There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to
the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the
ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet
true to their own laws, potent in their own influences. Philosophy
speculates on their effects, and disputes upon their uses; men who
do not philosophize regard them as special messengers and bodes of
evil.
They came out of the little park into a by-lane; a vast tract of common
land, yellow with furze and undulated with swell and hollow, spreading in
front; to their right the dark beechwoods, still beneath the weight of
the July noon. Lionel had been talking about the "Faerie Queene,"
knight-errantry, the sweet impossible dream-life that, safe from Time,
glides by bower and hall, through magic forests and by witching eaves in
the world of poet-books. And Darrell listened, and the flute-notes
mingled with the atmosphere faint and far off, like voices from that
world itself.
Out then they came, this broad waste land before them; and Lionel said
merrily,--
"But this is the very scene! Here the young knight, leaving his father's
hall, would have checked his destrier, glancing wistfully now over that
green wild which seems so boundless, now to the 'umbrageous horror' of
those breathless woodlands, and questioned himself which way to take for
adventure."
"Yes," said Darrell, coming out from his long reserve on all that
concerned his past life,--"Yes, and the gold of the gorse-blossoms
tempted me; and I took the waste land." He paused a moment, and renewed:
"And then, when I had known cities and men, and snatched romance from
dull matter-of-fact, then I would have done as civilization does with
romance itself,--I would have enclosed the waste land for my own
aggrandizement. Look," he continued, with a sweep of the hand round the
width of prospect, "all that you see to the verge of the horizon, some
fourteen years ago, was to have been thrown into the pretty paddock we
have just quitted, and serve as park round the house I was then building.
Vanity of human wishes! What but the several proportions of their common
folly distinguishes the baffled squire from the arrested conqueror?
Man's characteristic cerebral organ must certainly be acquisitiveness."
"Was it his organ of acquisitiveness that moved Themistocles to boast
that 'he could make a small state great'?" "Well remembered,--
ingeniously quoted," returned Darrell, with the polite bend of his
stately head. "Yes, I suspect that the coveting organ had much to do
with the boast. To build a name was the earliest dream of Themistocles,
if we are to accept the anecdote that makes him say, 'The trophies of
Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep,' To build a name, or to create a
fortune, are but varying applications of one human passion. The desire
of something we have not is the first of our childish remembrances: it
matters not what form it takes, what object it longs for; still it is to
acquire! it never deserts us while we live."
"And yet, if I might, I should like to ask, what you now desire that you
do not possess?"
"I--nothing; but I spoke of the living! I am dead. Only," added
Darrell, with his silvery laugh, "I say, as poor Chesterfield said before
me, 'It is a secret: keep it.'"
Lionel made no reply; the melancholy of the words saddened him: but
Darrell's manner repelled the expression of sympathy or of interest; and
the boy fell into conjecture, what had killed to the world this man's
intellectual life?
And thus silently they continued to wander on till the sound of the flute
had long been lost to their ears. Was the musician playing still?
At length they came round to the other end of Fawley village, and Darrell
again became animated.
"Perhaps," said he, returning to the subject of talk that had been
abruptly suspended,--"perhaps the love of power is at the origin of each
restless courtship of Fortune: yet, after all, who has power with less
alloy than the village thane? With so little effort, so little thought,
the man in the manor-house can make men in the cottage happier here below
and more fit for a hereafter yonder. In leaving the world I come from
contest and pilgrimage, like our sires the Crusaders, to reign at home."
As he spoke, he entered one of the cottages. An old paralytic man was
seated by the fire, hot though the July sun was out of doors; and his
wife, of the same age, and almost as helpless, was reading to him a
chapter in the Old Testament,--the fifth chapter in Genesis, containing
the genealogy, age, and death of the patriarchs before the Flood. How
the faces of the couple brightened when Darrell entered. "Master Guy!"
said the old man, tremulously rising. The world-weary orator and lawyer
was still Master Guy to him.
"Sit down, Matthew, and let, me read you a chapter." Darrell took the
Holy Book, and read the Sermon on the Mount. Never had Lionel heard
anything like that reading; the feeling which brought out the depth of
the sense, the tones, sweeter than the flute, which clothed the divine
words in music. As Darrell ceased, some beauty seemed gone from the day.
He lingered a few minutes, talking kindly and familiarly, and then turned
into another cottage, where lay a sick woman. He listened to her
ailments, promised to send her something to do her good from his own
stores, cheered up her spirits, and, leaving her happy, turned to Lionel
with a glorious smile, that seemed to ask, "And is there not power in
this?"
