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 him the pith and
substance of Fortune's grand nobodies, who become Fame's abrupt
somebodies when the chances of life throw suddenly in their way a noble
something, to be ardently coveted and boldly won. But I repeat, as yet
he was a boy; so he sat there, his hands before his face, an unreasoning
self-torturer. He knew now why this haughty Darrell had written with so
little tenderness and respect to his beloved mother. Darrell looked on
her as the cause of his ignoble kinsman's "sale of name;" nay, most
probably ascribed to her not the fond girlish love which levels all
disparities of rank, but the vulgar cold-blooded design to exchange her
father's bank-notes for a marriage beyond her station. And he was the
debtor to this supercilious creditor, as his father had been before him.
His father! till then he had been so proud of that relationship! Mrs.
Haughton had not been happy with her captain; his confirmed habits of
wild dissipation had embittered her union, and at last worn away her
wifely affections. But she had tended and nursed him in his last illness
as the lover of her youth; and though occasionally she hinted at his
faults, she ever spoke of him as the ornament of all society,--poor,
it is true, harassed by unfeeling creditors, but the finest of fine
gentlemen. Lionel had never heard from her of the ancestral estates sold
for a gambling debt; never from her of the county jail nor the mercenary
misalliance. In boyhood, before we have any cause to be proud of
ourselves, we are so proud of our fathers, if we have a decent excuse for
it. Of his father could Lionel Haughton be proud now? And Darrell was
cognizant of his paternal disgrace, had taunted his father in yonder old
hall--for what?--the marriage from which Lionel sprang! The hands grew
tighter and tighter before that burning face. He did not weep, as he had
done in Vance's presence at a thought much less galling. Not that tears
would have misbecome him. Shallow judges of human nature are they who
think that tears in themselves ever misbecome boy or even man. Well did
the sternest of Roman writers place the arch distinction of humanity
aloft from all meaner of Heaven's creatures, in the prerogative of tears!
Sooner mayst thou trust thy purse to a professional pickpocket than give
loyal friendship to the man who boasts of eyes to which the heart never
mounts in dew! Only, when man weeps he should be alone,--not because
tears are weak, but because they should be sacred. Tears are akin to
prayers. Pharisees parade prayer! impostors parade tears. O Pegasus,
Pegasus,--softly, softly,--thou hast hurried me off amidst the clouds:
drop me gently down--there, by the side of the motionless boy in the
shadowy glen.
