Читать книгу What Will He Do with It? — Complete - Эдвард Джордж Бульвер-Литтон, Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон - Страница 23

The old world and the new.

It was long before Lionel could sleep. What with the strange house and the strange master, what with the magic flute and the musician’s admonitory caution, what with tender and regretful reminiscences of Sophy, his brain had enough to work on. When he slept at last, his slumber was deep and heavy, and he did not wake till gently shaken by the well-bred arm of Mr. Mills. “I humbly beg pardon: nine o’clock, sir, and the breakfast-bell going to ring.” Lionel’s toilet was soon hurried over; Mr. Darrell and Fairthorn were talking together as he entered the breakfast-room,—the same room as that in which they had dined.

“Good morning, Lionel,” said the host. “No leave-taking to-day, as you threatened. I find you have made an appointment with Mr. Fairthorn, and I shall place you under his care. You may like to look over the old house, and make yourself”—Darrell paused “at home,” jerked out Mr. Fairthorn, filling up the hiatus. Darrell turned his eye towards the speaker, who evidently became much frightened, and, after looking in vain for a corner, sidled away to the window and poked himself behind the curtain. “Mr. Fairthorn, in the capacity of my secretary, has learned to find me thoughts, and put them in his own words,” said Darrell, with a coldness almost icy. He then seated himself at the breakfast-table; Lionel followed his example, and Mr. Fairthorn, courageously emerging, also took a chair and a roll. “You are a true diviner, Mr. Darrell,” said Lionel; “it is a glorious day.”

“But there will be showers later. The fish are at play on the surface of the lake,” Darrell added, with a softened glance towards Fairthorn, who was looking the picture of misery. “After twelve, it will be just the weather for trout to rise; and if you fish, Mr. Fairthorn will lend you a rod. He is a worthy successor of Izaak Walton, and loves a companion as Izaak did, but more rarely gets one.”

“Are there trout in your lake, sir?”

“The lake! You must not dream of invading that sacred water. The inhabitants of rivulets and brooks not within my boundary are beyond the pale of Fawley civilization, to be snared and slaughtered like Caifres, red men, or any other savages, for whom we bait with a missionary and whom we impale on a bayonet. But I regard my lake as a politic community, under the protection of the law, and leave its denizens to devour each other, as Europeans, fishes, and other cold-blooded creatures wisely do, in order to check the overgrowth of population. To fatten one pike it takes a great many minnows. Naturally I support the vested rights of pike. I have been a lawyer.”

It would be in vain to describe the manner in which Mr. Darrell vented this or similar remarks of mocking irony or sarcastic spleen. It was not bitter nor sneering, but in his usual mellifluous level tone and passionless tranquillity.