Put it was the sad peculiarity of this remarkable man that all his moods
were subject to rapid and seemingly unaccountable variations. It was as
if some great blow had fallen on the mainspring of his organization, and
left its original harmony broken up into fragments each impressive in
itself, but running one into the other with an abrupt discord, as a harp
played upon by the winds. For, after this evident effort at self-
consolation or self-support in soothing or strengthening others, suddenly
Darrell's head fell again upon his breast, and he walked on, up the
village lane, heeding no longer either the open doors of expectant
cottagers or the salutation of humble passers-by. "And I could have been
so happy here!" he said suddenly. "Can I not be so yet? Ay, perhaps,
when I am thoroughly old,--tied to the world but by the thread of an
hour. Old men do seem happy; behind them, all memories faint, save those
of childhood and sprightly youth; before them, the narrow ford, and the
sun dawning up through the clouds on the other shore. 'T is the critical
descent into age in which man is surely most troubled; griefs gone, still
rankling; nor-strength yet in his limbs, passion yet in his heart-
reconciled to what loom nearest in the prospect,--the armchair and the
palsied head. Well! life is a quaint puzzle. Bits the most incongruous
join into each other, and the scheme thus gradually becomes symmetrical
and clear; when, lo! as the infant claps his hands and cries, 'See! see!
the puzzle is made out!' all the pieces are swept back into the box,--
black box with the gilded nails. Ho! Lionel, look up; there is our
village church, and here, close at my right, the churchyard!"
Now while Darrell and his young companion were directing their gaze to
the right of the village lane, towards the small gray church,--towards
the sacred burial-ground in which, here and there amongst humbler graves,
stood the monumental stone inscribed to the memory of some former
Darrell, for whose remains the living sod had been preferred to the
family vault; while both slowly neared the funeral spot, and leaned,
silent and musing, over the rail that fenced it from the animals turned
to graze on the sward of the surrounding green,--a foot-traveller, a
stranger in the place, loitered on the threshold of the small wayside
inn, about fifty yards off to the left of the lane, and looked hard at
the still figures of the two kinsmen.
Turning then to the hostess, who was standing somewhat within the
threshold, a glass of brandy-and-water in her hand, the third glass that
stranger had called for during his half hour's rest in the hostelry,
quoth the man,
"The taller gentleman yonder is surely your squire, is he not? but who
is the shorter and younger person?"
The landlady put forth her head.
"Oh! that is a relation of the squire down on a visit, sir. I heard
coachman say that the squire's taken to him hugely; and they do think at
the Hall that the young gentleman will be his heir."
"Aha!--indeed--his heir! What is the lad's name? What relation can he
be to Mr. Darrell?"
"I don't know what relation exactly, sir; but he is one of the Haughtons,
and they've been kin to the Fawley folks time out of mind."
"Haughton?--aha! Thank you, ma'am. Change, if you please."
The stranger tossed off his dram, and stretched his hand for his change.
"Beg pardon, sir, but this must be forring money," said the landlady,
turning a five-franc piece on her palm with suspicious curiosity.
"Foreign! Is it possible?" The stranger dived again into his pocket,
and apparently with some difficulty hunted out half-a-crown.
"Sixpence more, if you please, sir; three brandies, and bread-and-cheese
and the ale too, sir."
"How stupid I am! I thought that French coin was a five shilling piece.
I fear I have no English money about me but this half-crown; and I can't
ask you to trust me, as you don't know me."
"Oh, sir, 't is all one if you know the squire. You may be passing this
way again."
"I shall not forget my debt when I do, you may be sure," said the
stranger; and, with a nod, he walked away in the same direction as
Darrell and Lionel had already taken, through a turnstile by a public
path that, skirting the churchyard and the neighbouring parsonage, led
along a cornfield to the demesnes of Fawley.
The path was narrow, the corn rising on either side, so that two persons
could not well walk abreast. Lionel was some paces in advance, Darrell
walking slow. The stranger followed at a distance: once or twice he
quickened his pace, is if resolved to overtake Darrell; then apparently
his mind misgave him, and he again fell back.
There was something furtive and sinister about the man. Little could be
seen of his face, for he wore a large hat of foreign make, slouched deep
over his brow, and his lips and jaw were concealed by a dark and full
mustache and beard. As much of the general outline of the countenance as
remained distinguishable was nevertheless decidedly handsome; but a
complexion naturally rich in colour seemed to have gained the heated look
which comes with the earlier habits of intemperance before it fades into
the leaden hues of the later.
His dress bespoke pretension to a certain rank: but its component parts
were strangely ill-assorted, out of date, and out of repair; pearl-
coloured trousers, with silk braids down their sides; brodequins to
match,--Parisian fashion three years back, but the trousers shabby, the
braiding discoloured, the brodequins in holes. The coat-once a black
evening dress-coat--of a cut a year or two anterior to that of the
trousers; satin facing,-cloth napless, satin stained. Over all, a sort
of summer travelling-cloak, or rather large cape of a waterproof silk,
once the extreme mode with the lions of the Chaussee d'Autin whenever
they ventured to rove to Swiss cantons or German spas; but which, from a
certain dainty effeminacy in its shape and texture, required the minutest
elegance in the general costume of its wearer as well as the cleanliest
purity in itself. Worn by this traveller, and well-nigh worn out too,
the cape became a finery mournful as a tattered pennon over a wreck.
