What Will He Do with It? — Complete

“Refuses you!—impossible! For what reason?”

“She cannot love me well enough to marry,” answered Lionel with a quivering lip, and an attempt at that irony in which all extreme anguish, at least in our haughty sex, delights to seek refuge or disguise. “Likes me as a friend, a brother, and so forth, but—nothing more. All a mistake, sir—all, except your marvellous kindness to me—to her—for which Heaven ever bless you.”

“Yes, all a mistake of your own, foolish boy,” said Darrell, tenderly; and, turning sharp, he saw Sophy hastening by, quickly and firmly, with her eyes looking straightward—on into space. He threw himself in her path.

“Tell this dull kinsman of mine that ‘faint heart never won fair lady.’ You do not mean seriously, deliberately to reject a heart that will never be faint with a meaner fear than that of losing you?”

Poor Sophy! She kept her blue eyes still on the cold grey space, and answered by some scarce audible words—words which in every age girls intending to say No seem to learn as birds learn their song; no one knows who taught them, but they are ever to the same tune. “Sensible of the honour”—“Grateful”—“Some one more worthy,” &c., &c.

Darrell checked this embarrassed jargon. “My question, young lady, is solemn; it involves the destiny of two lives. Do you mean to say that you do not love Lionel Haughton well enough to give him your hand, and return the true faith which is pledged with his own?”

“Yes,” said Lionel, who had gained the side of his kinsman, “yes, that is it. O Sophy—Ay or No?”

“No!” fell from her pale, firm lips—and in a moment more she was at Waife’s side, and had drawn him away from George. “Grandfather, grandfather!—home, home; let us go home at once, or I shall die!”

Darrell has kept his keen sight upon her movements—upon her countenance. He sees her gesture—her look—as she now clings to her grandfather. The blue eyes are not now coldly fixed on level air, but raised upward as for strength from above. The young face is sublime with its woe, and with its resolve.

“Noble child,” muttered Darrell, “I think I see into her heart. If so, poor Lionel, indeed! My pride has yielded, hers never will!”

Lionel, meanwhile, kept beating his foot on the ground, and checking indignantly the tears that sought to gather to his eyes. Darrell threw his arm round the young man’s shoulder, and led him gently, slowly away, by the barbed thorn-tree-on by the moss-grown crags.

Waife, meanwhile, is bending his ear to Sophy’s lip. The detestable Fairthorn emerges from between the buttresses, and shambles up to George, thirsting to hear his hopes confirmed, and turning his face back to smile congratulation, on the gloomy old house that he thinks he has saved from the lake.

Sophy has at last convinced Waife that his senses do not deceive him, nor hers wander. She has said, “O grandfather, let us ever henceforth be all in all to each other. You are not ashamed of me—I am so proud of you. But there are others akin to me, grandfather, whom we will not mention; and you would be ashamed of me if I brought disgrace on one who would confide to me his name, his honour; and should I be as proud of you, if you asked me to do it?”

At these word, Waife understands all, and he has not an argument in reply; and he suffers Sophy to lead him towards the house. Yes, they will go hence—yes, there shall be no schemes of marriage! They had nearly reached the door, when the door itself opened violently, and a man rushing forth caught Sophy in his arms, and kissed her forehead, her cheek, with a heartiness that it is well Lionel did not witness! Speechless and breathless with resentment, Sophy struggled, and in vain, when Waife, seizing the man by the collar, swung him away with a “How dare you, sir,” that was echoed back from the hillocks—summoned Sir Isaac at full gallop from the lake—scared Fairthorn back to his buttresses—roused Mrs. Morley from her sketch, and, smiting the ears of Lionel and Darrell, hurried them, mechanically as it were, to the very spot from which that thunder-roll had pealed.

“How dare I?” said the man, resettling the flow of his disordered coat—“How dare I kiss my own niece?—my own sister’s orphan child? Venerable Bandit, I have a much better right than you have. Oh, my dear injured Sophy, to think that I was ashamed of your poor cotton print—to think that to your pretty face I have been owing fame and fortune—and you, you wandering over the world—child of the sister of whose beauty I was so proud—of her for whom, alas, in vain! I painted Watteaus and Greuzes upon screens and fans!” Again he clasped her to his breast; and Waife this time stood mute, and Sophy passive—for the man’s tears were raining upon her face, and washed away every blush of shame as to the kiss they hallowed.

