge, too galled to pardon. There stood Guy Darrell, to whom the bar had destined its highest honors, to whom the Senate had accorded its most rapturous cheers ; and the more you gazed on him as he there stood, the more perplexed became the enigma, how with a career sought with such energy, advanced I. — 13 K 146 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? with such success, the man had abruptly subsided into a listless recluse, and the career had been voluntarily re- signed for a home without neighbors, a hearth without children. " I had no idea," said Lionel, as Darrell rode slowly away, soon lost from sight amidst the thick foliage of summer trees — "I had no idea that my cousin was so young ! " " Oh, yes ! " said Mr. Fairthorn ; " he is only a year older than I am ! " " Older than you ! " exclaimed Lionel, staring in blunt amaze at the elderly-looking personage beside him ; "yet true — he told me so himself." "And I am fifty-one last birthday." " Mr. Darrell fifty-two ! Incredible ! " " I don't know why we should ever grow old, the life we lead," observed Mr. Fairthorn, re-adjusting his spec- tacles. " Time stands so still ! Fishing, too, is very con- ducive to longevity. If you will follow me we will get the rods ; and the flute — you are quite sure you would like the flute ? Yes ! thank you, my dear young Sir. And yet there are folks who prefer the fiddle ! " " Is not the sun a little too bright for the fly at present ? and will you not, in the mean while, show me over the house ? " " Very well ; not that this house has much worth seeing. The other, indeed, would have had a music-room I But, after all, nothing like the open air for the flute. This way." I spare thee, gentle reader, the minute inventory of WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 147 Fawlej Manor House. It had nothing but its antiquity to recommend it. It had a great many rooms, all, except those used as the dining-room and library, very small and very low — innumerable closets, nooks — unexpected cav- ities, as if made on purpose for the venerable game of hide-and-seek. Save a stately old kitchen, the oflBces were sadly defective, even for Mr. DarrelPs domestic establish- ment, which consisted but of two men and four maids (the stablemen not lodging in the house). Drawing-room, properly speaking, it had none. At some remote period a sort of gallery under the gable roofs (above the first floor), stretching from end to end of the house, might have served for the reception of guests on grand occasions. For fragments of mouldering tapestry still, here and there, clung to the walls ; and a high chimney-piece, whereon, in plaster relief, was commemorated the memorable fishing- party of Antony and Cleopatra, retained patches of color and gilding, which must, when fresh, have made the Egypt- ian queen still more appallingly hideous, and the fish at the end of Antony's hook still less resembling any creature known to ichthyologists. The library had been arranged into shelves from floor to roof by Mr. Darrell's father, and subsequently, for the mere purpose of holding as many volumes as possible, brought out into projecting wings (college-like) by Dar- rell himself, without any pretension to mediaeval character. With this room communicated a small reading-closet, w^hich the host reserved to himself ; and this, by a circular rftair cut into the massive wall, ascended first into Mr. 148 -WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? DarrelPs sleeping-chamber, and thence into a gable recess that adjoined the gallery, and which the host had fitted up for the purpose of scientific experiments in chemistry, or other branches of practical philosophy. These more private rooms Lionel was not permitted to enter. Altogether the house was one of those cruel tenements which it would be a sin to pull down or even materially to alter, but which it would be an hourly inconvenience for a modern family to inhabit. It was out of all cha- racter with Mr. Darrell's former position in life, or with the fortune which Lionel vaguely supposed him to pos- sess, and considerably underrated. Like Sir Nicholas Bacon, the man had grown too large for his habitation. "I don't wonder," said Lionel, as, their wanderings over, he and Fairthorn found themselves in the library, " that Mr. Darrell began to build a new house. But it would have been a great pity to pull down this for it." " Pull down this ! Don't hint at such an idea to Mr. Darrell. He would as soon have pulled down the British monarchy ! Nay, I suspect, sooner." , " But the new building must surely have swallowed up the old one." " Oh, no ; Mr. Darrell had a plan by which he would have inclosed this separately in a kind of court with an open screen work or cloister ; and it was his intention to appropriate it entirely to mediaeval antiquities, of which he had a wonderful collection. He had a notion of illus- trating every earlier reign in which his ancestors Nour- ished — different apartments in correspondence with dif- WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 1-49 ferent dates. It would have been a chronicle of national manners," "Bat, if it be not an impertinent question, where is this collection? In London?" " Hush ! hush ! I will give you a peep of some of the treasures, only don't betray me." Fairthorn here, with singular rapidity, considering that he never moved in a straightforward direction, undulated into the open air in front of the house, described a rhom- boid toward a side-buttress in the new building, near to which was a postern door ; unlocked that door from a key in his pocket, and, motioning Lionel to follow him, entered within the ribs of the stony skeleton. Lionel followed in a sort of supernatural awe. and beheld, with more substantial alarm, Mr. Fairthorn winding up an in- clined plank which he embraced with both arms, and by which he ultimately ascended to a timber joist in what should have been an upper floor, only flooring there was none. Perched there, Fairthorn glared down on Lionel through his spectacles. " Dangerous," he said, whisper- ingly ; " but one gets used to every thing ! If you feel afraid, don't venture ! " Lionel, animated by that doubt of nis courage, sprang up the plank, balancing himself, school-boy fashion, with outstretched arms, and gained the side of his guide. " Don't touch me," exclaimed Mr. Fairthorn, shrinking, "or we shall both be over, Now observe and imitate." Dropping himself then carefully and gradually, till he cropped on the timber joist as if it were a velocipede, his 13* 150 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? long legs dangling down, he with thigh and hand impelled himself onward till he gained the ridge of a wall, on which he delivered his person, and wiped his spectacles. Lionel was not long before he stood in the same place. "Here we are!' said Fairthorn. "I don't see the collection," answered Lionel, first peering down athwart the joists upon the rugged ground overspread with stones and rubbish, then glancing up, through similar interstices above, to the gaunt rafters. " Here are some — most precious," answered Fairthorn, tapping behind him, " Walled up, except where these boards, cased in iron, are nailed across, with a little door just big enough to creep through ; but that is locked — Chubb's lock, and Mr. Darrell keeps the key ! — treasures for a palace ! No, you can't peep through here — not a chink ; but come on a little further, — mind your footing." Skirting the wall, and still on the perilous ridge, Fair- thorn crept on, formed an angle, and, stopping short, dapped his eye to the crevice of some planks nailed rudely across a yawning aperture. Lionel found another crevice for himself, and saw, piled up in admired disorder, pic- tures, with their backs turned to a desolate wall, rare cabinets, and articles of curious furniture, chests, boxes, crates — heaped pell-mell. This receptacle had been roughly floored in deal, in order to support its miscellane- ous contents, and was lighted from a large window (not visible in front of the house), glazed in dull rough glass, with ventilators. " These are the heavy things, and lea^st costly things, WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 151 that no one could well rob. The pictures here are merely curious as early specimens, intended for the old house, all spoiling and rotting; Mr. Darrell wishes them to do so, I believe ! What ho wishes must be done ! my dear young Sir — a prodigious mind — it is of granite." " I can not understand it," said Lionel, aghast. " The last man I should have thought capriciously whimsical." " Whimsical ! Bless ray soul ! don't say such a word — don't, pray, or the roof will fall down upon us ! Come away. You have seen all you can see. You must go first now — mind that loose stone there I " Nothing further was said till they were out of the build- ing ; and Lionel felt like a knight of old who had been led into sepulchral halls by a wizard. CHAPTER V. The annals of empire are briefly chronicled in family records brought down to the present day, showing that the race of men is indeed "like leaves on trees, now green in youth, now wither- ing on the ground." Yet to the branch the most bare will green leaves return, so long as the sap can remount to the branch from the root ; but the branch which has ceased to take life from the root — hang it high, hang it low — is a prey to the wind and the woodman. It was mid-day. The boy and his new friend were stand- ing apart, as becomes silent anglers, on the bank? of a Qarrow brawling" rivulet, running through green pastures, 152 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? half a mile from the house. The sky was overcast, as Darrell had predicted, but the rain did not yet fall. The two anglers were not long before they had filled a basket with small trout. Then Lionel, who was by no means fond of fishing, laid his rod on the bank, and strolled across the long grass to his companion. " It will rain soon," said he. " Let me take advantage of the present time, and hear the flute, while we can yet enjoy the open air. No, not by the margin, or you will be always looking after the trout. On the rising-ground, see that old thorn-tree — let us go and sit under it. The new building looks well from it. What a pile it would have been ! I may not ask you, I suppose, why it is left incompleted. Perhaps it would have cost too much, or would have been disproportionate to the estate." " To the present estate it would have been dispropor- tioned, but not to the estate Mr. Darrell intended to add to it. As to cost, you don't know him. He would never have undertaken what he could not afford to complete ; and what he once undertook, no thoughts of the cost would have scared him from finishing. Prodigious mind — granite ! And so rich ! " added Fairthorn, with an air of great pride. " I ought to know ; I write all his letters on money matters. How much do you think he has, with- out counting land ? " " I can not guess." "Nearly half a million — in two years it will be more than half a million. And he had not three hundred a WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 153 year when he began life ; for Fawlej was sadlv mort- gaged." " Is it possible ! Could any lawyer make half a million at the bar ? " " If any man could, he would, if he set his mind on it. But it was not all made at the bar, though a great part of it was. An East Indian old bachelor of the same name, but who had never been heard of hereabouts till he wrote from Calcutta to Mr. Dan*ell (inquiring if they were any relations — and Mr. Darrell referred hira to the College- at-Arms, which proved that they came from the same stock ages ago) — left him all his money. Mr. Darrell was not dependent on his profession when he stood up in Parlia- ment. And since we have been here, such savings ! Xot that Mr. Darrell is avaricious, but how can he spend money in this place ? You should have seen the servants we kept in Carlton Gardens. Such a cook too — a French gen-r tleman — looked like a marquis. Those were happy days, and proud ones ! It is true that I order the dinner here, but it can't be the same thing. Do you like fillet of veal ? we have one to-day." " We used to have a fillet of veal at school on Sundays. I thought it good then." " It makes a nice mince," said Mr. Fairthorn, with a sensual movement of his lips. " One must think of din- ner when one lives in the country — so little else to think of ! Not that Mr. Darrell does, but then he is — granite ! " " Still," said Lionel, smiling, " I do not get my answer. Why was the house uncompleted ? and why did Mr. Darrell letire from public life ? " 154 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? " He took both into his licad ; and when a thing once gets there, it is no use asking why. But," added Fair- thorn, and his innocent ugly face changed into an expres- sion of earnest sadness — "but no doubt he had his rea- sons. He has reasons for all he does, only they lie far far away from what appears on the surface — far as that