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What Will He Do With It, Book 7.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> What Will He Do With It, Book 7.



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BOOK VII.


CHAPTER I.

VIGNETTES FOR THE NEXT BOOK OF BEAUTY.

"I quite agree with you, Alban; Honoria Vipont is a very superior young
lady."

"I knew you would think so!" cried the Colonel, with more warmth than
usual to him.

"Many years since," resumed Darrell, with reflective air, "I read Miss
Edgeworth's novels; and in conversing with Miss Honoria Vipont, methinks
I confer with one of Miss Edgeworth's heroines--so rational, so prudent,
so well-behaved--so free from silly romantic notions--so replete with
solid information, moral philosophy and natural history--so sure to
regulate her watch and her heart to the precise moment, for the one to
strike, and the other to throb--and to marry at last a respectable steady
husband, whom she will win with dignity, and would lose with decorum! A
very superior girl indeed."

["Darrell speaks--not the author. Darrell is unjust to the more
exquisite female characters of a Novelist, admirable for strength of
sense, correctness of delineation, terseness of narrative, and
lucidity of style-nor less admirable for the unexaggerated nobleness
of sentiment by which some of her heroines are notably
distinguished.]

"Though your description of Miss Vipont is satirical," said Alban Morley,
smiling, in spite of some irritation, "yet I will accept it as panegyric;
for it conveys, unintentionally, a just idea of the qualities that make
an intelligent coinpanion and a safe wife. And those are the qualities
we must look to, if we marry at our age. We are no longer boys," added
the Colonel sententiously.

DARRELL.--"Alas, no! I wish we were. But the truth of your remark is
indisputable. Ah, look! Is not that a face which might make an
octogenarian forget that he is not a boy?--what regular features!
--and what a blush!"

The friends were riding in the park; and as Darrell spoke, he bowed to a
young lady, who, with one or two others, passed rapidly by in a barouche.
It was that very handsome young lady to whom Lionel had seen him
listening so attentively in the great crowd, for which Carr Vipont's
family party had been deserted.

Yes; Lady Adela is one of the loveliest girls in Loudon," said the
Colonel, who had also lifted his hat as the barouche whirled by--"and
amiable too: I have known her ever since she was born. Her father and I
are great friends--an excellent man but stingy. I had much difficulty in
arranging the eldest girl's marriage with Lord Bolton, and am a trustee
in the settlement. If you feel a preference for Lady Adela, though I
don't think she would suit you so well as Miss Vipont, I will answer for
her father's encouragement and her consent. 'Tis no drawback to you,
though it is to most of her admirers, when I add, 'There's nothing with
her!'"

"And nothing in her! which is worse," said Darrell.

"Still, it is pleasant to gaze on a beautiful landscape, even though the
soil be barren."

COLONEL MORLEY.--"That depends upon whether you are merely the artistic
spectator of the landscape, or the disappointed proprietor of the soil."

"Admirable!" said Darrell; "you have disposed of Lady Adela. So ho! so
ho!" Darrell's horse (his old high-nettled horse, freshly sent to him
from Fawley, and in spite of the five years that had added to its age, of
spirit made friskier by long repose) here put down its ears lashed out--
and indulged in a bound which would have unseated many a London rider.
A young Amazon, followed hard by some two or three young gentlemen and
their grooms, shot by, swift and reckless as a hero at Balaclava. But
With equal suddenness, as she caught sight of Darrell--whose hand and
voice had already soothed the excited nerves of his steed--the Amazon
wheeled round and gained his side. Throwing up her veil, she revealed a
face so prettily arch, so perversely gay--with eye of radiant hazel, and
fair locks half loosened from their formal braid--that it would have
beguiled resentment from the most insensible--reconciled to danger the
most timid. And yet there was really a grace of humility in the
apologies she tendered for her discourtesy and thoughtlessness. As the
girl reined her light palfrey by Darrell's side-turning from the young
companions who had now joined her, their hackneys in a foam-and devoting
to his ear all her lively overflow of happy spirits, not untempered by a
certain deference, but still apparently free from dissimulation--
Daxrell's grand face lighted up--his mellow laugh, unrestrained, though
low, echoed her sportive tones; her youth, her joyousness were
irresistibly contagious. Alban Morley watched observant, while
interchanging talk with her attendant comrades, young men of high ton,
but who belonged to that /jeunesse doree/ with which the surface of life
patrician is fretted over--young men with few ideas, fewer duties--but
with plenty of leisure--plenty of health--plenty of money in their
pockets--plenty of debts to their tradesmen--daring at Melton--scheming
at T'attersall's--pride to maiden aunts--plague to thrifty fathers--
fickle lovers, but solid matches--in brief, fast livers, who get through
their youth betimes, and who, for the most part, are middle-aged before
they are thirty--tamed by wedlock--sobered by the responsibilities that
come with the cares of property and the dignities of rank--undergo abrupt
metamorphosis into chairmen of quarter sessions, county members, or
decorous peers;--their ideas enriched as their duties grow--their
opinions, once loose as willows to the wind, stiffening into the
palisades of fenced propriety--valuable, busy men, changed as Henry V.,
when coming into the cares of state, he said to the Chief Justice, "There
is my hand;" and to Sir John Falstaff,

