CHAPTER XII.
Guy Darrell gives way to an impulse, and quickly decides what he
will do with it.
"Lionel Haughton," said Guy Darrell, regaining his young cousin's side,
and speaking in a firm and measured voice, "I have to thank you for one
very happy minute; the sight of a heart so fresh in the limpid purity of
goodness is a luxury you cannot comprehend till you have come to my age;
journeyed, like me, from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Heed
me: if you had been half-a-dozen years older, and this child for whom you
plead had been a fair young woman, perhaps just as innocent, just as
charming,--more in peril,--my benevolence would have lain as dormant as a
stone. A young man's foolish sentiment for a pretty girl,--as your true
friend, I should have shrugged my shoulders and said, 'Beware!' Had I
been your father, I should have taken alarm and frowned. I should have
seen the sickly romance which ends in dupes and deceivers. But at your
age, you, hearty, genial, and open-hearted boy,--you, caught but by the
chivalrous compassion for helpless female childhood,--oh, that you were
my son,--oh, that my dear father's blood were in those knightly veins!
I had a son once! God took him;" the strong man's lips quivered: he
hurried on. "I felt there was manhood in you, when you wrote to fling my
churlish favours in my teeth; when you would have left my roof-tree in a
burst of passion which might be foolish, but was nobler than the wisdom
of calculating submission, manhood, but only perhaps man's pride as man,
--man's heart not less cold than winter. To-day you have shown me
something far better than pride; that nature which constitutes the heroic
temperament is completed by two attributes,--unflinching 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.
