Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон - What Will He Do with It? — Complete

“ Quid feci?—ubi lapsus? Gone, no doubt, to pack up his knapsack, and take the Road to Ruin! Shall I let him go? Better for me, if I am really in danger of liking him; and so be at his mercy to sting—what? my heart! I defy him; it is dead. No; he shall not go thus. I am the head of our joint houses. Houses! I wish he had a house, poor boy! And his grandfather loved me. Let him go? I will beg his pardon first; and he may dine in his drawers if that will settle the matter.”

Thus, no less magnanimous than Lionel, did this misanthropical man follow his ungracious cousin. “Ha!” cried Darrell, suddenly, as, approaching the threshold, he saw Mr. Fairthorn at the dining-room window occupied in nibbing a pen upon an ivory thumb-stall—“I have hit it! That abominable Fairthorn has been shedding its prickles! How could I trust flesh and blood to such a bramble? I’ll know what it was this instant!” Vain menace! No sooner did Mr. Fairthorn catch glimpse of Darrell’s countenance within ten yards of the porch, than, his conscience taking alarm, he rushed incontinent from the window, the apartment, and, ere Darrell could fling open the door, was lost in some lair—“nullis penetrabilis astris”—in that sponge-like and cavernous abode wherewith benignant Providence had suited the locality to the creature.

New imbroglio in that ever-recurring, never-to-be-settled question, “What will he do with it?”

With a disappointed glare and a baffled shrug of the shoulder, Mr. Darrell turned from the dining-room, and passed up the stairs to Lionel’s chamber, opened the door quickly, and extending his hand said, in that tone which had disarmed the wrath of ambitious factions, and even (if fame lie not) once seduced from the hostile Treasury-bench a placeman’s vote, “I must have hurt your feelings, and I come to beg your pardon!”

But before this time Lionel’s proud heart, in which ungrateful anger could not long find room, had smitten him for so ill a return to well-meant and not indelicate kindness. And, his wounded egotism appeased by its very outburst, he had called to mind Fairthorn’s allusions to Darrell’s secret griefs,—griefs that must have been indeed stormy so to have revulsed the currents of a life. And, despite those griefs, the great man had spoken playfully to him,—playfully in order to make light of obligations. So when Guy Darrell now extended that hand, and stooped to that apology, Lionel was fairly overcome. Tears, before refused, now found irresistible way. The hand he could not take, but, yielding to his yearning impulse, he threw his arms fairly round his host’s neck, leaned his young cheek upon that granite breast, and sobbed out incoherent words of passionate repentance, honest, venerating affection. Darrell’s face changed, looking for a moment wondrous soft; and then, as by an effort of supreme self-control, it became severely placid. He did not return that embrace, but certainly he in no way repelled it; nor did he trust himself to speak till the boy had exhausted the force of his first feelings, and had turned to dry his tears.

Then he said, with a soothing sweetness: “Lionel Haughton, you have the heart of a gentleman that can never listen to a frank apology for unintentional wrong but what it springs forth to take the blame to itself and return apology tenfold. Enough! A mistake no doubt, on both sides. More time must elapse before either can truly say that he does not like the other. Meanwhile,” added Darrell, with almost a laugh,—and that concluding query showed that even on trifles the man was bent upon either forcing or stealing his own will upon others,—“meanwhile must I send away the tailor?” I need not repeat Lionel’s answer.

DARRELL—mystery in his past life—What has he done with it?

Some days passed, each day varying little from the other. It was the habit of Darrell if he went late to rest to rise early. He never allowed himself more than five hours sleep. A man greater than Guy Darrell—Sir Walter Raleigh—carved from the solid day no larger a slice for Morpheus. And it was this habit perhaps, yet more than temperance in diet, which preserved to Darrell his remarkable youthfulness of aspect and frame, so that at fifty-two he looked, and really was, younger than many a strong man of thirty-five. For, certain it is, that on entering middle life, he who would keep his brain clear, his step elastic, his muscles from fleshiness, his nerves from tremor,—in a word, retain his youth in spite of the register,—should beware of long slumbers. Nothing ages like laziness. The hours before breakfast Darrell devoted first to exercise, whatever the weather; next to his calm scientific pursuits. At ten o’clock punctually he rode out alone and seldom returned till late in the afternoon. Then he would stroll forth with Lionel into devious woodlands, or lounge with him along the margin of the lake, or lie down on the tedded grass, call the boy’s attention to the insect populace which sports out its happy life in the summer months, and treat of the ways and habits of each varying species, with a quaint learning, half humorous, half grave. He was a minute observer and an accomplished naturalist. His range of knowledge was, indeed, amazingly large for a man who has had to pass his best years in a dry and absorbing study: necessarily not so profound in each section as that of a special professor; but if the science was often on the surface, the thoughts he deduced from what he knew were as often original and deep. A maxim of his, which he dropped out one day to Lionel in his careless manner, but pointed diction, may perhaps illustrate his own practice and its results “Never think it enough to have solved the problem started by another mind till you have deduced from it a corollary of your own.”

