himself drawn to
the son of his loins and sole continuator of his new family, with
softnesses of sentiment that he could hardly credit and was wholly
impotent to express. With a face, voice, and manner trained through
forty years to terrify and repel, Rhadamanthus may be great, but he will
scarce be engaging. It is a fact that he tried to propitiate Archie, but
a fact that cannot be too lightly taken; the attempt was so
unconspicuously made, the failure so stoically supported. Sympathy is
not due to these steadfast iron natures. If he failed to gain his son's
friendship, or even his son's toleration, on he went up the great, bare
staircase of his duty, uncheered and undepressed. There might have been
more pleasure in his relations with Archie, so much he may have
recognised at moments; but pleasure was a by-product of the singular
chemistry of life, which only fools expected.

An idea of Archie's attitude, since we are all grown up and have
forgotten the days of our youth, it is more difficult to convey. He made
no attempt whatsoever to understand the man with whom he dined and
breakfasted. Parsimony of pain, glut of pleasure, these are the two
alternating ends of youth; and Archie was of the parsimonious. The wind
blew cold out of a certain quarter--he turned his back upon it; stayed
as little as was possible in his father's presence; and when there,
averted his eyes as much as was decent from his father's face. The lamp
shone for many hundred days upon these two at table--my lord ruddy,
gloomy, and unreverend; Archie with a potential brightness that was
always dimmed and veiled in that society; and there were not, perhaps,
in Christendom two men more radically strangers. The father, with a
grand simplicity, either spoke of what interested himself, or maintained
an unaffected silence. The son turned in his head for some topic that
should be quite safe, that would spare him fresh evidences either of my
lord's inherent grossness or of the innocence of his inhumanity;
treading gingerly the ways of intercourse, like a lady gathering up her
skirts in a by-path. If he made a mistake, and my lord began to abound
in matter of offence, Archie drew himself up, his brow grew dark, his
share of the talk expired; but my lord would faithfully and cheerfully
continue to pour out the worst of himself before his silent and offended
son.

"Well, it's a poor hert that never rejoices!" he would say, at the
conclusion of such a nightmare