purpose, disinterested humanity. I know not
yet if you have the first; you reveal to me the second.
Yes! I accept the duties you propose to me; I
will do more than leave to you the chance of discovering
this poor child. I will direct my solicitor
to take the right steps to do so. I will see
that she is safe from the ills you feel for her.
Lionel, more still, I am impatient till I write to
Mrs. Haughton. I did her wrong. Remember,
I have never seen her. I resented in her the
cause of my quarrel with your father, who was once
dear to me. Enough of that. I disliked
the tone of her letters to me. I disliked it
in the mother of a boy who had Darrell blood; other
reasons too,—let them pass. But in
providing for your education; I certainly thought
her relations provided for her support. She never
asked me for help there; and, judging of her hastily,
I thought she would not have scrupled to do so, if
my help there had not been forestalled. You
have made me understand her better; and, at all events,
three-fourths of what we are in boyhood most of us
owe to our mothers! You are frank, fearless,
affectionate, a gentleman. I respect the mother
who has such a son.”
Certainly praise was rare upon Darrell’s lips;
but when he did praise, he knew how to do it!
And no man will ever command others who has not by
nature that gift! It cannot be learned.
Art and experience can only refine its expression.
He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his
eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his
gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period
but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir
in another man’s child, sees the full stop at
the end of the sentence.
Lionel’s departure was indefinitely postponed;
nothing more was said of it. Meanwhile Darrell’s
manner towards him underwent a marked change.
The previous indifference the rich kinsman had hitherto
shown as to the boy’s past life, and the peculiarities
of his intellect and character, wholly vanished.
He sought now, on the contrary, to plumb thoroughly
the more hidden depths which lurk in the nature of
every human being, and which, in Lionel, were the
more difficult to discern from the vivacity and candour
which covered with so smooth and charming a surface
a pride tremulously sensitive, and an ambition that
startled himself in the hours when solitude and revery
reflect upon the visions of youth the giant outline
of its own hopes.
Darrell was not dissatisfied with the results of his
survey; yet often, when perhaps most pleased, a shade
would pass over his countenance; and had a woman who
loved him been by to listen, she would have heard the
short slight sigh which came and went too quickly for
the duller sense of man’s friendship to recognize
it as the sound of sorrow.