“But where is my old friend William Losely?—where is Willy?” said another voice, as a tall, thin personage stepped out from the hall, and looked poor Waife unconsciously in the face.

“Alban Morley!” faltered Waife, “you are but little changed!”

The Colonel looked again, and in the elderly, lame, one-eyed, sober-looking man, recognised the wild jovial Willy, who had tamed the most unruly fillies, taken the most frantic leaps, carolled forth the blithest song—madcap, good-fellow, frolicsome, childlike darling of gay and grave, young and old!

         “‘Eheu, fugaces, Postume, Postume,           Labuntur anni,’”

said the Colonel, insensibly imbibing one of those Horatian particles that were ever floating in that classic atmosphere—to Darrell medicinal, to Fairthorn morbific. “Years slide away, Willy, mutely as birds skim through air; but when friend meets with friend after absence, each sees the print of their crows’ feet on the face of the other. But we are not too old yet, Willy, for many a meet at the fireside! Nothing else in our studs, we can still mount our hobbies; and thoroughbred hobbies contrive to be in at the death.

“But you are waiting to learn by what title and name this stranger lays claim to so peerless a niece. Know then Ah, here comes Darrell. Guy Darrell, in this young lady you will welcome the grandchild of Sidney Branthwaite, our old Eton school friend, a gentleman of as good blood as any in the land!”

“None better,” cried Fairthorn, who had sidled himself into the group; “there’s a note on the Branthwaite genealogy, sir, in your father’s great work upon ‘Monumental Brasses.’”

“Permit me to conclude, Mr. Fairthorn,” resumed the Colonel; “Monumental Brasses are painful subjects. Yes, Darrell,—yes, Lionel; this fair creature, whom Lady Montfort might well desire to adopt, is the daughter of Arthur Branthwaite, by marriage with the sister of Frank Vance, whose name I shrewdly suspect nations will prize, and whose works princes will hoard, when many a long genealogy, all blazoned in azure and or, will have left not a scrap for the moths.”

“Ah!” murmured Lionel, “was it not I, Sophy, who taught you to love your father’s genius! Do you not remember how, as we bent over his volume, it seemed to translate to us our own feelings?—to draw us nearer together? He was speaking to us from his grave.”

Sophy made no answer; her face was hidden on the breast of the old man, to whom she still clung closer and closer.

“Is it so? Is it certain? Is there no doubt that she is the child of these honoured parents?” asked Waife, tremulously.

“None,” answered Alban; “we bring with us proofs that will clear up all my story.”

The old man bowed his head over Sophy’s fair locks for a moment; then raised it, serene and dignified: “You are mine for a moment yet, Sophy,” said he.

“Yours as ever-more fondly, gratefully than ever,” cried Sophy.

“There is but one man to whom I can willingly yield you. Son of Charles Haughton, take my treasure.”

“I consent to that,” cried Vance, “though I am put aside like a Remorseless Baron. And, Lionello mio, if Frank Vance is a miser, so much the better for his niece.”

“But,” faltered Lionel.

“Oh, falter not. Look into those eyes; read that blush now. She looks coy, not reluctant. She bends before him—adorned as for love, by all her native graces. Air seems brightened by her bloom. No more the Outlaw-Child of Ignominy and Fraud, but the Starry Daughter of POETRY AND ART! Lo, where they glide away under the leafless, melancholy trees. Leafless and melancholy! No! Verdure and blossom and the smile of spring are upon every bough!”

“I suppose,” said Alban, “it will not now break Lionel’s heart to learn that not an hour before I left London, I heard from a friend at the Horse Guards that it has been resolved to substitute the regiment for Lionel’s; and it will be for some time yet, I suspect, that he must submit to be in gloriously happy. Come this way, George, a word in your ear.” And Alban, drawing his nephew aside, told him of Jasper’s state, and of Arabella’s request. “Not a word to-day on these mournful topics, to poor Willy. To-day let nothing add to his pain to have lost a grandchild, or dim his consolation in the happiness and security his Sophy gains in that loss. But to-morrow you will go and see the stricken-down sinner, and prepare the father for the worst. I made a point of seeing Dr. F. last night. He gives Jasper but a few weeks. He compares him to a mountain, not merely shattered by an earthquake, but burned out by its own inward fires.”

