Page:What will he do with it.djvu/619

Rh "You will!" said Darrell, pale with haughty anger, and, with the impulse of his passion, his hand clenched. In the bravery of his nature, and the warmth of a temper constitutionally quick, he thought nothing of the strength and bulk of the insolent intruder—nothing of the peril of odds so unequal in a personal encounter. But the dignity which pervaded all his habits, and often supplied to him the place of discretion, came, happily for himself, to his aid now. He strike a man whom he so despised! he raise that man to his own level by the honor of a blow from his hand? Impossible! "You will!" he said. "Well, be it so. Are you come again to tell me that a child of my daughter lives, and that you won my daughter's fortune by a deliberate lie?"

"I am not come to speak of that girl, but of myself. I say that I have a claim on you, Mr. Darrell; I say that, turn and twist the truth as you will, you are still my father-in-law, and that it is intolerable that I should be wanting bread, or driven into actual robbery, while my wife's father is a man of countless wealth, and has no heir except—but I will not now urge that child's cause; I am content to abandon it, if so obnoxious to you. Do you wish me to cut a throat, and to be hanged, and all the world to hear the last dying speech and confession of Guy Darrell's son-in-law? Answer me, Sir!"

"I answer you briefly and plainly. It is simply because I would not have that last disgrace on Guy Darrell's name that I offer you a subsistence in lands where you will be less exposed to those temptations which induced you to invest the sums that, by your own tale, had been obtained from me on false pretences, in the sink of a Paris gambling-house. A subsistence that, if it does not pamper vice, at least places you beyond the necessity of crime, is at your option. Choose it or reject it as you will."

"Look you, Mr. Darrell," said Jasper, whose temper was fast giving way beneath the cold and galling scorn with which he was thus cast aside, "I am in a state so desperate, that, rather then starve, I may take what you so contemptuously fling to—your daughter's husband; but—"

"Knave!" cried Darrell, interrupting him, "do you again and again urge it as a claim upon me, that you decoyed from her home, under a false name, my only child; that she died in a foreign land—broken-hearted, if I have rightly heard; is that a claim upon your duped victim's father?"

"It seems so, since your pride is compelled to own that the world would deem it one, if the jail-chaplain took down the last words of your son-in-law. But basta, basta! hear me out, and spare hard names; for the blood is mounting into my brain, and