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 portrait of his father over the mantelpiece 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 revealed the delicacy of intellect, but not its power. There was something forlorn, but 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 my sacrifices were in vain. The race is not to be rebuilt! No grandchild of yours will succeed me,—me, the last of the 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, peering 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, almost upsetting the tall desk; he flung himself on his knees at Darrell’s feet, and exclaimed in broken words, “Master, 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 moment, and it will be over.”
One moment! That might be but a figure of speech; yet before Lionel had finished half the canto that was plunging him into fairyland, Darrell was standing by him with his ordinary tranquil mien; and Fairthorn’s flute from behind the boughs of a neighbouring lime-tree was breathing out an air as dulcet as if careless Fauns still piped in Arcady, and Grief were a far dweller on the other side of the mountains, of whom shepherds, reclining under summer 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?
CHAPTER XIV
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. Philosophy 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 beechwoods, still beneath the weight of the July noon. Lionel had been talking about the “Faerie Queene,” knight-errantry, the sweet impossible dream-life that, safe from Time, glides by bower and hall, through magic forests and by witching eaves 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 before them; and Lionel said merrily,—
“But this is the very scene! 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.”
“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 land.” 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 civilization does with romance itself,—I would have enclosed 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 pretty 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 conqueror? Man’s characteristic cerebral organ must certainly be acquisitiveness.”
“Was it his organ of acquisitiveness that moved Themistocles 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, what object it longs for; still it is to acquire! it never deserts us while we live.”
“And yet, 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 expression of sympathy or of interest; and the boy fell into conjecture, what had killed to the world this man’s intellectual 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 hereafter 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