After dinner, which was not over till past eight o’clock, they always adjourned to the library, Fairthorn vanishing into a recess, Darrell and Lionel each with his several book, then an air on the flute, and each to his own room before eleven. No life could be more methodical; yet to Lionel it had an animating charm, for his interest in his host daily increased, and varied his thoughts with perpetual occupation. Darrell, on the contrary, while more kind and cordial, more cautiously on his guard not to wound his young guest’s susceptibilities than he had been before the quarrel and its reconciliation, did not seem to feel for Lionel the active interest which Lionel felt for him. He did not, as most clever men are apt to do in their intercourse with youth, attempt to draw him out, plumb his intellect, or guide his tastes. If he was at times instructive, it was because talk fell on subjects on which it pleased himself to touch, and in which he could not speak without involuntarily instructing. Nor did he ever allure the boy to talk of his school-days, of his friends, of his predilections, his hopes, his future. In short, had you observed them together, you would have never supposed they were connections, that one could and ought to influence and direct the career of the other. You would have said the host certainly liked the guest, as any man would like a promising, warm-hearted, high-spirited, graceful boy, under his own roof for a short time, but who felt that that boy was nothing to him; would soon pass from his eye; form friends, pursuits, aims, with which he could be in no way commingled, for which he should be wholly irresponsible. There was also this peculiarity in Darrell’s conversation; if he never spoke of his guest’s past and future, neither did he ever do more than advert in the most general terms to his own. Of that grand stage on which he had been so brilliant an actor he imparted no reminiscences; of those great men, the leaders of his age, with whom he had mingled familiarly, he told no anecdotes. Equally silent was he as to the earlier steps in his career, the modes by which he had studied, the accidents of which he had seized advantage,—silent there as upon the causes he had gained, or the debates he had adorned. Never could you have supposed that this man, still in the prime of public life, had been the theme of journals and the boast of party. Neither did he ever, as men who talk easily at their own hearths are prone to do, speak of projects in the future, even though the projects be no vaster than the planting of a tree or the alteration of a parterre,—projects with which rural life so copiously and so innocently teems. The past seemed as if it had left to him no memory, the future as if it stored for him no desire. But did the past leave no memory? Why then at intervals would the book slide from his eye, the head sink upon the breast, and a shade of unutterable dejection darken over the grand beauty of that strong stern countenance? Still that dejection was not morbidly fed and encouraged, for he would fling it from him with a quick impatient gesture of the head, resume the book resolutely, or change it for another which induced fresh trains of thought, or look over Lionel’s shoulder, and make some subtile comment on his choice, or call on Fairthorn for the flute; and in a few minutes the face was severely serene again. And be it here said, that it is only in the poetry of young gentlemen, or the prose of lady novelists, that a man in good health and of sound intellect wears the livery of unvarying gloom. However great his causes of sorrow, he does not forever parade its ostentatious mourning, nor follow the hearse of his hopes with the long face of an undertaker. He will still have his gleams of cheerfulness, his moments of good humour. The old smile will sometimes light the eye, and awake the old playfulness of the lip. But what a great and critical sorrow does leave behind is often far worse than the sorrow itself has been. It is a change in the inner man, which strands him, as Guy Darrell seemed stranded, upon the shoal of the Present; which the more he strives manfully to bear his burden warns him the more from dwelling on the Past; and the more impressively it enforces the lesson of the vanity of human wishes strikes the more from his reckoning illusive hopes in the Future. Thus out of our threefold existence two parts are annihilated,—the what has been, the what shall be. We fold our arms, stand upon the petty and steep cragstone, which alone looms out of the Measureless Sea, and say to ourselves, looking neither backward nor beyond, “Let us bear what is;” and so for the moment the eye can lighten and the lip can smile.