rivulet lies from its source ! My dear young Sir, Mr. Darrell has known griefs on which it does not become you and rae to talk. He never talks of them. The least I can do for ray benefactor is not to pry into his secrets, nor babble them out. And he is so kind — so good — never gets into a passion ; but it is so awful to wound him — it gives him such pain ; that's why he frightens me — frightens me horribly; and so he will you when you come to know him. Prodigious mind ! — granite — over- grown with sensitive plants. Yes, a little music will do us both good." Mr. Fairthorn screwed his flute — an exceedingly hand- some one. He pointed out its beauties to Lionel — a pre- sent from Mr. Darrell last Christmas — and then he began. Strange thing, Art ! especially music. Out of an art a man may be so trivial you would mistake him for an im- becile — at best, a grown infant. Put him into his art, and how high he soars above you ! How quietly he enters into a heaven of which he has become a denizen, and, unlocking the gates with his golden key, admits you to follow, an humble, reverent visitor. In his art Fairthorn was certainly a master, and the air he now played was exquisitely soft and plaintive ; it ac» 155 corded with the clouded yet quiet skv, with the lone but summer landscape, with Lionel's melancholic but not afflicted train of thought. The boy could only murmur, "Beautiful!" when the musician ceased. " It is an old air," said Fairthorn ; " I don't think it is known. I found its scale scrawled down in a copy of the Eikon Basilike, with the name of Joannes Darrell, Eq. Aurot, written under it. That, by the date, was Sir John Darrell, the cavalier who fought for Charles I., father of the graceless Sir Ralph, who flourished under Charles II. Both their portraits are in the dining-room." " Tell me something of the family ; I know so little about it — not even how the Haughtons and Darrells seem to have been so long connected. I see by the portraits that the Haughton name was borne by former Darrells, then apparently dropped, now it is borne again by my <'Ousin." " He bears it only as a Christian name. Your grand- father was his sponsor. But he is, nevertheless, the head of your family." "So he says. How?" Fairthorn gathered himself up, his knees to his chin, and began in the tone of a guide who has got his lesson by heart, though it was not long before he warmed into his subject. " The Darrells are supposed to have got their name from a knight in the reign of Edward III., who held the lists in a joust victoriously against all comers, and was called, or called himself, John the Dare-all : or. in old 156 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? spelling, the Der-all ! They were among the most powerful families in the country ; their alliances were with the highest houses — Montfichets, Nevilles, Mowbrays ; they descend through such marriages from the blood of Plantagenet kings. You'll find their names in Chronicles in the early French wars. Unluckily, they attached themselves to the fortunes of Earl Warwick, the King-maker, to whose blood they were allied ; their representative was killed in the fatal field of Barnet ; their estates were, of course, confiscated ; the sole son and heir of that ill-fated politi- cian passed into the Low Countries, where he served as a soldier. His son and grandson followed the same call- ing under foreign banners. But they must have kept up the love of the old land ; for, in the latter part of the reign of Henry YIII., the last male Darrell returned to England with some broad gold pieces, saved by himself or his exiled fathers, bought some land in this country, in which the ancestral possessions had once been large, and built the present house, of a size suited to the altered fortunes of a race that had, in a former age, manned castles with retainers. The baptismal name of the soldier who thus partially refounded the old line in England was that now borne by your cousin Guy — a name always favored by Fortune in the family annals ; for, in Eliza- beth's time, from the rank of small gentry, to which their fortune alone lifted them since their return to their native land, the Darrells rose once more into Avealth and emi- nence under a handsome young Sir Guy — w^e have his picture in black flowered velvet — who married the heiress WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 157 of the Haugbtons, a family that had grown rich under the Tudors, and in high favor with the Maiden-Queen. This Sir Guy was befriended by Essex, and knighted by Ehzabeth herself. Their old house was then abandoned for the larger mansion of the Haughtons, which had also the advantage of being nearer to the Court. The re- newed prosperity of the Darrells was of short duration. The Cival Wars came on, and Sir John Darrell took the losing side. He escaped to France with his only son. He is said to have been an accomplished, melancholy man ; and ray belief is, that he composed that air which you justly admire for its mournful sweetness. He turned Koman Catholic, and died in a convent. But the son, Ralph, was brought up in France with Charles IT. and other gay roisterers. On the return of the Stuart, Ralph ran ofiF with the daughter of the Roundhead to whom his estates had been given, and, after getting them back, left his wife in the country, and made love to other men's wives in town. Shocking profligate ! no fruit could thrive upon such a branch He squandered all he could squander, and would have left his children beggars, but that he was providentially slain in a tavern brawl for boasting of a lady's favors to her husband's face. The husband suddenly stabbed him — no fair duello, for Sir Ralph was invincible with the small sword. Still the family fortune was much dilapidated, yet still the Darrells lived in the fine house of the Haughtons, and left Fawley to the owls. But Sir Ralph's son, in his old age, mar- ried a second time, a young lady of high rank, an earl's - L — 14 158 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? daughter. He must have been very much in love with her, despite his age ; for, to win her consent or her father's, he agreed to settle all the Haughton estates on her and the children she might bear to him. The smaller Darrell property had already been entailed on his son by his first marriage. This is how the family came to spht. Old Darrell had children by his second wife ; the eldest of those children took the Haughton name, and inherited the Haughton property. The son by the first marriage had nothing but Fawley, and the scanty domain round it. You descend from the second marriage, Mr. Darrell from the first. You understand now, my dear young Sir ? " " Yes, a little ; but I should like very much to know where those fine Haughton estates are now ? " " Where they are now ? I can't say. They were once in Middlesex. Probably much of the land, as it was sold piecemeal, fell into small allotments, constantly changing hands. But the last relics of the property were, I know, bought on speculation by Cox the distiller ; for, when we were in London, by Mr. Darrell's desire I went to look after them, and inquire if they could be repurchased. And I found that so rapid in a few years has been the prosperity of this great commercial country, that if one did buy them back, one would buy twelve villas, several streets, two squares, and a paragon ! But as that symp- tom of national advancement, though a proud thought in itself, may not have any pleasing interest for you, I return to the Darrells. From the time in which the Haughton estate had parted from them, they settled back in their WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 159 old house of Fawley. But they could never again hold up their heads with the noblemen and great squires in the country. As much as they could do to live at all upon the little patrimony ; still the reminiscence of what they had been made them maintain it jealously, and entail it rigidly. The eldest son would never have thought of any profession or business ; the younger sons generally became soldiers, and being always a venturesome race, and having nothing particular to make them value their existence, were no less generally killed off betimes. The family became thoroughly obscure, slipped out of place in the country, seldom rose to be even justices of the peace, never contrived to marry heiresses again, but only the daughters of some neighboring parson or Squire as poor as themselves, but always of gentle blood. Oh, they were as proud as Spaniards in that respect. So from father to son, each generation grew obscurer and poorer ; for, entail the estate as they might, still some settlements on it were necessary, and no settlements were ever brought into it ; and thus entails were cut off to ad- mit some new mortgage, till the rent-roll was somewhat less than £300 a year when Mr. Darrell's father came into possession. Yet somehow or other he got to collco'p, where no Darrell had been since the time of the Glorious Revolution, and was a learned man and an antiquary — A GREAT ANTIQUARY ! You may havc read his works. I know there is one copy of them in the British Museun^, and there is another here, but that copy Mr. Darrell keeps under lock and key." 160 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? " I am ashamed to say I don't even know the title of those works." " There were ' Popular Ballads on the Wars of the Roses ; ' ' Darrelliana,' consisting of traditional and other memorials of the Darrell family ; * Inquiry into the Origin of Legends connected with Dragons ; ' ' Hours among Monumental Brasses,' and other ingenious lucubrations above the taste of the vulgar ; some of them were even read at the Royal Society of Antiquaries. They cost much to print and publish. But I have heard my father, who was his bailiff, say that he was a pleasant man, and was fond of reciting old scraps of poetry, which he did with great energy ; indeed, Mr. Darrell declares that it was the noticing, in his father's animated and felicitous elocution, the effects that voice, look, and delivery can give to words, which made Mr. Darrell himself the fine speaker that he is. But I can only recollect the Anti- quary as a very majestic gentleman, with a long pigtail — awful, rather, not so much so as his son, but still awful — and so sad-looking; you would not have recovered your spirits for a week if you had seen him, especially when the old house wanted repairs, and he was thinking how he could pay for them ! " " Was Mr. Darrell, the present one, an only child ? " " Yes, and much with his father, whom he loved most dearly, and to this day he sighs if he has to mention his father's name ! He has old Mr. Darrell's portrait over the chimney-piece in his own reading-room ; and he had it in his own library in Carlton Gardens. Our Mr. Dar- WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 161 rell's raother was very pretty, even as I remember hei ; she died when he was about ten years old. And she too was a relation of yours — a Haughton by blood; but perhaps you will be ashamed of her, when I say she was a governess in a rich mercantile family. She had been left an orphan. I believe old Mr. Darrell (not that he was old then) married her because the Haughtons could or would do nothing for her, and because she was much snubbed and put upon, as I am told governesses usually are — married her because, poor as he was, he was still the head of both families, and bound to do what he could for decayed scions ! The first governess a Darrell ever married, but no true Darrell would have called that a mesalliance, since she was still a Haughton, and ' Fors non mutat genus,' Chance does not change race." "But how comes it that the Haughtons — my grand- father Haughton, I suppose, woald do nothing for his own kinswoman V' " It was not your grandfather, Robert Haughton, who was a generous man — he was then a mere youngster, hiding himself for debt — but your great-grandfather, who was a hard man, and on the turf. He never had money to give — only money for betting. He left the Haughton estates sadly dipped. But when Robert succeeded, he came forward, was godfather to our Mr. Darrell, insisted on sharing the expense of sending him to Eton, where he became greatly distinguished ; thence to Oxford, where he increased his reputation ; and would probably have done 14* L 162 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? more for him, only Mr. Darrell, once his foot on the ladder, wanted no help to climb to the top." " Then my grandfather, Robert, still had the Haughton estates ? Their last relics had not yet been transmuted by Mr. Cox into squares and a paragon ? " " No ; the grand old mansion, though much dilapidated, with its park, though stripped of saleable timber, was still left, with a rental from farms that still appertained to the residence, which would have suflBced a prudent man for the luxuries of life, and allowed a reserve fund to clear off the mortgages gradually. Abstinence and self-denial for one or tWo generations would have made a