Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/105

 Eikon Basilike,' with the name of 'Joannes Darrell, Esq., Aurat,' written under it. That, by the date, was Sir John Darrell, the cavalier who fought for Charles I., father of the graceless Sir Ralph, who flourished under Charles II. Both their portraits are in the dining-room."

"Tell me something of the family; I know so little about it,—not even how the Haughtons and Darrells seem to have been so long connected. I see by the portraits that the Haughton name was borne by former Darrells, then apparently dropped, now it is borne again by my cousin."

"He bears it only as a Christian name. Your grandfather was his sponsor. But he is nevertheless the head of your family."

"So he says. How?"

Fairthorn gathered himself up, his knees to his chin, and began in the tone of a guide who has got his lesson by heart; though it was not long before he warmed into his subject.

"The Darrells are supposed to have got their name from a knight in the reign of Edward III., who held the lists in a joust victoriously against all comers, and was called, or called himself, John the Dare-all; or, in old spelling, the Der-all. They were amongst the most powerful families in the country; their alliances were with the highest houses,—Montfichets, Nevilles, Mowbrays; they descended through such marriages from the blood of Plantagenet kings. You'll find their names in chronicles in the early French wars. Unluckily they attached themselves to the fortunes of Earl Warwick, the king-maker, to whose blood they were allied; their representative was killed in the fatal field of Barnet; their estates were of course confiscated; the sole son and heir of that ill-fated politician passed into the Low Countries, where he served as a soldier. His son and grandson followed the same calling under foreign banners. But they must have kept up the love of the old land; for in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., the last male Darrell returned to England with some broad gold pieces saved by himself or his exiled fathers, bought some land in this county, in which the ancestral possessions had once been large, and built the present house, of a size suited to the altered fortunes of a race that in a former age had manned castles with retainers. The baptismal name of the soldier who thus partially refounded the old line in England was that now borne by your cousin, Guy,—a name always favoured by Fortune in the family annals; for in Elizabeth's time, from the rank of small gentry, to which their