"I know thee not, old roan;
Fall to thy prayers!"

But meanwhile the elite of this /jeunesse doree/ glittered round Flora
Vyvyan: not a regular beauty like Lady Adela--not a fine girl like Miss
Vipont, but such a light, faultless figure--such a pretty radiant face--
more womanly for affection to be manlike--Hebe aping Thalestris. Flora,
too, was an heiress--an only child--spoilt, wilful--not at all
accomplished--(my belief is that accomplishments are thought great bores
by the jeunesse doree)--no accomplishment except horsemanship, with a
slight knack at billiards, and the capacity to take three whiffs from a
Spanish cigarette. That last was adorable--four offers had been advanced
to her hand on that merit alone.--(N.B. Young ladies do themselves no
good with the jeunesse doree, which, in our time, is a lover that rather
smokes than "sighs, like furnace," by advertising their horror of
cigars.) You would suppose that Flora Vyvyan must be coarse-vulgar
perhaps; not at all; she was pignaute--original; and did the oddest
things with the air and look of the highest breeding. Fairies cannot be
vulgar, no matter what they do; they may take the strangest liberties--
pinch the maids--turn the house topsy-turvy; but they are ever the
darlings of grace and poetry. Flora Vyvyan was a fairy. Not peculiarly
intellectual herself, she had a veneration for intellect; those fast
young men were the last persons likely to fascinate that fast young lady.
Women are so perverse; they always prefer the very people you would least
suspect--the antithesis to themselves. Yet is it possible that Flora
Vyvyan can have carried her crotchets to so extravagant a degree as to
have designed the conquest of Guy Darrell--ten years older than her own
father? She, too, an heiress--certainly not mercenary; she who had
already refused better worldly matches than Darrell himself was--young
men, handsome men, with coronets on the margin of their note-paper and
the panels of their broughams! The idea seemed preposterous;
nevertheless, Alban Morley, a shrewd observer, conceived that idea, and
trembled for his friend.

At last the young lady and her satellites shot off, and the Colonel said
cautiously, "Miss Vyvyan is--alarming."

DARRELL.--"Alarming! the epithet requires construing."

COLONEL MORLEY.--"The sort of girl who might make a man of our years
really and literally an old fool!"

DARRELL.--"Old fool such a man must be if girls of any sort are permitted
to make him a greater fool than he was before. But I think that, with
those pretty hands resting on one's arm-chair, or that sunny face shining
into one's study windows, one might be a very happy old fool--and that is
the most one can expect!"

COLONEL MORLEY (checking an anxious groan).--"I am afraid, my poor
friend, you are far gone already. No wonder Honoria Vipont fails to be
appreciated. But Lady Selina has a maxim--the truth of which my
experience attests--'the moment it comes to woman, the most sensible men
are the'--"

"Oldest fools!" put in Darrell. "If Mark Antony made such a goose of
himself for that painted harridan Cleopatra, what would he have done for
a blooming Juliet! Youth and high spirit! Alas! why are these to be
unsuitable companions for us, as we reach that climax in time and sorrow
--when to the one we are grown the most indulgent, and of the other have
the most need? Alban, that girl, if her heart were really won--her wild
nature wisely mastered, gently guided--would make a true, prudent,
loving, admirable wife--"

"Heavens!" cried Alban Morley.

"To such a husband," pursued Darrell, unheeding the ejaculation, "as--
Lionel Haughton. What say you?" "Lionel--oh, I have no objection at all
to that; but he's too young yet to think of marriage--a mere boy.
Besides, if you yourself marry, Lionel could scarcely aspire to a girl of
Miss Vyvyan's birth and fortune."