property, daily rising in value as the metropolis advanced to its outskirts, a princely estate for a third. But Robert Haughton, though not on the turf, had a grand way of living ; and while Guy Darrell went into the law to make a small patrimony a large fortune, your father, my dear young Sir, was put into the Guards to reduce a large patrimony — into Mr. Cox's distillery." Lionel colored, but remained silent. Fairthorn, who was as unconscious, in his zest of nar- rator, that he was giving pain, as an entomologist, in his zest for collecting, when he pins a live moth into his cabinet, resumed : " Your father and Guy Darrell were warm friends as boys and youths. Guy was the elder of the two, and Charlie Haughton (I beg your pardon, he wag always called Charlie) looked up to him as to an elder brother. Many's the scrape Guy got him out of; and many a pound, I believe, when Guy had some funds of his own, did Guy lend to Charlie." WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 1C3 " I am very sorry to hear that," said Lionel, sharply. Fairthorn looked frightened. " I'm afraid I have made a blunder. Don't tell Mr. Darrell." " Certainly not ; I promise. But how came my father to need this aid, and how came they at last to quarrel ? " " Your father, Charlie, became a gay young man about town, and very much the fashion. He was like you in person, only his forehead was lower and his eye not so steady. Mr. Darrell studied the law in Chambers. When Robert Haughton died, what with his debts, what with his father's, and what with Charlie's post-obits and I U's, there seemed small chance indeed of saving the estate to the Haughtons. But then Mr. Darrell looked close into matters, and with such skill did he settle them, that he removed the fear of foreclosure ; and what with increasing the rental here and there, and replacing old mortgages by new at less interest, he contrived to extract from the property an income of nine hundred pounds a year to Charlie (three times the income Darrell had in- herited himself), where before it had seemed that the debts were more than the assets. Foreseeing how much the land would rise in value, he then earnestly implored Charlie (who unluckily had the estate in fee-simple, as Mr. Darrell has this, to sell if he pleased), to live on his income, and in a few years a part of the property might be sold for building purposes, on terms that would save all the rest, with the old house in which Darrells and Haughtons both had once reared generations. Cliarlie promised, I know, and I've no doubt, my dear young Sir, 164 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? quite sincerely — but all men are not granite ! He took to gambling, incurred debts of honor, sold the farms one by one, resorted to usurers, and one night, after playing six hours at picquet, nothing was left for him but to sell all that remained to Mr. Cox the distiller, unknown to Mr. Darrell, who was then married himself, working hard, and living quite out of the news of the fashionable world. Then Charlie Haughton sold out of the Guards, spent what he got for his commission, went into the line ; and finally, in a country town, in which 1 don't think he was quartered, but having gone there on some sporting specu- lation, was unwillingly detained* — married — " " My mother ! " said Lionel, haughtily ; " and the best of women she is. What then ? " 'Nothing, my dear young Sir — nothing, except that Mr. Darrell never forgave it. He has his prejudices ; this marriage shocked one of them." " Prejudice against my poor mother I I always sup- posed so I I wonder why ? The most simple-hearted, inoffensive, affectionate woman." " I have not a doubt of it ; but it is beginning to rain. Let us go home. I should like some luncheon ; it breaks the day." " Tell me first why Mr. Darrell has a prejudice against my mother. I don't think that he has even seen her Unaccountable caprice! Shocked him, too — what a word! Tell me — I beg — I insist." " But you know," said Fairthorn, half piteously, half snappishly, " that Mrs. Haughton was the daughter of a WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 165 linen-draper, and her father's money got Charlie out of the county jail ; and Mr. Darrell said : ' Sold even your name ! " My father heard him say it in the hall at Fawley. Mr. Darrell was there during a long vacation, and your father came to see him. Your father fired up, and they never saw each other, I believe, again" Lionel remained still as if thunder-stricken. Some- thing in his mother's language and manner ha/i at times made him suspect that she was not so well born as his father. But it was not the discovery that she was a tradesman's daughter that galled him ; it was the thought that his father was bought for the altar out of the county jail ! It was those cutting words, " Sold even your name ! " His face, before very crimson, became livid ; his head sunk on his breast. He walked toward the old gloomy house by Fairthorn's side, as one who, for the first time in life, feels on his heart the leaden weight of an hereditary shame. CHAPTER YI. Showing how sinful it is in a man who does not care for his honor to beget children. When Lionel saw Mr. Fairthorn devoting his intel- lectual being to the contents of a cold chicken-pie, he silently stepped out of the room, and slunk away into a thick copse at the farthest end of the paddock. He longed to be alone. The rain descended, not heavily, but 166 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? in penetrating drizzle : he did not feel it, or rather, he felt glad that there was no gaudy, mocking sunlight. He sate down forlorn in the hollows of a glen which the copse covered, and buried his face in his clasped hands. Lionel Haughton, as the reader may have noticed, was no premature man — a manly boy, but still a habitant of the twilight, dreamy shadow-land of boyhood. Noble elements were stirring fitfully within him, but their agencies were crude and undeveloped. Sometimes, through the native acuteness of his intellect, he apprehended truths quickly and truly as a man ; then, again, through the warm haze of undisciplined tenderness, or the raw mists of that sensitive pride in which objects, small in them- selves, loom large with undetected outlines, he fell back into the passionate dimness of a child's reasoning. He was intensely ambitious ; Quixotic in the point of honor ; dauntless in peril; but morbidly trembling at the very shadow of disgrace, as a foal, destined to be the war- horse and trample down leveled steel, starts in its tranquil pastures at the rustling of a leaf. Glowingly romantic, but not inclined to vent romance in literary creations, his feelings were the more high-wrought and enthusiastic because they had no outlet in poetic channels. Most boys of great ability and strong passion write verses — it is nature's relief to brain and heart at the critical turning- age. Most boys thus gifted do so ; a few do not, and out of those few Fate selects the great men of action — those large, luminous characters that stamp poetry on the world's prosaic surface. Lionel had in him the pith and substance WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 167 of Fortune's grand nobodies, who become Fame's abrupt somebodies when the chances of life throw suddenly in their way a noble something, to be ardently coveted and boldly won. But, I repeat, as yet he \va^: a l)oy — so he sate there, his hands before his face, an unreasoning self- torturer. He knew now why this haughty Darrell had written with so little tenderness and respect to his beloved mother. Darrell looked on her as the cause of his ignoble kinsman's " sale of name ; " nay, most probably ascribed to her, not the fond, girlish love, which levels all dispari- ties of rank, but the vulgar, cold-blooded design to ex- change her father's bank-notes for a marriage beyond her station. And he was the debtor to this supercilious creditor, as his father had been before him ! His father ! — till then he had been so proud of that relationship. Mrs. Haughton had not been happy with her captain; his confirmed habits of \v\\d dissipation had embittered her union, and at last worn away her wifely affections. But she had tended and nursed him, in his last illness, as the lover of her youth ; and though occasionally she hinted at his faults, she ever spoke of him as the orna- ment of all society ; poor, it is true, harassed by unfeeling creditors, but the finest of fine gentlemen. Lionel had never heard from her of the ancestral estates sold for a gambling debt ; never from her of the county jail nor the mei'cenary mesalliance. In boyhood, before we have any cause to be proud of ourselves, we are so proud of our fathers, if we have a decent excuse for it. Of his father could Lionel Haughton be proud now ? And Darrell was cognizant of his paternal disgrace, had taunted his 168 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? father in yonder old hall — for what? — the marriage from which Lionel sprung ? The hands grew tighter and tighter before that burning face. He did not weep, as he had done in Yance's presence at a thought much less galling. Not that tears would have misbecome him. Shallow judges of human nature are they who think that tears in themselves ever misbecome boy or even man. Well did the sternest of Roman writers place the arch distinction of humanity, aloft from all meaner of heaven's creatures, in the prerogative of tears ! Sooner mayest thou trust thy purse to a professonal pickpocket than give loyal friendship to the man who boasts of eyes to which the heart never mounts in dew ! Only, when man weeps, he should be alone — not because tears are weak, but because they should be sacred. Tears are akin to prayers. Pharisees parade prayer ; impostors parade tears. Pegasus, Pegasus — softly, softly 1 — thou hast hurried me off amidst the clouds : drop me gently down — there, by the side of the motionless boy in the shadowy glen. CHAPTER YIl. Lionel Haughton, having hitherto much improved his chance of fortune, decides the question, "What will he do with it?" " I HAVE been seeking you every where," said a well- known voice ; and a hand rested lightly on Lionel's shoulder. The boy looked up, startled, but yet heavily, and saw Guy Darrell, the last man on earth he could have WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 169 desired to see. " Will you come in for a few minutes ? you are wanted." " What for ? I would rather stay here. Who can want me?" Darrell, struck by the words, and the sullen tone in which they were uttered, surveyed Lionel's face for an instant, and replied in a voice involuntarily more kind than usual — "Some one very commonplace, but, since the Picts went out of fashion, very necessary to mortals the most sublime. I ought to apologize for his coming. You threatened to leave me yesterday because of a defect in your wardrobe Mr. Fairthorn wrote to my tailor to hasten hither and repair it. He is here. I commend him to your custom ! Don't despise him because he makes for a man of my remote generation. Tailors are keen observers, and do not grow out of date so quickly as politicians." The words were said with a playful good-humor very uncommon to Mr. Darrell. The intention was obviously kind and kinsmanlike. Lionel sprang to his feet ; his lip curled, his eye flashed, and his crest rose. " Xo, Sir ; I will not stoop to this ! I will not be clothed by your charity — yours ! I will not submit to an implied taunt upon my poor mother's ignorance of the manners of a rank to which she was not born ! You said we might not like each other, and if so, we should part forever. I do not like you, and I will go ! " He turned abruptly, and walked to the house — magnanimous. If I —15 170 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? Mr. Darrell had not been the most singular of men he might well have been offended. As it was, though none less accessible to surprise, he was surprised. But offended ? Judge for yourself. " I declare," muttered Guy Darrell, gazing on the boy's receding figure — "I declare that I almost feel as if I could once again be capable of an emotion ! I hope I am not going to like that boy ! The old Darrell blood in his veins, surely. I might have spoken as he did at his age, but I must have had some better reason for it. What did I say to justify such an explosion! Quid feci? — ubi lapsus f Gone, no doubt, to pack up his knapsack, and take the Road to Ruin ! Shall I let him go ? Better for me, if I am really in danger of liking him ; and so be at his mercy to sting — what ? my heart ? I defy him : it is dead. No ; he shall not go thus. I am the head of our joint houses. Houses ! I wish he had a house, poor boy ! And his grandfather loved me. Let him go ! I will beg his pardon first ; and he may dine in his drawers if that will settle the matter !" Thus, no less magnanimous than Lionel, did this mis- anthropical man follow his ungracious cousin. " Ha ! " cried Darrell, suddenly, as, approaching the threshold, he saw Mr. Fairthorn at the dining-room