The breakfast was just over as a groom passed in front of the windows with a led horse. “I am going to leave you, Lionel,” said the host, “to make—friends with Mr. Fairthorn, and I thus complete, according to my own original intention, the sentence which he diverted astray.” He passed across the hall to the open house-door, and stood by the horse, stroking its neck and giving some directions to the groom. Lionel and Fairthorn followed to the threshold, and the beauty of the horse provoked the boy’s admiration: it was a dark muzzled brown, of that fine old-fashioned breed of English roadster which is now so seldom seen,—showy, bownecked, long-tailed, stumbling, reedy hybrids, born of bad barbs, ill-mated, having mainly supplied their place. This was, indeed, a horse of great power, immense girth of loin, high shoulder, broad hoof; and such a head! the ear, the frontal, the nostril! you seldom see a human physiognomy half so intelligent, half so expressive of that high spirit and sweet generous temper, which, when united, constitute the ideal of thorough-breeding, whether in horse or man. The English rider was in harmony with the English steed. Darrell at this moment was resting his arm lightly on the animal’s shoulder, and his head still uncovered. It has been said before that he was, of imposing presence; the striking attribute of his person, indeed, was that of unconscious grandeur; yet, though above the ordinary height, he was not very tall-five feet eleven at the utmost-and far from being very erect. On the contrary, there was that habitual bend in his proud neck which men who meditate much and live alone almost invariably contract. But there was, to use an expression common with our older writers, that “great air” about him which filled the eye, and gave him the dignity of elevated stature, the commanding aspect that accompanies the upright carriage. His figure was inclined to be slender, though broad of shoulder and deep of chest; it was the figure of a young man and probably little changed from what it might have been at five-and-twenty. A certain youthfulness still lingered even on the countenance,—strange, for sorrow is supposed to expedite the work of age; and Darrell had known sorrow of a kind most adapted to harrow his peculiar nature, as great in its degree as ever left man’s heart in ruins. No gray was visible in the dark brown hair, that, worn short behind, still retained in front the large Jove-like curl. No wrinkle, save at the corner of the eyes, marred the pale bronze of the firm cheek; the forehead was smooth as marble, and as massive. It was that forehead which chiefly contributed to the superb expression of his whole aspect. It was high to a fault; the perceptive organs, over a dark, strongly-marked, arched eyebrow, powerfully developed, as they are with most eminent lawyers; it did not want for breadth at the temples; yet, on the whole, it bespoke more of intellectual vigour and dauntless will than of serene philosophy or all-embracing benevolence. It was the forehead of a man formed to command and awe the passions and intellect of others by the strength of passions in himself, rather concentred than chastised, and by an intellect forceful from the weight of its mass rather than the niceness of its balance. The other features harmonized with that brow; they were of the noblest order of aquiline, at once high and delicate. The lip had a rare combination of exquisite refinement and inflexible resolve. The eye, in repose, was cold, bright, unrevealing, with a certain absent, musing, self-absorbed expression, that often made the man’s words appear as if spoken mechanically, and assisted towards that seeming of listless indifference to those whom he addressed, by which he wounded vanity without, perhaps, any malice prepense. But it was an eye in which the pupil could suddenly expand, the hue change from gray to dark, and the cold still brightness flash into vivid fire. It could not have occurred to any one, even to the most commonplace woman, to have described Darrell’s as a handsome face; the expression would have seemed trivial and derogatory; the words that would have occurred to all, would have been somewhat to this effect: “What a magnificent countenance! What a noble head!” Yet an experienced physiognomist might have noted that the same lineaments which bespoke a virtue bespoke also its neighbouring vice; that with so much will there went stubborn obstinacy; that with that power of grasp there would be the tenacity in adherence which narrows, in astringing, the intellect; that a prejudice once conceived, a passion once cherished, would resist all rational argument for relinquishment. When men of this mould do relinquish prejudice or passion, it is by their own impulse, their own sure conviction that what they hold is worthless: then they do not yield it graciously; they fling it from them in scorn, but not a scorn that consoles. That which they thus wrench away had “grown a living part of themselves;” their own flesh bleeds; the wound seldom or never heals. Such men rarely fail in the achievement of what they covet, if the gods are neutral; but, adamant against the world, they are vulnerable through their affections. Their love is intense, but undemonstrative; their hatred implacable, but unrevengeful,—too proud to revenge, too galled to pardon.

There stood Guy Darrell, to whom the bar had destined its highest honours, to whom the senate had accorded its most rapturous cheers; and the more you gazed on him as he there stood, the more perplexed became the enigma,—how with a career sought with such energy, advanced with such success, the man had abruptly subsided into a listless recluse, and the career had been voluntarily resigned for a home without neighbours, a hearth without children.

“I had no idea,” said Lionel, as Darrell rode slowly away, soon lost from sight amidst the thick foliage of summer trees,—“I had no idea that my cousin was so young!”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Fairthorn; “he is only a year older than I am!”

“Older than you!” exclaimed Lionel, staring in blunt amaze at the elderly-looking personage beside him; “yet true, he told me so himself.”

“And I am fifty-one last birthday.” “Mr. Darrell fifty-two! Incredible!”

“I don’t know why we should ever grow old, the life we lead,” observed Mr. Fairthorn, readjusting his spectacles. “Time stands so still! Fishing, too, is very conducive to longevity. If you will follow me, we will get the rods; and the flute,—you are quite sure you would like the flute? Yes! thank you, my dear young sir. And yet there are folks who prefer the fiddle!”

“Is not the sun a little too bright for the fly at present; and will you not, in the meanwhile, show me over the house?”

“Very well; not that this house has much worth seeing. The other indeed would have had a music-room! But, after all, nothing like the open air for the flute. This way.”

I spare thee, gentle reader, the minute inventory of Fawley Manor House. It had nothing but its antiquity to recommend it. It had a great many rooms, all, except those used as the dining-room and library, very small, and very low,—innumerable closets, nooks,—unexpected cavities, as if made on purpose for the venerable game of hide-and-seek. Save a stately old kitchen, the offices were sadly defective even for Mr. Darrell’s domestic establishment, which consisted but of two men and four maids (the stablemen not lodging in the house). Drawing-room properly speaking that primitive mansion had none. At some remote period a sort of gallery under the gable roofs (above the first floor), stretching from end to end of the house, might have served for the reception of guests on grand occasions; for fragments of mouldering tapestry still here and there clung to the walls; and a high chimney-piece, whereon, in plaster relief, was commemorated the memorable fishing party of Antony and Cleopatra, retained patches of colour and gilding, which must when fresh have made the Egyptian queen still more appallingly hideous, and the fish at the end of Antony’s hook still less resembling any creature known to ichthyologists.

