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.
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.
