Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/417

 father!--I loved him so intensely!--the love of childhood, how fearfully strong it is! All in him was so gentle, yet so sensitive,—chivalry without its armour. I was his constant companion: he spoke to me unreservedly, as a poet to his muse. I wept at his sorrows; I chafed at his humiliations. He talked of ancestors as he thought of them; to him they were beings like the old Lares,—not dead in graves, but images ever present on household hearths. Doubtless he exaggerated their worth, as their old importance. Obscure, indeed, in the annals of empire, their deeds and their power, their decline and fall. Not so thought he; they were to his eyes the moon-track in the ocean of history,—light on the waves over which they had gleamed,—all the ocean elsewhere dark! With him thought I; as my father spoke, his child believed. But what to the eyes of the world was this inheritor of a vaunted name?—a threadbare, slighted, rustic pedant; no station in the very province in which mouldered away the last lowly dwelling-place of his line,—by lineage high above most nobles, in position below most yeomen. He had learning; he had genius: but the studies to which they were devoted only served yet more to impoverish his scanty means, and led rather to ridicule than to honour. Not a day but what I saw on his soft features the smart of a fresh sting, the gnawing of a new care. Thus, as a boy, feeling in myself a strength inspired by affection, I came to him one day as he sat grieving, and kneeling to him, said, 'Father, courage yet a little while; I shall soon be a man, and I swear to devote myself as man to revive the old fading race so prized by you; to rebuild the House that, by you so loved, is loftier in my eyes than all the heraldry of kings.' And my father's face brightened, and his voice blessed me; and I rose up—ambitious!" Darrell paused, heaved a short, quick sigh, and then rapidly continued,

"I was fortunate at the University. That was a day when chiefs of party looked for recruits amongst young men who had given the proofs and won the first-fruits of emulation and assiduity; for statesmanship then was deemed an art which, like that of war, needs early discipline. I had scarcely left college when I was offered a seat in Parliament by the head of the Viponts, an old Lord Montfort. I was dazzled but for one moment; I declined the next. The fallen House of Darrell needed wealth; and Parliamentary success, in its higher honours, often requires wealth,—never gives it. It chanced that