“A few weeks only,” sighed George. “Well, Time, that seems everything to man, has not even an existence in the sight of God. To that old man I owe the power of speech to argue, to exhort, and to comfort;—he was training me to kneel by the deathbed of his son!”

“You believe,” asked the Man of the World, “in the efficacy of a deathbed repentance, when a sinner has sinned till the power of sinning be gone?”

“I believe,” replied the Preacher, “that in health there is nothing so unsafe as trust in a deathbed repentance; I believe that on the deathbed, it cannot be unsafe to repent!”

Alban looked thoughtful, and George turned to rejoin Waife, to whom Vance was narrating the discovery of Sophy’s parentage; while Fairthorn, as he listened, drew his flute from his pocket, and began screwing it, impatient to vent in delicate music what he never could have set into words for his blundering, untunable tongue. The Colonel joins Darrell, and hastens to unfold more fully the story which Vance is reciting to Waife.

Brief as it can, be the explanation due to the reader. Vance’s sister had died in childbirth. The poor young poet, unfitted to cope with penury, his sensitive nature combined with a frame that could feebly resist the strain of exhausting emotions, disappointed in fame, despairing of fortune, dependent for bread on his wife’s boyish brother, and harassed by petty debts in a foreign land, had been fast pining away, even before an affliction to which all the rest seemed as nought. With that affliction he broke down at once, and died a few days after his wife, leaving an infant not a week old. A French female singer, of some repute in the theatres, and making a provincial tour, was lodging in the same house as the young couple. She had that compassionate heart which is more common than prudence or very strict principle with the tribes who desert the prosaic true world for the light sparkling false one. She had assisted the young couple, in their later days, with purse and kind offices; had been present at the birth of the infant—the death of the mother; and had promised Arthur Branthwaite that she would take care of his child, until she could safely convey it to his wife’s relations, while he wept to own that they, poor as himself, must regard such a charge as a burthen.

The singer wrote to apprise Mrs. Vance of the death of her daughter and son-in-law, and the birth of the infant whom she undertook shortly to send to England. But the babe, whom meanwhile she took to herself, got hold of her affections; with that yearning for children which makes so remarkable and almost uniform a characteristic of French women (if themselves childless) in the wandering Bohemian class that separates them from the ordinary household affections, never dead in the heart of woman till womanhood itself be dead, the singer clung to the orphan little one to whom she was for the moment rendering the cares of a mother. She could not bear to part with it; she resolved to adopt it as her own. The knowledge of Mrs. Vance’s circumstances—the idea that the orphan, to herself a blessing, would be an unwelcome encumbrance to its own relations—removed every scruple from a mind unaccustomed to suffer reflection to stand in the way of an impulse. She wrote word to Mrs. Vance that the child was dead. She trusted that her letter would suffice, without other evidence, to relations so poor, and who could have no suspicion of any interest to deceive them. Her trust was well founded. Mrs. Vance and the boy Frank, whose full confidence and gratitude had been already secured to their correspondent for her kind offices to the young parents, accepted, without a demur or a question, the news that the infant was no more. The singer moved on to the next town at which she was professionally engaged. The infant, hitherto brought up by hand, became ailing. The medical adviser called in recommended the natural food, and found, in a village close by, the nurse to whom a little time before Jasper Losely had consigned his own daughter. The latter died; the nurse then removed to Paris to reside with the singer, who had obtained a lucrative appointment at one of the metropolitan theatres. In less than two years the singer herself fell a victim to a prevailing epidemic. She had lived without thought of the morrow; her debts exceeded her means; her effects were sold. The nurse, who had meanwhile become a widow, came for advice and refuge to her sister, who was in the service of Gabrielle Desmarets. Gabrielle, being naturally appealed to, saw the infant, heard the story, looked into the statement which, by way of confession, the singer had drawn up, and signed, in a notary’s presence, before she died; looked into the letters from Mrs. Vance, and the schoolboy scrawls from Frank, both to the singer and to the child’s parents, which the actress had carefully preserved; convinced herself of the poverty and obscurity of the infant’s natural guardians and next of kin; and said to Jasper, who was just dissipating the fortune handed over to him as survivor of his wife and child: “There is what, if well-managed, may retain your hold on a rich father-in-law when all else has failed. You have but to say that this infant is his grandchild; the nurse we can easily bribe, or persuade to confirm the tale. I, whom he already knows as that respectable baroness, your Matilda’s friend, can give to the story some probable touches. The lone childless man must rejoice to think that a tie is left to him. The infant is exquisitely pretty; her face will plead for her. His heart will favour the idea too much to make him very rigorous in his investigations. Take the infant. Doubtless in your own country you can find some one to rear it at little or no expense, until the time come for appeal to your father-in-law when no other claim on his purse remains.”

