Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
And then, vainly grasping at every argument his blunt sense could
suggest--then talked Roland much and grandly of the duties men
owed--even if they threw off all love to their father--still to their
father's name; and then his pride, always so lively, grew irritable and
harsh, and seemed, no doubt, to the perverted ears of the son, unlovely
and unloving. And that pride, without serving one purpose of good, did
yet more mischief; for the youth caught the disease, but in a wrong
way. And he said to himself,--
"Ho! then my father is a great man, with all these ancestors and big
words! And he has lands and a castle--and yet how miserably we live,
and how he stints me! But if he has cause for pride in all these dead
men, why, so have I. And are these lodgings, these appurtenances, fit
for the 'gentleman' he says I am?"
Even in England, the gipsy blood broke out as before; and the
youth found vagrant associates, heaven knows how or where; and
strange-looking forms, gaudily shabby, and disreputably smart, were
seen lurking in the corner of the street, or peering in at the window,
slinking off if they saw Roland--and Roland could not stoop to be a
spy. And the son's heart grew harder and harder against his father,
and his father's face now never smiled on him. Then bills came in,
and duns knocked at the door. Bills and duns to a man who shrunk from
the thought of a debt, as an ermine from a spot on its hide! And the
son's short answer to remonstrance was,--"Am I not a gentleman?--these
are the things gentlemen require." Then perhaps Roland remembered the
experiment of his French friend, and left his bureau unlocked, and
said, "Ruin me if you will, but no debts. There is money in those
drawers--they are unlocked." That trust would for ever have cured
of extravagance a youth with a high and delicate sense of honour:
the pupil of the Gitános did not understand the trust; he thought it
conveyed a natural though ungracious permission to take out what he
wanted--and he took! To Roland this seemed a theft, and a theft of the
coarsest kind: but when he so said, the son started indignant, and saw
in that which had been so touching an appeal to his honour, but a trap
to decoy him into disgrace. In short, neither could understand the
other. Roland forbade his son to stir from the house; and the young man
the same night let himself out, and stole forth into the wide world, to
enjoy or defy it in his own wild way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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