What Will He Do with It? — Volume 07Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
What Will He Do with It? — Volume 07
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century
"I knew you would. Mark this! never treat money affairs with levity--
MONEY is CHARACTER! Stop. I have bared a father's fault to a son. It
was necessary--or even in his grave those faults might have revived in
you. Now, I add this, if Charles Haughton--like you, handsome, high-
spirited, favoured by men, spoiled by women--if Charles Haughton, on
entering life, could have seen, in the mirror I have held up to you, the
consequences of pledging the morrow to pay for to-day, Charles Haughton
would have been shocked as you are, cured as you will be. Humbled by
your own first error, be lenient to all his. Take up his life where I
first knew it: when his heart was loyal, his lips truthful. Raze out the
interval; imagine that he gave birth to you in order to replace the
leaves of existence we thus blot out and tear away. In every error
avoided say, 'Thus the father warns the son;' in every honourable action,
or hard self-sacrifice, say, 'Thus the son pays a father's debt.'"
Lionel, clasping his hands together, raised his eyes streaming with
tears, as if uttering inly a vow to Heaven. The Colonel bowed his
soldier-crest with religious reverence, and glided from the room
noiselessly.
CHAPTER VIII.
BEING BUT ONE OF THE CONSIDERATE PAUSES IN A LONG JOURNEY,
CHARITABLY AFFORDED TO THE READER.
Colonel Morley found Mr. Poole at home, just returned from his office;
he stayed with that gentleman nearly an hour, and then went straight to
Darrell. As the time appointed to meet the French acquaintance, who
depended on his hospitalities for a dinner, was now nearly arrived,
Alban's conference with his English friend was necessarily brief and
hurried, though long enough to confirm one fact in Mr. Poole's statement,
which had been unknown to the Colonel before that day, and the admission
of which inflicted on Guy Darrell a pang as sharp as ever wrenched
confession from the lips of a prisoner in the cells of the Inquisition.
On returning from Greenwich, and depositing his Frenchman in some
melancholy theatre, time enough for that resentful foreigner to witness
theft and murder committed upon an injured countryman's vaudeville, Alban
hastened again to Carlton Gardens. He found Darrell alone, pacing his
floor to and fro, in the habit he had acquired in earlier life, perhaps
when meditating some complicated law case, or wrestling with himself
against some secret sorrow. There are men of quick nerves who require a
certain action of the body for the better composure of the mind; Darrell
was one of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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