“No, 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 Mr. Darrell had not been the most singular of
men, he might well have been offended. As it
was, though few were 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? 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 misanthropical
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!” Vain menace!
No sooner did Mr. Fairthorn catch glimpse of Darrell’s
countenance within ten yards of the porch, than, 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
penetrabilis astris”—in that sponge-like
and cavernous abode wherewith benignant Providence
had suited the locality to the creature.
CHAPTER VIII.
New imbroglio in that
ever-recurring, never-to-be-settled 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!”
