“Half our preferences are due to the vanity they flatter. Few can ride this horse; any one, perhaps, that.”
“There speaks the Dare-all!” said Lionel, laughing. The host did not look displeased.
“Where no difficulty, there no pleasure,” said he in his curt laconic diction. “I was in Spain two years ago. I had not an English horse there, so I bought that Andalusian jennet. What has served him at need, no preux chevalier would leave to the chance of ill-usage. So the jennet came with me to England. You have not been much accustomed to ride, I suppose?”
“Not much; but my dear mother thought I ought to learn. She pinched for a whole year to have me taught at a riding-school during one school vacation.”
“Your mother’s relations are, I believe, well off. Do they suffer her to pinch?”
“I do not know that she has relations living; she never speaks of them.”
“Indeed!” This was the first question on home matters that Darrell had ever directly addressed to Lionel. He there dropped the subject, and said, after a short pause, “I was not aware that you are a horseman, or I would have asked you to accompany me; will you do so to-morrow, and mount the jennet?”
“Oh, thank you; I should like it so much.”
Darrell turned abruptly away from the bright, grateful eyes. “I am only sorry,” he added, looking aside, “that our excursions can be but few. On Friday next I shall submit to you a proposition; if you accept it, we shall part on Saturday,—liking each other, I hope: speaking for myself, the experiment has not failed; and on yours?”
“On mine!—oh, Mr. Darrell, if I dared but tell you what recollections of yourself the experiment will bequeath to me!”
“Do not tell me, if they imply a compliment,” answered Darrell, with the low silvery laugh which so melodiously expressed indifference and repelled affection. He entered the stable-yard, dismounted; and on returning to Lionel, the sound of the flute stole forth, as if from the eaves of the gabled roof. “Could the pipe of Horace’s Faunus be sweeter than that flute?” said Darrell,
“‘Utcunque dulci, Tyndare, fistula,
Valles,’ etc.
What a lovely ode that is! What knowledge of town life! what susceptibility to the rural! Of all the Latins, Horace is the only one with whom I could wish to have spent a week. But no! I could not have discussed the brief span of human life with locks steeped in Malobathran balm and wreathed with that silly myrtle. Horace and I would have quarrelled over the first heady bowl of Massie. We never can quarrel now! Blessed subject and poet-laureate of Queen Proserpine, and, I dare swear, the most gentlemanlike poet she ever received at court; henceforth his task is to uncoil the asps from the brows of Alecto, and arrest the ambitious Orion from the chase after visionary lions.”
CHAPTER XI
Showing that if a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart is a letter of credit.
The next day they rode forth, host and guest, and that ride proved an eventful crisis in the fortune of Lionel Haughton. Hitherto I have elaborately dwelt on the fact that whatever the regard Darrell might feel for him, it was a regard apart from that interest which accepts a responsibility and links to itself a fate. And even if, at moments, the powerful and wealthy man had felt that interest, he had thrust it from him. That he meant to be generous was indeed certain, and this he had typically shown in a very trite matter-of-fact way. The tailor, whose visit had led to such perturbation, had received instructions beyond the mere supply of the raiment for which he had been summoned; and a large patent portmanteau, containing all that might constitute the liberal outfit of a young man in the rank of gentleman, had arrived at Fawley, and amazed and moved Lionel, whom Darrell had by this time thoroughly reconciled to the acceptance of benefits. The gift denoted this: “In recognizing you as kinsman, I shall henceforth provide for you as gentleman.” Darrell indeed meditated applying for an appointment in one of the public offices, the settlement of a liberal allowance, and a parting shake of the hand, which should imply, “I have now behaved as becomes me: the rest belongs to you. We may never meet again. There is no reason why this good-by may not be forever.”
But in the course of that ride, Darrell’s intentions changed. Wherefore? You will never guess! Nothing so remote as the distance between cause and effect, and the cause for the effect here was—poor little Sophy.
The day was fresh, with a lovely breeze, as the two riders rode briskly over the turf of rolling commons, with the feathery boughs of neighbouring woodlands tossed joyously to and fro by the sportive summer wind. The exhilarating exercise and air raised Lionel’s spirits, and released his tongue from all trammels; and when a boy is in high spirits, ten to one but he grows a frank egotist, feels the teeming life of his individuality, and talks about himself. Quite unconsciously, Lionel rattled out gay anecdotes of his school-days; his quarrel with a demoniacal usher; how he ran away; what befell him; how the doctor went after, and brought him back; how splendidly the doctor behaved,—neither flogged nor expelled him, but after patiently listening, while he rebuked the pupil, dismissed the usher, to the joy of the whole academy; how he fought the head boy in the school for calling the doctor a sneak; how, licked twice, he yet fought that head boy a third time, and licked him; how, when head boy himself, he had roused the whole school into a civil war, dividing the boys into Cavaliers and Roundheads; how clay was rolled out into cannon-balls and pistol-shots, sticks shaped into swords, the playground disturbed to construct fortifications; how a slovenly stout boy enacted Cromwell; how he himself was elevated into Prince Rupert; and how, reversing all history, and infamously degrading Cromwell, Rupert would not consent to be beaten; and Cromwell at the last, disabled by an untoward blow across the knuckles, ignominiously yielded himself prisoner, was tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to be shot! To all this rubbish did Darrell incline his patient ear,—not encouraging, not interrupting, but sometimes stifling a sigh at the sound of Lionel’s merry laugh, or the sight of his fair face, with heightened glow on his cheeks, and his long silky hair, worthy the name of lovelocks, blown by the wind from the open loyal features, which might well have graced the portrait of some youthful Cavalier. On bounded the Spanish jennet, on rattled the boy rider. He had left school now, in his headlong talk; he was describing his first friendship with Frank Vance, as a lodger at his mother’s; how example fired him, and he took to sketch-work and painting; how kindly Vance gave him lessons; how at one time he wished to be a painter; how much the mere idea of such a thing vexed his mother, and how little she was moved when he told her that Titian was of a very ancient family, and that Francis I., archetype of gentleman, visited Leonardo da Vinci’s sick-bed; and that Henry VIII. had said to a pert lord who had snubbed Holbein, “I can make a lord any day, but I cannot make a Holbein!” how Mrs. Haughton still confounded all painters in the general image of the painter and the plumber who had cheated her so shamefully in the renewed window-sashes and redecorated walls, which Time and the four children of an Irish family had made necessary to the letting of the first floor. And these playful allusions to the maternal ideas were still not irreverent, but contrived so as rather to prepossess Darrell in Mrs. Haughton’s favour by bringing out traits of a simple natural mother, too proud, perhaps, of her only son, not caring what she did, how she worked, so that he might not lose caste as a born Haughton. Darrell understood, and nodded his head approvingly. “Certainly,” he said, speaking almost for the first time, “Fame confers a rank above that of gentlemen and of kings; and as soon as she issues her patent of nobility, it matters not a straw whether the recipient be the son of a Bourbon or of a tallow-chandler. But if Fame withhold her patent; if a well-born man paint aldermen, and be not famous (and I dare say you would have been neither a Titian nor a Holbein),—why, he might as well be a painter and plumber, and has a better chance even of bread and cheese by standing to his post as gentleman. Mrs. Haughton