window occupied in nibbing a pen upon an ivory thumb-stall — " I have hit it ! That abominable Fairthorn has been shedding its prickles ! How could I trust flesh and blood to such a bramble ? I'll know what it was, this instant ! " Yain Menace ! No sooner did Mr. Fairthorn catch glimpse of Darrell's countenance within ten yards of the porch than, WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? IV 1 his conscience taking alarm, he rushed incontinent from the window — the apartment — and ere Darrell could fling open the door, was lost in some lair — " nullis penefrabilis afitris^^ — in that sponge-like and cavernous abode, where- with benignant Providence had suited the locality to the creature. CHAPTER yill. New imbroglio in that ever-recurring, uever-to-besettled question, "What will he do with it?" With a disappointed glare, and a baffled shrug of the shoulder, Mr. Darrell turned from the dining-room, and passed up the stairs to Lionel's chamber, opened the door quickly, and extending his hand, said, in that tone which had disarmed the wrath of ambitious factions, and even (if fame lie not) once seduced from the hostile Treasury- bench a placeman's vote, " I must have hurt your feelings, and I come to beg your pardon ! " But before this time Lionel's proud heart, in which un- grateful anger could not long find room, had smitten him for so ill a return to well-meant and not indelicate kind- ness. And, his wounded egotism appeased by its very outburst, he had called to mind Fairthorn's allusions to Darrell's secret griefs — griefs that must have been indeed stormy so to have revulsed the currents of a life. And, despite those griefs, the great man had spoken playfully 1'72 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? to him — playfully in order to make light of obligations. So when Guy Darrell now extended that hand, and stooped to that apology, Lionel w^as fairly overcome. Tears, before refused, now found irresistible way. The hand he could not take, but, yielding to his yearning im- pulse, he threw his arms fairly round his host's neck, leaned his young cheek upon that granite breast, and sobbed out incoherent words of passionate repentance — honest, venerating affection. Darrell's face changed, looking for a moment wondrous soft — and then, as by an effort of supreme self-control, it became severely placid. He did not return that embrace, but certainly he in no way repelled it ; nor did he trust himself to speak till the boy had exhausted the force of his first feelings, and had turned to dry his tears. Then he said, with a soothing sweetness : " Lionel Haughton, you have the heart of a gentleman that can never listen to a frank apology for unintentional wrong, but what it springs forth to take the blame to itself, and return apology ten-fold. Enough ! A mistake, no doubt, on both sides. More time must elapse before either can truly say that he does not like the other. Meanwhile," added Darrell, with almost a laugh — and that concluding query showed that even on trifles the man was bent upon either forcing or stealing his own will upon others — " meanwhile, must I send away the tailor ? " I Deed not repeat Lionel's answer. WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 173 CHAPTER IX. Darrell : mystery in his past life. What has he done with it ? Some days passed — each day varying little from the other. It was the habit of Darrell, if he went late to rest, to rise early. He never allowed himself more than five hours' sleep. A man greater than Guy Darrell — Sir Walter Raleigh — carved from the solid day no larger a slice for Morpheus. And it was this habit, perhaps, yet more than temperance in diet, which preserved to Darrell his remarkable youthfulness of aspect and frame, so that at fifty-two he looked, and really was, younger than many a strong man of thirty-five. For, certain it is, that on entering middle life, he who would keep his brain clear, his step elastic, his muscles from fleshiness, his nerves from tremor — in a word, retain his youth in spite of the register — should beware of long slumbers. Nothing ages like laziness. The hours before breakfast Darrell devoted first to exercise, whatever the weather — next to his calm scientific pursuits. At ten o'clock punctually he rode out alone, and seldom returned till late in the afternoon. Then he would stroll forth v^nth Lionel into devious woodlands, or lounge with him along the margin of the lake, or lie down on the tedded grass, call the boy's attention to the insect populace which sports out its happy life in the if.* 174 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? summer months, and treat of the ways and habits of each varying species, with a quaint learning, half humorous, half grave. He was a minute observer and an accom- plished naturalist. His range of knowledge was, indeed, amazingly large for a man who has had to pass his best years in a dry and absorbing study : necessarily not so profound in each section as that of a special professor, but if the science was often on the surface, the thoughts he deduced from what he knew were as often original and deep. A maxim of his, which he dropped out one day to Lionel in his careless manner, but pointed diction, may perhaps illustrate his own practice and its results : " Never think it enough to have solved the problem started by another mind, till you have deduced from it a corollary of your own." After dinner, which was not over till past eight o'clock, they always adjourned to the library, Fairthorn vanishing into a recess, Darrell and Lionel each with his several book, then an air on the flute, and each to his own room before eleven. No life could be more methodical ; yet to Lionel it had an animating charm, for his interest in his host daily increased, and varied his thoughts with per- petual occupation. Darrell, on the contrary, while more kind and cordial, more cautiously on his guard not to wound his young guest's susceptibilities than he had been before the quarrel and its reconciliation, did not seem to feel for Lionel the active interest which Lionel felt for him. He did not, as most clever men are apt to do in their intercourse with youth, attempt to draw him out, WHAT ^V I L L HE DO WITH IT? 175 plomb his intellect, or guide his tastes. If he was at times instructive, it was because talk fell on subjects on which it pleased himself to touch, and in which he could not speak without involuntarily instructing. 'Sot did he ever allure the boy to talk of his school-days, of his friends, of his predilections, his hopes, his future. In short, had you observed them together, you would have never sup- posed they were connections — that one could and ought to influence and direct the career of the other. You would have said the host certainly liked the guest, as any man would like a promising, warm-hearted, high-spirited, grace- ful boy, under his own roof for a short time, but who felt that that boy was nothing to him — would soon pass from his eye — form friends, pursuits, aims — with which he could be in no way commingled, for which he should be wholly irresponsible. There was also this peculiarity in Darrell's conversation : if he never spoke of his guest's past and future, neither did he ever do more than advert in the most general terms to his own. Of that grand stage, on which he had been so brilliant an actor, he imparted no reminiscences ; of those great men, the leaders of his age, with whom he had mingled familiarly, he told no anec- dotes. Equally silent was he as to the earlier steps in his career, the modes by which he had studied, the acci- dents of which he had seized advantage — silent there as upon the causes he had gained, or the debates he had adorned. Never could you have supposed that this man, still in the prime of public life, had been the theme of journals, and the boast of party. Neither did be ever, 176 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? as men who talk easil}^ at their own hearths are prone tc do, speak of projects in the future, even though the pro- jects be no vaster than the planting of a tree or the altera- tion of a parterre — projects with which rural life so copi- ously and so innocently teems. The past seemed as if it had left to him no memory, the future as if it stored for him no desire. But did the past leave no memory ? Why then at intervals would the book slide from his eye, the head sink upon the breast, and a shade of unutterable dejection darken over the grand beauty of that strong stern countenance ? Still that dejection was not morbidly fed and encouraged, for he would fling it from him with a quick impatient gesture of the head, resume the book re- solutely, or change it for another which induced fresh trains of thought, or look over Lionel's shoulder, and make some subtle comment on his choice, or call on Fair- thorn for the flute ; and in a few minutes the face was severely serene again. And be it here said, that it is only in the poetry of young gentlemen, or the prose of lady novelists, that a man in good health, and of sound intel- lect, wears the livery of unvarying gloom. However great his causes of sorrow, he does not forever parade its osten- tatious mourning, nor follow the hearse of his hopes with the long face of an undertaker. He will still have his gleams of cheerfulness — his moments of good-humor. The old smile will sometimes light the eye, and awake the old playfulness of the lip. But what a great and critical sorrow does leave behind is often far worse than the sor- row itself has been. It is a change in the inner man, which WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? IT" strands him, as Guy Darrell seemed stranded, upon the shoal of the Present ; which, the more he strive manfully to bear his burden, warns him the more from dwelling on the Past ; and the more impressively it enforce the lesson of the vanity of human wishes, strikes the more from his reckoning illusive hopes in the Future. Thus out of our threefold existence two parts are annihilated — the what has been — the what shall be. We fold our arms, stand upon the petty and steep cragstone, which alone looms out of the Measureless Sea, and say to ourselves, looking neither backward nor beyond, " Let us bear what is ; " and so for the moment the eye can lighten and the lip can smile. Lionel could no longer glean from Mr. Fairthorn any stray hints upon the family records. That gentleman had evidently been reprimanded for indiscretion, or warned against its repetition, and he became reserved and mum as if he had just emerged from the cave of Tro- phonius. Indeed he shunned trusting himself again alone to Lionel, and, affecting a long arrear of correspondence on behalf of his employer, left the lad during the fore- noons to solitary angling, or social intercourse with the swans and the tame doe. But from some mystic conceal- ment within doors would often float far into the open air the melodies of that magic flute ; and the boy would glide back, along the dark-red mournful walls of the old house, or the futile pomp of pilastered arcades in the uncompleted new one, to listen to the sound : listening, he, blissful boy, forgot the present ; he seized the unchallenged royalty of M 178 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? his years. For him no rebels in the past conspired with poison to the wine-cup, murder to the sleep. No deserts in the future, arresting the march of ambition, said, " Here are sands for a pilgrim, not fields for a conqueror." CHAPTER X. In which chapter the History quietly moves on to the next. Thus nearly a week had gone, and Lionel began to feel perplexed as to the duration of his visit. Should he be the first to suggest departure ? Mr. Darrell rescued him from that embarrassment. On the seventh day, Lionel met him in a lane near the house, returning from his habitual ride. The boy walked home by the side of the horseman, patting the steed, admiring its shape, and praising the beauty of another saddle-horse, smaller and slighter, which he had seen in the paddock exercised by a groom. "Do you ever ride that chestnut ? I think it even handsomer than this." " Half our preferences are due to the vanity they flatter. Few can ride this horse — any one, perhaps, that." " There speaks the Dare-all ! " said Lionel, laughing. The host did not look displeased. " Where no difficulty, there no pleasure," said he, in his curt laconic diction. " I was in Spain two years ago. I had not an English horse there, so I bought that WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 179 Andaluslan jennet. What has served him at need, no preux chevalier would leave to the chance of ill-usage. So the jennet came with me to England. You have not been much accustomed to ride, I suppose ? " " Not much ; but my dear mother thought I ought to learn. She pinched for a whole year to have me taught at a riding-school during one school vacation." " Your mother's relations are, I believe, well off. Do they sufifer her to pinch?" " I do not know that she has relations living ; she never