Davenport Dunn, a Man of Our Day. Volume 2. Lever Charles James
have n’t got great abilities. Now Beecher is just the fellow to suit them.”
“He is not a peer, surely?” asked she, hastily.
“No, he ain’t yet, but he may be one any day. He is as sure of the peerage as – I am not! and then, poor Beecher – as you called him awhile ago – becomes the Lord Viscount Lackington, with twelve or fourteen thousand a year! I tell you, girl, that of all the trades men follow, the very best, to enjoy life, is to be an English lord with a good fortune.”
“And is it true, as I have read,” asked Lizzy, “that this high station, so fenced around by privileges, is a prize open to all who have talent or ability to deserve it, – that men of humble origin, if they be gifted with high qualities, and devote them ardently to their country’s service, are adopted, from time to time, into that noble brotherhood?”
“All rubbish; don’t believe a word of it. It’s a flam and a humbug, – a fiction like the old story about an Englishman’s house being his castle, or that balderdash, ‘No man need criminate himself.’ They ‘re always inventing ‘wise saws’ like these in England, and they get abroad, and are believed, at last, just by dint of repeating. Here ‘s the true state of the case,” said he, coming suddenly to a halt, and speaking with greater emphasis. “Here I stand, Christopher Davis, with as much wit under the crown of my hat as any noble lord on the woolsack, and I might just as well try to turn myself into a horse and be first favorite for the Oaks, as attempt to become a peer of Great Britain. It ain’t to be done, girl, – it ain’t to be done!”
“But, surely, I have heard of men suddenly raised to rank and title for the services – ”
“So you do. They want a clever lawyer, now and then, to help them on with a peerage case; or, if the country grows forgetful of them, they attract some notice by asking a lucky general to join them; and even then they do it the way a set of old ladies would offer a seat in the coach to a stout-looking fellow on a road beset with robbers, – they hope he ‘ll fight for ‘em; but, after all, it takes about three generations before one of these new hands gets regularly recognized by the rest.”
“What haughty pride!” exclaimed she; but nothing in her tone implied reprobation.
“Ain’t it haughty pride?” cried he; “but if you only knew how it is nurtured in them, how they are worshipped! They walk down St. James’s Street, and the policeman elbows me out of the way to make room for them; they stroll into Tattersall’s, and the very horses cock their tails and step higher as they trot past; they go into church, and the parson clears his throat and speaks up in a fine round voice for them. It’s only because the blessed sun is not an English institution, or he ‘d keep all his warmth and light for the peerage!”
“And have they, who render all this homage, no shame for their self-abasement?”
“Shame! why, the very approach to them is an honor. When a lord in the ring at Newmarket nods his head to me and says, ‘How d’ ye do, Davis?’ my pals – my acquaintances, I mean – are twice as respectful to me for the rest of the day. Not that I care for that,” added he, sternly; “I know them a deuced sight better than they fancy! – far better than they know me!”
Lizzy fell into a revery; her thoughts went back to a conversation she had once held with Beecher about the habits of the great world, and all the difficulties to its approach.
“I wish I could dare to put a question to you, papa,” said she, at last.
“Do so, girl. I ‘ll do my best to answer it”
“And not be angry at my presumption, – not be offended with me?”
“Not a bit. Be frank with me, and you ‘ll find me just as candid.”
“What I would ask, then, is this, – and mind, papa, it is in no mere curiosity, no idle indulgence of a passing whim I would ask it, but for sake of self-guidance and direction, – who are we? – what are we?”
The blood rose to Davis’s face and temples till he became crimson; his nostrils dilated, and his eyes flashed with a wild lustre. Had the bitterest insult of an enemy been hurled at his face before the open world, his countenance could not have betrayed an expression of more intense passion.
“By heaven!” said he, with a long-drawn breath, “I did n’t think there was one in Europe would have asked me that much to my face. There’s no denying it, girl, you have my own pluck in you.”
“If I ever thought it would have moved you so – ”
“Only to make me love you the more, girl, – to make me know you for my own child in heart and soul,” cried he, pressing her warmly to him.
“But I would not have cost you this emotion, dearest pa – ”
“It’s over now; I am as cool as yourself. There ‘s my hand, – there ‘s not much show of nervousness there. ‘Who are we?’” exclaimed he, fiercely, echoing her question. “I ‘d like to know how many of that eight-and-twenty millions they say we are in England could answer such a question? There’s a short thick book or two tells about the peerage and baronetage, and says who are they; but as for the rest of us – ” A wave of the hand finished the sentence. “My own answer would be that of many another: I ‘m the son of a man who bore the same name, and who, if alive, would tell the same story. As to what we are, that’s another question,” added he, shrewdly; “though, to be sure, English life and habits have established a very easy way of treating the matter. Everybody with no visible means of support, and who does nothing for his own subsistence, is either a gentleman or a vagrant. If he be positively and utterly unable to do anything for himself, he ‘s a gentleman; if he can do a stroke of work in some line or other, he ‘s only a vagrant.”
“And you, papa?” asked she, with an accent as calm and unconcerned as might be.
“I? – I am a little of both, perhaps,” said he, after a pause.
A silence ensued, long enough to be painful to each; Lizzy did not dare to repeat her question, although it still remained unanswered, and Davis knew well that he had not met it frankly, as he promised. What a severe struggle was that his mind now endured! The hoarded secret of his whole life, – the great mystery to which he had sacrificed all the happiness of a home, for which he had consented to estrange himself from his child, training her up amidst associations and habits every one of which increased the distance between them, – there it was now on his lip; a word might reveal it, and by its utterance might be blasted all the fondest hopes his heart had ever cherished. To make Lizzy a lady, to surround her not only with all the wants and requirements of station, but to imbue her mind with sentiments and modes of thought such as befit that condition, had been the devoted labor of his life. For this he had toiled and struggled, contrived, plotted, and schemed for years long. What terrible scenes had he not encountered, with what desperate characters not associated! In the fearful commerce of the play-table there was not a dark passion of the human heart he had not explored, – to know men in their worst aspects, in their insolence of triumph, the meanness of their defeat, in their moments of avarice, in their waste; to read their natures so that every start or sigh, a motion of the finger, a quivering of the lip should have its significance; to perceive, as by an instinct, wherein the craft or subtlety of each lay, and by the same rapid intuition to know his weak point also! Men have won high collegiate honors with less intensity of study than he gave to this dark pursuit; men have come out of battle with less peril to life than he faced every day of his existence, and all for one object, – all that his daughter might breathe an atmosphere from which he must live excluded, and know a world whose threshold he should never pass. Such was the terrible conflict that now raged within him as he reviewed the past, and saw to what a narrow issue he had reduced his one chance of happiness. “There she stands now,” thought he, “all that my fondest hopes had ever fashioned her; and who is to say what one word – one single word uttered by my lips – may not make of that noble nature, pure and spotless as it is? How will she bear to hear that her station is a deception, her whole life a lie, – that she is the daughter of Grog Davis, the leg?” Heaven knows with what dexterous artifices he had often