Jasper assented with the insouciant docility by which he always acknowledged Gabrielle’s astuter intellect. He saw the nurse; it was clear that she had nothing to gain by taking the child to English relations so poor. They might refuse to believe her, and certainly—could not reward. To rid herself of the infant, and obtain the means to return to her native village with a few hundred francs in her purse, there was no promise she was not willing to make, no story she was too honest to tell, no paper she was too timid to sign. Jasper was going to London on some adventure of his own. He took the infant—chanced on Arabella—the reader knows the rest. The indifference ever manifested by Jasper to a child not his own—the hardness with which he had contemplated and planned his father’s separation from one whom he had imposed by false pretexts on the old man’s love, and whom he only regarded as an alien encumbrance upon the scanty means of her deluded protector—the fitful and desultory mode in which, when (contrary to the reasonings which Gabrielle had based upon a very large experience of the credulities of human nature in general, but in utter ignorance of the nature peculiar to Darrell) his first attempt at imposition had been so scornfully resisted by his indignant father-in-law, he had played fast and loose with a means of extortion which, though loth to abandon, he knew would not bear any strict investigation;—all this is now clear to the reader. And the reader will also comprehend why, partly from fear that his father might betray him, partly from a compassionate unwillingness to deprive the old man of a belief in which William Losely said he had found such solace, Jasper, in his last interview with his father, shrank from saying, “but she is not your grandchild!” The idea of recurring to the true relations of the child naturally never entered into Jasper’s brain. He considered them to be as poor as himself. They buy from him the child of parents whore they had evidently, by their letters, taxed themselves to the utmost, and in vain, to save from absolute want! So wild seemed the notion, that he had long since forgotten that relations so useless existed. Fortunately the nurse had preserved the written statement of the singer—the letters by Mrs. Vance and Frank—the certificate of the infant’s birth and baptism—some poor relics of Sophy’s ill-fated parents-manuscripts of Arthur’s poems—baby-caps with initials and armorial crests, wrought, before her confinement, by the young wife—all of which had been consigned by the singer to the nurse, and which the nurse willingly disposed of to Mrs. Crane, with her own formal deposition of the facts, confirmed by her sister, Gabrielle’s old confidential-attendant, and who, more favoured than her mistress, was living peaceably in the rural scenes of her earlier innocence, upon the interest of the gains she had saved in no innocent service—confirmed yet more by references to many whose testimonials could trace, step by step, the child’s record from its birth to its transfer to Jasper, and by the brief but distinct avowal, in tremulous lines, writ by Jasper himself. As a skein crossed and tangled, when the last knot is loosened, slips suddenly free, so this long bewildering mystery now became clear as a commonplace! What years of suffering Darrell might have been saved had he himself seen and examined the nurse—had his inquiry been less bounded by the fears of his pride—had the great lawyer not had himself for a client!

Darrell silently returned to Alban Morley the papers over which he had cast his eye as they walked slowly to and fro the sloping banks of the lake.

“It is well,” said he, glancing fondly, as Fairthorn had glanced before him, towards the old House, now freed from doom, and permitted to last its time. “It is well,” he repeated, looking away towards that part of the landscape where he could just catch a glimpse of Sophy’s light form beyond the barbed thorn-tree; “it is well,” he repeated thrice with a sigh. “Poor human nature! Alban, can you conceive it? I, who once so dreaded that that poor child should prove to be of my blood, now, in knowing that she is not, feel a void, a loss! To Lionel I am so distant a kinsman!—to his wife, to his children, what can I be? A rich old man; the sooner he is in his grave the better. A few tears, and then the will! But, as your nephew says, ‘This life is but a school;’ the new-comer in the last form thinks the head-boy just leaving so old! And to us, looking back, it seems but the same yesterday whether we were the last comer or the head-boy.”

