not change race.”
“But how comes it that the Haughtons, my grandfather Haughton, I suppose, would do nothing for his own kinswoman?”
“It was not your grandfather Robert Haughton, who was a generous man,—he was then a mere youngster, hiding himself for debt,—but your great—grandfather, who was a hard man and on the turf. He never had money to give,—only money for betting. He left the Haughton estates sadly clipped. But when Robert succeeded, he came forward, was godfather to our Mr. Darrell, insisted on sharing the expense of sending him to Eton, where he became greatly distinguished; thence to Oxford, where he increased his reputation; and would probably have done more for him, only Mr. Darrell, once his foot on the ladder, wanted no help to climb to the top.”
“Then my grandfather, Robert, still had the Haughton estates? Their last relics had not been yet transmuted by Mr. Cox into squares and a paragon?”
“No; the grand old mansion, though much dilapidated, with its park, though stripped of salable timber, was still left with a rental from farms that still appertained to the residence, which would have sufficed a prudent man for the luxuries of life, and allowed a reserve fund to clear off the mortgages gradually. Abstinence and self-denial for one or two generations would have made a property, daily rising in value as the metropolis advanced to its outskirts, a princely estate for a third. But Robert Haughton, though not on the turf, had a grand way of living; and while Guy Darrell went into the law to make a small patrimony a large fortune, your father, my dear young sir, was put into the Guards to reduce a large patrimony—into Mr. Cox’s distillery.”
Lionel coloured, but remained silent.
Fairthorn, who was as unconscious in his zest of narrator that he was giving pain as an entomologist in his zest for collecting when he pins a live moth in his cabinet, resumed: “Your father and Guy Darrell were warm friends as boys and youths. Guy was the elder of the two, and Charlie Haughton (I beg your pardon, he was always called Charlie) looked up to him as to an elder brother. Many’s the scrape Guy got him out of; and many a pound, I believe, when Guy had some funds of his own, did Guy lend to Charlie.”
“I am very sorry to hear that,” said Lionel, sharply. Fairthorn looked frightened. “I ‘m afraid I have made a blunder. Don’t tell Mr. Darrell.”
“Certainly not; I promise. But how came my father to need this aid, and how came they at last to quarrel?”
Your father Charlie became a gay young man about town, and very much the fashion. He was like you in person, only his forehead was lower, and his eye not so steady. Mr. Darrell studied the law in chambers. When Robert Haughton died, what with his debts, what with his father’s, and what with Charlie’s post-obits and I O U’s, there seemed small chance indeed of saving the estate to the Haughtons. But then Mr. Darrell looked close into matters, and with such skill did he settle them that he removed the fear of foreclosure; and what with increasing the rental here and there, and replacing old mortgages by new at less interest, he contrived to extract from the property an income of nine hundred pounds a year to Charlie (three times the income Darrell had inherited himself), where before it had seemed that the debts were more than the assets. Foreseeing how much the land would rise in value, he then earnestly implored Charlie (who unluckily had the estate in fee-simple, as Mr. Darrell has this, to sell if he pleased) to live on his income, and in a few years a part of the property might be sold for building purposes, on terms that would save all the rest, with the old house in which Darrells and Haughtons both had once reared generations. Charlie promised, I know, and I’ve no doubt, my dear young sir, quite sincerely; but all men are not granite! He took to gambling, incurred debts of honour, sold the farms one by one, resorted to usurers, and one night, after playing six hours at piquet, nothing was left for him but to sell all that remained to Mr. Cox the distiller, unknown to Mr. Darrell, who was then married himself, working hard, and living quite out of news of the fashionable world. Then Charlie Haughton sold out of the Guards, spent what he got for his commission, went into the Line; and finally, in a country town, in which I don’t think he was quartered, but having gone there on some sporting speculation, was unwillingly detained, married—”
“My mother!” said Lionel, haughtily; “and the best of women she is. What then?”
“Nothing, my dear young sir,—nothing, except that Mr. Darrell never forgave it. He has his prejudices: this marriage shocked one of them.”
“Prejudice against my poor mother! I always supposed so! I wonder why? The most simple-hearted, inoffensive, affectionate woman.”
“I have not a doubt of it; but it is beginning to rain. Let us go home. I should like some luncheon: it breaks the day.”
“Tell me first why Mr. Darrell has a prejudice against my mother. I don’t think that he has even seen her. Unaccountable caprice! Shocked him, too,—what a word! Tell me—I beg—I insist.”
“But you know,” said Fairthorn, half piteously, half snappishly, “that Mrs. Haughton was the daughter of a linendraper, and her father’s money got Charlie out of the county jail; and Mr. Darrell said, ‘Sold even your name!’ My father heard him say it in the hall at Fawley. Mr. Darrell was there during a long vacation, and your father came to see him. Your father fired up, and they never saw each other, I believe, again.”
Lionel remained still as if thunder-stricken. Something in his mother’s language and manner had at times made him suspect that she was not so well born as his father. But it was not the discovery that she was a tradesman’s daughter that galled him; it was the thought that his father was bought for the altar out of the county jail! It was those cutting words, “Sold even your name.” His face, before very crimson, became livid; his head sank on his breast. He walked towards the old gloomy house by Fairthorn’s side, as one who, for the first time in life, feels on his heart the leaden weight of an hereditary shame.
CHAPTER VI
Showing how sinful it is in a man who does not care for his honour to beget children.
When Lionel saw Mr. Fairthorn devoting his intellectual being to the contents of a cold chicken-pie, he silently stepped out of the room and slunk away into a thick copse at the farthest end of the paddock. He longed to be alone. The rain descended, not heavily, but in penetrating drizzle; he did not feel it, or rather he felt glad that there was no gaudy mocking sunlight. He sat down forlorn in the hollows of a glen which the copse covered, and buried his face in his clasped hands.
Lionel Haughton, as the reader may have noticed, was no premature man,—a manly boy, but still a habitant of the twilight, dreamy, shadow-land of boyhood. Noble elements were stirring fitfully within him, but their agencies were crude and undeveloped. Sometimes, through the native acuteness of his intellect, he apprehended truths quickly and truly as a man; then, again, through the warm haze of undisciplined tenderness, or the raw mists of that sensitive pride in which objects, small in themselves, loom large with undetected outlines, he fell back into the passionate dimness of a child’s reasoning. He was intensely ambitious; Quixotic in the point of honour; dauntless in peril: but morbidly trembling at the very shadow of disgrace, as a foal, destined to be the war-horse and trample down levelled steel, starts in its tranquil pastures at the rustling of a leaf. Glowingly romantic, but not inclined to vent romance in literary creations, his feelings were the more high-wrought and enthusiastic because they had no outlet in poetic channels. Most boys of great ability and strong passion write verses—it is Nature’s relief to brain and heart at the critical turning age. Most boys thus gifted do so; a few do not, and out of those few Fate selects the great men of action,—those large luminous characters that stamp poetry on the world’s prosaic surface. Lionel had in