The library had been arranged into shelves from floor to roof by Mr. Darrell’s father, and subsequently, for the mere purpose of holding as many volumes as possible, brought out into projecting wings (college-like) by Darrell himself, without any pretension to mediaeval character. With this room communicated a small reading-closet, which the host reserved to himself; and this, by a circular stair cut into the massive wall, ascended first into Mr. Darrell’s sleeping-chamber, and thence into a gable recess that adjoined the gallery, and which the host had fitted up for the purpose of scientific experiments in chemistry or other branches of practical philosophy. These more private rooms Lionel was not permitted to enter. Altogether the house was one of those cruel tenements which it would be a sin to pull down, or even materially to alter, but which it would be an hourly inconvenience for a modern family to inhabit. It was out of all character with Mr. Darrell’s former position in life, or with the fortune which Lionel vaguely supposed him to possess, and considerably underrated. Like Sir Nicholas Bacon, the man had grown too large for his habitation.

“I don’t wonder,” said Lionel, as, their wanderings over, he and Fairthorn found themselves in the library, “that Mr. Darrell began to build a new house. But it would have been a great pity to pull down this for it.”

“Pull down this! Don’t hint at such an idea to Mr. Darrell. He would as soon have pulled down the British Monarchy! Nay, I suspect, sooner.”

“But the new building must surely have swallowed up the old one?”

“Oh, no; Mr. Darrell had a plan by which he would have enclosed this separately in a kind of court, with an open screen-work or cloister; and it was his intention to appropriate it entirely to mediaeval antiquities, of which he has a wonderful collection. He had a notion of illustrating every earlier reign in which his ancestors flourished,—different apartments in correspondence with different dates. It would have been a chronicle of national manners.”

“But, if it be not an impertinent question, where is this collection? In London?”

“Hush! hush! I will give you a peep of some of the treasures, only don’t betray me.”

Fairthorn here, with singular rapidity, considering that he never moved in a straightforward direction, undulated into the open air in front of the house, described a rhomboid towards a side-buttress in the new building, near to which was a postern-door; unlocked that door from a key in his pocket, and, motioning Lionel to follow him, entered within the ribs of the stony skeleton. Lionel followed in a sort of supernatural awe, and beheld, with more substantial alarm, Mr. Fairthorn winding up an inclined plank which lie embraced with both arms, and by which he ultimately ascended to a timber joist in what should have been an upper floor, only flooring there was none. Perched there, Fairthorn glared down on Lionel through his spectacles. “Dangerous,” he said whisperingly; “but one gets used to everything! If you feel afraid, don’t venture!”

Lionel, animated by that doubt of his courage, sprang up the plank, balancing himself schoolboy fashion, with outstretched arms, and gained the side of his guide.

“Don’t touch me!” exclaimed Mr. Fairthorn, shrinking, “or we shall both be over. Now observe and imitate.” Dropping himself, then, carefully and gradually, till he dropped on the timber joist as if it were a velocipede, his long legs dangling down, he with thigh and hand impelled himself onward till he gained the ridge of a wall, on which he delivered his person, and wiped his spectacles.

Lionel was not long before he stood in the same place. “Here we are,” said Fairthorn.

“I don’t see the collection,” answered Lionel, first peering down athwart the joists upon the rugged ground overspread with stones and rubbish, then glancing up through similar interstices above to the gaunt rafters.

“Here are some,—most precious,” answered Fairthorn, tapping behind him. “Walled up, except where these boards, cased in iron, are nailed across, with a little door just big enough to creep through; but that is locked,—Chubb’s lock, and Mr. Darrell keeps the key!—treasures for a palace! No, you can’t peep through here—not a chink; but come on a little further,—mind your footing.”

Skirting the wall, and still on the perilous ridge, Fairthorn crept on, formed an angle, and stopping short, clapped his eye to the crevice of some planks nailed rudely across a yawning aperture. Lionel found another crevice for himself, and saw, piled up in admired disorder, pictures, with their backs turned to a desolate wall, rare cabinets, and articles of curious furniture, chests, boxes, crates,—heaped pell-mell. This receptacle had been roughly floored in deal, in order to support its miscellaneous contents, and was lighted from a large window (not visible in front of the house), glazed in dull rough glass, with ventilators.

“These are the heavy things, and least costly things, that no one could well rob. The pictures here are merely curious as early specimens, intended for the old house, all spoiling and rotting; Mr. Darrell wishes them to do so, I believe! What he wishes must be done! my dear young sir: a prodigious mind; it is of granite!”

“I cannot understand it,” said Lionel, aghast. “The last man I should have thought capriciously whimsical.”

“Whimsical! Bless my soul! don’t say such a word, don’t, pray! or the roof will fall down upon us! Come away. You have seen all you can see. You must go first now; mind that loose stone there!”

Nothing further was said till they were out of the building; and Lionel felt like a knight of old who had been led into sepulchral halls by a wizard.