“I thought,” said Alban, plaintively, “that, for a short time at least, I had done with ‘painful subjects.’ You revel in them! County Guy, you have not left school yet; leave it with credit; win the best prize.” And Alban plunged at once into THE CRISIS. He grew eloquent; the Party, the Country, the Great Measure to be intrusted to Darrell, if he would but undertake it as a member of the Cabinet; the Peerage, the House of Vipont, and immortal glory!—eloquent as Ulysses haranguing the son of Peleus in Troilus and Cressida.

Darrell listened coldly; only while Alban dwelt on “the Measure,” in which, when it was yet too unripe for practical statesmen, he had attached his faith as a thinker, the orator’s eye flashed with young fire. A great truth is eternally clear to a great heart that has once nourished its germ and foreseen its fruits. But when Alban quitted that part of his theme, all the rest seemed wearisome to his listener. They had now wound their walk to the opposite side of the lake, and paused near the thick beech-trees, hallowed and saddened by such secret associations to the mournful owner.

“No, my dear Alban,” said Darrell, “I cannot summon up sufficient youth and freshness of spirit to re-enter the turbulent arena I have left. Ah! look yonder where Lionel and Sophy move! Give me, I do not say Lionel’s years, but Lionel’s wealth of hope, and I might still have a wish for fame and a voice for England; but it is a subtle truth, that when a man misses a home, a link between his country and himself is gone. Vulgar ambition may exist—the selfish desire of power; they were never very strong in me, and now less strong than the desire of rest; but that beautiful, genial, glorious union of all the affections of social citizen, which begins at the hearth and widens round the land, is not for the hermit’s cell.”

Alban was about to give up the argument in irritable despair, when happening to turn his eye towards the farther depth of the beech-grove, he caught a glimpse—no matter what of; but quickening his step in the direction to which his glance had wandered, he seated himself on the gnarled roots of a tree that seemed the monarch of the wood, widespreading as that under which Tityrus reclined of old; and there, out of sight of the groups on the opposite banks of the lake—there, as if he had sought the gloomiest and most secret spot for what he had yet to say, he let fall, in the most distinct yet languid tones of his thoroughbred, cultured enunciation: “I have a message to you from Lady Montfort. Restless man, do come nearer, and stand still. I am tired to death.” Darrell approached, and, leaning against the trunk of the giant tree, said, with folded arms and compressed lips:

“A message from Lady Montfort!”

“Yes. I should have told you, by-the-by, that it was she who, being a woman, of course succeeded where I, being a man, despite incredible pains and trouble, signally failed, discovered Arabella Fossett, alias Crane, and obtained from her the documents which free your life forever from a haunting and torturing fear. I urged her to accompany me hither, and place the documents herself in your hand. She refused; you were not worth so much trouble, my dear Guy. I requested her at least to suffer me to show to you a paper containing Jasper Losely’s confession of a conspiracy to poison her mind against you some years ago—a conspiracy so villianously ingenious that it would have completely exonerated any delicate and proud young girl from the charge of fickleness in yielding to an impulse of pique and despair. But Lady Montfort did not wish to be exonerated; your good opinion has ceased to be of the slightest value to her. But to come to the point. She bade me tell you that, if you persist in sheltering yourself in a hermit’s cell from the fear of meeting her—if she be so dangerous to your peace—you may dismiss such absurd apprehension. She is going abroad, and between you and me, my dear fellow, I have not a doubt that she will marry again before six months are out. I spoke of your sufferings; she told me she had not the smallest compassion for them.”

“Alban Morley, you presumed to talk thus of me?” cried Darrell, livid with rage.

“Strike, but hear me. It is true you would not own, when I was last at Fawley, that she was the cause of your secluded life, of your blighted career; but I knew better. However, let me go on before you strangle me. Lady Montfort’s former feelings of friendship for you are evidently quite changed; and she charged me to add, that she really hoped that you would exert your good sense and pride (of which Heaven knows you have plenty) to eradicate an absurd and romantic sentiment, so displeasing to her, and so—”