Yet in spite of this dress, however unbecoming, shabby, obsolete, a
second glance could scarcely fail to note the wearer as a man wonderfully
well-shaped,--tall, slender in the waist, long of limb, but with a girth
of chest that showed immense power; one of those rare figures that a
female eye would admire for grace, a recruiting sergeant for athletic
strength.
But still the man's whole bearing and aspect, even apart from the dismal
incongruities of his attire, which gave him the air of a beggared
spendthrift, marred the favourable effect that physical comeliness in
itself produces. Difficult to describe how,--difficult to say why,--but
there is a look which a man gets, and a gait which he contracts when the
rest of mankind cut him; and this man had that look and that gait.
"So, so," muttered the stranger. "That boy his heir? so, so. How can I
get to speak to him? In his own house he would not see me: it must be as
now, in the open air; but how catch him alone? and to lurk in the inn,
in his own village,--perhaps for a day,--to watch an occasion;
impossible! Besides, where is the money for it? Courage, courage!"
He quickened his pace, pushed back his hat. "Courage! Why not now?
Now or never!"
While the man thus mutteringly soliloquized, Lionel had reached the gate
which opened into the grounds of Fawley, just in the rear of the little
lake. Over the gate he swung himself lightly, and, turning back to
Darrell cried, "Here is the doe waiting to welcome you."
Just as Darrell, scarcely heeding the exclamation, and with his musing
eyes on the ground, approached the gate, a respectful hand opened it
wide, a submissive head bowed low, a voice artificially soft faltered
forth words, broken and, indistinct, but of which those most audible
were--"Pardon, me; something to communicate,--important; hear me."
Darrell started, just as the traveller almost touched him, started,
recoiled, as one on whose path rises a wild beast. His bended head
became erect, haughty, indignant, defying; but his cheek was pale, and
his lip quivered. "You here! You in England-at Fawley! You presume to
accost me! You, sir,--you!"
Lionel just caught the sound of the voice as the doe had come timidly up
to him. He turned round sharply, and beheld Darrell's stern, imperious
countenance, on which, stern and imperious though it was, a hasty glance
could discover, at once, a surprise that almost bordered upon fear. Of
the stranger still holding the gate he saw but the back, and his voice he
did not hear, though by the man's gesture he was evidently replying.
Lionel paused a moment irresolute; but as the man continued to speak, he
saw Darrell's face grow paler and paler, and in the impulse of a vague
alarm he hastened towards him; but just within three feet of the spot,
Darrell arrested his steps.
"Go home, Lionel; this person would speak to me in private." Then,
in a lower tone, he said to the stranger, "Close the gate, sir; you are
standing upon the land of my fathers. If you would speak with me, this
way;" and, brushing through the corn, Darrell strode towards a patch of
waste land that adjoined the field: the man followed him, and both passed
from Lionel's eyes. The doe had come to the gate to greet her master;
she now rested her nostrils on the bar, with a look disappointed and
plaintive.
"Come," said Lionel, "come." The doe would not stir.
So the boy walked on alone, not much occupied with what had just passed.
"Doubtless," thought he, "some person in the neighbourhood upon country
business."
He skirted the lake, and seated himself on a garden bench near the house.
What did he there think of?--who knows? Perhaps of the Great World;
perhaps of little Sophy! Time fled on: the sun was receding in the west
when Darrell hurried past him without speaking, and entered the house.
The host did not appear at dinner, nor all that evening. Mr. Mills made
an excuse: Mr. Darrell did not feel very well.
Fairthorn had Lionel all to himself, and having within the last few days
reindulged in open cordiality to the young guest, he was especially
communicative that evening. He talked much on Darrell, and with all the
affection that, in spite of his fear, the poor flute-player felt for his
ungracious patron. He told many anecdotes of the stern man's tender
kindness to all that came within its sphere. He told also anecdotes more
striking of the kind man's sternness where some obstinate prejudice, some
ruling passion, made him "granite."
"Lord, my dear young sir," said Fairthorn, "be his most bitter open
enemy, and fall down in the mire, the first hand to help you would be Guy
Darrell's; but be his professed friend, and betray him to the worth of a
straw, and never try to see his face again if you are wise,--the most
forgiving and the least forgiving of human beings. But--"
The study door noiselessly opened, and Darrell's voice called out,
"Fairthorn, let me speak with you."