"Ho, not aspire! That boy at least shall not have to woo in vain from
the want of fortune. The day I marry--if ever that day come--I settle on
Lionel Haughton and his heirs five thousand a-year; and if, with gentle
blood, youth, good looks, and a heart of gold, that fortune does not
allow him to aspire to any girl whose hand he covets, I can double it,
and still be rich enough to buy a superior companion in Honoria Vipont--"

MORLEY.--"Don't say buy--"

DARRELL.--" Ay, and still be young enough to catch a butterfly in Lady
Adela--still be bold enough to chain a panther in Flora Vyvyan. Let the
world know--your world in each nook of its gaudy auction-mart--that
Lione: Haughton is no pauper cousin--no penniless fortune-hunter. I wish
that world to be kind to him while he is yet young, and can enjoy it.
Ah, Morley, Pleasure, like Punishment, hobbles after us, /pede claudo/.
What would have delighted us yesterday does not catch us up till
to-morrow, and yesterday's pleasure is not the morrow's. A pennyworth of
sugar-plums would have made our eyes sparkle when we were scrawling pot-
hooks at a preparatory school, but no one gave us sugar-plums then. Now
every day at dessert France heaps before us her daintiest sugar-plums in
gilt /bonbonnieres/. Do you ever covet them? I never do. Let Lionel
have his sugar-plums in time. And as we talk, there he comes. Lionel,
how are you?"

"I resign you to Lionel's charge now," said the Colonel, glancing at his
watch. "I have an engagement--trouble some. Two silly friends of mine
have been quarrelling--high words--in an age when duels are out of the
question. I have promised to meet another man, and draw up the form for
a mutual apology. High words are so stupid nowadays. No option but to
swallow them up again if they were as high as steeples. Adieu for the
present. We meet to-night at Lady Dulcett's concert?"

"Yes," said Darrell. "I promised Miss Vyvyan to be there, and keep her
from disturbing the congregation. You Lionel, will come with me."

LIONELL (embarrassed).--"No; you must excuse me. I have long been
engaged elsewhere."

"That's a pity," said the Colonel, gravely. "Lady Dulcett's conceit is
just one of the places where a young man should be seen." Colonel Morley
waved his hand with his usual languid elegance, and his hack cantered off
with him, stately as a charger, easy as a rocking-horse.

"Unalterable man," said Darrell, as his eye followed the horseman's
receding figure. "'Through all the mutations on Time's dusty high-road-
stable as a milestone. Just what Alban Morley was as a school-boy he is
now; and if mortal span were extended to the age of the patriarchs, just
what Alban Morley is now, Alban Morley would be a thousand years hence.
I don't mean externally, of course; wrinkles will come--cheeks will fade.
But these are trifles: man's body is a garment, as Socrates said before
me, and every seven years, according to the physiologists, man has a new
suit, fibre and cuticle, from top to toe. The interior being that wears
the clothes is the same in Alban Morley. Has he loved, hated, rejoiced,
suffered? Where is the sign? Not one. At school, as in life, doing
nothing, but decidedly somebody--respected by small boys, petted by big
boys--an authority with all. Never getting honours--arm and arm with
those who did; never in scrapes--advising those who were; imperturbable,
immovable, calm above mortal cares as an Epicurean deity. What can
wealth give that he has not got? In the houses of the richest he chooses
his room. Talk of ambition, talk of power--he has their rewards without
an effort. True prime minister of all the realm he cares for; good
society has not a vote against him--he transacts its affairs, he knows
its secrets--he yields its patronage. Ever requested to do a favour--no
loan great enough to do him one. Incorruptible, yet versed to a fraction
in each man's price; impeccable, yet confidant in each man's foibles;
smooth as silk, hard as adamant; impossible to wound, vex, annoy him--but
not insensible; thoroughly kind. Dear, dear Alban! nature never polished
a finer gentleman out of a solider block of man!" Darrell's voice
quivered a little as he completed in earnest affection the sketch begun
in playful irony, and then with a sudden change of thought, he resumed
lightly:

"But I wish you to do me a favour, Lionel. Aid me to repair a fault in
good breeding, of which Alban Morley would never have been guilty. I
have been several days in London, and not yet called on your mother.
Will you accompany me now to her house and present me?"

"Thank you, thank you; you will make her so proud and happy; but may I
ride on and prepare her for your visit?"

"Certainly; her address is--"

"Gloucester Place, No.--."

"I will meet you there in half an hour."




CHAPTER II.

"Let observation, with expansive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru,"

--AND OBSERVATION WILL EVERYWHERE FIND, INDISPENSABLE TO THE HAPPINESS OF
WOMAN, A VISITING ACQUAINTANCE.