speaks of them." " Indeed ! " This was the first question on home matters that Darrell had ever directly addressed to Lionel. He there dropped the subject, and said, after a short pause, " I was not aware that you are a horseman, or I would have asked you to accompany me ; will you do so to-morrow, and mount the jennet ? " "Oh, thank you; I should like it so much." Darrell turned abruptly away from the bright grateful eyes. "I am only sorry," he added, looking aside, "that our excursions can be but few. On Friday next I shall submit to you a proposition ; if you accept it, we shall part on Saturday — liking each other, I hope ; speaking for myself, the experiment has not failed ; and on yours ? " " On mine ! oh, Mr. Darrell, if I dared but tell you what recollections of yourself the experiment will be- queath to me ! " " Do not tell me, if they imply a compliment," answered Darrell, with a low silvery laugh which so melodiously 180 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? expressed indifference, and repelled affection. He entered the stable-yard, dismounted ; and on returning to Lionel, the sound of the flute stole forth, as if from the eaves of the gabled roof. " Could the pipe of Horace's Faun us be sweeter than that flute ? " said Darrell, " • Utcunqua dulci, Tyndare, fistula, Valles,' etc. What 'a lovely ode that is ! What knowledge of town life ! what susceptibility to the rural ! Of all the Latins, Horace is the only one with whom I could wish to have spent a week. But no ! I could not have discussed the brief span of human life with locks steeped in Malobathrau balm, and wreathed with that silly myrtle. Horace and I woiild have quarreled over the first heady bowl of Massic. We never can quarrel now ! Blessed subject and poet-laureate of Queen Proserpine, and, I dare swear, the most gentlemanlike poet she ever received at court, henceforth his task is to uncoil the asps from the brows of Alecto, and arrest the ambitious Orion from the chase after visionary lions." CHAPTER XI. Showing that if a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart is a letter of credit. The next day they rode forth, host and guest, and that ride proved an eventful crisis in the fortune of Lionel Haughton Hitherto I have elaborately dwelt on the fact that, whatever the regard Darrell miglit feel WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 181 for him, it was a regard apart from that interest which accepts a responsibility, and links to itself a fate. And even if, at moments, the powerful and wealthy man had felt that interest, he had thrust it from him. That he meant to be generons was indeed certain, and this he had typically shown in a very trite matter-of-fact w*ay. The tailor, whose visit had led to such perturbation, had re- ceived instructions beyond the mere supply of the rai- ment for which he had been summoned ; and a large patent portmanteau, containing all that might constitute the liberal outfit of a young man in the rank of a gentle- man, had arrived at Fawley, and amazed and moved Lionel, whom Darrell had by this time thoroughly re- conciled to the acceptance of benefits. The gift denoted this, " In recognising you as kinsman, I shall henceforth provide for you as gentleman." Darrell indeed meditated applying for an appointment in one of the public offices, the settlement of a liberal allowance, and a parting shake of the hand, which should imply, "I have now behaved as becomes me ; the rest belongs to you. We may never meet again. There is no reason why this good-by may not be forever." But in the course of that ride Darrell's intentions changed. Wherefore ? You will never guess ! Nothing so remote as the distance between cause and effect, and the cause for the effect here was — poor little Sophy. The day was fresh, with a lovely breeze, as the two riders rode briskly over the turf of rolling common-lands, with the feathery boughs of neighboring woodlands L — IF. 182 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? tossed joyously to and fro by the sportive summer wind. The exhilarating exercise and air raised Lionel's spirits, and released his tongue from all trammels ; and when a boy is in high spirits, ten to one but he grows a frank egotist, feels the teeming life of his individuality, and talks about himself. Quite unconsciously Lionel rattled out gay anecdotes of his school-days ; his quarrel with a de- moniacal usher ; how he ran away ; what befell him ; how the doctor went after, and brought him back ; how splen- didly the doctor behaved — neither flogged nor expelled him, but after patient listening, while he rebuked the pupil dismissed the usher, to the joy of the whole academy ; how he fought the head boy in the school for calling the doctor a sneak ; how, licked twice, he yet fought that head lx)y a third time, and licked him ; how, when head boy himself, he had roused the whole school into a civil war, dividing the boys into Cavaliers and Roundheads ; how clay was rolled out into cannon-balls and pistol-shot, sticks shaped into swords ; the play-ground disturfed to construct fortifications ; how a slovenly stout boy enacted Cromwell ; how he himself was elevated into Prince Rupert ; and how, reversing all history, and infamously degrading Cromwell, Rupert would not consent to be beaten ; and Cromwell at the last, disabled by an unto- ward blow across the knuckles, ignominiously yielded himself prisoner, was tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to be shot ! To all this rubbish did Darrell in- cline his patient ear — not encouraging, not interrupting, but sometimes stifling a sigh at the sound of Lionel's WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 183 merry laugh, or the sight of his fair face, with heightened glow on its cheeks, and his long silky hair, worthy the name of love-locks, blown by the wind from the open loyal features, which might well have graced the portrait of some youthful Cavalier. On bounded the Spanish jennet, on rattled the boy rider. He had left school now, in his headlong talk ; he was describing his first friendship \nth Frank Yauce, as a lodger at his mother's ; how example fired him, and he took to sketch-work and painting ; how kindly Yance gave him lessons ; how at one time he wished to be a painter ; how much the mere idea of such a thing vexed his mother, and how little she was moved when he told her that Titian was of a very ancient family, and that Francis I., archetype of gentle- men, visited Leonardo da Yinci's sick-bed ; and that Henry YIII. had said to a pert lord who had snubbed Holbein, " I can make a lord any day, but I cannot make a Holbein ; " how Mrs. Haughton still confounded all painters in the general image of the painter and plumber who had cheated her so shamefully in the renewed window-sashes and redecorated walls, which Time and the four children of an Irish family had made necessary to the letting of the first floor. And these playful allu- sions to the maternal ideas were still not irreverent, but contrived so as rather to prepossess Darrell in Mrs. Haughton 's favor, by bringing out traits of a simple natural mother, too proud, perhaps, of her only son, not caring what she did, how she worked, so that he might not lose caste as a born Haughton. Darrell understood, 184 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? and nodded his head approvingly. " Certainly," he said, speaking almost for the first time, " fame confers a rank above that of gentlemen and of kings ; and as soon as she issues her patent of nobility, it matters not a straw whether the recipient be the son of a Bourbon or of a tallow-chandler. But if Fame withhold her patent — if a well-born man paint aldermen, and be not famous (and I dare say you would have been neither a Titian nor a Holbein), why, he might as well be a painter and plumber, and has a better chance, even of bread and cheese, by standing to his post as gentleman. Mrs. Haughton was right, and I respect her." " Quite right. If I lived to the age of Methuselah, I could not paint a head like Frank Yance." " And even he is not famous yet. Never heard of him." " He will be famous — I am sure of it ; and if you lived in London, you would hear of him even now. Oh, Sir 1 such a portrait as he painted the other day ! But I must tell you all about it." And therewith Lionel plunged at once, median res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy, and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and then begged : with what artless elo- quence he brought out the colors of the whole story — now its humor, now its pathos ; with what beautifying sympathy he adorned the image of the little vagrant girl, with her mien of gentlewoman and her simplicity of child; the river-excursion to Hampton Court; her still delight ; how annoyed he felt when Vance seemed ashamed of her before those fine people ; the orchard scen^ in WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 185 which he bad read Darrell's letter, that, for the time, drove her from the foremost place in his thoughts ; the return home, the parting, her wistful look back, the visit to the Cobbler's next day — even her farewell gift, the nursery poem, with the lines written on the fly-leaf, he had them by heart ! Darrell, the grand advocate, felt he could not have produced on a jury, with those elements the eflFect which that boy-narrator produced on his granite self. "And, oh, Sir !" cried Lionel, checking his horse, and even arresting Darrell's with bold right hand, '* oh ! " said he, as he brought his moist and pleading eyes in full battery upon the shaken fort to which he had mined his way — "oh Sir! you are so wise, and rich, and kind, do rescue that poor child from the penury and hardships of such a life ! If you could but have seen and heard her ! She could never have been bom to it ! You look away — I offend you. I have no right to tax your benevolence for others ; but, instead of showering favors upon me, so little would suffice for her, if she were but above positive want, with that old man (she would not be happy without him), safe in such a cottage as you give to your own peasants ! I am a man, or shall be one soon ; I can wrestle with the world, and force my way somehow ; but that delicate child, a village show, or a beggar on the high-road ! no mother, no brother, no one but that broken-down cripple, leaning upon her arm as his crutch. I can not bear to think of it. I am sure I fcUall meet her again somewhere ; and when I do, may IG* 186 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? I not write to you, and will you not come to her help ? Do speak — do say 'Yes,' Mr. Darrell." The rich man's breast heaved slightly ; he closed his eyes, but for a moment. There was a short and sharp struggle with his better self, and the better self conquered. " Let go my reins — see, my horse puts down his ears — he may do you a mischief. Now canter on — you shall be satisfied. Give me a moment to — to unbutton my coat — it is too tight for me." CHAPTER XII. Guy Darrell gives way to an impulse, and quickly decides what he will do with it "Lionel Haughton," said Guy Darrell, regaining his young cousin's side, and speaking in a firm and measured voice, " I have to thank you for one very happy minute ; the sight of a heart so fresh in the limpid purity of good- ness is a luxury you can not comprehend till you have come to my age ; journeyed, like me, from DantoBeersheba, and found all barren. Heed me ; if you had been half a dozen years older, and this child for whom you plead had been a fair young woman, perhaps just as innocent, just as charming — more in peril — my benevolence would have lain as dormant as a stone. A young man's foolish senti- ment for a pretty girl. As your true friend, I should have shrugged my shoulders, and said, 'Beware ! '' Had WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 187 I been your father, I should have taken alarm, and frowned. I should have seen the sickly romance, which ends in dupes or deceivers. But at your age, you hearty, genial, and open-hearted boy — you caught but by the chivalrous compassion for helpless female childhood — oh, that you wei-e ray son — oh, that my dear father's blood were in those knightly veins ! I had a son once. God took him ;" the strong man's lips quivered — he hurried on. " I felt there was manhood in you when you wrote to fling ray churlish favors in ray teeth — when you would have left ray roof-tree in a burst of passion which might be foolish, but was nobler than the wisdom of calculating submission — manhood, but only perhaps man's pride as man — man's heart not less cold than winter. To-day you have shown me something far better than pride ; that nature which constitutes the heroic temperament is completed by two attributes — unflinching purpose, disinterested humanity. I know not yet if you have the first ; you reveal to me the second. Yes ! I accept the duties you propose to me ; I will do more than leave to you the chance of discover- ing this poor child. I will direct my solicitor to take