apparently dropped, now it is borne again by my cousin.”
“He bears it only as a Christian name. Your grandfather was his sponsor. But he is nevertheless the head of your family.”
“So he says. How?”
Fairthorn gathered himself up, his knees to his chin, and began in the tone of a guide who has got his lesson by heart; though it was not long before he warmed into his subject.
“The Darrells are supposed to have got their name from a knight in the reign of Edward III., who held the lists in a joust victoriously against all comers, and was called, or called himself, John the Dare-all; or, in old spelling, the Der-all. They were amongst the most powerful families in the country; their alliances were with the highest houses,—Montfichets, Nevilles, Mowbrays; they descended through such marriages from the blood of Plantagenet kings. You’ll find their names in chronicles in the early French wars. Unluckily they attached themselves to the fortunes of Earl Warwick, the king-maker, to whose blood they were allied; their representative was killed in the fatal field of Barnet; their estates were of course confiscated; the sole son and heir of that ill-fated politician passed into the Low Countries, where he served as a soldier. His son and grandson followed the same calling under foreign banners. But they must have kept up the love of the old land; for in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., the last male Darrell returned to England with some broad gold pieces saved by himself or his exiled fathers, bought some land in this county, in which the ancestral possessions had once been large, and built the present house, of a size suited to the altered fortunes of a race that in a former age had manned castles with retainers. The baptismal name of the soldier who thus partially refounded the old line in England was that now borne by your cousin, Guy,—a name always favoured by Fortune in the family annals; for in Elizabeth’s time, from the rank of small gentry, to which their fortune alone lifted them since their return to their native land, the Darrells rose once more into wealth and eminence under a handsome young Sir Guy,—we have his picture in black flowered velvet,—who married the heiress of the Haughtons, a family that had grown rich under the Tudors, and was in high favour with the Maiden-Queen. This Sir Guy was befriended by Essex and knighted by Elizabeth herself. Their old house was then abandoned for the larger mansion of the Haughtons, which had also the advantage of being nearer to the Court, The renewed prosperity of the Darrells was of short duration. The Civil Wars came on, and Sir John Darrell took the losing side. He escaped to France with his only son. He is said to have been an accomplished, melancholy man; and my belief is, that he composed that air which you justly admire for its mournful sweetness. He turned Roman Catholic and died in a convent. But the son, Ralph, was brought up in France with Charles II, and other gay roisterers. On the return of the Stuart, Ralph ran off with the daughter of the Roundhead to whom his estates had been given, and, after getting them back, left his wife in the country, and made love to other men’s wives in town. Shocking profligate! no fruit could thrive upon such a branch. He squandered all he could squander, and would have left his children beggars, but that he was providentially slain in a tavern brawl for boasting of a lady’s favours to her husband’s face. The husband suddenly stabbed him,—no fair duello, for Sir Ralph was invincible with the small sword. Still the family fortune was much dilapidated, yet still the Darrells lived in the fine house of the Haughtons, and left Fawley to the owls. But Sir Ralph’s son, in his old age, married a second time, a young lady of high rank, an earl’s daughter. He must have been very much in love with her, despite his age, for to win her consent or her father’s he agreed to settle all the Haughton estates on her and the children she might bear to him. The smaller Darrell property had already been entailed on his son by his first marriage. This is how the family came to split. Old Darrell had children by his second wife; the eldest of those children took the Haughton name and inherited the Haughton property. The son by the first marriage had nothing but Fawley and the scanty domain round it. You descend from the second marriage, Mr. Darrell from the first. You understand now, my dear young sir?” “Yes, a little; but I should very much like to know where those fine Haughton estates are now?”
“Where they are now? I can’t say. They were once in Middlesex. Probably much of the land, as it was sold piecemeal, fell into small allotments, constantly changing hands. But the last relics of the property were, I know, bought on speculation by Cox the distiller; for, when we were in London, by Mr. Darrell’s desire I went to look after them, and inquire if they could be repurchased. And I found that so rapid in a few years has been the prosperity of this great commercial country, that if one did buy them back, one would buy twelve villas, several streets, two squares, and a paragon! But as that symptom of national advancement, though a proud thought in itself, may not have any pleasing interest for you, I return to the Darrells. From the time in which the Haughton estate had parted from them, they settled back in their old house of Fawley. But they could never again hold up their heads with the noblemen and great squires in the county. As much as they could do to live at all upon the little patrimony; still the reminiscence of what they had been made them maintain it jealously and entail it rigidly. The eldest son would never have thought of any profession or business; the younger sons generally became soldiers, and being always a venturesome race, and having nothing particular to make them value their existence, were no less generally killed off betimes. The family became thoroughly obscure, slipped out of place in the county, seldom rose to be even justices of the peace, never contrived to marry heiresses again, but only the daughters of some neighbouring parson or squire as poor as themselves, but always of gentle blood. Oh, they were as proud as Spaniards in that respect! So from father to son, each generation grew obscurer and poorer; for, entail the estate as they might, still some settlements on it were necessary, and no settlements were ever brought into it; and thus entails were cut off to admit some new mortgage, till the rent-roll was somewhat less than L300 a year when Mr. Darrell’s father came into possession. Yet somehow or other he got to college, where no Darrell had been since the time of the Glorious Revolution, and was a learned man and an antiquary,—A GREAT ANTIQUARY! You may have read his works. I know there is one copy of them in the British Museum, and there is another here, but that copy Mr. Darrell keeps under lock and key.”
“I am ashamed to say I don’t even know the titles of those works.”
“There were ‘Popular Ballads on the Wars of the Roses;’ ‘Darrelliana,’ consisting of traditional and other memorials of the Darrell family; ‘Inquiry into the Origin of Legends Connected with Dragons;’ ‘Hours amongst Monumental Brasses,’ and other ingenious lucubrations above the taste of the vulgar; some of them were even read at the Royal Society of Antiquaries. They cost much to print and publish. But I have heard my father, who was his bailiff, say that he was a pleasant man, and was fond of reciting old scraps of poetry, which he did with great energy; indeed, Mr. Darrell declares that it was the noticing, in his father’s animated and felicitous elocution, the effects that voice, look, and delivery can give to words, which made Mr. Darrell himself the fine speaker he is. But I can only recollect the antiquary as a very majestic gentleman, with a long pigtail—awful, rather, not so much so as his son, but still awful—and so sad-looking; you would not have recovered your spirits for a week if you had seen him, especially when the old house wanted repairs, and he was thinking how he could pay for them!”
“Was Mr. Darrell, the present one, an only child?”
“Yes, and much with his father, whom he loved most dearly, and to this day he sighs if he has to mention his father’s name! He has old Mr. Darrell’s portrait over the chimney-piece in his own reading-room; and he had it in his own library in Carlton Gardens. Our Mr. Darrell’s mother was very pretty, even as I remember her: she died when he was about ten years old. And she too was a relation of yours,—a Haughton by blood,—but perhaps you will be ashamed of her, when I say she was a governess in a rich mercantile family. She had been left an orphan. I believe old Mr. Darrell (not that he was old then) married her because the Haughtons could or would do nothing for her, and because she was much snubbed and put upon, as I am told governesses usually are,—married her because, poor as he was, he was still the head of both families, and bound to do what he could for decayed scions. The first governess a Darrell, ever