Lionel knew that Mrs. Haughton would that day need more than usual
forewarning of a visit from Mr. Darrell. For the evening of that day
Mrs. Haughton proposed "to give a party." When Mrs. Haughton gave a
party, it was a serious affair. A notable and bustling housewife, she
attended herself to each preparatory detail. It was to assist at this
party that Lionel had resigned Lady Dulcett's concert. The young man,
reluctantly acquiescing in the arrangements by which Alban Morley had
engaged him a lodging of his own, seldom or never let a day pass without
gratifying his mother's proud heart by an hour or two spent in Gloucester
Place, often to the forfeiture of a pleasant ride, or other tempting
excursion, with gay comrades. Difficult in London life, and at the full
of its season, to devote an hour or two to visits, apart from the track
chalked out by one's very mode of existence--difficult to cut off an hour
so as not to cut up a day. And Mrs. Haughton was exacting-nice in her
choice as to the exact slice in the day. She took the prime of the
joint. She liked her neighbours to see the handsome, elegant young man
dismount from his charger or descend from his cabriolet, just at the
witching hour when Gloucester Place was fullest. Did he go to a levee,
he must be sure to come to her before he changed his dress, that she and
Gloucester Place might admire him in uniform. Was he going to dine at
some very great house, he must take her in his way (though no street
could be more out of his way), that she might be enabled to say in the
parties to which she herself repaired "There is a great dinner at Lord
So-and-so's to-day; my son called on me before he went there. If he had
been disengaged, I should have asked permission to bring him here."

Not that Mrs. Haughton honestly designed, nor even wished to draw the
young man from the dazzling vortex of high life into her own little
currents of dissipation. She was much too proud of Lionel to think that
her friends were grand enough for him to honour their houses by his
presence. She had in this, too, a lively recollection of her lost
Captain's doctrinal views of the great world's creed. The Captain had
flourished in the time when Impertinence, installed by Brummell, though
her influence was waning, still schooled her oligarchs, and maintained
the etiquette of her court; and even when his /misalliance/ and his debts
had cast him out of his native sphere, he lost not all the original
brightness of an exclusive. In moments of connubial confidence, when
owning his past errors, and tracing to his sympathising Jessie the causes
of his decline, he would say: "'Tis not a man's birth, nor his fortune,
that gives him his place in society--it depends on his conduct, Jessie.
He must not be seen bowing to snobs, nor should his enemies track him to
the haunts of vulgarians. I date my fall in life to dining with a horrid
man who lent me L100, and lived in Upper Baker Street. His wife took my
arm from a place they called a drawing-room (the Captain as he spoke was
on a fourth floor), to share some unknown food which they called a dinner
(the Captain at that moment would have welcomed a rasher). The woman
went about blabbing--the thing got wind--for the first time my character
received a soil. What is a man without character! and character once
sullied, Jessie, man becomes reckless. Teach my boy to beware of the
first false step--no association with parvenus. Don't cry, Jessie--
I don't mean that he is to cut your--relations are quite different from
other people--nothing so low as cutting relations. I continued, for
instance, to visit Guy Darrell, though he lived at the back of Holborn,
and I actually saw him once in brown beaver gloves. But he was a
relation. I have even dined at his house, and met odd people there--
people who lived also at the back of Holborn. But he did not ask me
to go to their houses, and if he had, I must have cut him." By
reminiscences of this kind of talk, Lionel was saved from any design of
Mrs. Haughton's to attract his orbit into the circle within which she
herself moved. He must come to the parties she gave--illumine or awe odd
people there. That was a proper tribute to maternal pride. But had they
asked him to their parties, she would have been the first to resent such
a liberty.

Lionel found Mrs. Haughton in great bustle. A gardener's cart was before
the street door. Men were bringing in a grove of evergreens, intended to
border the staircase, and make its exiguous ascent still more difficult.
The refreshments were already laid out in the dining-room. Mrs.
Haughton, with scissors in hand, was cutting flowers to fill the eperyne,
but darting to and fro, like a dragonfly, from the dining-room to the
hall, from the flowers to the evergreens.

"Dear me, Lionel, is that you? Just tell me, you who go to all those
grandees, whether the ratafia-cakes should be opposite to the spauge-
cakes, or whether they would not go better--thus--at cross-corners?"

"My dear mother, I never observed--I don't know. But make haste-take off
that apron-have those doors shut come upstairs. Mr. Darrell will be here
very shortly. I have ridden on to prepare you."

