Your father Charlie became a gay young man about town, and very much the fashion. He was like you in person, only his forehead was lower, and his eye not so steady. Mr. Darrell studied the law in chambers. When Robert Haughton died, what with his debts, what with his father’s, and what with Charlie’s post-obits and I O U’s, there seemed small chance indeed of saving the estate to the Haughtons. But then Mr. Darrell looked close into matters, and with such skill did he settle them that he removed the fear of foreclosure; and what with increasing the rental here and there, and replacing old mortgages by new at less interest, he contrived to extract from the property an income of nine hundred pounds a year to Charlie (three times the income Darrell had inherited himself), where before it had seemed that the debts were more than the assets. Foreseeing how much the land would rise in value, he then earnestly implored Charlie (who unluckily had the estate in fee-simple, as Mr. Darrell has this, to sell if he pleased) to live on his income, and in a few years a part of the property might be sold for building purposes, on terms that would save all the rest, with the old house in which Darrells and Haughtons both had once reared generations. Charlie promised, I know, and I’ve no doubt, my dear young sir, quite sincerely; but all men are not granite! He took to gambling, incurred debts of honour, sold the farms one by one, resorted to usurers, and one night, after playing six hours at piquet, nothing was left for him but to sell all that remained to Mr. Cox the distiller, unknown to Mr. Darrell, who was then married himself, working hard, and living quite out of news of the fashionable world. Then Charlie Haughton sold out of the Guards, spent what he got for his commission, went into the Line; and finally, in a country town, in which I don’t think he was quartered, but having gone there on some sporting speculation, was unwillingly detained, married—”
“My mother!” said Lionel, haughtily; “and the best of women she is. What then?”
“Nothing, my dear young sir,—nothing, except that Mr. Darrell never forgave it. He has his prejudices: this marriage shocked one of them.”
“Prejudice against my poor mother! I always supposed so! I wonder why? The most simple-hearted, inoffensive, affectionate woman.”
“I have not a doubt of it; but it is beginning to rain. Let us go home. I should like some luncheon: it breaks the day.”
“Tell me first why Mr. Darrell has a prejudice against my mother. I don’t think that he has even seen her. Unaccountable caprice! Shocked him, too,—what a word! Tell me—I beg—I insist.”
“But you know,” said Fairthorn, half piteously, half snappishly, “that Mrs. Haughton was the daughter of a linendraper, and her father’s money got Charlie out of the county jail; and Mr. Darrell said, ‘Sold even your name!’ My father heard him say it in the hall at Fawley. Mr. Darrell was there during a long vacation, and your father came to see him. Your father fired up, and they never saw each other, I believe, again.”
Lionel remained still as if thunder-stricken. Something in his mother’s language and manner had at times made him suspect that she was not so well born as his father. But it was not the discovery that she was a tradesman’s daughter that galled him; it was the thought that his father was bought for the altar out of the county jail! It was those cutting words, “Sold even your name.” His face, before very crimson, became livid; his head sank on his breast. He walked towards the old gloomy house by Fairthorn’s side, as one who, for the first time in life, feels on his heart the leaden weight of an hereditary shame.