Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/123

 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 was right, and I respect her."

"Quite right. If I lived to the age of Methuselah, I could not paint a head like Frank Vance."

"And even he is not famous yet. Never heard of him."

"He will be famous: I am sure of it; and if you lived in London, you would hear of him even now. Oh, sir! such a portrait as he painted the other day! But I must tell you all about it." And therewith Lionel plunged at once, medias res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy, and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and then begged; with what artless eloquence he brought out the colours of the whole story,—now its humour, now its pathos; with what beautifying sympathy he adorned the image of the little vagrant girl, with her mien of gentlewoman and her simplicity of child; the river excursion to Hampton Court; her still delight; how annoyed he felt when Vance seemed ashamed of her before those fine people; the orchard scene in which he had read Darrell's letter, that, for the time, drove her from the foremost place in his thoughts; the return home, the parting, her wistful look back, the visit to the Cobbler's next day; even her farewell gift, the nursery poem, with the lines written on the fly-leaf, he had them by heart! Darrell, the grand advocate, felt he could not have produced on a jury, with those elements, the effect which that boy-narrator produced on his granite self.

"And, oh, sir!" cried Lionel, checking his horse, and even arresting Darrell's with bold right hand—"oh," said he, as he brought his moist and pleading eyes in full battery upon the shaken fort to which he had mined his way—"oh, sir! you are so wise and rich and kind, do rescue that poor child from the penury and hardships of such a life! If you could but have seen and heard her! She could never have been born