The American Claimant | Page 3

note in his voice:
"Since the introduction of heraldic symbols,--the motto of this house

has been 'Suum cuique'--to every man his own. By your own intrepidly
frank confession, my lord, it is become a sarcasm: If Simon Lathers--"
Keep that exasperating name to yourself! For ten years it has pestered
my eye--and tortured my ear; till at last my very footfalls time
themselves to the brain-racking rhythm of Simon Lathers!--Simon
Lathers! --Simon Lathers! And now, to make its presence in my soul
eternal, immortal, imperishable, you have resolved to--to--what is it
you have resolved to do?"
"To go to Simon Lathers, in America, and change places with him."
"What? Deliver the reversion of the earldom into his hands?"
"That is my purpose."
"Make this tremendous surrender without even trying the fantastic case
in the Lords?"
"Ye--s--" with hesitation and some embarrassment.
"By all that is amazing, I believe you are insane, my son. See here
--have you been training with that ass again--that radical, if you prefer
the term, though the words are synonymous--Lord Tanzy, of
Tollmache?"
The son did not reply, and the old lord continued:
"Yes, you confess. That puppy, that shame to his birth and caste, who
holds all hereditary lordships and privilege to be usurpation, all nobility
a tinsel sham, all aristocratic institutions a fraud, all inequalities in rank
a legalized crime and an infamy, and no bread honest bread that a man
doesn't earn by his own work--work, pah!"--and the old patrician
brushed imaginary labor-dirt from his white hands. "You have come to
hold just those opinions yourself, suppose,"--he added with a sneer.
A faint flush in the younger man's cheek told that the shot had hit and
hurt; but he answered with dignity:
"I have. I say it without shame--I feel none. And now my reason for
resolving to renounce my heirship without resistance is explained. I
wish to retire from what to me is a false existence, a false position, and
begin my life over again--begin it right--begin it on the level of mere
manhood, unassisted by factitious aids, and succeed or fail by pure
merit or the want of it. I will go to America, where all men are equal
and all have an equal chance; I will live or die, sink or swim, win or
lose as just a man--that alone, and not a single helping gaud or fiction
back of it."

"Hear, hear!" The two men looked each other steadily in the eye a
moment or two, then the elder one added, musingly, "Ab-so-lutely
cra-zy-ab-solutely!" After another silence, he said, as one who, long
troubled by clouds, detects a ray of sunshine, "Well, there will be one
satisfaction--Simon Lathets will come here to enter into his own, and I
will drown him in the horsepond. That poor devil--always so humble in
his letters, so pitiful, so deferential; so steeped in reverence for our
great line and lofty-station; so anxious to placate us, so prayerful for
recognition as a relative, a bearer in his veins of our sacred blood-- and
withal so poor, so needy, so threadbare and pauper-shod as to raiment,
so despised, so laughed at for his silly claimantship by the lewd
American scum around him--ah, the vulgar, crawling, insufferable
tramp! To read one of his cringing, nauseating letters--well?"
This to a splendid flunkey, all in inflamed plush and buttons and
knee-breeches as to his trunk, and a glinting white frost-work of
ground-glass paste as to his head, who stood with his heels together and
the upper half of him bent forward, a salver in his hands:
"The letters, my lord."
My lord took them, and the servant disappeared.
"Among the rest, an American letter. From the tramp, of course. Jove,
but here's a change! No brown paper envelope this time, filched from a
shop, and carrying the shop's advertisement in the corner. Oh, no, a
proper enough envelope--with a most ostentatiously broad mourning
border--for his cat, perhaps, since he was a bachelor--and fastened with
red wax--a batch of it as big as a half-crown--and--and--our crest for a
seal!--motto and all. And the ignorant, sprawling hand is gone; he
sports a secretary, evidently--a secretary with a most confident swing
and flourish to his pen. Oh indeed, our fortunes are improving over
there--our meek tramp has undergone a metamorphosis."
"Read it, my lord, please."
"Yes, this time I will. For the sake of the cat:
14,042 SIXTEENTH. STREET, WASHINGTON, May 2.
It is my painful duty to announce to you that the head of our illustrious
house is no more--The Right Honourable, The Most Noble, The Most
Puissant Simon Lathers Lord Rossmore having departed this life
("Gone at last-- this is unspeakably precious news, my son,") at his seat
in the environs of the hamlet of Duffy's Corners in the grand old