the right steps to do so. I will see that she is safe from the ills you fear for her. Lionel ; more still, I am impatient till I write to Mrs. Haughton. I did her ^Tong. Re- member, I have never seen her. I resented in her the cause of my quarrel with your father, who was once dear to me. Enough of that. I disliked the tone of her letters to nie. I dislike it in the mother of a boy who had Barrell blood; other reasons too — let them pass 188 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? But in providing for your education, I certainly thought her relations provided for her support. She never asked me for help there ; and, judging of her hastily, I thought she would not have scrupled to do so if my help there had not been forestalled. You have made me understand her better ; and at all events, three-fourths of what we are in boyhood most of us owe to our mothers 1 You are frank, fearless, affectionate — a gentleman. I respect the mother who has such a son." Certainly praise was rare upon Darrell's lips ; but, when he did praise, he knew how to do it ! And no man will ever command others who has not by nature that gift. It can not be learned. Art and experience can only refine its expression. CHAPTER XIII. He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyonJ his grave-stone ; viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child, sees the full stop at the end of the sentence. Lionel's departure was indefinitely postponed ; no- thing more was said of it. Meanwhile Darrell's manner toward him underwent a marked change. The previous indifference the rich kinsman had hitherto shown as to the boy's past life, and the peculiarities of his intellect and character, wholly vanished. He sought now, on WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 189 the contrary, to plumb thoroughly the more hidden depths which lurk in the nature of every human being, and which, in Lionel's, were the more difficult to discern from the vivacity and candor which covered with so smooth and charming a surface a pride tremulously sensitive, and an ambition that startled himself in the hours when solitude and reverie reflect upon the visions of Youth the giant outline of its own hopes. Darrell was not dissatisfied with the results of this survey; yet often, when perhaps most pleased, a shad® would pass over his countenance ; and, had a woman who loved him been by to listen, she would have heard the short, slight sigh which came and went too quickly for the duller sense of man's friendship to recognise it as the sound of sorrow. In Darrell himself, thus insensibly altered, Lionel daily discovered more to charm his interest and deepen his af- fection. In this man's nature there were, indeed, such wondrous under-currents of sweetness, so suddenly gush- ing forth, so suddenly vanishing again ! And exquisite in him were the traits of that sympathetic tact which the world calls fine breeding, but which comes only from a heart at once chivalrous and tender, the more bewitching in Darrell from their contrast with a manner usually cold, and a bearing so stamped with masculine, self-willed, haughty power. Thus days went on as if Lionel had be- come a very child of the house. But his sojourn was in truth drawing near to a close not less abrupt and unex- pected than the turn in his host's humors to which he owed the delay of his departure. 190 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? One bright afternoon, as Darrell was standing at the window of his private study, Fairthorn, who had crept in on some matter of business, looked at his countenance long and wistfully, and then, shambling up to his side, put one hand on his shoulder with a light, timid touch, and, point- ing with the other to Lionel, who was lying on the grass in front of the casement, reading the Faerie Queen, said, " Why do you take him to your heart if he does not com- fort it?" Darrell winced, and answered gently, " I did not know you were in the room. Poor Fairthorn ! thank you ! " "Thank me ! — what for?" " For a kind thought. So then you like the boy ? " " Mayn't I like him ? " asked Fairthorn, looking rather frightened ; " surely you do ! " " Yes, I like him much ; I am trying my best to love him. But, but — " Darrell turned quickly, and the por- trait of his father over the mantle-piece came full upon his sight — an impressive, a haunting face — sweet and gentle, yet with the high, narrow brow and arched nostril of pride, with restless, melancholy eyes, and an expression that re- vealed the delicacy of intellect, but not its power. There was something forlorn, yet imposing, in the whole effigy. As you continued to look at the countenance the mournful attraction grew upon you. Truly a touching and a most lovable aspect. Darrell's eyes moistened. " Yes, my father, it is so ! " he said, softly. "All ray sacrifices were in vain. The race is not to be rebuilt ! No grandchild of yours will succeed me — me, the last of the 191 old line ! Fairthorn, how can I love that boy? He may be my heir, and in his veins not a drop of my father's blood!" " But he has the blood of your father's ancestors ; and why must you think of him as your heir? — you, who, if you would but go again into the world, might yet find a fair wi — " With such a stamp came Darrell's foot upon the floor that the holy and conjugal monosyllable dropping from Fairthorn's lips was as much cut in two as if a shark had snapped it. Unspeakably frightened, the poor man sidled away, thrust himself behind a tall reading-desk, and, peer- ing aslant from that covert, whimpered out, " Don't, don't now — don't be so awful; I did not mean to offend, but I'm always saying something I did not mean ; and really you look so young still (coaxingly), and, and — " Darrell, the burst of rage over, had sunk upon a chair, his face bowed over his hands, and his breast heaving as if with suppressed sobs. The musician forgot his fear ; he sprang forward, al- most upsetting the tall desk ; he flung himself on his knees, at Darrell's feet, and exclaimed, in broken words, " Mas- ter, master, forgive me ! Beast that I was ! -Do look up — do smile, or else beat me — kick me. " Darrell's right hand slid gently from his face, and fell into Fairthorn's clasp. " Hush, hush," muttered the man of granite ; " one mo- ment, and it will be over." One moment ? That might be but a figure of speech ; 192 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? yet before Lionel had finished half the canto that was plunging him into fairy-land, Darrell was standing by him with his ordinary, tranquil mien, aud Fairthorn's flute from behind the boughs of a neighboring lime-tree was breath- ing out an air as dulcet as if careless Fauns still piped in Arcady, and Grief were a far dweller on the otlier side of the mountains, of whom shepherds, reclining under sum- mer leaves, speak as we speak of hydras and unicorns and things in fable. On, on swelled the mellow, mellow, witching music ; and now the worn man with his secret sorrow, and the boy with his frank, glad laugh, are passing away, side by side, over the turf, with its starry and golden wild-flowers, under the boughs in yon Druid copse, from which they start the ringdove — farther and farther, still side by side, now out of sight, as if the dense green of the summer had closed around them like waves. But still the flute sounds on, and still they hear it, softer and softer, as they go. Hark! do you not hear it — you? WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 193 CHAPTER XIY. There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents ; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences. Phi- losophy speculates on their effects, and disputes upon their uses ; men who do not philosophize regard them as special messengers and bodes of evil. They came out of the little park into a by-lane ; a vast tract of common land, yellow with furze, and undulated with swell and hollow spreading in front ; to their right the dark beech-woods, still beneath the weight of the July noon. Lionel had been talking about the Faerie Queen, knight-errantry, the sweet, impossible dream-life that, safe from Time, glides by bower and hall, through magic for- ests and by witching caves, in the world of poet-books. And Darrell listened, and the flute-notes mingled with the atmosphere faint and far off, like voices from that world itself. Out then they came, this broad waste land between them ; and Lionel said, merrily : "But this is the very scene I Here the young knight, leaving his father's hall, would have checked his destrier, glancing wistfully now over that green wild which seems so boundless, now to the 'umbrageous horror' of those breathless woodlands, and questioned himself which way to take for adventure." I. — 17 N 194 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? " Yes," said Darrell, coming out from his long reserve on all that concerned his past life — ** Yes, and the gold of the gorse-blossoms tempted me ; and I took the waste laud." He paused a moment, and renewed : "And then, when I had known cities and men, and snatched romance from dull matter-of-fact, then I would have done as civili- zation does with romance itself — I would have inclosed the waste land for my own aggrandizement. Look," he continued, with a sweep of the hand round the width of prospect, "all that you see to the verge of the horizon, some fourteen years ago, was to have been thrown into the petty paddock we have just quitted, and serve as park round the house I was then building. Vanity of human wishes ! What but the several proportions of their common folly distinguishes the baffled squire from the arrested conquerer ? Man's characteristic cerebral organ must certainly be acquisitivenesss." " Was it his organ of acquisitiveness that moved The- mistocles to boast that ' he could make a small state great ? ' " "Well remembered — ingeniously quoted," returned Darrell, with the polite bend of his stately head. " Yes, I suspect that the coveting organ had much to do with the boast. To build a name was the earliest dream of Themistocles, if we are to accept the anecdote that makes him say, ' The trophies of Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep.' To build a name, or to create a fortune, are but varying applications of one human passion. The desire of something we have not is the first of our childish remembrances; it matters not what form it takes, wliat WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 195 object it longs for ; still it is to acquire ; it never deserts us while we live." " And jet, if I might, I should like to ask, what you now desire that you do not possess ? " "I — nothing ; but I spoke of the living ! I am dead. Only," added Darrell, with his silvery laugh, "I say, as poor Chesterfield said before me, 'it is a secret — keep it.'" Lionel made no reply ; the melancholy of the words saddened him ; but Darrell's manner repelled the expres- sion of sympathy or of interest ; and the boy fell into con- jecture — what had killed to the world this man's iutel- lectual life ? And thus silently they continued to wander on till the sound of the flute had long been lost to their ears. Was the musician playing still ? At length they came round to the other end of Fawley village, and Darrell again became animated. " Perhaps," said he, returning to the subject of talk that had been abruptly suspended — '• perhaps the love of power is at the origin of each restless courtship of Fortune ; yet, after all, who has power with less alloy than the village thane? With so little effort, so little thought, the man in the manor-house can make men in the cottage happier here below, and more fit for a here- after yonder. In leaving the world I come from contest and pilgrimage, like our sires the Crusaders, to reign at home." As he spoke he entered one of the cottages. An old 196 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? paralytic man was seated by the fire, hot though the July sun was out of doors ; and his wife, of the same age, and ahiiost as helpless, was reading to him a chapter in the Old Testament — the fifth chapter in Genesis, containing the genealogy, age, and death of the patriarchs before the Flood. How the faces of the couple brightened when Darrell entered. " Master Guy ! " said the old man, tremulously rising. The world-weary orator and lawyer was still Master Guy to him. "Sit down Matthew, and let me read you a chapter." Darrell took the Holy Book, and read^the Sermon on the Mount. Never had Lionel heard any thing like that reading ; the feeling which brought out the depth of the sense, the tones, sweeter than the flute, which clothed the divine words in music. As Darrell ceased, some beauty seemed gone from the day. He lingered a few minutes, talking kindly and familiarly, and then turned into another cottage, where lay a sick woman. He listened to her ailments, promised to send her something to do her good from his own stores, cheered up her spirits, and, leaving her happy, turned to Lionel with a glorious smile, that seemed to ask, "And is there not power in this ? " But it was the sad peculiarity of this remarkable man, that all his moods were subject to rapid and seemingly unaccountable variations. It was as if some great blow had fallen on the mainspring of his organization, and left its original harmony broken up into fragments, each im- pressive in itself, but running one into the other with an abrupt discord, as a harp played upon by the winds. For, WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 197 after this evident effort at self-consolation or self-support in soothing or strengthening others, suddenly Darrell's head fell again upon his breast, and he walked on, up the village lane, heeding no longer either the open doors of expectant cottagers, or the salutation of humble passers-by. " And I could have been so happy here ! " he said sud- denly. " Can I not be so yet ? Ay, perhaps, when I am thoroughly old — tied to the world but by the thread of an hour. Old men do seem happy ; behind them all memories faint, save those of childhood and sprightly youth ; before them, the narrow ford, and the sun dawning up the clouds on the other shore. 