“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 obtruder—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 honour 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 than 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 I may become dangerous. Had any other man eyed, and scoffed, and railed at me as you have done, he would be lying dead and dumb as this stone at my foot; but you-are my father-in-law! Now, I care not to bargain with you what be the precise amount of my stipend if I obey your wish, and settle miserably in one of those raw, comfortless corners into which they who burthen this Old World are thrust out of sight. I would rather live my time out in this country—live it out in peace and for half what you may agree to give in transporting me. If you are to do anything for me, you had better do it so as to make me contented on easy terms to your own pockets, rather than to leave me dissatisfied, and willing to annoy you, which I could do somehow or other, even on the far side of the Herring Pond. I might keep to the letter of a bargain, live in Melbourne or Sydney, and take your money, and yet molest and trouble you by deputy. That girl, for instance—your grandchild; well, well, disown her if you please; but if I find out where she is, which I own I have not done yet, I might contrive to render her the plague of your life, even though I were in Australia.”
“Ay,” said Darrell, murmuring—“ay, ay; but”—(suddenly gathering himself up)—“No! Man, if she were my grandchild, your own child, could you talk of her thus? make her the object of so base a traffic, and such miserable threats? Wicked though you be, this were against nature! even in nature’s wickedness—even in the son of a felon, and in the sharper of a hell. Pooh! I despise your malice. I will listen to you no longer. Out of my path.”
“No!”
“No?”
“No, Guy Darrell, I have not yet done; you shall hear my terms, and accept them—a moderate sum down; say a few hundreds, and two hundred a-year to spend in London as I will—but out of your beat, out of your sight and hearing. Grant this, and I will never cross you again—never attempt to find, and, if I find by chance, never claim as my child by your daughter that wandering girl. I will never shame you by naming our connection. I will not offend the law, nor die by the hangman; yet I shall not live long, for I suffer much, and I drink hard.”