Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/125

 veins! I had a son once! God took him;" the strong man's lips quivered: he hurried on. "I felt there was manhood in you, when you wrote to fling my churlish favours in my teeth; when you would have left my roof-tree in a burst of passion which might be foolish, but was nobler than the wisdom of calculating submission, manhood, but only perhaps man's pride as man,—man's heart not less cold than winter. To-day you have shown me something far better than pride; that nature which constitutes the heroic temperament is completed by two attributes,—unflinching purpose, disinterested humanity. I know not yet if you have the first; you reveal to me the second. Yes! I accept the duties you propose to me; I will do more than leave to you the chance of discovering this poor child. I will direct my solicitor to take the right steps to do so. I will see that she is safe from the ills you feel for her. Lionel, more still, I am impatient till I write to Mrs. Haughton. I did her wrong. Remember, I have never seen her. I resented in her the cause of my quarrel with your father, who was once dear to me. Enough of that. I disliked the tone of her letters to me. I disliked it in the mother of a boy who had Darrell blood; other reasons too,—let them pass. But in providing for your education; I certainly thought her relations provided for her support. She never asked me for help there; and, judging of her hastily, I thought she would not have scrupled to do so, if my help there had not been forestalled. You have made me understand her better; and, at all events, three-fourths of what we are in boyhood most of us owe to our mothers! You are frank, fearless, affectionate, a gentleman. I respect the mother who has such a son."

Certainly praise was rare upon Darrell's lips; but when he did praise, he knew how to do it! And no man will ever command others who has not by nature that gift! It cannot be learned. Art and experience can only refine its expression.

CHAPTER XIII.

He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child, sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.

Lionel's departure was indefinitely postponed; nothing more was said of it. Meanwhile Darrell's manner towards