What Will He Do With It? (Belford)/Book 1/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
Being a Chapter that links the Past to the Future by the gradual elucidation of Antecedents.
O Wayside inns, pedestrian rambles! O summer nights, under honey-suckle arbors, on the banks of starry waves! O Youth, Youth!
Vance ladled out the toddy and lighted his cigar, and then, leaning his head on his hand, and his elbow on the table, he looked with an artist's eye along the glancing river.
"After all," said he, "I am glad I am a painter; and I hope I may live to be a great one."
"No doubt, if you live, you will be a great one," cried Lionel, with cordial sincerity. "And if I, who can only just paint well enough to please myself, find that it gives a new charm to nature—"
"Cut sentiment," quoth Vance, "and go on."
"What," continued Lionel, unchilled by the admonitory interruption, "must you feel who can fix a fading sunshine—a fleeting face—on a scrap of canvas, and say, 'Sunshine and Beauty, live there forever!'"
Vance. "Forever! no! Colors perish, canvas rots. What remains to us of Zeuxis? Still it is prettily said on behalf of the poetic side of the profession; there is a prosaic one—we'll blink it. Yes; I am glad to be a painter. But you must not catch the fever of my calling. Your poor mother would never forgive me if she thought I had made you a dauber by my example."
Lionel (gloomily). "No. I shall not be a painter! But what can I be? How shall I ever build on the earth one of the castles I have built in the air? Fame looks so far—Fortune so impossible! But one thing I am bent upon" (speaking with knit brow and clenched teeth), "I will gain an independence somehow, and support my mother."
Vance. "Your mother is supported—she has the pension—"
Lionel. "Of a captain's widow and" (he added, with a flushed cheek) "a first floor that she lets to lodgers!"
Vance. "No shame in that! Peers let houses; and on the Continent, princes let not only first floors, but fifth and sixth floors, to say nothing of attics and cellars. In beginning the world, friend Lionel, if you don't wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air upon grand occasions. Pride is a garment all stiff brocade outside, all grating sackcloth on the side next to the skin. Even kings don't wear the dalmaticum except at a coronation. Independence you desire; good. But are you dependent now? Your mother has given you an excellent education, and you have already put it to profit. My dear boy," added Vance, with unusual warmth, "I honor you, at your age, on leaving school, to have shut yourself up, translated Greek and Latin per sheet for a bookseller at less than a valet's wages, and all for the purpose of buying comforts for your mother; and having a few pounds in your own pockets, to rove your little holiday with me, and pay your share of the costs! Ah, there is energy and spirit and life in all that, Lionel, which will found upon rock some castle as fine as any you have built in air. Your hand, my boy."
This burst was so unlike the practical dryness, or even the more unctuous humor, of Frank Vance, that it took Lionel by surprise, and his voice faltered as he pressed the hand held out to him. He answered, "I don't deserve your praise, Vance, and I fear the pride you tell me to put under lock and key, has the larger share of the merit you ascribe to better motives. Independent? No! I have never been so."
Vance. "Well, you depend on a parent—who, at seventeen, does not?"
Lionel. "I did not mean my mother; of course, I could not be too proud to take benefits from her. But the truth is simply this: my father had a relation, not very near, indeed—a cousin, at about as distant a remove, I fancy, as a cousin well can be. To this gentleman my mother wrote when my poor father died—and_he was generous, for it is he who paid for my schooling. I did not know this till very lately. I had a vague impression, indeed, that I had a powerful and wealthy kinsman who took interest in me, but whom I had never seen."
Vance. "Never seen?"
Lionel. "No. And here comes the sting. On leaving school last Christmas, my mother, for the first time, told me the extent of my obligations to this benefactor, and informed me that he wished to know my own choice as to a profession—that if I preferred Church or Bar, he would maintain me at college."
Vance. "Body o' me! where's the sting to that? Help yourself to toddy, my boy, and take more genial views of life."
Lionel. "You have not heard me out. I then asked to see my benefactor's letters; and my mother, unconscious of the pain she was about to inflict, showed me not only the last one, but all she had received from him. Oh, Vance, they were terrible, those letters! The first began by a dry acquiescence in the claims of kindred—a curt proposal to pay my schooling, but not one word of kindness, and a stern proviso that the writer was never to see nor hear from me. He wanted no gratitude—he disbelieved in all professions of it. His favors would cease if I molested him. 'Molested' was the word; it was bread thrown to a dog."