"Mr. Darrell--TO-DAY--HOW could you let him come? Oh, Lionel, how
thoughtless you are! You should have some respect for your mother--I am
your mother, sir."

"Yes, my own dear mother--don't scold--I could not help it. He is so
engaged, so sought after; if I had put him off to-day, he might never
have come, and--"

"Never have come! Who is Mr. Darrell, to give himself such airs?--Only a
lawyer after all," said Mrs. Haughton, with majesty.

"Oh, mother, that speech is not like you. He is our benefactor--our--"

"Don't, don't say very more--I was very wrong--quite wicked--only my
temper, Lionel dear. Good Mr. Darrell! I shall be so happy to see him--
see him, too, in this house that I owe to him--see him by your side! I
think I shall fall down on my knees to him."

And her eyes began to stream.

Lionel kissed the tears away fondly. "That's my own mother now indeed--
now I am proud of you, mother; and how well you look! I am proud of that
too."

"Look well--I am not fit to be seen, this figure--though perhaps an
elderly quiet gentleman like good Mr. Darrell does not notice ladies
much. John, John, makes haste with those plants. Gracious me! you've
got your coat off!--put it on--I expect a gentleman--I'm at home, in the
front drawing-room--no--that's all set out--the back drawing-room, John.
Send Susan to me. Lionel, do just look at the supper-table; and what is
to be done with the flowers, and--"

The rest of Mrs. Haughton's voice, owing to the rapidity of her ascent,
which affected the distinctness of her utterance, was lost in air. She
vanished at culminating point--within her chamber.




CHAPTER III.

MRS. HAUGHTON AT HOME TO GUY DARRELL.

Thanks to Lionel's activity, the hall was disencumbered--the plants
hastily stowed away-the parlour closed on the festive preparations--and
the footman in his livery waiting at the door--when Mr. Darrell arrived.
Lionel himself came out and welcomed his benefactor's footstep across the
threshold of the home which the generous man had provided for the widow.

If Lionel had some secret misgivings as to the result of this interview,
they were soon and most happily dispelled. For, at the sight of Guy
Darrell leaning so affectionately on her son's arm, Mrs. Haughton
mechanically gave herself up to the impulse of her own warm, grateful,
true woman's heart. And her bound forward, her seizure of Darrell's
hand--her first fervent blessing--her after words, simple but eloquent
with feeling--made that heart so transparent, that Darrell looked it
through with respectful eyes.

Mrs. Haughton was still a pretty woman, and with much of that delicacy of
form and outline which constitutes the gentility of person. She had a
sweet voice too, except when angry. Her defects of education, of temper,
or of conventional polish, were not discernible in the overflow of
natural emotion. Darrell had come resolved to be released if possible.
Pleased he was, much more than he had expected. He even inly accepted
for the deceased Captain excuses which he had never before admitted to
himself. The linen-draper's daughter was no coarse presuming dowdy, and
in her candid rush of gratitude there was not that underbred servility
which Darrell had thought perceptible in her epistolary compositions.
There was elegance too, void both of gaudy ostentation and penurious
thrift, in the furniture and arrangements of the room. The income he
gave to her was not spent with slatternly waste or on tawdry gewgaws. To
ladies in general, Darrell's manner was extremely attractive--not the
less winning because of a certain shyness which, implying respect for
those he addressed, and a modest undervaluing of his own merit, conveyed
compliment and soothed self-love. And to that lady in especial such
gentle shyness was the happiest good-breeding.

In short, all went off without a hitch, till, as Darrell was taking
leave, Mrs. Haughton was reminded by some evil genius of her evening
party, and her very gratitude, longing for some opportunity to requite
obligation, prompted her to invite the kind man to whom the facility of
giving parties was justly due. She had never realised to herself,
despite all that Lionel could say, the idea of Darrell's station in the
world--a lawyer who had spent his youth at the back of Holborn, whom the
stylish Captain had deemed it a condescension not to cut, might indeed
become very rich; but he could never be the fashion. "Poor man," she
thought, "he must be very lonely. He is not, like Lionel, a young
dancing man. A quiet little party, with people of his own early rank and
habits, would be more in his way than those grand places to which Lionel
goes. I can but ask him--I ought to ask him. What would he say if I did
not ask him? Black ingratitude indeed, if he were not asked!" All these
ideas rushed through her mind in a breath, and as she clasped Darrell's
extended hand in both her own, she said: "I have a little party to-
night!"--and paused. Darrell remaining mute, and Lionel not suspecting
what was to ensue, she continued: "There may be some good music--young
friends of mine--sing charmingly--Italians!"

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