lost nothing
in reputation by success. But there was something so specious, so
ostensibly fair in his manner and words, while he was ruining Mordaunt,
that it was impossible not to suppose he was actuated by the purest
motives, the most holy desire for justice; not for himself, he said, for
he was old, and already rich enough, but for his son! From that son came
the punishment of all his offences,--the black drop at the bottom of a
bowl seemingly so sparkling. To him, as the father grew old and desirous
of quiet, Vavasour had transferred all his selfishness, as if to
a securer and more durable firm. The child, when young, had been
singularly handsome and intelligent; and Vavasour, as he toiled and
toiled at his ingenious and graceful cheateries, pleased himself with
anticipating the importance and advantages the heir to his labours would
enjoy. For that son he certainly had persevered more arduously than
otherwise he might have done in the lawsuit, of the justice of which he
better satisfied the world than his own breast; for that son he rejoiced
as he looked around the stately halls and noble domain from which the
rightful possessor had been driven; for that son he extended economy
into penuriousness, and hope into anxiety; and, too old to expect much
more from the world himself, for that son he anticipated, with a wearing
and feverish fancy, whatever wealth could purchase, beauty win, or
intellect command.

But as if, like the Castle of Otranto, there was something in Mordaunt
Court which contained a penalty and a doom for the usurper, no sooner
had Vavasour possessed himself of his kinsman's estate, than the
prosperity of his life dried and withered away, like Jonah's gourd, in a
single night. His son, at the age of thirteen, fell from a scaffold,
on which the workmen were making some extensive alterations in the old
house, and became a cripple and a valetudinarian for life. But still
Vavasour, always of a sanguine temperament, cherished a hope that
surgical assistance might restore him: from place to place, from
professor to professor, from quack to quack, he carried the unhappy boy,
and as each remedy failed he was only the more impatient to devise a new
one. But as it was the mind as well as person of his son in which
the father had stored up his ambition; so, in despite of this fearful
accident and the wretched health by which it was followed, Vavasour
never suffered his son to rest from the tasks and tuitions a