Vance. "Tut! Only a rich man's eccentricity. A bachelor, I presume?"
Lionel. "My mother says he has been married, and is a widower."
Vance. "Any children?"
Lionel. "My mother says none living; but I know little or nothing about his family."
Vance looked with keen scrutiny into the face of his boy-friend, and, after a pause, said, dryly—"Plain as a pikestaff. Your relation is one of those men who, having no children, suspect and dread the attention of an heir-presumptive; and what has made this sting, as you call it, keener to you, is—pardon me—is in some silly words of your mother, who, in showing you the letters, has hinted to you that that heir you might be, if you were sufficiently pliant and subservient. Am I not right?"
Lionel hung his head, without reply.
Vance (cheeringly). "So, so; no great harm as yet. Enough of the first letter. What was the last?"
Lionel. "Still more offensive. He, this kinsman, this patron, desired my mother to spare him those references to her son's ability and promise, which, though natural to herself, had slight interest to him—him, the condescending benefactor!—As to his opinion, what could I care for the opinion of one I had never seen? All that could sensibly affect my—oh, but I cannot go on with those cutting phrases, which imply but this, 'All I can care for is the money of a man who insults me while he gives it.'"
Vance (emphatically.) "Without being a wizard, I should say your relative was rather a disagreeable person—not what is called urbane and amiable—in fact, a brute."
Lionel. "You will not blame me, then, when I tell you that I resolved not to accept the offer to maintain me at college, with which the letter closed. Luckily Dr. Wallis (the head-master of my school), who had always been very kind to me, had just undertaken to supervise a popular translation of the classics. He recommended me, at my request, to the publisher engaged in the undertaking, as not incapable of translating some of the less difficult Latin authors—subject to his corrections. When I had finished the first instalment of the work thus intrusted to me, my mother grew alarmed for my health, and insisted on my taking some recreation. You were about to set out on a pedestrian tour. I had, as you say, some pounds in my pocket; and thus I have passed with you the merriest days of my life."
Vance. "What said your civil cousin when your refusal to go to college was conveyed to him?"
Lionel. "He did not answer my mother's communication to that effect till just before I left home, and then—no, it was not his last letter from which I repeated that withering extract—no, the last was mote galling still, for in it he said, that if, in spite of the ability and promise that had been so vaunted, the dulness of a college and the labor of learned professions were so distasteful to me, he had no desire to dictate to my choice, but that as he did not wish one who was, however remotely, of his blood, and bore the name of Haughton, to turn shoeblack or pickpocket—Vance—Vance!"
Vance. "Lock up your pride—the sackcloth frets you—and go on; and that therefore he—"
Lionel. "Would buy me a commission in the army, or get me an appointment in India."
Vance. "Which did you take?"
Lionel (passionately.) "Which! so offered—which?—of course neither! But, distrusting the tone of my mother's reply, I sat down, the evening before I left home, and wrote myself to this cruel man. I did not show my letter to my mother—did not tell her of it. I wrote shortly—that, if he would not accept my gratitude, I would not accept his benefits; that shoeblack I might be—pickpocket, no! that he need not fear I should disgrace his blood or my name; and that I would not rest till, sooner or later, I had paid him back all that I had cost him, and felt relieved from the burdens of an obligation which—which—" The boy paused, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed.
Vance, though much moved, pretended to scold his friend, but finding that ineffectual, fairly rose, wound his arm brother-like round him, and drew him from the arbor to the shelving margin of the river. "Comfort," then said the Artist, almost solemnly, as here, from the inner depths of his character, the true genius of the man came forth and spoke—"Comfort, and look round; see where the islet interrupts the tide, and how smilingly the stream flows on. See, just where we stand, how the slight pebbles are fretting the wave—would the wave, if not fretted, make that pleasant music? A few miles farther on, and the river is spanned by a bridge, which busy feet now are crossing; by the side of that bridge now is rising a palace;—all the men who rule England have room in that palace. At the rear of the palace soars up the old Abbey, where kings have their tombs in right of the names they inherit: men lowly as we have found tombs there, in right of the names which they made. Think, now, that you stand on that bridge with a boy's lofty hope, with a man's steadfast courage; then turn again to that stream, calm with starlight, flowing on toward the bridge—spite of islet and pebbles."
Lionel made no audible answer, though his lips murmured, but he pressed closer and closer to his friend's side; and the tears were already dried on his cheek—though their dew still glistened in his eyes.