'Tis the critical descent into age in which man is surely most troubled ; griefs gone, still rankling ; nor, strength yet in his limbs, passion yet in his heart, reconciled to what loom nearest in the prospect — the arm-chair and the palsied head. Weill life is a quaint puzzle. Bits the most incongruous join into each other, and the scheme thus gradually becomes symmetrical and clear ; when, lo ! as the infant claps his hands, and cries, ' See, see ! the puzzle is made out 1 ' all the pieces are swept back into the box — black box with the gilded nails. Ho ! Lionel, look up ; there is our village church, and here, close at my right, the church- yard ! " Now while Darrell and his young companion were di- recting their gaze to the right of the village lane, toward the small gray church — toward the sacred burial-ground in which, here and there among humbler graves, stood the monumental stone inscribed to the memory of some n* 198 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? former Darrell, for whose remains the living sod had been preferred to the family vault ; while both slowly neared the funeral spot, and leaned, silent and musing, over the rail that fenced it from the animals turned to graze on the sward of the surrounding green, a foot- traveler, a stranger in the place, loitered on the threshold of the small way- side inn, about fifty yards off to the left of the lane, and looked hard at the still figures of the two kinsmen. Turning then to the hostess, who was standing some- what within the threshold, a glass of brandy-and- water in her hand (the third glass that stranger had called for during his half-hour's rest in the hostelry), quoth the man — " The taller gentleman yonder is surely your Squire, is it not ? but who is the shorter and younger person ? " The landlady put forth her head. " Oh ! that is a relation of the Squire's down on a visit, Sir. I heard coachman say that the Squire's taken to him hugely ; and they do think at the hall that the young gen- tleman will be his heir." "Aha ! — indeed — his heir ? What is the lad's name ? What relation can he be to Mr. Darrell ? " "I don't know what relation exactly, Sir; but he is one of the Haughtons, and they've been kin to the Faw- ley folks time out of mind." " Haughton I — aha I Thank you, ma'am. Change, if you please." The stranger tossed off his dram, and stretched his hand for his change. WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 199 "Beg pardon, Sir, but this must be forring money," said the landlady, turning a five-franc piece on her palm with suspicious curiosity. " Foreign ! is it possible ? " The stranger dived again into his pocket, and apparently with some difficulty hunted out half a crown. " Sixpence more, if you please, Sir ; three brandies, and bread-and-cheese, and the ale too, Sir." " How stupid I am ! I thought that French coin was a five-shilling piece. I fear I have no English money about me but this half-crown ; and I can't ask you to trust me, as you don't know me." "Oh, Sir, 'tis all one if you know the Squire. You may be passing this way again." " I shall not forget my debt when I do, you may be sure," said the stranger ; and, with a nod, he walked away in the same direction as Darrell and Lionel had already taken — through a turn-stile by a public path that, skirt- ing the church-yard and the neighboring parsonage, led along a corn-field to the demesnes of Fawley. The path was narrow, the corn rising on either side, so that two persons could not well walk abreast. Lionel was some paces in advance, Darrell walking slow. The stranger followed at a distance ; once or twice he quick- ened his pace, as if resolved to overtake Darrell ; then, apparently, his mind misgave him, and he again fell back. There was something furtive and sinister about the man. Little could be seen of his face, for he wore a large hat of foreign make, slouched deep over his brow, and 200 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? his lips and jaw were concealed by a dark and full mus- tache and beard. As much of the general outline of the countenance as remained distinguishable was, neverthe- less, decidedly handsome ; but a complexion naturally rich in color, seemed to have gained the heated look which comes with the earlier habits of intemperance, be- fore it fades into the leaden hues of the later. His dress bespoke pretension to a certain rank ; but its component parts were strangely ill-assorted, out of date, and out of repair : pearl-colored trowsers, with silk braids down their sides ; brodequins to match — Parisian fashion three years back, but the trowsers shabby, the braiding discolored, the brodequins in holes. The coat — once a black evening-dress coat — of a cut a year or two anterior to that of the trowsers; satin facings — cloth napless, satin stained. Over all, a sort of summer travelling-cloak, or rather large cape of a waterproof silk, once the ex- treme mode with the Lions of the Chaussee d^Antin when- ever they ventured to rove to Swiss cantons or German spas ; but which, from a certain dainty effeminacy in its shape and texture, required the minutest elegance in the general costume of its wearer as well as the cleanliest purity in itself. Worn by this traveller, and well-nigh w^orn out too, the cape became a finery, mournful as a tattered pennon over a wreck. Yet in spite of this dress, however unbecoming, shabby, obsolete, a second glance could scarcely fail to note the wearer as a man wonderfully w^ell shaped — tall, slender in the waist, long of limb, but with a girth of chest that WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 201 showed immense power — one of those rare figures that a female eye would admire for grace — a recruiting sergeant for athletic strength. But still the man's whole bearing and aspect, even apart from the dismal incongruities of his attire, which gave him the air of a beggared spendthrift, marred the favora- ble effect that physical comeliness in itself produces. Dif- ficult to describe how — difficult to say why — but there is a look which a man gets, and a gait which he contracts, when the rest of mankind cut him ; and this man had that look and that gait. " So, so," muttered the stranger. " That boy his heir ! — so, so. How can I get to speak to him ? In his own house he would not see me : it must be as now, in the open air; but how catch him alone ? and to lurk in the inn, in his own village — perhaps for a day — to watch an occasion ; impossible ! Besides, where is the money for it ? Courage, courage ! " He quickened his pace, pushed back his hat. " Courage ! Why not now ? Now or never ! " While the man thus mutteringly soliloquized, Lionel had reached the gate which opened into the grounds of Fawley, just in the rear of the little lake. Over the gate he swung himself lightly, and, turning back to Darrell, cried, " Here is the doe waiting to welcome you ! " Just as Darrell, scarcely heeding the exclamation, and with his musing eyes on the ground, approached the gate, a respectful hand opened it wide, a submissive head bowed low, a voice artificially soft faltered forth words, broken 202 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? and indistinct, but of which those most audible were — " Pardon me — something to communicate — important — hear me." Darrell started — just as the traveller almost touched him — started — recoiled, as one on whose path rises a wild beast. His bended head became erect, haughty, indignant, defying ; but his cheek was pale, and his lip quivered. " You here ! You in England — at Fawley ! You pre- sume to accost me! You, Sir, you — Lionel just caught the sound of the voice as the doe had come timidly up to him. He turned round sharply, and beheld Darrell's stern, imperious countenance, on which, stern and imperious though it was, a hasty glance .could discover, at once, a surprise, that almost bordered upon fear. Of the stranger still holding the gate he saw but the back, and his voice he did not hear, though by the man's gesture he was evidently replying. Lionel paused a moment irresolute ; but as the man continued to speak, he saw Darrell's face grow paler and paler, and in the impulse of a vague alarm he hastened toward him ; but just within three feet of the spot, Darrell arrested his steps. "Go home, Lionel; this person would speak to me in private." Then, in a lower tone, he said to the stranger, " Close the gate, Sir ; you are standing upon the land of my fathers. If you would speak with me, this way ; " and Ijrushing through the corn, Darrell strode toward a patch of waste land that adjoined the field : the man followed him, and both passed from Lionel's eyes. The doe had WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 203 come to the gate to greet her master ; she now rested her nostrils on the bar, with a look disappointed and plaintive. "Come," said Lionel, ''come." The doe would not stir. So the boy walked on alone, nor much occupied with what had just passed. " Doubtless," thought he, "some person in the neighborhood upon country business." He skirted the lake, and seated himself on a garden bench near the house. What did he there think of? — who knows ? Perhaps of the Great World ; perhaps of little Sophy ! Time fled on : the sun was receding in the west, when Darrell hurried past him without speaking, and entered the house. The host did not appear at dinner, nor all that evening. Mr. Mills made an excuse — Mr.Darrell did not feel very well. Fairthorn had Lionel all to himself, and having within the last few days reindulged in open cordiality to the young guest, he was especially communicative that even- ing. He talked much on Darrell, and with all the affec- tion that, in spite of his fear, the poor flute-player felt for his ungracious patron. He told many anecdotes of the stern man's tender kindness to all that came within his sphere. He told also anecdotes more striking of the kind man's sternness where some obstinate prejudice, some ruling passion, made him "granite." " liord, my dear young Sir," said Fairthorn, "be his most bitter open enemy, and fall down in the mire, the first hand to help you would be Guy Darrell's ; but be his 204 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? professed friend, and betray him to the worth of a straw, and never try to see his face again if you are wise — the most forsriving and the least forgiving of human beings. But — " The study door noiselessly opened, and Darrell's voice called out, "Fairthorn, let me speak with you." CHAPTER XT. Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny. When two men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny side; he will be the younger man of the two. The next morning, neither Darrell nor Fairthorn appeared at breakfast ; but as soon as Lionel had con- cluded that meal, Mr. Mills informed him, with customary poKteness, that Mr. Darrell wished to speak with him iu the study. Study, across the threshold of which Lionel had never yet set footstep ! He entered it now with a sentiment of mingled curiosity and awe. Nothing in it remarkable, save the portrait of the host's father over the mantle-piece. Books strewed tables, chairs, and floors in the disorder loved by habitual students. Near the window was a glass bowl containing gold fish, and close by, in its cage, a singing-bird. Darrell might exist with- out companionship in the human species, but not without something which he protected and cherished — a bird — even a fish. WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 205 Darrell looked really ill ; his keen eye was almost dim, and the lines in his face seemed deeper. But he spoke with his u^al calm passionless melody of voice. " Yes," he said, in answer to Lionel's really anxious inquiry ; " I am ill. Idle persons like me give way to illness. When I was a busy man, I never did ; and then illness gave way to me. My general plans are thus, if not actually altered, at least huraed to their consumma- tion sooner than I expected. Before you came here, I told you to come soon, or you might not find me. I meant to go abroad this summer ; I shall now start at once. I need the change of scene and air. You will return to London to-day." "To-day! You are not angry with me?" "Angry ! boy and cousin — no ! " resumed Darrell, in a tone of unusual tenderness. "Angry — fie! But since the parting must be, 'tis well to abridge the pain of long farewells. You must wish, too, to see your mother, and thank her for rearing you up so that you may step from poverty into ease with a head erect. You will give to Mrs. Haughton this letter : for yourself, your inclinations seem to tend toward the army. But before you decide on that career, I should like you to see something more of the world. Call to-morrow on Colonel Morley, in Curzon Street : this is his address. He will receive by to-day's post a note from me, requesting him to advise you. Follow his counsels in what belongs to the world. He is a man of the world — a distant connection of mine — who will be kind to you for my sake. Is there more L — IS 206 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? to say ? Yes. It seems an ungracious speech ; but I should speak it. Consider yourself sure from me of an independent income. Never let idle sycophants lead you into extravagance, by telling you that you will have more. But indulge not the expectation, however plausible, that you will be my heir." '' Mr. Darrell — oh, Sir — " " Hush — the expectation would be reasonable ; but I am a strange being. I might marry again — have heirs of my own. Eh, Sir — why not ? " Darrell spoke these last words almost fiercely, and fixed his eyes on Lionel as he repeated — "why not?" But seeing that" the boy's face evinced no surprise, the expression of his own relaxed, and he continued calmly — " Eno' ; what I have thus rudely said was kindly meant. It is a treason to a young man to let him count on a fortune which at last is left away from him. Now, Lionel, go ; enjoy your spring of life ! Go, hopeful and light-hearted. If sorrow reach you, battle with it ; if error mislead you, come fear- lessly to me for counsel. Why, boy — what is this — tears? Tut, tut." " It is your goodness," faltered Lionel. " I cannot help it. And is there nothing I can do for you in return ?" " Yes. much. Keep your name free from stain, and your heart open to such noble emotions as awaken tears like those. Ah, by-the-by, I heard from my lawyer to- day about your poor little protege. Not found yet, but he seems sanguine of quick success. You shaU know the moment I hear more." WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 207 " You will write to me then, Sir, and I may write to you ?" "As often as you please. Always direct to me here." "Shall you be long abroad?" Darrell's brows met. " I don't know," said he, curtly. "Adieu." He opened the door as he spoke. Lionel looked at him with wistful yearning, filial aflfec- tion, through his swimming eyes. " God bless you. Sir," he murmured simply, and passed away. " That blessing should have come from me ! " said Dar- rell to himself, as he turned back, and stood on his soli- tary hearth. " But they on whose heads I once poured a blessing, where are they — where? And that man's tale, reviving the audacious fable which the other, and I verily believe the less guilty knave of the two, sought to palm on me years ago ! Stop ; let me weigh well what he said. If it were true ; if it were true ! Oh, shame, shame ! " Folding his arms tightly on his breast, Darrell paced the room with slow measured strides, pondering deeply. He was, indeed, seeking to suppress feeling, and to exer- cise only judgment ; and his reasoning process seemed at length fully to satisfy him, for his countenance gradually cleared, and a triumphant smile passed across it. "A lie — certainly a palpable and gross lie ; lie it must and shall be. Never will I accept it as truth. Father" (looking full at the portrait over the mantle-shelf j, "father, fear not — never — never ! " BOOK THIRD. CHAPTER I. Certes, the Lizard is a shy and timorous creature. He runs into chinks and crannies if you come too near to him, and sheds his very tail for fear, if you catch it by the tip. He has not his being in good society — no one cages him, no one pets. He is an idle vagrant. But when he steals through the green herbage, and basks unmolested in the sun, he crowds perhaps as much enjoyment into one summer hour as a parrot, however pampered and erudite, spreads over a whole drawing-room life spent in saying, "How d'ye do?" and "Pretty Poll." On that dull and sombre summer morning in which the grandfather and grandchild departed from the friendly roof of Mr. Merle, very dull and very sombre were the thoughts of little Sophy. She walked slowly behind the gray cripple who had need to lean so heavily on his staff, and her eye had not even a smile for the golden butter- cups that glittered on dewy meads alongside the barren road. Thus had they proceeded apart and silent till they had passed the second milestone. There, Waife. rousing from his own reveries, which were perhaps yet more dreary than those of the dejected child, halted abruptly, passed (208) WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 209 his hand once or twice rapidly over his forehead, and turning round to Sophy, looked into her face with great kindness as she came slowly to his side. "You are sad, little one?" said he. "Yery sad, Grandy." "And displeased with me ? Yes, displeased that I have taken you suddenly away from the pretty young gentleman who was so kind to you, without encouraging the chance that you were to meet with him again." "It was not like you, Grandy," answered Sophy ; and her under-lip slightly pouted, while the big tears swelled to her eye. "True," said the vagabond; "anything resembling common-sense is not like me. But don't you think that I did what I felt was best for you ? Must I not have some good cause for it, whenever I have the heart deliberately to vex you ? " Sophy took his hand and pressed it, but she could not trust herself to speak, for she felt that at such effort she would have burst out into hearty crying. Then Waife proceeded to utter many of those wise sayings, old as the hills, and as high above our sorrows as hills are from the valley in which we walk. He said how foolish it was to unsettle the mind by preposterous fancies and impossible hopes. The pretty young gentleman could never be any thing to her, nor she to the pretty young gentleman. It might be very well for the pretty young gentleman to promise to correspond with her, but as soon as he returned to his friends he would have other things to think of, and 18* 210 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? she would soon be forgotten ; while she, on the contrary, would be thinking of him, and the Thames, and the butterflies, and find hard life still more irksome. Of all this, and much more, in the general way of consolers who set out on the principle that grief is a matter of logic, did Gentleman Waife deliver himself with a vigor of ratiocination which admitted of no reply, and conveyed not a particle of comfort. And feeling this, that great Actor — not that he was acting then — suddenly stopped, clasped the child in his arms, and murmured in broken accents — "But if I see you thus cast down, I shall have no strength left to hobble on through the world ; and the sooner I lie down, and the dust is shoveled over me, why, the better for you ; for it seems that Heaven sends you friends, and I tear you from them." And then Sophy fairly gave way to her sobs ; she twined her little arms round the old man's neck convul- sively, kissed his rough face with imploring pathetic fond- ness, and forced out through her tears, "Don't talk so I I've been ungrateful and wicked. I don't care for any one but my own dear, dear Grandy." After this little scene they both composed themselves, and felt much lighter of heart. They pursued their journey — no longer apart, but side by side, and the old man leaning, though very lightly, on the child's arm. But there was no immediate reaction from gloom to gayety. Waife began talking in softened under- tones, and vaguely, of his own past afflictions ; and partial as was the reference, how vast did the old man's sorrows WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 211 Beem beside the child's regrets ; and yet he commented on them as if rather in pitying her state than grieving for his own. "Ah ! at your age, my darling, I had not your troubles and hardships. I had not to trudge these dusty roads on foot with a broken-down, good-for-nothing scatterling. I trod rich carpets, and slept under silken curtains. I took the air in gay carriages — I such a scape-grace — and you, little child — you so good I All gone! all melted away from me, and not able now to be sure that you will have a crnst of bread this day week." " Oh, yes ! I shall have bread, and you, too, Grandy !'' cried , Sophy, with cheerful voice. " It was you who taught me to pray to God, and said that in all your troubles God had been good to you ; and He has been so good to me since I prayed to Him : for I have no dread- ful Mrs. Crane to beat me now, and say things more hard to bear than beating — and you have taken me to your- self. How I prayed for that ! And I take care of you, too, Grandy, don't I ? I prayed for that, too ; and as to carriages," added Sophy, with superb air, "I don't care if I am never in a carriage as long as I live ; and you know I have been in a van, which is bigger than a car- riage, and I didn^t like that at all. But how came people to behave so ill to you, Grandy ? " "I never said people behaved ill to me, Sophy." " Did not they take away the carpets and silk curtains, and all the fine things you had as a little boy ?" " I don't know exactly," replied Waife, with a puzzled 212 WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? look, "that people actually took them away — but they melted away. However, I had much still to be thankful for — I was so strong, and had such high spirits, Sophy, and found people not behaving ill to me — quite the con- trary — so kind. I found no Crane (she monster) as you did, my little angel. Such prospects before me, if I had walked straight toward them I But I followed my own fancy, which led me zigzag ; and now that I would stray back into the high-road, you see before you a man whom a Justice of the Peace could send to the treadmill for pre- suming to live without a livelihood." Sophy. "Not without a livelihood ? the what did you call it! independent income — that is, the Three Pounds, Grandy?" Waife (admiringly). " Sensible child ! That is true. Yes, Heaven is very good to me still. Ah ! what signi- fies fortune ? How happy I was with my dear Lizzy, and yet no two persons could live more from hand to mouth." Sophy (rather jealously). " Lizzy ? " Waife (with moistened eyes, and looking down). " My wife. She was only spared to me two years — such sunny years ! And how grateful I ought to be that she did not live longer. She was saved — such — such — such shame and misery ! " A long pause. Waife resumed, with a rush from memory, as if pluck- ing himself from the claws of a harpy — "What's the good of looking back I A man's gone self is a dead thing. It is not I — now tramping this road, with you to lean upon — whom I see when I would turn to look behind on WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? 213 that which I once was — it is another being-, defunct and buried ; and when I saj to myself, ' That being did so and so,' it is like reading an epitaph on a tombstone. So, at last, solitary and hopeless, I came back to my owti land; and I found you — a blessing greater than I had ever dared to count on. And how was I to maintain you, and take you from that long-nosed alligator called Crane, and put you in womanly, gentle hands, for I never thought then of subjecting you to all you have since un- dergone with me. I who did not know one useful thing ill life by which a man can turn a penny. And then, as I was all alone in a village ale-house, on my way back from — it does not signify from what, or from whence, but I was disappointed and despairing — Providence merci- fully threw in my way — Mr. Rugge -and ordained me to be of great service to that ruffian — and that ruffian of great use to me." Sophy. "Ah ! how was that ? " Waife. " It was Fair-time in the village wherein I stopped, and Rugge's principal actor was taken ofif by delirium tremens, which is Latin for a disease common to men who eat little and drink much. Rugge came into the ale-house, bemoaning his loss. A bright thought struck me. Once in my day I had been used to acting. I offered to try my chance on Mr. Rugge's stage ; he caught at me — I at him. I succeeded ; we came to terms, and my little Sophy was thus taken from that ringleted crocodile, and placed with Christian females who wore caps and read their Bible. Is not Heaven good to n>, S')phy — and t