The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Volume 16Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Volume 16
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century; Families -- Fiction
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 gypsy blood broke out as before, and the youth found
vagrant associates,--Heaven knows how or where; 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 shrank from the thought of a debt as an
ermine from a spot on its fur! 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 forever have cured of extravagance a youth with a high
and delicate sense of honor: the pupil of the Gitanos 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 honor 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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