Other Fiction Boldrewood, Rolf: Nevermore. V1. 27-Oct-2013

[weatherwax]

Thomas Alexander Browne (6 August 1826 – 11 March 1915) was an author, who sometimes published under the pseudonym Rolf Boldrewood. He is best known for his novel Robbery Under Arms.

‘Then, by Heaven! I’ll leave the country. I won’t stop here to be bullied for doing what scores of other fellows have done and nothing thought about it. It’s unjust, it’s intolerable—’

Thus spoke impetuous Youth.

‘I should say something would depend upon the family tradition of the “other fellows” to whom you refer. In ours gambling debts and shady transactions with turf-robbers happen to be forbidden luxuries.’

Thus spoke philosophic Age, calm, cynical, unsparing.

No power of divination was needed to decide that the speakers were father and son; no prophet to discover, on one side, sullen defiance following a course of reckless folly; on the other, wounded family pride and long-nursed consuming wrath.

As the rebellious son stood up and faced his sire, it was curious to mark the similarity of the inherited lineaments brought out more clearly in his moments of rage and defiance.

Both men were strong and sinewy, dark in complexion, and bearing the ineffaceable impress of gentle nurture, leisure, and assured position. The younger man was the taller, and of a frame which, when fully developed, promised unusual strength and activity. More often than the converse, does it obtain that the son, in outward appearance or mental constitution, reproduces his mother’s attributes or those of her male relatives; the daughter, in complemental ratio, inheriting the paternal traits. But in this case Nature had strongly adhered to the old-established formula ‘like father like son,’ for whoso looked on Mervyn Trevanion, of Wychwood—the head of one of the oldest families in Cornwall—could not doubt for one moment that Launcelot Trevanion was his son.

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